Basel was a center of choral music in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The selection of works on the album Stilles Leuchten traces the developments of this vocal high culture with works by composers who worked in and around Basel. The older pieces were composed in the 1850s, while the more recent ones were written during the cultural upheaval of the 1920s and early 1930s. Raphael Immoos and his vocal ensemble Basler Madrigalisten vividly present the broad spectrum of vocal works from the late Romantic period in the Swiss city on the Rhine.

Johann Ernst, the third-born son of Johanna Sophia Siefer and Johann Bernhard Bach, was a musician and organist at the Georgenkirche in Eisenach. He was taught first by his father and then, from January 1737 in Leipzig by his uncle and godfather Johann Sebastian Bach, when he moved there to attend the Thomasschule and later to study law. He was forced to abandon his studies there in 1741 upon being called back to Eisenach to help his ill father, and though Ernst missed the musical activity at Leipzig he was persuaded by Johann Sebastian to remain by his father’s side. He eventually succeeded him in the organist post at Eisenach in 1749.

Ubuntu Music is delighted to announce the signing of Australian based Israeli sax player Maayan Sherman, for the release of Contrast, his upcoming album on Ubuntu Music.

Celebrating 25 years of LSO Live and the Year of Czech Music 2024: In 1924, the centenary of Bedřich Smetana’s birth was the impetus for establishing the tradition of the Year of Czech Music, commemorated every ten years since then. 2024 marks not only the 200th anniversary of Smetana’s birth, but also the 120th anniversary of Antonín Dvořák’s death and the 170th of Leoš Janáček’s birth. It also marks the 25th anniversary of LSO Live and its first recordings—the Ninth and Eighth Symphonies of Antonín Dvořák.

Never coming home - the idea of not being able to return to the way something was — has grabbed hold of our collective consciousness and refused to let go. Perhaps the world is falling apart. Perhaps we’re just getting older. Whatever the case, the transient nature of life brings about its share of existential crises and nostalgia remains a difficult emotion to shake. It seems only fitting for a band that recently parted ways with two of its members to center our first album as a quartet around themes of anxiety and depression amidst tumultuous change. Influenced by Phoebe Bridgers, Prince, and In Rainbows-era Radiohead, Twenty Pills Without Water is an album full of ghosts and coping mechanisms.

The middle of the twentieth century was a period of tremendous conflict and upheaval throughout the world. Composers responded sometimes directly, sometimes more obliquely to the horrors of fascism, war and state-controlled communism – sometimes with intense seriousness, sometimes with unexpected levity and beauty.

Zubin Mehta has had a decades-long artistic relationship and deep friendship with the Munich Philharmonic. Since conducting his first concert with the orchestra in 1987, he has been a regular guest there and in 2004 was named the orchestra's first and so far only "honorary conductor". Twenty years later, the orchestra celebrated this anniversary with the two piano concertos played by one of today's most celebrated and admired pianists: Yefim Bronfman.

‘Infinite Health’ is the engrossing sixth album by Tycho, the two-time-GRAMMY-nominated project of celebrated San Francisco songwriter, musician and producer Scott Hansen. The album will be released on August 30 via Mom + Pop Records in the U.S. and Ninja Tune in the rest of the world, and is announced today with lead single and accompanying video, “Phantom”.

Incredible art blossoms when the stresses of time and funds do not weigh on its creator. It was with a generous grant and time provided by the pandemic that vocalist/composer Luciana Souza was able to sit down and compose a new longform piece without distraction. Along with her trio of guitarist Chico Pinheiro and bassist Scott Colley, Souza debuts her wonderful new composition, Twenty-Four Short Musical Episodes (with first lines from poems by Emily Dickinson).

Over the last several decades, one of the pleasures of attending the San Francisco Symphony has been its music directors’ commitment to performing semistaged operas, some of which have been rarities or works that were otherwise underperformed. On June 8, the orchestra presented the latest in this series, the great Finnish composer Kaija Saariaho’s second opera, Adriana Mater, in its first West Coast production.

Compiled from ultra-rare dead stock pressed at a Soviet-era vinyl plant in Tashkent, Uzbekistan, this first-of-its-kind fully licensed album features a supreme selection of Uzbek disco, Tajik electronic folk, Uyghur guitar licks, Crimean Tatar jazz, Korean brass, and genre-defying styles from Soviet Central Asia.

For singer/songwriter Becca Stevens, making music is a charmed form of service—a means of mining her own experience for insight into the beautiful complexity of being alive, in the hopes of providing others with understanding and solace and a renewed sense of strength. But in the early days of 2023, the North Carolina-bred artist felt an overwhelming need to process two monumental changes in her life (the death of her mother and the start of her own journey into motherhood), and soon sought the comfort and catharsis of pure self-expression. By the time she emerged from that period of unfettered creativity, Stevens had completed her new album Maple to Paper: an illuminating glimpse into her most private moments of grief and transcendence, rendered with both stunning clarity and heartfelt devotion to music’s alchemical powers.

In this new album, Florence Bolton and Benjamin Perrot revisit the composer who gave their ensemble its delightful name, ‘La Rêveuse’. Drawing on his heritage (Sainte-Colombe), his friendships (Robert de Visée) and his own visionary genius, Marin Marais blazed new trails for his instrument in his second book of viol pieces (1701). Alongside the customary dances and sets of variations, he invented the ‘character pieces’ that were to become so popular in the eighteenth century.

The title of this latest release from bassist Neil Swainson is fitting: HERE FOR A WHILE. Amen to that. At 68, he’s had not just a long career, but a most distinguished and impactful one. In Canada and internationally, a world-class musician.

“Eastern Montana”, the first in a series of posthumous releases from acclaimed solo pianist George Winston, was inspired by the surroundings of his childhood growing up in Miles City and Billings during the 1950s. Winston described Montana with its beautiful topography and wonderful people as “the greatest feeling of love and inspiration I have ever had.” Winston’s legacy as one of the foremost instrumental composers of our time perseveres with his latest studio album "Eastern Montana" sure to become a Winston classic.