Hope Wechkin – “Leaning toward the Fiddler”
Santa Barbara-based composer Emma Lou Diemer (b. 1927) is a fixture in California's classical music community, having received commissions and performances from orchestras and ensembles throughout the state and worked throughout her career to advance the musical community. “Pacific Ridge”, Diemer's debut Navona release, features three of her orchestral works, each in a single movement: Santa Barbara Overture, Concerto in One Movement for Marimba, and Concerto in One Movement for Piano.
”Al Combate” , the debut release from the Chicago Arts Orchestra (Javier Jose Mendoza, Artistic Director), highlights New Spain as a mecca of baroque and galant music through a handpicked selection of works from two of eighteenth-century colonial Mexico's most prolific and influential composers, whose music explores the period's transatlantic cultural flow from Europe to New Spain: Ignacio Jerusalem, a master of the galant style who brought modern European styles and techniques across the Atlantic; and Santiago Billoni, whose harmonic experimentation and erudite voice
helped shape late baroque repertoire.
Composed with integrity, mystery, and ambition, the orchestral works of Marga Richter thrive on the emotional and the visceral, conjuring vast and majestic imagery with poetic and dramatic underpinnings. “Poetic Images beyond Poetry” includes three of Richter's works for orchestra, each of which present a tonal and moving representation of their various influences: Out of Shadows and Solitude, Quantum Quirks of a Quick Quaint Quark, and Spectral Chimes: Enshrouded Hills.
“James Adler & Friends”, an album of works by and commissioned for pianist, composer, and Yamaha Artist James Adler, features works by Leo Ornstein, Paul Turok, Seth Bedford, Franz Liszt, Stephen Sondheim, and Adler himself, showcasing his penchant for both contemporary and traditional concert repertoire. These pieces offer a career-spanning glimpse into Adler's career, from his first publicly performed piece, to works sprouted from personal collaborations, to his own original compositions and arrangements.
Richard Cornell’s “Tracer” explores the nature of art and the collaboration that occurs among artists and the interaction between creator and influence, highlighting the performers' instincts to respond to one another, interpreting the music as individuals and as a group, and exploring the intricacies of the works as they are played. This release includes a visual version of Tracer, which serves as a computer-rendered survey of art and culture that guides and morphs the music to match the viewer's progress through time and space; as the viewer travels among an imagined world, the music responds to the imagery.
Original works by Seattle-based violinist and singer Hope Wechkin, which also includes her inventive arrangements of traditional Balkan folk songs. Wechkin's virtuosic and innovative pairing of voice and violin-which she performs simultaneously-fuses folk, classical, and world music into a blend of genres that emerges "full-bore, all-out, utterly unselfconsciously" (Seattle Times). The works on “Leaning toward the Fiddler” range from themes of passionate longing to humorous musical feuds between lovers, highlighting Wechkin's ability to perform in a wide breadth of styles with great ease and skill.
