MAX RICHTER - from SLEEP

"One of Britain's leading contemporary composers has written what is thought to be one of the longest single pieces of classical music ever to be recorded. SLEEP is eight hours long, and is actually and genuinely intended to send the listener to sleep.

'It's an eight-hour lullaby,' says its composer, Max Richter.

The landmark work is scored for piano, strings, electronics and vocals, but no words. 'It's my personal lullaby for a frenetic world,' he says. 'A manifesto for a slower pace of existence.'

SLEEP will receive its world premiere this September in Berlin, in a concert performance lasting from 12 midnight to 8am at which the audience will be given beds instead of seats and programmes. The eight-hour version will be available as a digital album, and for those who prefer it, a one-hour adaptation of the work, from SLEEP, will be released on CD, vinyl, download, and streaming formats, all through Deutsche Grammophon on  September 4.

'You could say that the short one is meant to be listened to and the long one is meant to be heard while sleeping,' says Richter, who describes the one-hour version as “a series of windows opening into the big piece.'" - Deutsche Grammophon

ARVO PÄRT - Musica Selecta

"Composer Arvo Pärt and producer Manfred Eicher have maintained their creative partnership for more than thirty years. Eicher launched the ECM New Series in 1984 as a platform for Pärt's music, bringing the Estonian composer to the world's attention with Tabula Rasa.

Since that epochal release, all first recordings of Pärt's major works have been made for ECM, with the composer's committed participation. In this special double album, issued on Pärt's birthday, Eicher revisits episodes from their shared musical quest, evoking fresh associations from juxtapositions of pieces in his dramaturgical sequence, as we are invited to hear the music anew." - ECM

NILS FRAHM - LateNightTales

"Nils Frahm's musical curation of the latest edition of LateNightTales leans on the side of the slow burning, the meditative and the hypnotic; it's a listening experience for those who appreciate subtle complexity. Frahm mixes and layers various genres, especially jazz and electronic, with organic natural sounds and gently humming drones, and a number of the featured compositions have been slowed, to great effect. 

Most notably he not only slowed Boards of Canada's 2000 track 'In a Beautiful Place Out in the Country,' but appears to have emphasized both the beats and the keyboards, transforming it into a narcotic, molasses-slow drip. Perhaps the crowning achievement on this collection is Frahm's ability to seamlessly unite the compositions of a diverse array of artists—Miles Davis, Four Tet, Nina Simone and the glitchy stylings of System, to name but a few—into a cohesive whole. There is never a moment when any of the songs clash or seem otherwise out of place." - Exclaim!

GONZALES - Chambers

"Jason Beck, the man who puts the bomb into the bombast of Chilly, retired from the rap game in 2003, and while he's dabbled since then (The Unspeakable purported to be the world's first orchestral rap album), he's managed to successfully smuggle the virtuoso pianist into our midst as his own career Trojan horse, and it's that persona we imagine now when we think of him. It's been a gradual and surprisingly smooth transmogrification, the electro cabaret maître d' with the extra testicle now a fully-fledged classical composer, having released Solo Piano, Solo Piano II and now this; indeed, by the conclusion of Chambers and the final song 'Myth Me', to hear the Canadian's voice suddenly appear almost feels incongruous. It's testament to just how successful he's been in his image overhaul, not that it really feels like one...Gonzales the renaissance man comes with the not uncharacteristically grand ambition of breathing new life into something contemporarily neglected. To do this, he conflates the old with the new with customary swagger." - The Quietus

JON HOPKINS - LateNightTales

"LateNightTales welcomes UK producer and musician Jon Hopkins to the fold with a beautiful sequence of songs and music, a requiem for a dreamstate. It's possibly somewhere between heaven, hell and high water, down the Thames Delta towards Eden. It may involve techno and a distorted state, or simply mates sat listening to music together, drifting on the open sea of their minds. This is Jon Hopkins' world, not so much joining the dots as colouring the whole damn picture in.

