Matt Haimovitz / Mari Kodama MON AMI, MON AMOUR

 

MON AMI, MON AMOUR

 

Jamie Barton UNEXPECTED SHADOWS

UNEXPECTED SHADOWS

 

NOVUS NY / Julian Wachner LUNA PEARL WOOLF Fire and Flood

                                                                FIRE AND FLOOD

EIN ENGEL IN DER NACHT

Gentle and haunting spirits from distant spheres meet in a surging world of dreams and lullabies in 'The Girl and the Angel, a musical narrative'. This work interweaves a new story by bestselling author Cornelia Funke with expressive new compositions by Luna Pearl Woolf and familiar and popular songs by Irving Berlin, Lennon / McCartney, Jake Heggie, Engelbert Humperdinck, Gordon Getty and others. Cornelia Funke herself captures her story with rousing songs by Frederica von Stade, Daniel Taylor, Lisa Delan and Zhen Cao, accompanied by the lush cellos of Matt Haimovitz and his Uccello ensemble. Exquisite images from the award-winning creative studio Mirada visually shine the story. The Girl and the Angel was originally released in 2013 under the title Angel Heart with accompanying concerts in Los Angeles and New York's Carnegie Hall, first released internationally in 2018, and now appears in a German-language version. The New York Times described The Girl and the Angel as 'a story that penetrates directly into the imagination of young people, with the simplicity and dark pull of a fairytale.'

Bruckner Orchester Linz / Dennis Russell Davies ISANG YUN Sunrise Falling

Uncompromising in his life as he was in his music, Korean composer Isang Yun (1917–95) held fast to his dream of a united Korea, even as he was unjustly accused of espionage for North Korea and sentenced to imprisonment and death. From a life of unimaginable oppression and torture emerges music of raw emotional power, heard on ISANG YUN: Sunrise Falling, a centennial commemoration of Yun’s life and music from the PENTATONE Oxingale Series. Maestro Dennis Russell Davies, a longtime collaborator and advocate for Yun, curates the program and conducts the Bruckner Orchestra Linz. A cellist himself, Yun’s fascinating, highly autobiographical Concerto for Violoncello and Orchestra (1975/76) anchors the album. In a live performance, cellist Matt Haimovitz tackles the controlled chaos of Yun’s score, bursting with passion, despair, and new timbral textures, such as the use of a plectrum to emulate the Korean zither, the kŏmun’go. Yun’s Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No. 1 (1981) features violinist Yumi Hwang-Williams, who reflects upon her own emotional return to Korea in 2015, where she performed the work at a Festival in honor of Yun. The double album also includes the orchestral Fanfare & Memorial, and additional illuminating solo works by Yun performed by pianist Maki Namekawa, Hwang-Williams, and Haimovitz. 100 years after Isang Yun’s birth, the two Koreas still teeter on a razor’s edge, with ever more global ramifications. His music opens the gate to a lost, united land, with Yun’s own heart bleeding but ever hopeful.

Tippet Rise OPUS 2017 Daydreams

Tippet Rise OPUS 2017 is the second compilation album to emerge from the summer music season at Montana’s Tippet Rise Arts Center, which features performance spaces of acoustic perfection amidst a sculpture-laden terrain of awe-inspiring beauty, nestled against a backdrop of the Beartooth Mountains near Yellowstone National Park. From the PENTATONE Oxingale Series, Tippet Rise OPUS 2017 inhabits the sphere of Daydreams, a sculpture by Patrick Dougherty where natural saplings organically emerge out of an eroding schoolhouse.

In this whimsical, imaginary world, composers open a visionary portal to the past and future. In the jazz-infused FIRST CLUB DATE, a world premiere by Aaron Jay Kernis and a Tippet Rise commission, cellist Matt Haimovitz and pianist Andrea Lam illuminate the musical playground of a boy on the cusp of manhood. The new work is dedicated to Haimovitz and the composer’s cellist-son Jonah, with double-entendre movement titles like “Puppy Love” and “Matt’s Monkish Machinations.” Violinist Caroline Goulding and pianist David Fung embody the youthful spirit of George Enescu’s Impressions from Childhood, while a pastoral mood reigns in Eugène Bozza’s Image for solo flute, performed by Jessica Sindell. An epic expansiveness saturates Red Arc / Blue Veil by John Luther Adams, featuring electronics and a wide array of sounds from pianist Vicky Chow and percussionist Doug Perkins. Opening the album is Jeffrey Kahane’s hopeful America the Beautiful, performed on piano by the composer himself, while works by Chopin and Bach, performed by pianists Yevgeny Sudbin and Anne-Marie McDermott, anchor the program with their sheer beauty and virtuosity. (PENTATONE)

