I Care If You Listen (new classical music, art, and technology), has a great new feature on our With Strings Attached recording with the San Francisco Choral Artists. Here are a a few quotes from the review:
“This album is the creative fruit of a unique Bay Area collaboration between San Francisco Choral Artists (Magen Solomon, Artistic Director) and The Alexander String Quartet… Especially in the resonance of a church (in this album’s case, St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Belvedere, CA), the strings are not overwhelmed by the choir, but rather find their own space to complement the sometimes dense vocal texture.
“Inspired by a sculpture of the same name in front of the poet’s City Lights Bookstore, composer Veronika Krausas’ language of the birds sets passages from five of Ferlinghetti’s San Francisco Poems. Three (1, 3, 5) are jouncy bird-themed exercises in which the strings saw away quick successions of detached notes to create a frenetic energy on which the choir feeds, turning these simple haiku-like phrases into insistent declamations with plenty of dramatic irony.
“Brahms’ Four Quartets, Op. 92, originally for vocal quartet and piano, are here performed with the piano part transcribed for string quartet by Zakarias Grafilo, first violin of the Alexander String Quartet. SFCA’s rich vocal blend is as effective with these Romantic settings as with the freer modern works.
“For Winter Light, composer Michael Gandolfi set two poems by the Imagist poet Amy Lowell that crystallize the individual’s tortured experience with, respectively, nature and passion. “Falling Snow” begins with the strings playing a hurried falling figure in a minor, sounding like the beginning of a string quartet, so complete is the idea.
“Anchored by fresh interpretations of Brahms and Beethoven, the imaginative new works commissioned for the Alexander String Quartet and SFCA cohere uncannily, as the composers no doubt took advantage of the ensembles’ polished ability to stretch time and evoke an endless range of emotional and picturesque subjects.” — Rob Wendt, I Care If You Listen
Read the wonderful, full feature on www.ICareIfYouListen.com!
Purchase With Strings Attached: