WCRB's Will Peacock spotlights living composers, innovative artists, and recent album releases from all corners of the classical music world.
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Boston-based choir Nightingale Vocal Ensemble shakes up the classical choral format with their entirely improvised debut album “Composition Sped Up.”
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Japanese composer, columnist and iconoclast Takashi Yoshimatsu evokes babbling brooks, chirping birds, and delicate beauty in this radically pastoral album featuring Sachio Fujioka and the Manchester Camerata.
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Composer, pianist, singer-songwriter, and creative chair of the Oregon Symphony Gabriel Kahane confronts uncomfortable truths about the housing crisis in America with his witty, eclectic, dynamic, and genre-defying oratorio “emergency shelter intake form,” performed by the Oregon Symphony.
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American singer-songwriter extraordinaire and indie icon Sufjan Stevens cuts his classical teeth with “Reflections,” a stunning ballet for two pianos, brought to the studio by pianists Timo Andres and Conor Hanick.
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Part dream diary, part chamber piece, and 100% psychedelic fever dream, minimalist maverick Terry Riley's "Autodreamographical Tales" bursts into life with the flexible and frenetic Bang On A Can All-Stars.
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Nico Muhly’s arresting and textural ambient accompaniment to visual artist David Hockney’s immersive exhibit "Bigger & Closer (not smaller & further away)" finds new life on the Bedroom Community label.
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The words of evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins and theoretical physicist Richard Feynman introduce a secular twist to the choral mass format in David Shapiro’s Sumptuous Planet Mass, brought to life by the Philadelphia-based choral ensemble The Crossing.
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Joe Hisaishi’s film music finds new life in "Joe Hisaishi, A Symphonic Celebration" on the Deutsche Grammophon label, joining the ranks of legendary classical musicians including Leonard Bernstein, Max Richter, and John Williams.
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From Shakespeare to an apocalyptic musical fever dream and everything in between, eclectic choral ensemble Roomful of Teeth’s Grammy-winning "Rough Magic" is an album worth hearing.