Tag Archives: New Focus

The music on 'Toward Light' speaks to listeners who appreciate something bracing and new from a format – string quintet – that dates back centuries.

The digitally manipulated vocals and piano have an effect both compelling and distancing; they suggest fire and blood, not machinery...

Nicholas Tolle is the featured performer in new music for the cimbalom, an Eastern European instrument resembling a large hammered dulcimer.

With 1,024 parts, the individual lines blend into what we hear as one prolonged chord. Listening to it out of context you'd likely think it was a piece of avant-garde conceptual art.

What accounts for the persistent popularity of Vivaldi's music after all these centuries? Cecilia and Martin Gelland, together known as Duo Gelland, capture one important reason on their new recording.

When music is so baldly programmatic we should listen in two ways: with the context in mind, and purely musically.

A new album that includes arias from the opera 'Quake' along with instrumental music reveals composer Kay Rhie's ability to adapt her style for abstraction and direct storytelling alike.

Composer Aaron Helgeson's starting points range from traditional Norwegian fiddle to Shakespeare to Debussy.

Natural horn specialist Isaac Shieh has paired music by 19th-century composer Jacques-François Gallay with new commissions by contemporary composers, revealing Shieh's gifts as a musician and the potential for continued life for this ancient, "outdated" member of the brass family.

The meaning of simple contrasts is magnified in composer Ryan Vigil's meditative, thought-provoking works for violin and piano.