Recorded with conductor Sir Simon Rattle and the London Symphony Orchestra, the disc features the Elgar Cello Concerto in E Minor, Frank Bridge's ‘4 Short Pieces‘, Ernest Bloch's ‘Prelude‘ and ‘From Jewish Life‘, Gabriel Faure's ‘Elegie‘, Julius Klengel's ‘Hymnus‘ – plus a number of new cello arrangements of Elgar's ‘Enigma Variations‘ and ‘Romance‘ and the traditional folk songs ‘Scarborough Fair‘ and ‘Blow the Wind Southerly‘. "The main piece on the album is Elgar's Cello Concerto, which I grew up listening to a lot … it has always been one of my favorite pieces of music, so it was was such a privilege to record …" Sheku has told The Violin Channel. "I wanted to also record pieces around it that relate to the Concerto – by either also being written by Elgar, or being by British composers, or written around a similar time … or simply sharing a mood or theme …" the 20-year-old 2016 ‘BBC Young Musician of the Year‘ has said. "But essentially it's just pieces I really love." SEE The Violin Channel PAGE & WATCH THE VIDEO

WETA Evening Host James Jacobs speaks with world renowned violinist Rachel Barton Pine about her latest album on the Avie label, a pairing of the violin concertos of Antonín Dvořák and Aram Khachaturian, in which she collaborates with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra and conductor Teddy Abrams. In this wide-ranging conversation Ms. Pine takes us through her favorite moments of both works, analyzes the ways in which both concertos are derived from the folk music of the countries of their respective composers, and reveals the joy she felt in discovering a connection between the Khachaturian and heavy metal. (She references a video she made that delves more deeply into that connection, which can be found here.) She also provides a brief history of the fraught relationship between Dvořák and Joseph Joachim, his concerto's intended dedicatee who ultimately rejected the work, and shares her thoughts on finding happiness through music.  LISTEN TO THE WETA: Wash DC INTERVIEW

Andris Nelsons has joined forces with the Vienna Philharmonic to record Beethoven's nine symphonies for Deutsche Grammophon. The release marks the start of the label's celebration of the 250th anniversary of Beethoven's birth in 2020. Beethoven has been central to Nelsons' work since he began his career. The Latvian conductor garnered rave reviews for his 2013-14 Beethoven cycle with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra and scored critical acclaim for more recent Beethoven performances as Music Director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. p.p1 {margin: 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px 0.0px; font: 12.0px 'Helvetica Neue'; color: #4d4d4d} Andris Nelsons, Vienna Philharmonic - Beethoven Complete Symphonies is the WFMT: Chicago 'Featured New Released'

2020 (specifically, January 27) marks the 75th anniversary of the liberation of Auschwitz, the WWII concentration camp that is symbolic of the persecution and murder of millions of Jews and other groups by the Nazi regime.  In addition to the handful of people who survived the camps, a small body of art, including music, has emerged over time.  Music written by prisoners of the Nazis who persevered in their art despite the conditions.  The string trio Black Oak Ensemble (violinist Desirée Ruhrstrat, violist Aurélian Fort Pederzoli and cellist David Cunliffe) first encounter of much of this music was in a shop in Budapest, and at first, they didn't know the circumstances of the composers of these works.  This debut disc is the result of several years of research and performance, including at the Czech camp at Terezín. The music is at times filled with a sense of foreboding, at other times sadness, but also great energy and even humor.  They were written between the late 1920s (when the first signs of fascism were appearing in parts of Europe) to the 1930s era of persecution, and finally to the last years of the war (most of the composers went from places like Terezín, where artists were kept, to the death camps such as Auschwitz.  Only one composer on the disc, Géza Frid, survived the war and lived in the Netherlands to 1989). LISTEN TO All Classical Portland's John Pitman discuss the album with with Cunliffe and Pederzoli from BOE who share their unique connection and admiration for this music which, finally, is "silenced" no more.

