The Novel Voices Refugee Aid Project, created and directed by the Carr-Petrova Duo, is a project designed to give voice and visibility, through music and film, to the lives and struggles of both local and international refugee communities, and to encourage audiences and artists alike to become connected and involved. Since August 2018, it has brought free, interactive classical music concerts and workshops to displaced populations while increasing awareness of and raising support for both U.S.-based and international refugee-aid programs.  From August 12th to October 1st, 2019, The Novel Voices Refugee Aid Project, and the Carr-Petrova Duo are launching #50Days4Refugees - a social media campaign which walks through our past year of travels with the Novel Voices Refugee Aid Project from start to finish. We are releasing a single story/image/clip a day in order to give our followers the chance to virtually travel with us, meeting and engaging with the people, places, life-stories, cultures, music, and organizations we encountered along the way. Follow us daily as we share our journey and highlight the activities, strengths, and specific needs of the organizations we partnered with - along with what we learned about ways anyone anywhere can get involved.  Day 3: "Quick Facts: Behnam from Afghanistan"   Behnam lives in the Sandvaad Refugee Camp and takes a bus every day for two hours to get to school.  Behnam taught himself how to speak perfect English by watching youtube videos.  Behnam dreams of becoming a pianist. He learned to read music in front of our disbelieving eyes in the span of a single 30-minute piano lesson. Watch the video. The look and hugs Behnam gave Molly and Anna when they said goodbye nearly broke their hearts in two. They hold Behnam dear and hope that they will see him play again some day.

This week's playlist covers an array of music past and present from different countries. I have enjoyed the earlier songs over the years and don't want them forgotten. I just received a Deutsche Grammophon CD called Gateways, which features the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra with conductor Long Yu. Asia's oldest symphony, the Shanghai Symphony Orchestra celebrates its 140th anniversary this year. We hear part 1 of composer Qigang Chen's (b. 1951) suite for orchestra, "Wu Xing" (The Five Elements). SEE THE FULL KCRW: Los Angeles PAGE p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #4d4d4d} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #4d4d4d; min-height: 14.0px}

British-Nigerian singer/songwriter Ola Onabulé has more than 20 years' experience behind him. He has performed at some of the most prestigious jazz festivals – Montreal, Vancouver, San Sebastian, Istanbul, Washington and Umbria to name a few – as well as at concert halls and jazz clubs around the world. His compositions cross cultural and musical boundaries. He is also a veteran of the recording studio, where he takes a hands-on approach, immersing himself not only in musical creativity, but also in the technology necessary to produce it. With his latest studio album Point Less – 14 original tracks that tell tales of violence, immigration, xenophobia, betrayal, and dignity, at once celebrating life and warning the social forces threatening it – due for release at the end of August, he talks us through how he captured the complexity of the music, its heart and its spirit. READ THE FULL resolution magazine ARTICLE

p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #4d4d4d} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #4d4d4d; min-height: 14.0px} The Novel Voices Refugee Aid Project, created and directed by the Carr-Petrova Duo, is a project designed to give voice and visibility, through music and film, to the lives and struggles of both local and international refugee communities, and to encourage audiences and artists alike to become connected and involved. Since August 2018, it has brought free, interactive classical music concerts and workshops to displaced populations while increasing awareness of and raising support for both U.S.-based and international refugee-aid programs.  From August 12th to October 1st, 2019, The Novel Voices Refugee Aid Project, and the Carr-Petrova Duo are launching #50Days4Refugees - a social media campaign which walks through our past year of travels with the Novel Voices Refugee Aid Project from start to finish. We are releasing a single story/image/clip a day in order to give our followers the chance to virtually travel with us, meeting and engaging with the people, places, life-stories, cultures, music, and organizations we encountered along the way. Follow us daily as we share our journey and highlight the activities, strengths, and specific needs of the organizations we partnered with - along with what we learned about ways anyone anywhere can get involved.  Day 2: '60 Seconds With Meisar' We met so many incredible humans on this journey - all with similar hopes, dreams, and aspirations hidden behind the effacing label of "refugee"... Please meet our inspiring friend Meisar: an Iraqi English teacher & translator now living in Denmark, actively and passionately pursuing his dream of becoming a social worker with the goal of helping refugees like himself. Meisar and his translating skills were an indispensable part of our musical activities during our time in the Jelling Refugee Camp with the Danish Red Cross. We're so grateful to have met him. 

