Jorge Federico Osorio THE FRENCH ALBUM

THE FRENCH ALBUM

Pacifica Quartet / Menahem Pressler BRAHMS Piano Quintet SCHUMANN String Quartet No. 1

PIANO QUINTET - STRING QUARTET NO. 1

Pacifica Quartet CONTEMPORARY VOICES

CONTEMPORARY VOICES

Jennifer Koh SAARIAHO X KOH

SAARIAHO X KOH

Chicago Sinfonietta / Mei-Ann Chen PROJECT W

Project W began as Chicago Sinfonietta’s year-long initiative to highlight contemporary, diverse, women composers through four commissioned works by Clarice Assad, Reena Esmail, Jennifer Higdon, and Jessie Montgomery culminating in the recording of the orchestra’s 16th album.

Innovation, imagination, passion and dynamism are the hallmarks of conductor Mei-Ann Chen. Music Director of the 2016 MacArthur Award-winning Chicago Sinfonietta, she is acclaimed for infusing the orchestra with energy, enthusiasm and high-level music-making, and galvanizing audiences and communities alike. In December 2015, Musical America, the bible of the performing arts industry, named Mei-Ann Chen one of its 2015 Top 30 Influencers. A sought-after guest conductor, Ms. Chen’s reputation as a compelling communicator has resulted in growing popularity with orchestras both nationally and internationally.  

This gender representation gap is not for lack of talented composers and great music. All three finalists (and needless to say, winner Du Yun) for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Music were women. Jennifer Higdon continues to be one of America’s most acclaimed and most frequently performed living composers (and yes, she is also a Pulitzer Prize winner.) Women composers are increasingly winning residencies and recognition across the nation.

Rachel Barton Pine / Matthew Hagle BLUES DIALOGUES

Violinist Rachel Barton Pine, “an exciting, boundary-defying performer” (Washington Post) known for her “bravura technique and soulful musicianship” (New York Times), headlines a groundbreaking album of blues-influenced classical works for solo violin and violin and piano by 20th and 21st century composers of African descent.
World-premiere recordings include Noel Da Costa’s A Set of Dance Tunes for Solo Violin, based on American fiddle tunes, and Billy Childs’s Incident on Larpenteur Avenue, a single-movement violin sonata/tone poem written as a response to a fatal shooting by police. Another premiere is Wendell Logan’s violin and piano arrangement of Duke Ellington’s 1935 composition, In a Sentimental Mood.
The album’s title track, Dolores White’s improvisational Blues Dialogues, draws on classical, jazz, and country music, as well as African-American vocalizations and a blues harmonic language. David N. Baker’s gospel-tinged Blues (Deliver My Soul) evokes the ecstatic energy of a Black church service. Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson’s Blue/s Forms and Louisiana Blues Strut befit a composer with a legacy of achievements in the classical, jazz, modern dance, and pop music worlds. Each movement of William Grant Still’s Suite for Violin and Piano evokes the work of a different African-American visual artist. Clarence Cameron White’s Levee Dance, a favorite of legendary violinist Jascha Heifetz, surrounds a traditional African-American spiritual with a playful, syncopated dance. Errollyn Wallen’s Woogie Boogie is a humorous and inventive reimaging of the boogie-woogie blues dance. Daniel Bernard Roumain’s Filter, with a new opening cadenza written specially for Rachel Barton Pine, conjures the sounds of electronic dance music and psychedelic guitar. Concluding the program, Charles S. Brown’s A Song Without Words was inspired by bottleneck guitar player and gospel blues master Blind Willie Johnson.

Nicole Cabell / Alyson Cambridge SISTERS IN SONG

Nicole Cabell and Alyson Cambridge, acclaimed sopranos and close friends, record together for the first time on an album of opera duets by Mozart, Offenbach, Humperdinck, and Delibes and specially commissioned duet arrangements of classical songs, folk tunes, and African-American spirituals.
Cabell, 2005 winner of the BBC Cardiff Singer of the World Competition, is “a faultlessly gleaming soprano” (Financial Times). Cambridge is “radiant, vocally assured . . . and artistically imaginative” (Washington Post), known for her “revelatory, sensual, smoky readings” (Opera News). Joining them in the “Soave sia il vento” trio from Mozart’s Così fan tutte is the “mellow-voiced and charismatic” (New York Times) baritone Will Liverman. They’re accompanied on their Cedille debut by the Lake Forest Symphony under 2015 Sir Georg Solti Conducting Award winner Vladimir Kulenovic.
Inspired by opera stars Kathleen Battle & Jessye Norman’s spirituals recording from the early 1990s, the sopranos describe their album as a “dream project” that’s “uniquely us,” reflecting their multi-ethnic heritages and showcasing pieces that profoundly influenced them both. Composer-arranger Joe Clark, whose music has been performed by Reneé Fleming, Yo-Yo Ma, and jazz singer Kurt Elling, among other classical, jazz, and pop artists, created arrangements expressly for Cabell and Cambridge’s distinctive voices.

Rachel Barton Pine / Jory Vinikour J.S. BACH The Sonatas for Violin & Harpsichord

Violinist Rachel Barton Pine and harpsichordist Jory Vinikour, critically acclaimed artists of international renown — and also close friends — record together for the first time on this album of J.S. Bach’s complete sonatas for violin and harpsichord. The artists approach these works as Bach intended: as trio sonatas with equally important roles for the violin and the harpsichord’s treble and bass lines. In addition to the six Sonatas, the album offers the remarkable and ravishingly poetic Cantabile, BWV 1019a, a freestanding work that Bach originally conceived as a movement of the Sonata, BWV 1019.
Cedille’s audiophile engineering and the intimate acoustics of Evanston, IL’s Nichols Hall allow the complex trio textures to blossom with detail. In all, the album sets a new standard for a body of work that Bach’s son, C.P.E., considered among his father’s finest compositions.

