Classical WETA 90.9 FM showcases notable new (or newly reissued) albums each week. Hear selections from the album on-air throughout the week, and check online to learn more about the artist and the music. We're pleased to resume Album of the Week during Black History Month by featuring the wonderfully talented family of musicians: the Kanneh-Masons. They recently released a recording of Carnival of the Animals by Camille Saint-Saëns, along with several other animal-themed classical works.  The Carnival of the Animals features a new text by author Michael Morpurgo, narrated by him and Academy Award-winning actor Olivia Colman (of The Crown fame). Listen all week for portions of the Carnival as well as several full performances.  Here is a note from the seven talented Kanneh-Masons who are featured in this recording: The idea for this album grew from our special connection with music as young children. Music that speaks to the young, brought to life in the creative dialogue between narrative and sound has an impact that lasts a lifetime. As very young children, our parents introduced us to Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, and we listened to this obsessively every morning before Primary school. (We still love the way the music illustrates the words spoken in that recording by the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra and Dame Edna Everage!) We were all similarly fascinated by the magical world of story and music created in Carnival of the Animals by Saint-Saëns. The drama, the picture-painting and the humour which is packed into the music has been brought into vivid colour by Michael Morpurgo's story poems, – also narrated by the extraordinary Olivia Colman – which are funny, exciting and at times incredibly moving.

Hilary Hahn's new recording pays homage to the rich cultural heritage of a city that has been close to her heart throughout her career. Set for international release by Deutsche Grammophon on 5 March 2021, Paris sees the American violinist resume her productive partnership with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France and its Music Director, Mikko Franck. The three-time Grammy Award-winner's album presents the world premiere of Einojuhani Rautavaara's Deux Sérénades, commissioned by Mikko Franck. It also includes Ernest Chausson's Poème and Sergei Prokofiev's Violin Concerto No.1, which received its first performance in the French capital in 1923. HH made some time available TODAY!! to speak with radio stations about the new release. The list includes   KDFC: San Francisco    CRB: Boston     WMBR: Boston WRCJ: Detroit   Spokane Public Radio: WA        WGTE: Toledo OH WCMU: Mount Pleasant MI WCPE: Wake Forest NC WMHT: Schenectady NY WQLN: Erie PA WOMR Provincetown MA Winnipeg's CLASSIC107: Canada Taintradio: Online

Harmonious World Podcast: UK

A Quiet Madness features three piano pieces, a piano and violin duet, a series of seven scenes for four flutes and a solo accordion piece that was composed as a response to Hurricane Katrina. The album immerses the listener in a photorealistic sound world of understated beauty. At once calming and thought-provoking, it allows the ear and mind to make their own connections without feeling overwhelmed by thematic constraints. William Susman's precise harmonic and rhythmic languages invite us into a subdued, enchanting expression of madness that roams all over the map, akin to the mind wandering during a rainy day-or, perhaps clairvoyantly, akin to the strange passage of time spent in self-isolation during the collective trauma of COVID-19. Harmonious World Podcast's Hilary Robertson conducts her first podcast with William Susman and extracts from the composer's music. LISTEN TO THE SEGMENT Support the show

Interview with Harmonious World podcast

89.1WMHT: Schenectady NY's Rob Brown writes....When British pianist Benjamin Grosvenor was just a boy, his grandfather, an amateur pianist, introduced him to the music of Franz Liszt. Grosvenor's new recording on Decca Records is all music of Liszt. Grosvenor said, "I wanted with this recording to show the composer in his different aspects, including some of his original compositions, but also displaying the extraordinarily re-creative abilities he showed in his transcriptions." SEE THE PAGE & LISTEN

Interview with WMHT's Rob Brown

CRB's BRIAN MCCREATH writes.....Boston Symphony Orchestra Music Director Andris Nelsons describes the three online performances he conducts, each of them featuring Beethoven symphonies, and works inspired by them, written by composers of our time. In January 2020, Nelsons and the BSO were looking ahead to a concert tour of Asia, followed by the last chapters of the 2019-2020 season. The tour, however, was cancelled as the now world-wide pandemic took hold in the very countries the orchestra was to have visited. And eventually, those last dynamic chapters of the season, including Nelsons's return, were also stricken from the schedule. In a radically changed world, Nelsons and the orchestra were finally reunited to record three concerts for BSO Now, the Boston Symphony's online concert series. And in a remotely-produced interview, Nelsons described each concert, revealing the ways his relationship with Beethoven's symphonies have evolved, as well as how the impact of those symphonies is refracted through compositional voices of our time. I began by asking Nelsons to describe the feeling of returning to Symphony Hall after being gone for so long. LISTEN TO THE 99.5:CRB - Boston SEGMENT

