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Recordings
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1-8 Oculus:
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Oculus: Kurt Rhode From The Gramophone: Energetic, impeccable, beautifully recorded accounts of 'brilliant' music. These three pieces, each of them scored for strings, offer a stunning display of a formidable compositional imagination. Kurt Rohde is young, but no slave to fashion. You could even say there's something charmingly old-fashioned about his language, which share an anxious and sinuous ambiguity of harmony with Berg, Nicholas Maw, Frank Martin and Britten in his more exploratory vein. Rohde's is a rare muse in that the idiom is original but not prickly or pretentious, the vocabulary not obviously tonal yet at the same time consistently anchored. Lest this makes him sound like a compromiser, let it be said that Rohde is master of his compositional worlds, and each score loses no time in carving out its own course. The music is skittery, conflicted, self-doubting, peripatetic. It plays host to gestures and riffs rather than melodies. Yet the lines of action are tightly drawn, and the eight movements of Oculus (for string orchestra) trace a sure arc over their 30 minute span. The fifth, Stretto, artfully weaves in a quote from The Rite of Spring before we land in the oasis-like Cenotaph movement with its sense of deep, well-deserved inhalation. So Oculus covers itself in brilliance. By contrast, Minerva's Pools with its pedal points and slow harmonic shift is a darker, more elusive score. I only wish this composer's precise conception of each musical cameo were surer still: each piece offer an individual landscape, but by comparison each individual number of Britten's Frank Bridge Variations and Maw's Life Studies springs to life immediately, like a portrait of a favorite relative. Perhaps Rohde could do more to particularize his own set of harmonic likes and dislikes, to polemicize in chords. His unfailingly idiomatic and enterprising writing for strings, however, does much to catch the ear: this composer is obviously a string player himself. Rohde is composer in residence for the New Century group, and also director of San Francisco's Left Coast Chamber Ensemble. I see here he has been working with Kent Nagano on several large scale projects, including an opera. Here's hoping Mondovibe let's us hear them. In the meantime, the New Century Chamber Orchestra's energetic, impeccable and beautifully recorded performances will go a long way in converting you to his cause.
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Chamber Symphony for Strings, Opus 110a:
Symphony for Strings,
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Written with the Heart's BloodThe New Century Chamber Orchestra, Stuart Canin Music Director Best Small Ensemble Performance. A superb accomplishment! The poet Carl Sandburg once said that Shostakovich's music is music "written with the heart's blood", and it was this feeling that enabled my colleagues and me in the New Century Chamber Orchestra to maintain the passionate energy needed to record these magnificent works. The power of Shostakovich's music is evidenced by the fact that its composer used it as a weapon in the fight against Hitler: witness the 7th [Leningrad] Symphony, written in 1942, which became the worldwide symbol of resistance against Nazism. The dedication of the Eighth String Quartet "to the memory of the victims of fascism and war" was a constant reminder to us musicians of how visceral Shostakovich's music is; and yet the recurring motifs of hope and renewal show that Shostakovich was ever a human being, always hopeful of an end to dark times. |
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Concerto for strings op.33 (Ginastera)
Three argentine suites (Williams)
Segunda suite argentina
Tercera suite argentina
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Echoes of ArgentinaThis release from d'Note Classics features the award winning, Grammy nominated New Century Chamber Orchestra with their third compact disc, Echoes of Argentina, combining the music of Argentine composers Alberto Williams and Alberto Ginastera. "If you ever get a chance to hear the New Century Chamber Orchestra, don't miss it." |
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Etudes for string orchestra
Concerto for violin and orchestra
Maria triptychon
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Music of Frank MartinStuart Canin, violin; Sara Ganz, soprano; New Century Chamber Orchestra; Berkeley Symphony Orchestra A first-rate performance! Martin composed the Etudes for String Orchestra in 1955-56. The work was commissioned by Paul Sacher for the Basel Chamber Orchestra, and premiered on November 23, 1956. This striking work consists of a sharply profiled slow overture, followed by four etudes, each of which treats an important aspect of string performance. Composed in 1950-51, Martin's Violin Concerto was first performed in the spring of 1952, when Joseph Szigeti played it with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande under Ernest Ansermet. The work assumes the traditoinal three-movement concerto form. The creation of Maria Triptychon evolved through the friendship Martin shared with the soprano Irmgard Seefried and her husband, the violinist Wolfgang Schneiderhan. The work is a setting of three canticles: the Ave Maria, the Magnificat in Martin Luther's German translation, and the Stabat Mater. You can practically smell the rosin and see it powdering off the bow. |
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