Talking about his work The Horse with the Lavender Eye (1997), composer Stephen Hartke writes, "I've always been fascinated by non-sequiturs, and the way that sense can suddenly appear out of nonsense. I also find imagery derived from words and pictures to be a great stimulus to my musical thinking, even if the relationships between the images I seize upon are not necessarily obvious or logical. The sources for the titles of this trio are quite disparate [Music of the Left; The Servant of Two Masters; Waltzing at the Abyss; Cancel My Rumba Lesson], ranging from Carlo Goldoni to Japanese court music to the cartoonist R. Crumb, as well as 19th century Brazilian novelist Machado de Assis and Looney Tunes. A bewildering array of references, to be sure, but one that somehow whets my musical appetite." Watch a performance of Stephen Hartke's The Horse with the Lavender Eye, played by clarinetist Jerome Simas, violinist Anna Presler, and pianist Eric Zivian . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

Parthenia, hailed by The New Yorker as "one of the brightest lights in New York's early-music scene," is a quartet of viols dedicated to the performance of ancient and contemporary repertoires. Parthenia has presented concerts across America, produced its own concert series in New York City, collaborates regularly with the world's foremost early music artists and ensembles, and has been featured on radio and television as well as festivals and series as wide-ranging as Music Before 1800, the Pierpont Morgan Library, Columbia University's Miller Theatre and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Yale Center for British Art, the Harriman-Jewell Series in Kansas City, and the Tage Alter Musik Festival in Regensburg, Germany. Parthenia's unique variety of performances range from its popular touring program, "When Music & Sweet Poetry Agree", a celebration of Elizabethan poetry and music with actor Paul Hecht and mezzo-soprano Jacqueline Horner-Kwiatek of Anonymous 4, to the complete viol fantasies of Henry Purcell and complete instrumental works of Robert Parsons, as well as commissions and premieres of many new works by composers such as Phil Kline, Richard Einhorn, Brian Fennelly, Will Ayton, Max Lifchitz, Kristin Norderval, David Glaser, and Frances White. Read more about Parthenia and the new music they have commissioned . . . they're our FEATURED ENSEMBLE, and the subject of our FEATURED THOUGHTS & IDEAS.

Hailed as a "virtuoso" by the New York Times, "unique sound" by the Daily Star, and "engagingly flamboyant" by the L.A. Times, clarinetist and composer Kinan Azmeh is one of Syria's rising stars. His utterly distinctive sound is now fast gaining international recognition. Born in Damascus, Azmeh is a graduate of New York's Juilliard school, and the first Arab to win the premier prize at the 1997 Nicolai Rubinstein International Competition, Moscow. A Sad Morning, Every Morning (2012), Azmeh's collaboration with visual artist, Kevork Mourad is "a little prayer for home. Dedicated to all those who have fallen in Syria in the past year." Listen to Kinan Azmeh's perform his A Sad Morning, Every Morning, with visuals by Kevork Mourad . . . it's one of our PYTHEAS EARFULS for the week.

American composer George Tsontakis composed the movements of his Four Symphonic Quartets as follows: Other Echoes (1996), Perpetual Angelus (1992), The Dove Descending (1995), and Winter Lightning (1993). The title of each is based on one of the Four Quartets by T. S. Eliot, but not in the order of his cycle of meditative poems. Tsontakis does not attempt to set Eliot to music, either impressionistically or programmatically. In fact, he says he scarcely consulted the poems while writing his pieces. Instead, he sought to create aural landscapes that were somehow Eliotic in expanse and depth. This is much the same relationship as between Eliot's poems and the late Beethoven String Quartets, from which the poet sought to create in language a depth of meditative introspection and breadth comparable to the composer of the previous century. Whatever one may think of Eliot's craving for spiritual absolutes and his sometimes slippery mysticism, The Four Quartets are one of the most aurally sonorous and reverberant works of 20th century poetry in the English language. And any reader who has read them with absorption aloud must have found their rhythms and phrases impressed on the aural memory indelibly. The third Quartet, The Dove Descending, concerns potentiality in reserve - conservation and expectation. This is why Tsontakis says that even though it is the gentlest and most consoling movement it also hides a kind of terror. How it is able to hold potentiality together for such length without collapsing into exhaustion or erupting into climax is the mystery the ear revisits with each re-hearing [notes thanks to Don Mager/Making Time]. Listen to a performance of George Tsontakis' The Dove Descending (1995) . . . this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.