'Putting this album together was a unique opportunity for me to present music that I have been listening to for years, free from the constraints of a club setting or from trying to stick to one genre. I chose tracks not just because they have been important to me but because of how they sit together, putting as much thought into the transitions and overall narrative as I did into the track choices. I mixed by key and by texture more than anything else, using original sound design, pivot notes, and often recording new synth or piano parts to link things together in a way that flows as naturally as possible. I hope you enjoy it.' -J. H." - LateNightTales

JORDAN DE LA SIERRA - Gymnosphere: Song Of The Rose

"Before New Age hit terra firma at the dawn of the 1980s, the classically-trained Bay Area composer Jordan De La Sierra's consciousness soared with cosmic concepts. With cues and lessons from the great minimalists La Monte Young, Terry Riley, Pandit Pran Nath, and help from the venerable public radio program Hearts of Space, De La Sierra embarked on journey in alternate tunings and resounding reverberations, transporting entranced listeners from the Golden Gates to the intergalactic." - Numero Group

MAX RICHTER - Retrospective (4CD)

The success of Max Richter's Recomposition of Vivaldi's The Four Seasons, our best-selling classical release of the past five years by a significant margin, has resulted in this repackaging of four of his earlier releases in a stunning box set by Deutsche Grammophon. A beautiful hybrid of ambient, classical and electronic styles.

"Whether it be the Haruki Murakami readings and subtle piano arrangements with the broken synapse electronics flickering in the background on parts of 2006's Songs From Before or the more mechanical effusions that emit a dystopian glow from 2008's 24 Postcards In Full Colour, there is a restless energy percolating beneath the elegance and the elegiac. 2010’s Infra closes out the set, an album that fuses the electronic, the orchestral and the ethereal like no other piece this reviewer’s heard before or since.

By corralling all of Richter's fine works of this period together, Retrospective firmly underscores the belief that music can transcend all boundaries. From the soaring wonders of On The Nature Of Daylight right through to the mournful violin that sees out Infra 8, Richter beckons for the listener to close their eyes and jump into the nebulous abyss of their own imagination. That ability is truly magical." - TheMusic.com.au

KRONOS QUARTET Plays Music By BRYCE DESSNER - Aheym

Classical music doesn't get much play time in our shop, but every once in a while it'll find its way into the queue. When we played this latest Kronos Quartet release a while ago, it generated a flurry of interest from the handful of customers in the shop at the time. Perhaps more in-store play of classical music is in the offing?

"Aheym, Dessner's collaboration with contemporary-classical hip-uncle figures the Kronos Quartet, is the result of a working relationship that dates back a few years. Three of its four pieces were written specifically for Kronos, and the title track has been a fixture of their concerts for a few years now. 'Aheym' begins with all four members digging into their strings and producing hard, sinewy sforzandos, or sudden, violent accents, before subsiding quickly into an agitated, seething hum. The cello plays lopsided arpeggios, each one nervously edging forward, while pizzicato prickles tension higher. It is fierce, vivid music." - Pitchfork

DANIEL HOPE - Spheres

Violinist Daniel Hope follows his brilliant appearance as soloist on Max Richter's Recomposed: Vivaldi's Four Seasons (a turn impressive enough to have made our Staff Best Of 2012 list) with this program centred around the concept of planetary movement, the 'music of the spheres,' featuring pieces by Richter himself as well as Arvo Pärt, Philip Glass, Michael Nyman and Gabriel Prokofiev, among others. (Listen to Hope's own commentary, along with selections from Spheres, at Deutsche Grammophon's SoundCloud page.)

"The idea that the universe can aspire to elegance, harmony and symmetry has long been an irresistible concept for artists, musicians and even some scientists. It’s a controversial notion, of course, to suggest that subjective aesthetics can be applied to inherently objective disciplines.

But flip the concept around, and you get projects like Spheres, the thought-provoking album by the British violinist Daniel Hope. The collection is based on the 'music of the spheres,' the philosophical idea that the proportions of the movements of celestial bodies (the sun, moon and planets) can be viewed in the form of music, inaudible but perfectly harmonious.

Hope has assembled a collection of 18 pieces whose repetitions evoke the recurrent orbits of astral bodies. As bookends are two Baroque works: Imitazione delle campane by Bach predecessor Johann Paul von Westhoff, and a string trio arrangement of Bach’s own Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 1. In between are minimalist works by Philip Glass and Arvo Pärt, a film music selection by Michael Nyman, and ear-massaging new pieces by Ludovico Enaudi, Alex Baranowski, Max Richter and others." - WQXR

MAX RICHTER - Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi - The Four Seasons

With autumn in full swing, now's the perfect time to listen to the musical evocation of the season in this latest entry in Deutsche Grammophon's Recomposed series. Subtly incorporating ambient elements similar to his own work, Max Richter tastefully reinvents this classic for the modern age with the assistance of violinist Daniel Hope.

