Tag Archives: New Focus Recordings

Guitarist-composer Flórez is uniquely skilled at interlocking written music with group improvisation in song-length tracks that leave us bopping our heads and scratching them at the same time.

One of this music's most interesting characteristics is a seamless fusion of acoustic and electronic sound.

If alternate tuning systems are new to you, this album will be an introduction more musical than pedagogic, and nonetheless revealing. If not, it will be easy to admire Thornock's ingenuity and talent.

The title piece is a set of variations on a theme from the Irish folk song "Shule Agra." The lyrics to a version known in English as "Johnny Has Gone for a Solider" are hopeful but uncertain. But that doesn't take away from this colorful album's predominantly upbeat feel.

Yugoslav-Israeli intellectual and Holocaust survivor Yehuda Elkana may be best known for his insistence that a people must leave the traumas of the past behind in order to thrive. With 'Que sais-je?' Amos Elkana, Yehuda's son, has created a profound portrait in music of his father.

The Crossing, the elite new-music chamber choir led by Donald Nally, routinely pushes the boundaries of what kinds of music a group of human voices can create.

'River Spirits' by Susan Botti lives up to its dual billings as a 'theatrical motet' and a 'futuristic abstract fable.'

A lot of contemporary music comes my way, and rarely do I hear a collection as appealing as this one, full of interesting ideas and curiously beautiful sounds.

The language comes not from notes and rhythms but the physical parameters of how an instrument is played.

Exceptet's debut album explores the sonic possibilities of a lineup inspired by Stravinsky, with music by Katherine Balch, Paul Kerekes and Sarah Goldfeather.