David Krakauer / Matt Haimovitz & Friends AKOKA

In their “brilliantly inventive” (The New York Times) live recording, clarinetist David Krakauer and cellist Matt Haimovitz’s AKOKA lift Messiaen's transcendent 1940-41 work Quartet for the End of Time out of the polite context of a chamber music performance, placing it in a dramatic 21st century setting that drives home its gravity and impact. AKOKA was inspired by the wartime experience of Jewish clarinetist Henri Akoka, who premiered the Quartet for the End of Time with Messiaen himself at the German prisoner-of-war camp in which they were both interred. Henri Akoka's vibrant personality and the story of his survival, with all its twists and turns, is the inspiration for this recording, which brings out the human aspect of this composition, seen through the eyes of one individual caught up in terrifying events beyond his control. Messiaen’s Quartet for the End of Time is bookended by Akoka, Krakauer’s highly improvisational, Sephardic-tinged piece, and Meanwhile… a re-mix by hip-hop/klezmer artist Socalled, who joins the ensemble on electronics. As the forces of fundamentalism, intolerance and violence intensify in today's world, this mounting of Messiaen’s great work is all the more timely.

Jonathan Crow / Douglas McNabney / Matt Haimovitz MOZART Divertimento

Mozart’s brilliance at the keyboard is well known, but it was his joy in playing the viola – and the musical dialogue and kinship of playing with friends – that led the composer to write his music for string trio. Mozart’s Divertimento remains one of the pinnacles of chamber music history. Haydn had already established the string quartet genre, but there was nothing like the richness and craft of this string trio before Mozart. The equality and variety of roles, the grand form spanning six movements, the constantly shifting couplings – all create a fully satisfying sonic texture from the spiritual and symbolic number, three. All for one, one for all, the three players share a bond, fraternal brothers connected by Mozart’s imagination. 

It brings me happy memories to look back a dozen years to when this recording was made in the marvellous acoustic of Église Saint- Augustin near Mirabel, Quebec. My friends and colleagues Jonathan Crow and Douglas McNabney join me on this Mozartean journey, all of us at the time professors at the Schulich School of Music of McGill University. (Matt Haimovitz)

Matt Haimovitz / Christopher O'Riley BEETHOVEN Period

Cellist Matt Haimovitz prefaces his period-instrument Beethoven cycle with an absorbing essay, writing that ‘the consideration is no longer the modern-day “how can the cello cut through the multi-voiced powerhouse of a concert grand piano”, but “how can it make room for the nuances of the 19th-century fortepiano?”’ Good engineering also helps, and Pentatone’s vividly resonant production captures the music’s wide dynamic range with comparable clarity and heft to the two Bylsma editions, and surpasses the slightly dry and close-up Isserlis/Levin cycle.

More significantly, Haimovitz and pianist Christopher O’Riley play the living daylights out of these works. They lap up Beethoven’s combative style like hungry lions anticipating raw steak, relishing the composer’s frequent subito dynamics, unpredictable placement of accents and over-the-bar-line phrase groupings. Rarely has Op 5 No 1’s first-movement introduction come alive with such rhythmic character, while the rollicking yet relaxed repartee of Op 5 No 2’s Rondo underlines the music’s kinship to the Fourth Piano Concerto’s finale. Similar attention to detail adds intensity and colour to the off-beat accents in Op 69’s Scherzo, and the Allegro vivace’s playful demeanor (complete with scrupulously observed staccatos) makes for a brash contrast to the eloquence and nobility one normally encounters. If the duo pile into Op 102 No 1’s Allegro vivace too aggressively for certain pitches to register, the joyous, uplifting mood conveyed by their briskly paced Op 102 No 2 final fugue’s transparency and sophisticated phraseology is worth this release’s total price.