"[Richter's] solo work combines ambient electronica with melodic minimalism, and in his recasting of The Four Seasons, everything is up for reconsideration except the classical instrumentation. Sometimes the melody is retained while elements of the accompaniment are reconstituted into a droning or minimalist style: sometimes the rhythm is chopped up into uneven time signatures. Motifs are stretched through repetition in a way that reminds us of the similar construction of much Baroque music. Occasionally revisions practically result in a new melody, as in the opening movement of 'Summer.' [...] It would have been very easy for Richter's Four Seasons to end up a cheap gimmick. Instead it aligns the Baroque and the modern in thoroughly enjoyable and memorable ways." - eMusic

WILLIAM SHELLER - Lux Aeterna

This newly-unearthed Omni Recording Corp. reissue has been getting major store play here, and with good reason—imagine a David Axelrod/Serge Gainsbourg/Jean-Claude Vannier dream-team collaboration (one which presciently narrowly predates the latter two Frenchmen's collaborations, even!), replete with lysergic Catholic mass choir.

Including 11 bonus tracks focusing on Sheller's poppier (but still fairly freaky) 45s, this is the very first time this rarity has ever been widely available.

"Originally composed as a wedding gift in 1970, it's an oddly beautiful recording which combines a weirdly sinister melange of ritualistic choral chants, melancholic psychedelic orchestration, whirling electronic oscillations, meditative kosmiche groove and devout spoken word recitations. I can only think of a handful of records to compare it to, the nearest touchstones being the dark instrumental passages of Jean Claude Vannier's L'Enfant Assassin Des Mouches or the mystical psychedelic liturgical paens of Majoie Hajary's La Passion Selon Judas, or maybe a few of the immersive orchestral reverberations found on Jason Havelock's Pop Symphony. As I said, comparisons are not easy. Whatever dark chemicals they were dumping in the Seine in the late 60's and early 70's to create such weirdly uncharted musical waters we can only guess." - A Sound Awareness

KRONOS QUARTET - Music of Vladimir Martynov

Be sure not to miss the Kronos Quartet playing with the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, Saturday, March 3, 2012 as part of the New Creations Festival. They'll be playing a specially-commissioned piece by Canadian composer Derek Charke. That piece isn't on their latest album, which instead features the work of Vladimir Martynov (whose opening piece The Beatitudes is especially sublime).

"In 1979, Vladimir Martynov entered the Spiritual Academy at the Trinity Lavra of St. Sergius, where he worked on preserving and restoring traditional Russian Orthodox chant. He returned to composition in the 1990s with a new style that combined the traditions of American minimalism with the repetitive chant of Russian Orthodoxy. As Greg Dubinsky writes in the liner notes, Martynov explores the 'perspective of the Orthodox Church’s hermetic, ascetic tradition of insight and ecstasy achieved through ceaseless prayer. His goal is to create a music that maintains this pose of enraptured contemplation for as long as possible.'" - Nonesuch

"Martynov's commissioned compositions include a re-scoring of his 1998 work The Beatitudes, Schubert-Quintet (Unfinished), and Der Abschied. Schubert-Quintet (Unfinished) is influenced by Schubert's String Quartet in C Major, and allows Kronos Quartet to reunite with former cellist Joan Jeanrenaud. In it, Martynov goes backwards in time, meeting Schubert and then extending his thought into a modern composition that highlights the power found in the interaction of two cellos. Der Abschied is a tribute to Martynov's father, and the piece replicates his father's difficult final breaths through its use of repetition." - The Violin Shop

THE CARETAKER - Patience (After Sebald)

This newest release on James Leyland Kirby's History Always Favours The Winners imprint has him once again donning his Caretaker guise, and these detourned piano pieces are a classical gas (or maybe more of a gauze, come to think of it—click here to sample this album's outtakes, the supplemental mini-album Extra Patience).

"Leyland Kirby's most recent effort, much like, but unique from, those released previously, exists as a faded daguerreotype of passing time and time passed. Commissioned as the score for Grant Gee's most recent film  [of the same name], it's an amorphous miasma of echoing antiquity, evoking a time prior to the advent of colour film as a crackling grey scale roll." - Exclaim!