Women Warriors: The Voices of Change multimedia concert performed by Orchestra Moderne NYC, under the direction of Amy Andersson, features the music of eight renowned female film composers and presents 800 years of women fighting for human rights and equality. This 80-minute interactive experience is a socially and culturally relevant world premiere concert which includes historical visuals from the past to present day. Women Warriors: The Voices of Change celebrates the strength and heroism of female global activists fighting for human, civil, and minority rights, environmental causes, and gender equality. Orchestra Moderne NYC and Conductor/Producer Amy Andersson team with composers Nathalie Bonin, Miriam Cutler, Anne-Kathrin Dern, Sharon Farber, Mandy Hoffman, Penka Kouneva, Starr Parodi, and Lolita Ritmanis, who together have created a rich and cinematic orchestral experience in seventeen world premiere pieces that inspire hope and courage for women and girls around the world. Special guest artists include; Afghan rapper/songwriter Sonita Alizadeh, fifteen year old singer/songwriter Isolde Fair, and violinist Nathalie Bonin. Iranian human rights activist and author Masih Alinejad is the honored guest speaker. The featured Podcast for Week 8.12.2019 is 'Chapter 4: Love Is Love' with music by Starr Parodi Starr Parodi first entered the public eye as part of the house band on the hit late-night Arsenio Hall Show. Since then she has created scores for numerous films, television series, and iconic movie trailers. Her solo work has been featured on NPR, LA's non-comm powerhouse radio station - KCRW and on iHEART Radio. Parodi's darkly innovative production/arrangement of the JAMES BOND Theme which received an RIAA Gold Record was credited by Forbes magazine as "reinventing the modern action movie trailer." Parodi's World Premiere 'Joy of the Waters' is featured in Chapter Four "Love is Love" which celebrates LGBTQ activists and the achievement of Marriage Equality in the US. Join us at New York's Alice Tully Hall, Lincoln Center - September 20 2019 at 8:00pm for this historical and stunning concert experience which celebrates the strength and heroism of female global activists fighting for human and civil rights, environmental causes, and gender equality. Podcast narration by Max Horowitz, and opening theme music provided by Penka Kouneva. This content, as well as the related podcast, are licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) for redistribution and adaptation.

Women Warriors, The Voices of Change ? Chapter 4: Love Is Love

Summer nights feel especially precious now that we're well into August, and summer twilights seem especially magical. The "blue hour"-that last period of day when the sun has set, but residual light gives the sky a soft, bluish shade-this time and mood is captured in a recent album of the same name by clarinetist Andreas Ottensamer and pianist Yuja Wang. The repertoire that threads throughout Blue Hour, recently released by Deutsche Grammophon, consists of intimate Romantic solo piano masterpieces, arranged for clarinet and piano. Brahms leads off the album, with one of his late miniature gems, the Intermezzo in A Major, Op. 118, No. 2, beautifully arranged by Nicolai Popov. Andreas Ottensamer himself arranges a Brahms art song, "Wie Melodien zieht es mir," as well as seven Songs Without Words by Felix Mendelssohn. In this sensitive collaboration by Ottensamer and Wang, these arrangements sound as natural as if Mendelssohn and Brahms had written their pieces for this particular duo of instruments. From showy to poetic, Blue Hour will please fans of Yuja Wang, of Andreas Ottensamer, and of summer twilights. It's the WRTI: Philadelphia 'Classical Album of the Week' for August 12, 2019.  SEE THE PAGE & WATCH THE VIDEOS

The Grammy Award-winning PARTCH Ensemble, hailed as "funny, moving, inventive and insanely theatrical" by the San Francisco Chronicle, announced the release of Sonata Dementia, their third volume of music by American maverick composer Harry Partch (Bridge Records 9525). Sonata Dementia follows on the success of the ensemble's Vol. 1: Bitter Music: Harry Partch's Depression Journal; (Bridge 9349 A/C); which earned a GRAMMY Award nomination in 2012 for Best Classical Compendium, and Vol. 2: Plectra & Percussion Dances (Bridge 9432), the 2014 GRAMMY Award winner for Best Classical Compendium, which was also nominated for Best Chamber Music Performance. Early reviews recognize Partch as "truly one of a kind, and the group PARTCH does a wonderful job of capturing both the letter and the spirit of his music." PublicRadio90: Michigan - Classiclectic host Kurt Hauswirth spoke with PARTCH Ensemble music director John Schneider about their third recorded volume of the music of American composer Harry Partch.   LISTEN

Interview with Public Radio 90's Kurt Hauswirth

On Wilhemina Smith - Works for Solo Cello (Ondine 2018) featuring Esa-Pekka Salonen, Sarabande per un coyote, Giuseppe Colombi – Chiacona, Kaija Saariaho – Dreaming Chaconne, the Columbi selection is the real if routine baroque McCoy. Salonen's "Wile E." riff on a related genre, full of "wrong" notes and snapping pizzicati, struck these ears as kind of awful, but I loved Saariaho's untethered excursion into some night sky of her own, with its ominous low-lying passages and splintery flights to the dog-whistle stratosphere, often with no middle ground to plant one's feet on. The cellist is magnificent. On Esa-Pekka Salonen, Cello Concerto (Sony, 2019), featuring Yo-Yo Ma, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Esa-Peka Salonen, cond. II [the second movement, of three] Out of step as I found myself with Salonen's coyote sarabande, this expansive movement struck me as masterly, building from an exclamatory opening to a lonely, moody monologue for the soloist, whom the orchestra eventually rejoins in force like a rising by the seashore. Gorgeous. READ ALL beyondcriticism REVIEWS