The New York Times - David Allen writes....For his new album, Benjamin Grosvenor delved into historical recordings of the daunting Sonata in B minor. "This is music that's probably not supposed to be played cleanly," Benjamin Grosvenor said of Liszt's Piano Sonata in B minor, the centerpiece of his new album. How do the great musicians prepare to play the great works? Each has his or her own methods, and tends to keep the strategy quiet, a secret key to success. One thing that distinguishes the subtle Benjamin Grosvenor, 28, from the rest of the pack of young star pianists is his extensive knowledge of historical recordings. This listening has paid off in a spellbinding Liszt recording out on Decca on Friday, crowned with a typically thoughtful account of the treacherous Sonata in B minor. "I almost feel like you should know the notable recordings of a work like this," Grosvenor said of the sonata in a recent interview. "More than anything, it helps you understand what works and what doesn't work. You react to some things positively and you react to some things negatively, and that fuels your imagination." What do you think about the opening bars of the sonata, which are so spare compared to what follows? It's foreboding, and mysterious, and a little bit threatening. It would be quite interesting to just line up eight recordings of the first bar. For someone who is a music lover but who is not that acquainted with putting a piece together, it might just be interesting to hear how two notes can essentially be interpreted in so many different ways. There are many valid approaches. What Vladimir Horowitz does in a large hall in his Carnegie recording, this kind of demonic thing, works very well. Cherkassky's is interesting; it sounds like he's improvising, like it's something that's just come to him in the moment, but it's obviously conscious because he executes it in the same way at the end of the slow movement as well. I was aiming for something mysterious, almost - so the notes are not too present. They're quite soft, very much like plucked strings, the bass more in it than the treble, like what Alfred Brendel does. So comparisons with orchestral sounds help you define what you are trying to achieve, even in a work as pianistic as this? As a pianist you've been playing the piano all of your life; you have a natural association with piano sound. So it's only when you're forced to put it into words that you try to make those associations. But it is an appropriate way to think, because, for most composers, the piano is always trying to imitate other instruments, because of its nature as a percussion instrument. Again, it's a line of thought that adds fire to the imagination, and the colors that you then draw out. One of the challenges in the piece is how to create tension over the whole, or even just over shorter periods of double octaves, or continuous fortissimo dynamics. You picked out a section near the start as an example. In this double-octave passage there is a lot of fortissimo playing, and you vary that in terms of dynamics, but the meter is the same for a while, with these continuous quavers. Horowitz, in the final rise and descent, just pushes through. There's lots of wrong notes, but it's raw. It's exceptionally difficult because of the octaves, but if you can push through it in that way I think it's very effective, all the way to the lowest note on the piano. So when you are playing the piece live, does atmosphere matter more than precision in passages like this? Yes, this is music that's probably not supposed to be played cleanly. Part of the struggle is, it is technically difficult, but that's what makes it exciting. Someone said of Horowitz that his playing is not exciting because he plays fast, but because he plays faster than he can. In this music there's an element of that. Lupu generates the tension in a different way; it's tension by holding back, by creating a limit that you're working against. Then the slow movement poses quite different challenges. It's magical music. The most incredible bit for me is this ascending line in the right hand, the scales after the climax. It's the most static point of the piece, and a groove needs to be found between static to the point of no motion, and finding the magic that's in it. Not to play it too casually. Claudio Arrau there is very special; it's such a wonderful moment with these triple pianissimos - finding that beautiful color, and where to take the time. Then comes the fugue, a moment when I'm always wondering how fast a pianist is going to try to play. Is this another place where aura matters more than accuracy? The counterpoint needs to be clear. So it's the point at which you can still characterize it, and that point is different for each pianist, as long as it builds and builds gradually to the right point. Intellectually speaking it's not necessarily correct, but I quite like the idea of treating the first five bars as a kind of fanfare. They don't carry enough to push forward out of the slow movement, so to me they inevitably sit somewhere in between if you are going to take it at that tempo. I like the change of pace there. The magic, and the music, of the slow movement return on the very last page. It's this final transition from darkness to light: the rumbling in the left hand, then the way that it ascends to the top of the piano. Those diminished chords are little shards of light, then it comes away to the very low notes, then these transcendent last chords. That's what the last page is about: transcendence. You can't help but think that the last note is an awakening from a dream. Close listening brought out the enormous range of possibilities in a work that presents an intellectual challenge of interpretation as much as a punishing test of technique. The piece is a Faustian struggle between the diabolical and the divine; the question is how to make it cohere over more than 30 minutes. Image“You react to some things positively and you react to some things negatively,” Grosvenor said, “and that fuels your imagination.” "You react to some things positively and you react to some things negatively," Grosvenor said, "and that fuels your imagination."Credit...Kalpesh Lathigra for The New York Times There is no single answer. The example of Radu Lupu points in one direction. "It has this great inevitability about it," Grosvenor said of Lupu's interpretation. "In terms of the way he controls the pulse it's quite symphonic, and also in the kinds of sounds he produces." Shura Cherkassky, a figure beloved of pianophiles whose impulsive, visionary performances were so idiosyncratic that Grosvenor said he would never dare imitate them, offers something else in a live recording from 1965. "Sometimes it feels kind of improvisatory and sometimes he doesn't quite do what's written in the score," Grosvenor said. "But he somehow makes this miracle of his own unique narrative from it." Perils lurk whichever way a pianist turns. "The danger in pursuing this symphonic, quite rigid, controlled outlook is that it could quite easily become something more of an academic exercise than the fantastical piece that it is," Grosvenor said. "And obviously if you go along the Cherkassky route, you could make it sound like something that doesn't make much sense." If Grosvenor successfully traces a course between those extremes, he also takes inspiration from how his forebears have resolved the many difficulties in a work of this scale. These are edited excerpts from the conversation.

