03/25/22: Crossovers
Featuring Gabriel Kahane, Evan Ziporyn, and Nico Muhly, Philip Glass, and Pekka Kuusisto
Welcome back to Keeping Score! This week I have three new releases.
The Music
Something Intimate
American composer Gabriel Kahane released Magnificent Bird. Kahane, known for his blend of art music and singer-songwriter folk, composed the album during the Covid-19 lockdown, nearing the end of a year-long internet fast. The release notes state:
Shuttling between the quotidian mundane and a series of overlapping global crises, he sings of grief, nostalgia, shame, and salvation: a portrait of daily life in the roiling chaos of the 21st century.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, etc.
Something Playful
American composer and clarinettist Evan Ziporyn released Pop Channel, with rich arrangements of iconic pop songs of the last fifty years, re-imagined with only sounds from various clarinets. Ziporyn uses extended techniques to push the frontier of clarinet sounds further, while still retaining the accessibility and feel of the original music.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, etc.
Something Vibrant
Finnish violinist Pekka Kuusisto released First Light, featuring Shrink, a violin concerto composed by American composer Nico Muhly, as well as The Orchard and String Quartet No. 3 “Mishima” by American composer Philip Glass. The Strad writes:
Muhly worked for a period as Glass’s musical assistant, and his own music often seems to take Glass’s distinctive rippling arpeggios and run with them in unexpected directions – as is the case in Muhly’s witty, spirited violin concerto Shrink, written for Kuusisto in 2019…Kuusisto’s chamber orchestra arrangement of Glass’s Third Quartet, derived from his score to the 1985 movie Mishima: A Life in Four Chapters, brings a welcome added heft and depth to the work, while losing none of its luminous transparency, and Kuusisto and Muhly manage a remarkably supple reading of the reflective The Orchard.
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, etc.
Doesn't matter. I went ahead and listened to all of it.
Magnificent Bird and Sit Shiva were awesome sounds. The Basement Engineer is really cool too.
Evan Ziporyn's I Live Above the Hobby Shop and Your Gold Teeth II were really good sounding songs in addition to the knowledge that it's all made using clarinet sounds.
Shrink I. Ninths while being all over the place doesn't sound bad which is the highest compliment I can give it.
Are we supposed to listen to one song per album or the albums in totality?