Eliot's Burnt Norton, Pratt handed the text to six composers as a jumping-off point. It's been 12 years since Pratt released an album, but what a comeback record he's made. Eliot, Roomful of Teeth, new piano music The Story: A young Awadagin Pratt burst on the scene in the 1990s with awards, appearances on Sesame Street and Good Morning America and a big record deal. " Paradiso" is indeed heavenly - and more, a cosmic journey, spiraling ever upward with orchestral colorings and textures that sound truly out of this world.įor Those Who Like: T.S. Amid the haunting (pre-recorded) chant of a cantor's morning prayer, the orchestra adopts a Middle Eastern dialect with wheezy contrabassoons and snaky melodies. Still, the rigorously crafted sound world is textbook Adès, and the performance is both meticulous and, well, hell-raising. Brass snarls, winds gasp and strings swirl with nods to Liszt, Berlioz and Stravinsky. The Music: The musical acid trip within the "Inferno" is uproariously orchestrated in blinding technicolor. Adès is our musical tour guide through hell, where we meet a broad spectrum of sinners, from "The Thieves - devoured by reptiles" to the man himself, "Satan - in the lake of ice," before working our way through purgatory and then into paradise. Dante, an evening-length ballet with Wayne McGregor's choreography, premiered in 2021 and now receives its recorded debut with Gustavo Dudamel leading the Los Angeles Philharmonic. The new music vocal outfit Roomful of Teeth makes appearances on one of the year's most satisfying releases, STILLPOINT, marking the studio return, after a 12-year absence, of pianist Awadagin Pratt in six new works for piano.įor Those Who Like: The Divine Comedy, Mahler, roller coasters The Story: Dante Alighieri's epic poem La Divina Commedia might be 700 years old, but it's still inspiring artists today. The sunny-voiced tenor Jonathan Tetelman released a resplendent Puccini disc, while the late Jessye Norman's discography grew with a three-disc set of previously unreleased recordings, and the French conductor Raphäel Pichon issued a scorching rendition of Monteverdi's Vespers of 1610. Joan Tower's undervalued Concerto for Piano (Homage to Beethoven) received a tremendous reboot at the hands of Marc-André Hamelin, and we now have a fuller picture of Missy Mazzoli the orchestral composer in the album Dark with Excessive Bright, highlighting four harmonically fresh, dramatically charged works.Īside from the symphonic bonanza, there were heavenly vocals this year. Finnish composer Lotta Wennäkoski, a new discovery for me, displays a bold Van Gogh sensibility for radiant coloration and quirky textures in three rigorously built pieces played by the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra. It's endlessly fascinating to hear how composers choose to wield their symphonic forces. Like its namesake's famous 14th century poem, Adès' 90-minute ballet score guides us down into hell and back up, through purgatory, into paradise - and seemingly beyond, thanks to an astonishing performance by Gustavo Dudamel and the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Perhaps buoyed by the terrific orchestral concerts I saw, symphonic recordings resonated with me this year, none more so than the kaleidoscopic escapade that is Thomas Adès' Dante. These concerts were among the year's delights, and while live music is always best, the bulk of my classical music nourishment came, once again, from recordings. And I'm still a little buzzed from a visit to Cologne, Germany - a modernist music stronghold - to bask in a centennial György Ligeti concert (including Poème symphonique for 100 metronomes), conducted by Matthias Pintscher. To hear flutist Claire Chase and the Helsinki Philharmonic brilliantly navigate the dreamscape sounds of Kaija Saariaho, who suddenly died three weeks after that May performance, now seems like a balm for a deep musical wound. Still, this year I did jump back in the saddle to experience a carefully curated selection of live performances.Ĭonductor Rafael Payare led the Montreal Symphony Orchestra in a dynamic, youthful account of Mahler's 5th, while Yuja Wang's blur of fingers made for a ripsnorting Bartók Piano Concerto No. So far, I've dodged the COVID bullet (yes, an outlier), though I'm still squeamish about large crowds. Since the pandemic began, I've not been going to concerts - as in none since March 2020 - until this year. In 2023, pianist Awadagin Pratt released a terrific comeback album, his first in 12 years.
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