Music
It is always heartening for an album to live up to its much-anticipated buildup. It is even more reassuring that, after nearly four decades, The Goo Goo Dolls are breaking new ground.
An opera from Fascist Italy, Gino Marinuzzi’s Palla de’ Mozzi receives a splendid world-premiere recording. Should you listen despite its pedigree?
“Farewell” is the shortest album in the series, but it is perhaps the most provocative in the way it calmly muses, philosophically, on the form that togetherness can take – as it exists and as it dissolves.
The saxophonist has the slithery facility of a bebopper, but I also hear something of the forthright stance of Coltrane in his playing, despite the rhythmic complexity of his writing — and his distinctively varied use of his Puerto Rican background.
To my ears, these beautifully recorded improvisations — with their unique sequences of tones and subtle interactions — are never less than intriguing.
A world-premiere recording of Richard Flury’s fascinating 1935 opera about love, deceit, and the possibility of forgiveness.
Age certainly wasn’t an issue in terms of energy. Elvis Costello played for a solid two hours with barely a break, running through four decades of music with a heavy emphasis on the old favorites.
Walter Crockett’s beautiful album is as multifaceted as life itself.
Nico Muhly’s writing in Stranger is of a type of post-Minimalism: often pulsing (or undulating) and rhythmically driven, though anything but harmonically simplistic.
A serving of the essence of the music of John Corigliano: a blend of old and new, radical and traditional that has made him such a singular force in American music over the last fifty-plus years.
Fest Review: IFFBoston Shorts — Part One