RollingStone's ANDY GREENE writes......Peter Gabriel has re-recorded his 1980 protest classic "Biko" with help from 25 musicians from around the globe, including Beninese vocalist and activist Angélique Kidjo, Yo-Yo Ma, the Cape Town Ensemble, Sebastian Robertson, and bassist Meshell Ndegeocello. The video was produced by Sebastian Robertson and Mark Johnson as part of Playing for Change's Song Around the World initiative. The original song was written as a tribute to South African anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, who was murdered in police custody in 1977, but Gabriel tells Rolling Stone that it still holds incredible meaning today. "Although the white minority government has gone in South Africa, the racism around the world that apartheid represented has not ," he says. "Racism and nationalism are sadly on the rise. In India, Myanmar and Turkey, Israel and China, racism is being deliberately exploited for political gain." "On the black/white front the Black Lives Matter movement has made it very clear how far we still have to go before we can hope to say we have escaped the dark shadow of racism," he adds. READ THE FULL RollingStone ARTICLE & WATCH THE VIDEO

The Honeywell Arts Academy will launch in June of 2021 with three separate programs for double-bassists, pianists, and instrumentalists. The Violin Channel recently caught up with Ranaan Meyer, artistic director of the Honeywell Arts Academy. Here';s some Q&A Tell us about the Honeywell Arts Academy? When was it founded and what is its main mission?  Auditions are happening now for the Honeywell Arts Academy which launches this June, and I am so proud to be artistic director. Thirteen years ago I started a bass camp with my buddies Hal Robinson of the Philadelphia Orchestra, Juilliard, and Curtis faculty, and Eric Larson of the Houston Symphony. That vision was completely ideal. The concept was - through a philosophy we follow called Sharing of Knowledge - to accept extraordinary bass players to come hang out with us for a week. We would swap ideas, play for each other, make music together, and push our musical boundaries. Thirteen years later, we are blown away by the people who have come to attend. They are now in orchestras like the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Concertgebouw, and more. Because of the success, we are launching the expansion of this program for all instruments called Honeywell Arts Academy.   PHOTO: Amanda Reynolds READ THE FULL Violin Channel Q&A