You Already Know, the New Deal/Impulse! debut from the acclaimed drummer Ted Poor - "a trustworthy engine in countless modern-jazz settings,"  (New York Times) isn't your typical jazz drummer's recording, almost defiantly so. But if you're at all familiar with the Seattle-based Poor's explorative career-or the wide-ranging work of his principal collaborators here, the deeply influential guitarist-producer Blake Mills and the saxophonist Andrew D'Angelo-this should come as no surprise. After all, Poor has proven equally brilliant in bands led by the visionary avant-jazz trumpeter Cuong Vu and the lauded indie singer-songwriter Andrew Bird. Whether he's on a club bandstand alongside a generation-defining improviser like the guitarist Ben Monder, or onstage at New York's historic Town Hall, backing Paul Simon as part of Chris Thile's trusted Live From Here band, Poor is a music-first drummer. His tremendous technical abilities behind the kit are inarguable-and no doubt serve him well as the Assistant Professor of Jazz Studies at the University of Washington in Seattle-but he places color, texture, sound and especially melody atop chops. "The songs that I write, and certainly the songs that appear on this record, are songs you can sing," Poor says, explaining how his time in the employ of renowned singer-songwriters has informed his own composing. "These are the songs I sing to myself as well." Ted Poor - Only You feat. Andrew D'Angelo makes the 'Play MPE Top 10 Downloads and Streams' for Friday 1.24.2020

"Common Tones in Simple Time" is featured on a 'minimalist' album brimming with sublime subtlety, which, like so many things in life, is much more than it first appears. The Montréal Symphony Orchestra's The John Adams Album presents some of John Adams's most spectacular orchestral works. Included are the Schoenberg-inspired "Harmonielehre," the fast-paced "Short Ride in a Fast Machine," and Adams's first minimalist orchestral work, our focus this week on Out of the Box, "Common Tones in Simple Time." Minimalism is, broadly speaking, a compositional style characterized by simplicity and repetition -- think of it as music stripped down to the chassis. There is something deeply mesmerizing about minimalism, especially in the hands of composer John Adams. In the late Seventies there were very few models for an Minimalist orchestral style. So in a certain sense, I felt both the excitement as well as the challenge of venturing in to uncharted terrain. - John Adams, on 'Common Tones in Simple Time' Minimalism grew out of one of the more heated musical debates of the 20th century: what should Western "classical" music be? Should it be deeply complex, cerebral, and impenetrable? Should it be big and richly colorful, shot through with meaning and story? Or should it be undecorated and simple, aiming for a sonic and rhythmic aesthetic above all else? Composers like Arnold Schoenberg and Alban Berg believed firmly in the first, creating atonal and mathematically derived serial compositions. Gustav Mahler, Ralph Vaughan Williams, and Richard Strauss were deeply committed to the second, following in the footsteps of Romantics like Brahms and Wagner. But the "minimalists," composers like Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and eventually John Adams, disavowed the central tenets of either of those compositional philosophies and set about creating something simpler than atonal music and without the narrative aspects of the Romantics. It was... minimal. I really enjoy the driving subtlety of minimalism because I find it really easy to become enveloped in it. And I find John Adams, of all the early minimalist composers (having come to the style nearly a decade after it was first invented in Manhattan in the 1960s), the most interesting to listen to. As writer Michael Steinberg puts it, John Adams's works are "full of surprises, always enchanting in the glow and gleam of their sonority, and bursting with the energy generated by their harmonic movement." It's as though John Adams took aspects of all three of the aforementioned 20th-century schools of compositional thought, and wove them into his own unequivocably unique sound tapestry. It's not simple music. It's just minimal, and mesmerizingly so. 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} LISTEN TO THE SEGMENT Catch Out of the Box on the radio Sunday nights at 9, following WCRB In Concert.

The movie 1917, directed by Sam Mendez, is a major hit in theatres. It is nominated for 10 Oscars, including best film, best director and, of course, best music. Composer Thomas Newman has been collaborating with Mendez since Mendez's first film American Beauty. Some of his movies had amazing scores, featuring Newman's famous piano melodies that I love, such as American Beauty and The Road to Perdition. 1917 would be a very different movie though, where during The Great War, two English soldiers have to cross through German-occupied territory as fast as possible to deliver a message. The whole movie was shot in such a way that the camera follows them as they move, giving the audience the impression that all has been shot in a single take, with the cameraman being the witness of the whole journey. As a side effect, the pace of the movie is in real-time. To write the music for such a movie must have been quite a challenge.  READ THE FULL Soundtrack WORLD REVIEW