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"Rands at Oberlin" and Other Notable New Recordings

Apr. 01, 2020

"Rands at Oberlin" and Other Notable New Recordings

As the musical landscape has been profoundly changed by the global COVID-19 crisis, it's a great time to discover and revisit some recent recordings that bring the experience of great music into your home! 

On April 24th, Oberlin Music—the official record label of the Oberlin Conservatory of Music—will release Rands at Oberlin, containing recordings of two landmark works by Bernard Rands: Concerto for English Horn, commissioned and premiered for Oberlin's 150th anniversary in 2015, and Rands's Pulitzer prize-winning Canti del Sole. On this new recording, Rands's Concerto for English Horn is performed by Robert Walters, who is both principal English horn for The Cleveland Orchestra and a professor at Oberlin, alongside the Oberlin Orchestra, conducted by Raphael Jiménez. Rands's Concerto explores the lyrical, unique timbre of the English horn, playing with the tempo and instrumentation of the orchestra to throw the horn into relief; its final movement, "Hommage à C-AD", celebrates Rands's lifelong love of the music of Claude-Achille Debussy. This work complements the lyricism of Rands's Canti del Sole, here performed by tenor Magnus Staveland, which sets a multi-lingual collection of poetry relating to the sun into a single, uninterrupted movement, narrating the course of a day. On this new recording, Canti del Sole is masterfully performed by Staveland with the Oberlin Contemporary Music Ensemble, conducted by their long-standing director Timothy Weiss.

For those at home with children—or for the young at heart—now is a great time to check out the Boston Modern Opera Project's recording of Tobias Picker's Fantastic Mr. Fox, which recently won the 2020 Grammy™ Award for Best Opera Recording. Under the baton of BMOP's Gil Rose, Picker's opera brings Roald Dahl's classic story to life, "adding vivid splashes of color and rhythmic drive to the score," according to Gramophone. As the BostonGlobe has noted, this is the seventh nomination and first Grammy™ win for BMOP, which recorded Fantastic Mr. Fox in 2014. 

Joining Picker in the honors of the 2020 Grammy™ Awards is Andrew Norman and the Los Angeles Philharmonic, whose recording of Norman's Sustain won the Grammy for Best Orchestral Performance. Since its 2018 premiere, Sustain has taken the orchestral world by storm, praised as “a new American masterpiece” in The New Yorker, “sublime” by The New York Times, and “a near out-of-body acoustic experience that sounds like, and feels like, the future we want…” in the Los Angeles Times. A Finalist for the 2019 Pulitzer Prize, Sustain is a meditation on time: its human perception, its cyclical nature, its stillness, and its immensity. Norman writes:

"I realized, as I was trying to conceptualize Sustain as one long unbroken musical thought, that I was attempting to access and understand spans of time that were much bigger than my own, that I was trying to move from times with which I was familiar—that of a tweet, or a work day, or a year—to things I could never personally experience, like the rise and fall of species, the movement of tectonic plates, the birth and death of stars."

Our final Grammy™ nod comes from Christopher Cerrone, whose song cycle The Pieces That Fall To Earth, recorded by Wild Up, Christopher Rountree, Lindsay Kesselman and Theo Bleckmann, was nominated for the Best Chamber Music/Small Ensemble Performance award. Setting poems by Bay Area-poet Kay Ryan, The Pieces That Fall To Earth was commissioned and premiered by the Los Angeles Philharmonic in 2015, before being recorded by Wild Up, Rountree, Kesselman and Bleckmann in 2019 for New Amsterdam Records. Get an inside look into the recording process below: 

Across the Atlantic, Signum Classics has released a highly-anticipated recording of Gerald Barry's Beethoven and Piano Concerto, performed by Thomas Adès and the Britten Sinfonia, paired with Ludwig van Beethoven's Symphonies 1–3.

In Beethoven, Barry sets the only known surviving love letter written by Beethoven, famously addressed to his "Immortal Beloved"—an unnamed person of lengthy scholarly speculation. Barry's poetic, enigmatic note for his Piano Concerto contains only two sentences: "The Concerto is itself. Life and the wind play a part." This may or may not refer to the two wind machines in its percussion section. 

Like Barry, Alexander Goehr has also recently seen an intertextual work released on CD: his after 'The Waking', commissioned, premiered, and recorded by the Nash Ensemble, is a kind of rememberance of both one of his previous works—'The Waking'—and the eponymous poem it sets by Theodore Roethke. Goehr's new quintet is a fantasia in five movements on material that Goehr explains "wouldn’t let me go." After 'The Waking' is now available from NMC Recordings, which has made a preview of the album available on its website.

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