Wings 2025

Composers Jocelyn Hagen and Timothy C. Takach partnered with the VOCES8 Foundation Choir and Orchestra and violinist Jack Liebeck to create and record Rose Ever Blooming, a NEW 55-minute Christmas oratorio featuring SATB choir, violin solo, and orchestra. Rose Ever Blooming honors the role of Mary in the story of Jesus, highlighting the importance of family and the eternally strong bonds between mother and son. This thrilling collaborating is Hagen and Takach’s first full-length collaborative album. The oratorio will be premiered during VOCES8’s “LIVE From London” online Christmas festival in 2025, and will have in-person premiere performances in the U.K. and the U.S. See the kickstarter page that is making this project possible: Rose Ever Blooming: a new VOCES8 Foundation Christmas Album.

Allison and Katie Crutchfield have formed a new band called Snocaps. Their 13-track debut album, released digitally as a surprise, is now made available on vinyl and CD formats.

A Note from Peter Knight
This is music inspired by the water and the wind. By the tattoo of the insects’ beating wings and the soughing of the wattle in the sea breeze. By the dull roll of the surf and the rhythm of my breath against the pad of my feet as I walk along the sandy, leaf-littered path through the scrub to the beach. The fingers of the fire-blackened dead banksias clawing the vicious blue. Somewhere, a peal of laughter is torn from its source and flies for a moment on the thermals rising from the baking sand. It is the summer of 2024/25 in Australia as the ideas for this album coalesce from a dozen different threads. I’m camping with my family on Krowathunkooloong land in the south-east corner of the country. The place where I grew up. The same beach where I spent every summer through my childhood.

Some of the first public performances by alto saxophonist and composer Randal Despommier were at Mardi Gras parades in New Orleans alongside his father, a drummer who studied with Crescent City guru James Black and served a stint in the Big Easy rock band South.

Eight years after Blue Maqams, Anouar Brahem returns with a poignant project, titled after a line of verse by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, which asks "Where should the birds fly, after the last sky?" Graceful chamber pieces for oud, cello, piano and bass subtly address the metaphysical question and its broad resonances in a troubled time.

Eight years after Blue Maqams, Anouar Brahem returns with a poignant project, titled after a line of verse by Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish, which asks "Where should the birds fly, after the last sky?" Graceful chamber pieces for oud, cello, piano and bass subtly address the metaphysical question and its broad resonances in a troubled time. While drawing upon the traditional modes of Arab music, Brahem has consistently sought to engage with the wider world, too, and found inspiration in many sources from different cultures.

Kat is unashamedly bold & confident in her abilities as a vocalist and songwriter, effortlessly merging Soul, and classic R&B which transpired throughout the mature and well rounded 10 tracks from her debut opus released in 2021.

Explore a cursed Japanese town! Recruit mascot friends and come to the rescue when disaster strikes! Solve the mystery of your exile! Help a living finger work through her many anger issues! Turn Promise Mascot Agency into the best agency in Japan in this open-world narrative adventure!

Russell Norman Morris AM (born 31 July 1948) is an Australian singer-songwriter and guitarist who had five Australian Top 10 singles during the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Antonia Bembo's opera L'Ercole amante waited nearly 340 years for its premiere. This delay may have been due to the subject matter, as her teacher, Antonio Cavalli, had already composed a festival opera based on the same tragedy for the wedding of Louis XIV and Maria Theresa of Spain in 1660. Although the Sun King, reportedly an admirer of her compositions, had taken the Venetian singer under his wings following her separation from her husband and relocation to France, he was already by then quite familiar with the tragic tale of Hercules. And so, he allowed the enchanting and emotionally stirring music, rich with arias, to pass him by. Finally, on May 26, 2023, Jorg Halubek and Il Gusto Barocco brought this long-overlooked masterpiece to its well-deserved breakthrough at Stuttgart's Liederhalle.