"James Kirby's discography as The Caretaker is essentially variations on a theme, but you never quite know what you're going to get out of him. This time around, Kirby has chosen recordings of Franz Schubert works circa 1927 and repurposed them via his usual mix of gentle processing and decay, but here the lines are blurred more than ever between artifacts of age and purposeful manipulation." - Resident Advisor

WILLIAM ORBIT - Pieces In A Modern Style 2

The first volume of this series—whose wide release happened back in 2000—was an unexpected favourite of mine. Opinion often seemed split on whether it was an heir to Wendy Carlos or an entry-level muzak update of Hooked On Classics, but there was something about Orbit's unfussy electronic takes on classical pieces that really resonated with me (despite strong initial skepticism, I might add).

For starters, his love and reverence for the pieces was obvious—there was little attempt to add a throbbing techno pulse or glitchy hip hop break to the tracks. On some pieces, like the opener of Samuel Barber's "Adagio For Strings", it took a while to tell that it wasn't an orchestra. And even when he did go for a sound more obviously electro (as on Beethoven's "Triple Concerto"), the effect was tasteful and gorgeous in its own right. But that was Volume One...

This second time around, Orbit is much more comfortable with the idea of introducing elements from his own past as a storied house and dance producer (Madonna's Ray of Light, Blur's 13, the Strange Cargo series, etc.). Elgar's "Nimrod" bubbles and percolates like a pot on the edge of boil, driven forward by a gurgling bass line. Similarly, Grieg's "Peer Gynt" could easily be remixed to back a dark Kylie Minogue pop cut. Pieces such as Bach's "Arioso" and Faure's "Paradisum" hold truer to the original volume, but Orbit is definitely putting a heavier foot forward than previously. If Volume One was bringing modern technology into the past, Volume Two is much more about the album's titular ambition of bringing older pieces of music into a modern context.

If this sounds like something you'd hate, guess what? You probably will. I can't pretend for a second that what Orbit is doing here won't be seen by many as awful at best and sacrilege at worst. But again, despite the fact that I can see myself buying pants and drinking martinis to this album, I find myself inexplicably drawn to it. Perhaps it's because it so directly challenges the discrepancies between my pleasure centers and my taste centers (i.e. I like even though most of my 'critical' faculties tell me not to). Maybe it's because the more I listen to it, the better it gets. And besides, at its best, such as on Vaughan Williams' "Lark" or Tchaikovsky's "Swan Lake", Orbit offers a unique opportunity to see well-established pieces in an entirely new light—not to mention one that isn't solely based on making Nutcracker excerpts sound 'funky' to try and hawk cheesy Christmas gifts. Once again, Orbit dances on a knife's edge and manages to come out quite unscathed. Well played.

TIMOTHY ANDRES - Shy and Mighty

loudQUIETloud is the name of a Pixies documentary, referring to that band's signature dynamics that influenced everyone from Nirvana to Mogwai as a dramatic device. But it could just as easily be the title of pianist/composer Timothy Andres' debut (an album that instead opts for the more poetic Shy and Mighty). Sudden dynamic shifts have been an key to much Western classical music for centuries, whether it's the jarring penultimate choral blast that explodes from a gentle drift in the 5th movement of Beethoven's Ninth, or the heart-pulsing ebbs and flows of Chopin's Ballade No. 2 in F Major.

The 25-year old Andres—already a quite experienced composer—is keen to carry on the tradition, but his approach is hardly Romantic. Where Chopin allowed his musical phrases to harmoniously wind their way through the scales, Andres pulls from the more recent traditions established by composers such as Steve Reich. In other words, repetition, subtle shifts of accent and the occasional fits of dissonance. The result is an album of tightly interlocked piano duets (performed throughout with pianist David Kaplan) that is beautifully placed between two modes—the cool calculation of the modern masters with a dash of Romantic emotional, fiery temperament.

In this context, the title Shy and Mighty is almost a little too on the nose, too eager a description. But it is one that Andres sells fully, if for no other reason than that it is truly exciting to hear a young pianist/composer who so convincingly blends daring originality, a reverence for the past, and respect for the listener. Because even when Andres' competing desires threaten to swallow each other, he manages to keep an eye on the piece as a whole long enough to always see it through. The result is both an accessible and unpredictable debut, not to mention a total score for the label Nonesuch. With Mehldau's Highway Rider already a great success, these pianists are giving their employers a vibrant 2010. Expect many big things from this guy in the future.

