The Momenta Quartet, an ensemble in residence at Temple University in Philadelphia, specializes in music written by living composers. They have also received great acclaim for performances they have given of music written by composers of past generations and centuries. This beautifully...

Of the two works on this recording, the major one, by virtue of the quality of the composition coupled simply with the revelation of its existence, is Passion Week by Lithuanian born Russian composer Maximilian Steinberg (major, too, because the piece takes up three-quarters of the total time...

The Polish composer Roman Statkowski (1859-1925) studied at the St. Petersburg Conservatory with Anton Rubinstein and Nicolay Rimsky-Korsakov, and in 1890 he began his teaching career in Kiev. He then spent about a decade managing various piano stores, and spent the rest of his career teaching...

If you’ve been following and collecting the splendid series of recordings being issued by Guild Records of the symphonies by Swiss composer Fritz Brun, you likely need little encouragement to acquire this most recent release beyond an awareness it exists. In this issue, Brun’s...

Harmonia Mundi’s collection of cantatas on the story of Orfeo is exactly what I want from new recordings of early music. The Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin and Sunhae Im are exemplary in their playing and singing; the audio engineering and sound quality are deeply satisfying; and the...

Noted theologian, church historian, author and Archbishop, Metropolitan Hilarion Alfeyev is among the most performed Russian composers working today. Born in 1966, Hilarion Alfeyev studied at the Moscow State Conservatory. In 1987, he was ordained a priest, later to become an Archbishop, and...

Originally a denizen of the west coast, John O’Gallagher (b. 1964) - alto saxophonist, composer, teacher and author – has been a first-call player in New York’s jazz scene since his move east in 1990, attaining an international reach with audiences and students through his playing,...

Ensemble Odyssee’s album of music by Gaetano Veneziano (1656–1716) and Alessandro Scarlatti (1660–1725) is as much about the group and their approach to performance as it is about the composers and music they’ve chosen. That is, when an ensemble champions the work of a composer, they...

Velázquez and the Music of his Time is a compilation CD assembled to coincide with a 2015 exhibit at the Grand Palais in Paris of Diego Velázquez’s (1599-1660) most important paintings. Aside from Velazquez’s 120 surviving works of art, his appointment to Philip IV of Spain in...

Stimulating, non-hierarchical group improvisation in music – that which is resistant to sloppiness, incoherency and ultimately, irrelevancy – comes to successful fruition only with the tremendous efforts of highly skilled, compatible and coordinated musicians responding relationally in the...

This second disc from Dutton of orchestral music by Walter Braunfels continues a small revival of the German composer’s music, which appears to have been jumpstarted by the 2010 release of his early opera Die Vogel from the Los Angeles Opera. All three of the works here are world...

Gleaned from a week’s worth of live gigs at NYC’s famed Village Vanguard venue in May, 2014, Steve Wilson & Wilsonian’s Grain, Live in New York: The Vanguard Sessions, a subtitle pregnant with dual or triple significance, insists at one level that we may be (and to judge from the...