George Tsontakis has received two of the richest prizes awarded in all of classical music - the international Grawemeyer Award, in 2005, for his Second Violin Concerto, and the 2007 Charles Ives Living award, given every three years by the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Ryan Morris writes of Tsontakis' Violin Concerto No. 2 (2003), "This is an extraordinary violin concerto. The more you listen to it, the more you will enjoy it and the more it will call to you with its strange glasslike textures and rolling rhythms. There is much lyricism here, as can be heard in the first movement and the "cantilena" - the heart - of the concerto; it's one of the finest pieces Tsontakis has composed." See a performance of the Violin Concerto No. 2 with violinist Paul Kantor and the Cleveland Institute of Music Orchestra conducted by Michael Adelson . . . one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

Hikurangi Sunrise was composed by Christopher Marshall for the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra in 1999 as the result of a quest by the orchestra and ConcertFM Radio to find a piece to mark the turn of the millennium. In 2000, after several performances throughout New Zealand it was judged overwhelmingly the audience's favorite work. According to the composer, "Hikurangi Sunrise, is a festive overture expressing my feelings for Aotearoa-New Zealand. Hikurangi is the sacred mountain on East Cape in the North Island of New Zealand. It is the first place in the world to see the sun. I imagined myself standing on the summit as the sun rose, with a bird's-eye view of the beach, forests and farmlands below. The music is strongly melodic throughout, with an unmistakably Romantic flavor and not without the occasional, slightly ironic nod in the direction of the nationalistic overtures of past ages." Listen to a performance of Hikurangi Sunrise by New Zealand Symphony Orchestra with James Judd conducting . . . our current PYTHEAS EARFUL.

Christopher Lydon at Open Source writes, "My subtitle for Alex Ross's addictive encyclopedia The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century would be: How the headquarters of musical composition moved from Vienna to Los Angeles: from the old home address of Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Brahms to its new home in and around Hollywood: home, that is, of the refugee modernists Stravinsky and Schoenberg and of course the movie business and the film score: name your monument from Bernard Herrmann's themes for Orson Welles' Citizen Kane (1941) and the great Hitchcocks, to Tan Dun's for Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000)." Read more and listen to an interview with Alex Ross about contemporary music . . . it's this week's FEATURED THOUGHT & IDEA.

According to composer Alex Shapiro, " I named my 2004 composition Bioplasm because 'Oozing Up From the Primordial Sludge' seemed a bit long for a title. Bioplasm is the stuff of life, the germinal matter that's essential for living beings to generate. This is a squishy piece: rather than exploit the individual voice of each flute, I wanted to create an organism that oozes across the sonic floor as one tethered entity, sometimes slowly, sometimes at a quick pace, but always as one, like a Slinky toy. The blend of homogenous sound with four flutes is a throbbing pulse of life; add to this four human voices, and it's a choir of plasma, looking for life to begin." Hear Alex Shapiro's Bioplasm, accompanied by artist Simon Kenevan creating a pastel study for After a Storm . . . this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVES.

Explore, Listen and Enjoy!
Vinny Fuerst
Pytheas Center for Contemporary Music

When John Corigliano’s The Ghosts of Versailles premiered at the Metropolitan opera in 1991, audiences and critics alike were delighted with the final installment of the Beaumarchais Figaro trilogy. Andrew Porter of The Times wrote, "A triumph with the public, a success with the New York press, and a sell-out at the box office ... It is heartening to find a new opera greeted with a standing ovation." Hear Teresa Stratas (as Marie Antoinette) sing the moving aria They Are Always With Me ... one of this week's FEATURED NEW MUSIC VIDEOS.

Behzad Ranjbaran's music has variously been described as having "qualities of inherent beauty and strong musical structure that make it a satisfying musical entity" (Henry Arnold, Nashville Scene) and "radiant luminescence" (Cecelia Porter, The Washington Post). Allen Gimbel (American Record Guide) said about the Persian Trilogy that "Ranjbaran has composed a noble and brilliantly conceived score, spectacularly orchestrated and filled with memorable tunes, meticulous development, and impressive craftsmanship." Accolades continue for Songs of Eternity, which was described in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (Philippa Kiraly) as "beautiful ... with exquisite melismas"; and Joe Riley commented in the Liverpool Echo that the Violin Concerto is "high class, cohesive" and "when the concerto ... just sings out a fine melodic line, the effect is ravishing." Hear the composer himself talk about his life and music - Pytheas' current COMPOSER PORTRAIT.

Bob McQuiston (Classical Lost and Found) writes, "George Tsontakis is fast becoming recognized as one of America's greatest living composers. Yes, his music is quite contemporary ... but also quite approachable, and anyone willing to do some serious listening will be amply rewarded!" Check out the Koch International recording of Tsontakis' Violin Concerto and other works ... this week's FEATURED RECORDING.

And lastly, loose yourself in a performance of Jean Langlais' brooding Plainte from the Suite Brève (1947) ... this week's FROM THE PYTHEAS ARCHIVE.

Explore, Listen and Enjoy!
Vinny Fuerst
Pytheas Center for Contemporary Music