Terrific performances of the variation sets prove more than merely filler. If you want a HIP counterpart to the Maisky/Argerich cycle, look no further. (Jed Distler / Gramophone)

Matt Haimovitz ORBIT

Orbit maps my musical journey since the turn of the millenium, a path travelled with my partner in life and music, composer Luna Pearl Woolf. Initially released on Oxingale Records as five thematic albums – Anthem (2003), Goulash! (2005), After Reading Shakespeare (2007), Figment (2009), and Matteo (2011) – Orbit encompasses nearly all of the solo contemporary works on these albums, along with two newly recorded tracks: Philip Glass’ “Orbit” and a new arrangement by Luna of the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter.” All but these two tracks were produced by Luna, and all have now been remastered for SACD HD surround sound. More than twenty composers are represented in the set, fifteen of them still living. Ten works receive their world premiere recording here. 

With the solo cello as our pilot, we steer headlong into the great musical debates of the past half-century: maximalist vs. minimalist; folk-rooted vs. abstract, absolute vs. narrative, tonal vs. atonal. In many ways, we live in a golden age of music, with a perspective rich in history and reference. We can look back at the 20th century’s Tower of Babel. We can embrace its boldness, diversity, complexity, and its return to the natural order of harmony. Leonard Bernstein’s words from his Norton Lectures, The Unanswered Question, ruminating on Noam Chomsky’s linguistic theory of universality, the collective wiring that connects us across borders and between far-reaching lands, resonates more than ever. He writes, “I’m no longer quite sure what the question is, but I do know that the answer is Yes.” (Matt Haimovitz)

Matt Haimovitz / Christopher O'Riley SHUFFLE.PLAY.LISTEN

Shuffle.Play.Listen unites ground-breaking, Grammy-nominated cellist Matt Haimovitz with pianist Christopher O'Riley, host of NPR and PBS’s popular weekly radio and television series, From the Top, in a collaboration that blurs the boundaries between classical and pop music.

Two performers, each a superstar in his own right, come together to plumb the virtuosic and lyrical possibilities of their instruments in an expansive 2-CD set from Oxingale Records.

Disc 1 features Igor Stravinsky’s neo-classical Suite Italienne, Leos Janacek’s Fairy Tale, Bohuslav Martinu’s Variations on a Slovak Folksong and Astor Piazzolla’s Grand Tango, all interwoven with an arresting new arrangement of Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo film score, celebrating the composer’s 100th birthday this year.

Disc 2 kicks off with Empty Room from the 2011 Grammy winning Album of the Year by Arcade Fire, and follows up with tracks by Blond Redhead, the Cocteau Twins, Radiohead, and more Arcade Fire, as well as supergroup A Perfect Circle’s hit song 3 Libras and a jaw dropping rendition of John McLaughlin’s Dance of Maya. All the arrangements for cello and piano were made with O’Riley’s signature passion and finesse, and realized with Haimovitz’s uncompromising artistic depth. The pair display their considerable improvisational skills in several tunes, including their 9-minute un-cut interpretation of McLaughlin’s A Lotus on Irish Streams.

Inside the package, New York Times best-selling author Dan Levitin (This is your Brain on Music), interviews Haimovitz and O’Riley on the making of Shuffle.Play.Listen.

One of the most anticipated collaborations of the 2011-2012 season, Haimovitz and O’Riley will tour extensively in major concert series and university residencies throughout throughout the US. In addition, each continues to tour exhaustively as a solo artist in recital and as concerto soloist.

Shuffle.Play.Listen embraces a new kind of listening public who mix Wagner with Lady Gaga on their iPods, exploring new sounds and moving comfortably between genres. While Classical lovers will be drawn to CD1, more adventurous listeners will thrill to CD2, and both will want to shuffle, play and listen! (Oxingale Records)

Matt Haimovitz / Philippe Cassard PORTES OUVERTES

Matt Haimovitz’s latest recital of twentieth-century cello compositions sustains the thesis of its predecessors (12/95 and 5/97) that extreme contrast, not merely variety, has been the spice of twentieth-century musical life. To juxtapose two works from 1914, Reger’s Third Suite and Webern’s Three Little Pieces, the former expansive and retrospective, the latter aphoristic and reaching nervously into an unknowable future, makes the point with admirable immediacy.

