Ensemble Offspring's performance for the SOH digital program, in front of a live audience, is a joyous, mesmerising occasion.

It’s as difficult to know where to start describing the brilliance of this album as it is to avoid superlatives. Cellist Yo-Yo Ma, mandolin player Chris Thile and bassist Edgar Meyer are masters of their respective instruments. All are fluent in different musical styles and genres. All have collaborated with each other, either as duos or as part of a larger ensemble, on many occasions. All have performed and recorded JS Bach’s works for solo cello or violin to critical acclaim, so one can immediately assume a certain facility and intimacy when playing Bach together. Here, they present a programme comprising arrangements of mostly keyboard works, the only exception being the Viola da Gamba Sonata No 3 in G Minor. There is the Trio Sonata No 6 in G, the Passepied from the Partita No 5 in G, an excerpt from The Art of Fugue and a selection of preludes and fugues and chorale preludes. There are flashes of extreme virtuosity, such as the breakneck section in the E Minor Fugue BWV548, originally for organ. There are almost heartbreakingly beautiful renderings of some of Bach’s most famous chorale preludes, such as Erbarm dich mein, o Herre Gott, BWV721 and… Continue reading Get…

Steve Reich’s highly anticipated September 11 lament comes ten years after the terrorist attacks and the release itself was not without controversy (note the revised album artwork). His account is everything we have come to expect from America’s greatest minimalist, and therein lies the problem. WTC 9/11 serves as a bookend to the Kronos Quartet’s 1988 collaboration with the composer, Different Trains: a profound work in which the strings echo the sampled speech of Holocaust survivors. Reich has rehashed the technique, this time with the voices of air traffic controllers and firemen who were among the first to grasp the magnitude of the American tragedy. What fails to move me is the mimicry, so poignant in Different Trains but cumbersome and almost tasteless here. Redeeming melodic interest comes in a reflective section of Hebrew Psalms, sung by Jews who prayed for the dead on the scene. Just shy of 16 minutes long, WTC 9/11 is as immediately terse and engaging as, say, Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima. Reich’s structure and economy of means are masterful, but with the entire disc running to only 36 minutes I feel short-changed, despite the inclusion… Continue reading Get unlimited digital access from…

Brisbane-born flautist Tim Munro is on the new music adventure of a lifetime with this quirky Chicago sextet.

Ten years after the September 11 attacks, Reich makes sense of the tragedy in a haunting new work.