The Collegian's Alexis Daniels writes....Though radio in Hillsdale has only been around for five years, its production range has grown significantly, and they now broadcast a variety of radio shows appealing to many crowds.  These radio shows range from news broadcasts to podcasts to features. Junior Christine Talent, who joined radio just last semester, started with newscasting and has just started a feature of her own called "All the Small Things," a five minute segment in between shows that highlights fun facts about how common items, such as toast, came to be. "I was having one of my 2 a.m. snacks. I was making toast. Really love toast," Talent said. "And I just thought, ‘You know, who thought of making it crunchy? Because I just love them for it.' I have those kinds of questions about a lot of things where I'll just pause and think, ‘What was the best thing before sliced bread?'" Talent said doing radio has built her confidence. She became interested in it because of a friend's involvement, and  she has "always been told by people that [she has] a good radio voice." She also wanted to step outside her comfort zone. "It was kind of an impulse decision because I wanted just to try something new that was low time commitment," Talent said, "and radio is just one of those things where you get however much you put into it." These and other student-created shows can be found on WFRH Radio Free Hillsdale on 101.7 FM, SoundCloud, or Apple Podcasts. READ THE FULL Collegian ARTICLE

The New York Times - Joshua Barone writes......Music can't survive on its own. Composers not entrenched in the canon need support: from publishers, from foundations, from performers. Without these champions, it's all too easy to slide into obscurity. Three projects - by the Catalyst Quartet; the baritone Will Liverman; and the pianist Lara Downes - consider another avenue for maintaining a legacy: recordings. Gone are the days when classical albums could be relied on as moneymakers. But in the age of streaming, they are endlessly accessible, easy to disseminate and, in the case of these new releases, ideal for spreading the word about overlooked composers of color, whose music often exists in varying states of disrepair. Recordings have helped propel the recent revivals of Julius Eastman and Florence Price, whose works are held up by scholars and critics today but languished for decades - neglected for a variety of reasons, including race. When a friend of mine, the musicologist Jacques Dupuis, programmed Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's "Endymion's Dream" a few years ago for the Boston ensemble Calliope, the only full score of it he could find was a rare holograph at the Library of Congress. So he traveled to Washington and spent dozens of hours transcribing it and creating a performing edition. A video of the resulting concert is the only available recording of the piece. "I'm not sure that would be sustainable as a regular practice without robust institutional support," he said, "which speaks to some of the hurdles in bringing equity and diversity to music programming." Similar labor went into the creation of these albums, made with the goal of highlighting music by Black composers and offering new possibilities for the classical canon. ‘Uncovered, Vol. 1: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor' The Catalyst Quartet's Uncovered project began in 2018, growing from an initial idea of performing and recording a program of works by a few underrepresented composers. That quickly blossomed into something more ambitious: a series of focused surveys, beginning with music by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. Coleridge-Taylor, born to a white mother and Black father in Britain in 1875, wrote the pieces on "Uncovered, Vol. 1" while he was a student at the Royal College of Music in London. Although they reflect the influence of Brahms and Dvorak, as the violinist and scholar Matthew Leslie Santana observes in the album's liner notes, they have the feel of "a new music project," said Karlos Rodriguez, the quartet's cellist. "Except it of course isn't new, and now it's redefining the canon," Rodriguez added. He pointed to the Clarinet Quintet in F-sharp minor: "You think of Brahms and Mozart clarinet quintets, but this is up there. It holds its own." "Uncovered, Vol. 1," released earlier this month on the Azica label, features Catalyst - the violinists Karla Donehew Perez and Jessie Montgomery, the violist Paul Laraia and Rodriguez - in three early Coleridge-Taylor works, including quintets performed with the pianist Stewart Goodyear and Anthony McGill, the New York Philharmonic's principal clarinet. (Montgomery, increasingly in demand as a composer, left the quartet last month and was succeeded by Abi Fayette.) Preparation for the Coleridge-Taylor album - and future installments of Uncovered, which continues with a Florence Price recording - didn't come as easily as, say, a recording of Beethoven quartets. The scores were not always readily available, and there wasn't an established interpretation history. "These pieces are not in your blood," Donehew Perez said. Some of the music had never been recorded, or there was only a single record, and, as Laraia said, "None of these pieces should exist in one recording." The members of the quartet are hoping that "Uncovered, Vol. 1" prompts more Coleridge-Taylor performances. "I think this is an interesting way for presenters to move in an interesting direction, but there doesn't have to be shock," Fayette said. "You can hear the Classical era and Romantic era; it's not like you're throwing audiences into the deep end. And I think this year has proven to us that classical music is ready for a shift." Will Liverman's "Dreams of a New Day," a program of American art songs by Black composers out Friday on Cedille Records, has been in the works for two years. But, Liverman said, the album "is coming at a good time." Because of pandemic delays, he found himself recording it with the pianist Paul Sánchez last summer, a time of widespread Black Lives Matter demonstrations and renewed urgency for racial equity in classical music. At the heart of the album - its roster includes both living composers and older ones like Margaret Bonds and Harry Burleigh, known for his influence on Dvorak and the threading of spirituals with classical idioms - is the premiere recording of Shawn Okpebholo's "Two Black Churches." It is an affecting setting of poems about the bombing of a Birmingham, Ala., church in 1963 and the 2015 shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. Liverman, who is scheduled to sing this fall in the Metropolitan Opera's season-opening production of Terence Blanchard's "Fire Shut Up in My Bones" - the company's first opera by a Black composer - said that he has been performing these works in recitals, but that the recording is a way to "normalize" them. "When I was starting off as a student, I kept seeing people like Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau because they had made so many recordings," he said. "There's something very important about having music that's out there and accessible." About two years ago, Lara Downes wanted to record an album of unearthed piano works by Florence Price. She took the project to three labels; none were interested. "But it needed to happen," she recalled. "So I just did it." A similar spirit led to the creation of Rising Sun Music, a digital label that debuted this month with the EP "Remember Me to Harlem" and will continue to release recordings of works by Black composers. "If you're independent," Downes said, "you can move a lot faster." Downes has been working to develop a community of scholars and musicians to help with the project, which seeks to highlight the work of composers of color going back more than 200 years. Two of those collaborators appear on "Remember Me to Harlem": the oboist Titus Underwood, in William Grant Still's "Song for the Lonely"; and the bass-baritone Davóne Tines, achingly gentle in Margaret Bonds's "When the Dove Enters In." As part of the initiative, Downes also intends to release new - in some cases, the first - editions of scores, to make them more accessible to performers and students. The shaky state of these works, she said, reflects the history of American music, and of the country more broadly. "Every story you uncover, there's a question of, ‘Why was this covered?'" Downes said. "You're talking about Black life and an imbalance. Part of this is bigger than the music. We can look at our art and culture as a microscope of us." Photo Credit...Max Barrett; Ricardo Quiñones; Jaclyn Simpson