The rest of the music here is more mainstream, the Britten Sonata showing that there was as much mileage left in the old classical genres in 1960 as Debussy had found in his Sonata more than 40 years before. With these works, of course, Haimowitz is competing against a long series of distinguished predecessors on disc, and his partnership with Cassard (how often have they played these works in concert, I wonder?) can’t match the empathy of Moray Welsh and John Lenehan in the Britten, or – it goes without saying – of Rostropovich and Britten himself in both sonatas.

The recording as such is at its best in the unaccompanied works, its closeness and resonance reinforcing the powerful musical profile of Dutilleux’s elegant yet forceful Strophes, and helping to ensure that Reger does not seriously outstay his welcome. In Webern, Debussy and Britten the piano sound has an abrasive aspect to it, as if the object were to underline the incompatibility of two such different instruments. But the playing is technically first-rate, and should certainly open doors (why the French title?) to anyone exploring this repertory for the first time.' (Arnold Whittall / Gramophone)

Matt Haimovitz THE 20th CENTURY CELLO - VOL. 2

For his latest ‘twentieth-century-only’ recital, the American cellist Matt Haimovitz serves up a distinctively mixed bag: four American works alongside two highly characteristic pieces by Hindemith and Britten.
The level of musical interest is high, the commitment to unfamiliar repertory commendable. As with the first disc in this series (12/95) the sound is spectacular, the playing technically first-rate but not always interpretatively spot-on. In the Britten, particularly, Haimovitz doesn’t seem consistently on the right wavelength, adopting an overly rhapsodic manner and, in the “Fugue”, a surprisingly cautious tempo. So I prefer the versions of this work by Tim Hugh or, as first choice, Robert Cohen. The much-recorded Hindemith arouses no such qualms, perhaps because its very explicit dialogue between plangent neo-romanticism and forceful neo-classicism suits this player better than Britten’s more understated style.
The four American works all earn their relatively modest disc time, even though the Harbison is a bit too winsome, in post-Britten fashion, for my taste. George Perle’s pair of miniatures, dating from 1945, are touchingly direct, and the set of Six Pieces by Roger Sessions (1966), though growing a bit predictable in their rhythmic organization, project a personality all the more winning for not being required to sustain a symphonic breadth. Most enjoyable of all is Mario Davidovsky’s study in the interaction between live cello and pre-recorded tape. While very much of its time (1964) it still has something to say, not least that an unabashed neo-romantic style is as good a basis for this kind of composition as a more radical modernity.' (Arnold Whittall / Gramophone)

Matt Haimovitz THE 20th CENTURY CELLO

The sound on this disc is absolutely stunning – and the playing is pretty impressive too: but what about the music? Matt Haimovitz's first DG disc of twentieth-century unaccompanied cello works (1/92) emphasized the relatively recent past, with Britten's Suite No. 1, sonatas by Crumb and Ligeti and only a Suite by Reger from the century's early years. This time about half the disc is given over to Kodaly's amply proportioned Sonata (1915), which also featured in a no-holds-barred account on Pieter Wispelwey's relatively recent disc.
While I can't say that Haimovitz has fully won me over to this work, I am in no doubt that this is how it should be played – with a spontaneity that never lurches into mannerism, and with supreme technical control: the dynamic shading of harmonics and the fluency in passages exploiting opposing extremes of register are such as to make lesser cellists give up in despair. So, even though it is disappointing that this disc brings no previously unrecorded music into the catalogue, it makes a distinguished contribution to an increasingly crowded field.
In 1992 I thought that Haimovitz was rather too flamboyant in Britten's First Suite, but the concentrated forms and predominantly dark moods of No. 3 are finely characterized here, in a reading to rival that of Kim Bak Dinitzen (part of a two-disc set) or any other currently available version. The short pieces by Berio and Henze, whose original versions were part of the Rostropovich-inspired seventieth birthday tribute to Paul Sacher, have recently been recorded (on a two-CD set) by Patrick and Thomas Demenga in the context of all 12 tributes. Once again, however, Haimovitz's superfine technique, and the exceptionally faithful DG sound, make these performances outstanding, and the Berio, in particular, is a small masterpiece.' (Gramophone)

