Avie Records

Apollo’s Fire and its founder-director Jeannette Sorrell have blazed trails in the world of historically informed performance with pioneering programming, presentational flair and an entrepreneurial spirit. Their latest release, which launches the ensemble’s 30th anniversary season, is destined to soar to similar heights: the ensemble’s first recording of the perennial audience favourite, Antonio Vivaldi’s The Four Seasons, featuring the phenomenal Spanish-born fiddler Francisco Fullana. Frequently performed at Apollo’s Fire home base in Cleveland, Ohio and on their international tours, “Sorrell’s vivid approach to the pictorial elements make these familiar works seem freshly minted, full of astonishing incident”, according to Seen & Heard International. The Four Seasons is the first of five releases spread throughout the season celebrating Apollo’s Fire’s milestone 30th anniversary. © AVIE Records

First Percy Grainger: Folk Music, then Edvard Grieg: Lyric Music, and now Modest Mussorgsky: Unorthodox Music – a logical sequence in soprano Claire Booth’s and pianist Christopher Glynn’s growing AVIE discography, interspersing a selection of under-represented songs with solo piano works by this most individual and idiosyncratic of all Russian composers. Claire Booth and Christopher Glynn approach Modest Mussorgsky's music in the spirit of a storyteller, tracing an arc of life from innocence to experience that is arranged across a prologue and four “scenes” – Nursery, Youthful Years, Marriage and Loneliness – taking their cue from the colorful tableaux of the composer’s operas. Individual numbers from the great song cycles – Youthful Years, Nursery, Sunless, and Songs and Dances of Death – are juxtaposed with works from Mussorgsky’s more unorthodox output, all delivered by Claire Booth and Christopher Glynn with disarming affect. © AVIE Records

With his critically acclaimed AVIE Records recordings of music by Johann Sebastian Bach, Johannes Brahms, Gabriel Fauré and Sergei Rachmaninov to his credit, the celebrated British pianist Charles Owen scales the heights of Franz Liszt’s anthology Années de pelerinage, and especially the first part, Suisse, which evokes the great 19th-century pianist-composer’s Swiss sojourns with aural impressions of the Alpine landscape, its peaks and valleys, mountains and streams, and the country’s distinctive folk music. Literary references abound as they do in the album’s concluding piece, the emotional Bénédiction de Dieu dans la solitude which was inspired by a poem penned by Liszt’s friend Alphonse de Lamartine. Emotions ran equally high for Charles Owen who turned to Liszt during lockdown. The uncertainty of being homebound throughout the pandemic was eased by the extra meaning and solace of the composer’s evocations of journeying, experiencing the natural world and its sense of beauty and liberation. © AVIE Records

Modernism. Multiculturism. Multi-tuning. Lockdown. These are among the elements that bind the works on "The Solo Album" by cellist Christoph Croisé, who took the opportunity of 2020’s coronavirus isolation to work intensively on a variety of solo works and also turn his hand to composition. At the heart of the album is Hungarian composer Zoltán Kodály’s epic Sonata, the first major work for solo cello after the Suites by Johann Sebastian Bach which were written two centuries earlier. The virtuosity demands of the soloist re-tuning two of the cello’s strings, double-stop trills and simultaneous bowed and plucked passages, all of which Christoph dispatches with aplomb. Framing Kodály’s Sonata are works by two compatriots, György Ligeti’s two-movement Sonata which draws inspiration from Béla Bartók, and the more recent Stonehenge by cellist, composer and pop-music producer Péter Pejtsik which includes intimations of electric guitar. A “sandwich filler” is Christophe’s first composition for solo cello, Spring Promenade, which is infused with boogie-woogie, reggae, swing and techno. He took inspiration from Sicilian composer-cello virtuoso Giovanni Sollima whose Concerto Rotondo incorporates electronics and extended techniques. Closing out the album, Sollima’s short work Alone gives way to the album’s “encore”, the exuberant Some like to show it off by Croatian cellist-composer Thomas Buritch. © AVIE Records

Cellist Inbal Segev’s inspirational commissioning project, "20 for 2020", continues apace with the second of four digital EPs featuring five of the 20 composers she commissioned in response to the extraordinary combination of events the world experienced 2020. A gesture of support to her fellow musicians and solace for audiences, "20 for 2020" features an immensely varied palette of strong and distinctive compositional voices spanning a range of ages, genders and cultures, and reflects by turns the darkness of the pandemic, the BLM movement, isolation and contemplation. Collectively the works celebrate a stunning array of music for the soulful sound of the cello in the 21st century. © AVIE Records

At first glance, the musical worlds of Frédéric Chopin and William Bolcom would seem strange bedfellows. But on his solo debut recording, Israeli American pianist Ran Dank makes a convincing case for pairing the two composers. The former, Poland’s national composer, is synonymous with pianistic panache. The latter, a leading American, possesses one of contemporary music’s most bold and inventive voices. Juxtaposing the works of these two pianist-composers reveals their common affinity for the keyboard and ear for sound and sense of structure. William Bolcom’s Twelve New Etudes won the Pulitzer Prize in 1988. Wonderfully eclectic, they move effortlessly between one musical idiom to another with endless ingenuity, exhibiting all the traits of Bolcom’s compositional craft. Chopin equally excelled with his Etudes, but Dank turns to his plentiful Polonaises, Mazurkas and Waltzes which range in style from heroic, to dark and brooding, haunting and beautiful. Ran Dank, a winner of numerous international competitions and prizes, has been significantly influenced by these two composers who have shaped his trajectory as a pianist and musician. As a child to two parents from Poland, Chopin played a meaningful part in his upbringing, and he became mesmerised by the composer’s music at an early age. Bolcom’s music was a much later discovery, but one that has become equally valuable and fitting, following Dank’s move to America. © AVIE Records