TODOR KOBAKOV - Pop Music

You never really know your neighbours, do you? I mean, sure, us Torontonians know that we have a really solid indie scene—one that spans everything from video-game punk to carnival-esque avant-jazz. But how many of you really knew that we had our very own Chopin lurking in our midst? Perhaps that has something to do with the fact that Todor Kobakov's most well-known contributions to our music scene were as one half of the pop duo Major Maker—they're responsible for that uber-catchy Maynard's candy jingle. In other words, it's okay if this one catches you by surprise. Kobakov may appear to be coyly acknowledging this past by calling his debut solo piano effort Pop Music, but it's more than a gag. To start, two indie-pop vocalists in Emily Haines of Metrics and TV On The Radio's Tunde Adebimpe contribute vocals to a pair of tracks. But with or without these vocal turns, he has made a rather populist album. With each track hovering in the three to four minute range, Kobakov makes sure to never overstate his talents or his ambitions, favouring tight, eloquent narratives over bombastic showmanship or drawn-out melancholy. Furthermore, his titles all offer direct windows into the themes of each piece. If it all sounds like I'm suggesting he's recorded a sort of Solo Piano for Dummies, then a thousand apologies, because Pop Music is no such thing. Rather, it's Solo Piano for the People—an album that is as humble and unassuming with its great gifts as it is generous. Simply gorgeous, timeless stuff.

MUSKOX - 5 Pieces

Mike Smith's Muskox finally make the leap to full-length (and -sized, as all-out triangle-tesselated packaging deservedly flaunts the fact) status with 5 Pieces, their first for Alex Durlak's Standard Form imprint (also home to Canaille and Feuermusik, among many other interrelated acts) after three consistently impressive 3" CD-Rs self-released over as many years. The ensemble's since likewise grown, now counting cellist Erika Nielsen among its ranks.

Disciplined but lyrical and delicately driving, Smith and company continue to temper tricky rhythms and time changes with lithe melodic lines that brainily intertwine, often returning to state the head motif after an adventurous, involved digression. A truly progressive crossbreed, Muskox straddle genres with the grace of a much less brawny beast.

(Muskox perform at the Music Gallery Thu. Oct 29 with Canaille and Damian Valles. Tickets are $10 at the door, and the show starts at 8:30pm.)

ARVO PART - In Principio

Long the indie-rocker's gateway drug to classical music, minimalist Estonian composer Part specializes in the sort of sombre, contemplative and relatively linear music that fans of Mogwai and Godspeed instantly understand. In particular, the highly influential trio of "Fratres", "Spiegel Im Spiegel" and "Cantus In Memory Of Benjamin Britten" have seen him held in the kind of high regard that finds him equally respected amongst jazz, post-rock, and contemporary classical darlings like pianist Helene Grimaud, who has recorded his works on albums alongside those of Beethoven. In Principio is another excellent effort that is, on the whole, less heavy than 2005's meditation on mortality, Lamentate. Of course, In Principio means "In the beginning...", so don't expect lollipops. Using the first verses of the Gospel of John as its template, this piece for choir and orchestra is classic Part: measured, graceful, and tinged with sadness and understanding. Other highlights here include the tensely ascending/descending "La Sindone", and a reprise of "Da pacem Domine", a piece performed annually in tribute to the victims of the 2004 Madrid bombings.

NICO MUHLY - Mothertongue

Nico Muhly's day job as assistant to Philip Glass is a particularly pertinent backstory when confronted with the Einstein-ian barrage of rich low-end and flutttering operatic chatter (with mezzo-soprano Abigail Fischer instructed to incorporate as many past street addresses lived at into said overdubs) on Mothertongue's first, eponymous piece. Harpischord, celeste and trombones back Helgi Hrafn Jonsson's recitations riffing on various early-1600s texts for the duration of "Wonders", but nu-folk wunderkind Sam Amidon threatens to steal the show with "The Only Tune"'s cheery telling of a murder ballad involving two sisters, slowly drawn out additively.

ELODIE LAUTEN - The Death Of Don Juan

An artifact of early digital recording and composition (the year: 1985; the main tool: the Fairlight CMI polyphonic sampling synthesizer), Don Juan transcends both the era of its making and the many styles it encompasses, from speedy-grid minimalism to pensive lyre passages (played on an electro-acoustic model of Lauten's own invention, the Trine) and drawn-out, haunting choral singing (as on the mid-opera "Death Of A Woman", where Don Juan himself is voiced by Arthur Russell--his chief accomplice Peter Zummo also features prominently throughout). This reissue continues Unseen Worlds' mandate, giving deserving cult avant-garde classical works a new audience.