Matt Haimovitz J.S. BACH 6 Suites for Cello Solo

Haimovitz has been taking the beloved solo cello suites of Bach out of the concert hall, performing them in intimate venues and music clubs across the U.S., Canada, the U.K., and soon Europe. The tour which has sold-out nearly every performance has been profiled on National Public Radio’s ‘Performance Today’ and PRI’s ‘The World,’ as well as in the New Yorker, the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times, the Boston Globe, the Seattle Times, and the Philadelphia Inquirer. Among the reviews, LA Times critic Mark Swed writes, "In these experiments, Haimovitz has, indeed, recaptured the freshness in music making. There is nothing like the intimacy of hearing great music in a close, casual environment, and Monday night the cellist seemed to absorb as much energy from the crowd as we did from him." Philadelphia Enquirer critic David Patrick Stearns remarks, "If playing Bach in the Old City folk club the Tin Angel was an experiment, cellist Matt Haimovitz succeeded Monday in! ways that say as much about the needs of the music-loving public as his extraordinary talent."

Haimovitz has been honored with the Avery Fisher Career Grant (1986), and was the first cellist ever to receive the prestigious Premio Internazionale "Accademia Musicale Chigiana" (1999). Of six acclaimed recordings on the Deutsche Grammophon label, his Suites and Sonatas for Solo Cello was awarded the Grand Prix du Disque (1991) and le Diapason d'Or (1991). Haimovitz’s recording, J.S. Bach: 6 Suites for Cello Solo has been a TOP PICK in U.S. News and World Report and featured in Billboard, Gramophone, The New Criterion, and others. Also on Oxingale, an album entitled "Lemons Descending" of music for soprano and cello originated as a limited edition fine-art book and recording that can be found in some of the finest special collections in the U.S., including the Library of Congress, Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Brown Universities and many others. His most recent release, "The Rose Album" with pianist Itamar Golan, a reminiscence through musical association of his teacher, the legendary American cellist Leonard Rose, features the music of Schubert, Schumann, Chopin, Paganini, Stern, and Popper.

Matt Haimovitz / Dennis Russell Davies PHILIP GLASS Cello Concerto No. 2 "Naqoyqatsi"

As the subtitle indicates, the music in the Cello Concerto No. 2 ("Naqoyqatsi") of Philip Glass is not new but is drawn from the score to the film of that title composed by Glass in 2002. Though the term is drawn from Hopi cosmology, the film used a good deal of computer-assisted imagery to address the theme of the relationship between technology and the natural world. Glass' music, as usual, is entirely performed on conventional orchestral instruments. The original score had a prominent cello part, performed on the soundtrack recording by Yo-Yo Ma, and Glass has here boiled the original score, with perhaps a dozen cuts, down to seven movements that seem to make a vaguely linear sequence. The music is a good example of Glass' mature film scores, which may endure as his most lasting works; it combines the composer's characteristic minimal textures with more elaborate cello lines, some involving lightly extended techniques, that seem to evoke the metaphysical concept under examination ("Massman," "Intensive Time," "Point Blank," etc.). Although there's nothing new here, the version makes an attractively sized package of Glass, and listeners without access to the film may well prefer it as more coherent in this form. The realization is very strong. Cellist Matt Haimovitz, who has specialized in experimental mixtures of concert and vernacular traditions, acquits himself in such a way that no one will be thinking about Yo-Yo Ma; Glass' solo parts, although not virtuosic in a fancy way, aren't easy, for they require the composer's ensemble concepts to be sustained over long periods. Haimovitz soars. Another attraction is the superlative live recording in Cincinnati's venerable Music Hall; it would be hard to think of a venue that would be better in providing the resonant yet clean acoustic Glass' music demands. The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra under Dennis Russell Davies, who has conducted a lot of Glass in his time, catches the grander moments of the score without giving them the pounding quality they take in inferior Glass performances. (James Manheim)