Rachel Barton Pine / Chicago Symphony Orchestra / Carlos Kalmar BRAHMS & JOACHIM Violin Concertos

I have been fascinated with the Brahms Concerto since my earliest violin lessons. I began studying it when I was 14, and it rapidly became a mainstay of my repertoire. It was with the Brahms Concerto that I won several of my international prizes and made many of my debuts in Europe and America. It remains one of the most fulfilling works I perform.

I have been intrigued by Joachim's "Hungarian" Concerto for many years. When I began to study it intensely it seemed a very natural fit, enhanced by two of my professors' strong connections to this music. One of my Chicago teachers, Roland Vamos, shares Joachim's Hungarian Jewish heritage. As a youngster, Dr. Vamos frequently accompanied his father to hear gypsy music in the cabarets of New York's Hungarian section. He even supported himself through college by playing gypsy tunes as a strolling violinist. His stylistic knowledge was an invaluable resource. My teacher in Berlin, Werner Scholz, was a student of Gustav Havemann, who studied with Joachim. I feel fortunate to have gained knowledge about both the Joachim and Brahms Concertos from one so close to the original source. My study of the Brahms was augmented also by reading Joachim's essay in his Violinschule in which he laid out how he felt the Brahms concerto should be played.

The long friendship between Brahms and Joachim enhanced their music and their lives. Friendship has also enhanced the performances on this recording. When I debuted with the Chicago Symphony at age ten, I gushed in a televised interview, "the Chicago Symphony isn't just any old orchestra. It's a great big, super-duper orchestra!" Over the eighteen years and many solo performances that followed, I came to know most members of the orchestra personally. The coaches, mentors, and teachers of my early teens have become chamber music partners, colleagues, and friends. Our history of working together adds a special dimension to the music whenever we collaborate.

I first met Maestro Carlos Kalmar shortly before this recording when we collaborated on the Joachim "Hungarian" Concerto in concerts with Chicago's Grant Park Orchestra. He is an amazing and inspiring musician with a warm personality. I will always be grateful for his musicianship, humor, and energy throughout our two-day recording marathon. He became a kindred musical spirit and a dear friend. I am very excited to be able to share with you these two wonderful concertos. (Rachel Barton Pine)

Rachel Barton Pine / Göttinger Symphonie Orchester / Christoph-Mathias Mueller MENDELSSOHN & SCHUMANN Violin Concertos - BEETHOVEN Romances

This recording by Chicago violinist Rachel Barton Pine has no right to work as well as it does. Funded through Kickstarter, it features the mid-level Göttinger Symphonie Orchester from Germany, and Pine takes on one of the absolute warhorses of the repertory, the Violin Concerto in E minor, Op. 64, of Felix Mendelssohn. How could she have anything to add? As it happens, her performance of the Mendelssohn is startlingly good and merits consideration from anybody at all looking for a recording of the work. Her differentiation between the themes of the opening movement is very strong, with the second subject forming its own island of repose within the movement. And her finale is a romping joy: she says that she first played the work as a neophyte in a family concert devoted to the Wild West, and you can still hear a vigorous fiddling quality in her reading. Also worthwhile is the still rarely performed Violin Concerto in D minor, WoO 23, of Robert Schumann. This work was suppressed after Schumann's death because it was thought to be too difficult to perform. Pine has an interesting angle on this. She reasons that the dedicatee of the work, Joseph Joachim, would have worked with him on revisions of the work, as he later did with Brahms on the latter's violin concerto, had not Schumann been suddenly incapacitated by mental illness. So she modifies the violin line. You can argue about this, but the changes do allow her to take the finale at a faster tempo than in most other recordings. And she keeps control over the large structure of the first movement, whose form is not easy to define. The two Beethoven Romances show Pine's capacity for simple lyrical lines, and the high quality of the recording as a whole is a quite unexpected surprise. (James Manheim)

Jorge Federico Osorio FINAL THOUGHTS The Last Piano Works of SCHUBERT & BRAHMS

Jorge Federico Osorio, “an imaginative interpreter with a powerful technique (The New York Times), deftly pairs Brahms’s final solo piano works with those by Schubert for an inventive program of richly satisfying works that capture the essence of each composer’s towering individuality. 

Osorio records Brahms’s Three Intermezzos, Op. 117, and Six Piano Pieces, Op. 118, for the first time. He revisits Brahms’s Seven Fantasies, Op. 116, and Four Piano Pieces, Op. 119, which he last recorded nearly two decades ago, to great acclaim: “Quite marvelous,” said BBC Music Magazine. “It’s clear that Jorge Federico Osorio is an important Brahmsian,” proclaimed the Chicago Tribune. On his new album, Osorio’s penchant for color accentuates the individual character of these concentrated miniatures. 

On this, his first Schubert recording, Osorio, whom the Los Angeles Times called “one of the more elegant and accomplished pianists on the planet,” presents the composer’s final two Piano Sonatas, D. 959 and D. 960, epic in scale and brimming with melodic invention. Osorio’s insights into the music’s architecture yield eloquent performances of these spacious, ambitious masterworks. Osorio’s Cedille Records albums of Mexican and Spanish music have introduced the pianist to new audiences worldwide. Now they can hear his artistry in more of the core German repertoire that has been central to his concert life for decades. 

Osorio has performed Brahms’s Piano Quintet with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and musicians from the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. The Mexican-born, European-trained virtuoso has served as artistic director of Mexico’s Brahms Chamber Music Festival. He has received the Medalla Bellas Artes, the highest honor granted by Mexico’s National Institute of Fine Arts, and the Dallas Symphony Orchestra’s Gina Bachauer Award. (Cedille Records)