Swiss violinist Sebastian Bohren, who’s star is rapidly in the ascendant, makes his AVIE label debut with two concertos from Mozart’s “year of the violin” – No. 3 and No. 5 – paired with the composer’s youthful Symphony No. 29. Sebastian’s interpretations bring out the sparkling energy of the concertos, written when Mozart was just 19 years old, yet at the same time a brandish a smoothly burnished sense of style. His partners on the album, famed Hungarian violinist-turned conductor Gábor Takács-Nagy and Sebastian’s compatriots the CHAARTS Chamber Artists – comprised of leading European soloists and chamber musicians – perfectly embody these contrasting characteristics, both in their accompaniments and their reading of the Symphony which was written within a year of the concerti. Sebastian is equally at home as a soloist and chamber musician. He plays the “Ex-Wanamaker-Hart” violin made by Guadagnini in Parma in 1761. © AVIE Records

Lebanese-born, Canadian-Armenian-American soprano Isabel Bayrakdarian is as celebrated for her beauty, dynamic presence, and style as for her strikingly multidimensional voice. With this deeply personal project, she gathers a selection of haunting and poignant lullabies that draw on the memories and experiences of the Armenian people. Twenty-nine tracks trace an arc from the Ottoman Empire through the Genocide and beyond, with songs and transcriptions by the country’s beloved folk composer Gomidas Vartabed, Parsegh Ganatchian who joined the diaspora in Lebanon, and Ganatchian’s contemporary Mihran Toumajan. For Isabel, these evocative songs span two centuries and five generations. Sung by her great-grandmother, grandmother and mother, and now to her own children, Isabel’s "Armenian Songs" have an appeal to children of all ages. © AVIE Records

Lithuanian, London-based pianist Indrė Petrauskaitė makes her AVIE label debut with a selection of Mozart’s piano works with a twist: she uniquely brings together the composer’s solo keyboard works written in minor keys. The nine works offered here represent a fraction of the composer’s overall oeuvre, yet they span a gamut of genres – including improvisatory and emotional fantasies, enigmatic miniatures and complex sonatas. Indrė Petrauskaitė showcases these pieces – much loved staples of stage and studio alike – in a novel and quite exciting album. “Strong and well-played performances” (MusicWeb International). © AVIE Records

Recorded live at the Kennedy Center’s Terrace Theater on November 12, 2018, one day after the centennial of the signing of the Armistice that ended World War I, "The Journey Home" captures John Brancy’s radiant baritone and Peter Dugan’s dazzling pianism in a program that pays homage to composers and poets who fought in the war and traces a narrative arc of contemplation and peace. From the jollity of Gustav Holst’s Jupiter and Oley Speaks’ When the Boys Come Home to Ralph Vaughan Williams’ affectionate cycle Songs of Travel, from some of the finest lieder penned by Schubert and Rachmaninoff to war-time songs by Irving Berlin and Ivor Novello and Pete Seeger’s iconic Where Have All the Flowers Gone, the music on "The Journey Home" spans many styles and generations but is united by a shared story about the search for meaning and belonging in the wake of catastrophe. John Brancy's and Peter Dugan’s Kennedy Center performance was the culmination of a tour that brought their message to thousands of audience members throughout the United States. © AVIE Records

Vast, deep and emotional are apt descriptions of the single-movement, 53-minute-long Symphony No. 2 by Christopher Tyler Nickel. The Canadian composer elaborates, “one can think of this music as consisting of mirrors between ideas that equally disturb yet entice. Each side of the reflection is in itself conceivably valid, but when facing each other friction and dissonance are created. The exquisitely alluring and the grotesque exist simultaneously. Perhaps another way to understand the symphony is as a meditation on the state of cognitive dissonance”. The entrepreneurial Clyde Mitchell conducts the Seattle-based Northwest Sinfonia on this world-premiere recording. © AVIE Records

The provocative and beguiling Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (LCCE) comprises the "crème de la crème" of the San Francisco Bay Area’s musicians. Their motto: nothing is out of bounds, and anything is possible. Presenters of all types of music including small ensemble, vocal, orchestral, multi-media and operatic, a select group comes together for this recording of Olivier Messiaen’s seminal chamber work, Quartet for the End of Time. Written during the composer’s confinement in World War II, he maintained hope, expressing, “The abyss is Time with its sadness, its weariness. The birds are the opposite … our desire for light, for stars, for rainbows, and for jubilant songs”. LCCE co-founder and prize-winning composer Kurt Rohde echoes this sentiment in his Messiaen-inspired one wing for violin and piano, heard here in its world-premiere recording. © AVIE Records