Throughout his long and varied career, conductor Robert Geary has led hundreds of works, from early music to world premieres. But he says David Lang's latest piece is something fairly new. The composer's "teach your children," which Geary will conduct as part of this weekend's San Francisco Choral Society concert, sets texts Lang arranged using computer searches finished by auto-complete.  A reflection on the bonds between parents and children, the work was commissioned by Geary and the Choral Society. It makes its world premiere in performances Aug. 17-18 in Davies Symphony Hall on a program that also includes Carl Orff's "Carmina Burana." Presented as part of the Choral Society's  30th anniversary season, "teach your children" is the organization's sixth commissioned work in 12 years. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #4d4d4d} p.p2 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #4d4d4d; min-height: 14.0px} READ THE FULL Mercury News ARTICLE

The Novel Voices Refugee Aid Project, created and directed by the Carr-Petrova Duo, is a project designed to give voice and visibility, through music and film, to the lives and struggles of both local and international refugee communities, and to encourage audiences and artists alike to become connected and involved. Since August 2018, it has brought free, interactive classical music concerts and workshops to displaced populations while increasing awareness of and raising support for both U.S.-based and international refugee-aid programs.  From August 12th to October 1st, 2019, The Novel Voices Refugee Aid Project, and the Carr-Petrova Duo are launching #50Days4Refugees - a social media campaign which walks through our past year of travels with the Novel Voices Refugee Aid Project from start to finish. We are releasing a single story/image/clip a day in order to give our followers the chance to virtually travel with us, meeting and engaging with the people, places, life-stories, cultures, music, and organizations we encountered along the way. Follow us daily as we share our journey and highlight the activities, strengths, and specific needs of the organizations we partnered with - along with what we learned about ways anyone anywhere can get involved.  Day 1: "Feels Like Home"   When we began this project, we had no idea what to expect on so many levels. We were entering new terrain personally, linguistically, musically, geographically, socially, culturally…the list could go on for a while.   On August 12, 2018, we entered our very first refugee camp in Jelling Denmark, feeling almost like school children on our first day - with butterflies flitting about our stomachs not knowing what to expect. Very lucky for us, however, our very first encounter was with the head school teacher in the Danish Red Cross Jelling School - Alma. We later speculated that we experienced perhaps .01% of what the refugee children she works with must feel when entering her school and meeting her for the first time - because within minutes, our nerves were assuaged and we felt an immediate attachment to this kind, gentle, open, and generous woman who made us feel instantly welcome and at home.  Alma is a Bosnian refugee herself and has spent the past 25 years teaching at the Jelling school. She brings to the school a lightness, motherly warmth, and kindness that is reflected in the way the children interact with her. She is deeply loved and respected by all in her care.

In February 1987, Keith Jarrett recorded, on piano, the first book of The Well-Tempered Clavier by Johann Sebastian Bach. It was the first in a series of lauded Bach discs that Jarrett would make for ECM. On March 7, 1987, prior to the release of the studio set, he performed the complete WTC Book I for an audience in upstate New York at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, a venue renowned for its beautiful acoustics. With this release, ECM is presenting an archival live recording of this concert for the first time. When his studio album of the WTC Book I was released, Jarrett's manner in these iconic preludes and fugues surprised many listeners with its poetic restraint, given his renown as a jazz improvisor. But the pianist was deeply attuned to what he called "the process of thought" in Bach; by not imposing his personality unduly on the music, Jarrett allowed the score to shine via the natural lyricism of the contrapuntal melodic lines, the dance-like pulse of the rhythmic flow. These qualities are strikingly apparent in the live recording, with its added electricity of a concert performance. To these ears, unique insights in Jarrett's Bach from the historic concert recording of March 1987 are evasive, but the preludes in minor keys bring out his best. SEE THE beyondcriticism PAGE

The Forest Food Song A Riddle Another new piece of music theater, presented on our show the morning after the world premiere at the Santa Fe Opera. Based on "The Twelve Brothers," a lesser-known tale from the Brothers Grimm. A king threatens his queen with the death of their twelve sons unless the thirteenth child, still in the womb, turns out to be a girl. The queen arranges for the boys' safety-unnecessarily, as it turns out, since the thirteenth child is, indeed a daughter. All turns out for the best in the end, though not for the parents and not without extra tribulations for the siblings after the princess innocently cuts the stalks of her brother's mysterious twelve lilies. What was she thinking? The ingenious score blends Gothic foreboding with music-hall brio. A delightful addition to the repertoire, likely to be taken up widely. That said, at 70 minutes, The Thirteenth Child passes a little swiftly for a full evening of opera. How about a double will with Stravinsky's Nightingale or Orff's Der Mond? SEE THE beyondcriticism PAGE