JAZZ.FM91's Adam Feibel writes.....Just in time for Valentine's Day, Juno Award-winning singer-songwriter Laila Biali has shared a cover of Joni Mitchell's heart-stirring song A Case of You in an exclusive premiere with JAZZ.FM91. The Canadian pianist and vocalist is joined by George Koller on bass and her husband Ben Wittman on djembe for this intimate acoustic rendition of Mitchell's classic love song from 1971. The performance was filmed and recorded live off the floor at Revolution Recording Studios in Toronto. "My first experience hearing Joni Mitchell's music was when I was still a music student at Humber College," Biali recalls. "Hejira and Mingus were the obvious starting point for a jazz novice as much interested in the musicians accompanying Joni as in Joni herself. But then along came Blue. That was the one, the album that triggered a lifelong fascination with Joni and her songwriting. She made my heart ache with every feeling - love and loss in the same breath. No song captures that more for me than A Case of You. I think it's the ultimate Valentine's song because it can reach you no matter where you're at - whether you're in love, longing for it, or mourning it." Known for her masterful mix of jazz and pop, Biali won a Juno Award for her self-titled album released in 2018. She then followed it up with Out of Dust, which was named one of JAZZ.FM91's top albums of 2020.  SEE THE JAZZ.FM91 PAGE

NEW YORK MUSIC DAILY's delarue writes....For the most rapturously gorgeous piece of music released so far this year, cue up the Catalyst Quartet's new recording of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor's Humoresque, which hasn't hit the web yet (although there is a live version at youtube). It starts as a quasi-Balkan dance. When the sun busts through the clouds and a chorus of sorts kicks in, it's a gutpunch. The album it's on, Uncovered Vol. 1, should come with one of those stickers that you sometimes see on old heavy metal and punk records from the 80s: PLAY LOUD. READ THE FULL NEW YORK MUSIC DAILY REVIEW