Jason Victor Serinus

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Bernstein's Serious Symphonic Side
Jason Victor Serinus
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Sep 22, 2018  |  2 comments
How many who love Bernstein's "popular" music—everything from On the Town and West Side Story to the final Arias and Barcarolles—have actually spent time with his three "serious," gravely introspective symphonies? Perhaps the best way to do so in up-to-date sound is to dive into Warner Classics' superbly annotated and recorded Bernstein: The 3 Symphonies from Antonio Pappano and the Orchestra, Chorus, and "Voci Bianche" of the Accademia Nazionale di Santa Cecilia. Together with excellent soloists, Pappano presents the three symphonies on two CDs, with options of a 24/96 download and hi-rez streaming in MQA on Tidal. The recording balances out Bernstein's three soul-searching introspections with the original version of Prelude, Fugue and Riffs for clarinet and jazz ensemble, which Bernstein initially conceived for the Woody Herman Band.
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Wonderful Times with Wonderful Town
Jason Victor Serinus
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Sep 17, 2018  |  3 comments
After umpteen serious reviews, penned in serious and somber times, it's high time to lighten up. Hence to Leonard Bernstein's Wonderful Town we go, and to Sir Simon Rattle's new SACD of the musical, recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra and a stellar cast that includes Danielle de Niese (Eileen), Alysha Umphress (Ruth), and Nathan Gunn (Bob).
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Other Minds' Modern Hits
Jason Victor Serinus
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Sep 09, 2018  |  1 comments
Other Minds, the San Francisco-based organization that champions music so far ahead of its time that the 21st century is still catching up with what OM championed in the last millennium, has turned its ear to archival works by unsung electronic music pioneers from the Bay Area and beyond. In its latest offering of digital-only Modern Hits releases, two of which are hi-rez (24/44.1), OM champions the music of Philip Bimstein, Tom Djll, Jerry Hunt, and Alden Jenks.
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Anne-Sophie Mutter's Hommage à Penderecki
Jason Victor Serinus
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Sep 02, 2018  |  7 comments
No violinist is more equipped to perform the music of Krzysztof Penderecki than Anne-Sophie Mutter. The composer dedicated his Concerto for Violin and Orchestra No.2, Metamorphosen (1992–1996), to her after hearing her perform at a young age—Mutter subsequently recorded Metamorphosen with Penderecki conducting the London Symphony Orchestra in 1997—she has commissioned three works from him. If anyone can be said to have Penderecki's music in their blood, it is Anne-Sophie Mutter.

Which does not make any of the four works on her new two-CDs-for-the-price-of-one set from Deutsche Grammophon, Hommage à Penderecki, any easier to wrap your arms around on first hearing.

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English Song in All its Richness
Jason Victor Serinus
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Aug 26, 2018  |  1 comments
From John McCormack, Kathleen Ferrier, and Dame Janet Baker through today's Bryn Terfel, Alice Coote, and Roderick Williams, some of our greatest English and Irish singers have become indelibly associated with the art of English song. To that exalted list we must now add mezzo-soprano Dame Sarah Connolly, whose recent recording of 120 years of English song from the Royal College of Music, Come to Me in My Dreams (Chandos 10944), with the superb pianist Joseph Middleton, is so deeply felt and gorgeously voiced that it earns a 5-star recommendation.
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A Big Surprise Among Three American Symphonies
Jason Victor Serinus
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Aug 20, 2018  |  12 comments
How many of us, when asked to name great American symphonists, typically start and stop with Copland, Ives, Bernstein, Barber and, among living composers, Glass and Adams? In doing so, we often ignore a host of others from the mid-to-late 20th century, including Schumann, Piston, Diamond, Cowell, Hanson, Harris, and Hovhaness (to name but a few)...Perception could very well change with the release of Lance Friedel and the London Symphony Orchestra's recent SACD for BIS, American Symphonies (BIS-2118).
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Escape into Reverie with Stephen Hough
Jason Victor Serinus
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Aug 12, 2018  |  22 comments
Inveterate news junkies of the world, your way out has come. For at least one good hour of your otherwise doom-laden day, you have a reason to turn off Fox or CNN and drift on feathery clouds to a far sweeter place. Your exit has been most graciously supplied by pianist Stephen Hough—he of Stephen Hough's Dream Album—whose latest recorded achievement may well be hailed as the most engaging, charming, and delightful recording of the year... or even the decade.
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Transcendent Bridges Continents and Consciousness
Jason Victor Serinus
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Aug 05, 2018  |  3 comments
There is music so new, so original, so contemplative, and so deeply felt that it makes you want to listen, and then demands that you listen again. It's music whose layers peel back over time, as it draws you deeper into its mysteries. For premiere recordings of compositions that address time and place, and then often take you beyond them, Transcendent (DE 3555), the first offering on Delos from composer/orchestrator Chad Cannon's Asia/America New Music Institute (AANMI), earns its title.
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Schubert's Joy-Filled Octet
Jason Victor Serinus
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Jul 28, 2018  |  5 comments
Got the blues from too much real news about the fake news, and too much fake news about the real news? Harmonia Mundi's recent release of Franz Schubert's Octet (Oktett) in F, D803, on which violinist Isabelle Faust joins a superb ensemble of fellow period-instrument musicians, may be just the scream-saver that the doctor recommended.
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An Enlightening Debut from Duo Noire
Jason Victor Serinus
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Jul 22, 2018  |  5 comments
Duo Noire's debut recording for New Focus Recordings, Night Triptych, covers so many bases, and speaks so clearly to contemporary realities, that it immediately qualifies for several gold stars. But once you hear the sheer musicality of its premiere recordings of six new works for duo guitar, and how wonderfully they are played, you may be tempted to award the album several more.
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Exquisite Art Songs from Sandrine Piau
Jason Victor Serinus
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Jul 15, 2018  |  62 comments
Given how much fuller and more natural I find hi-rez audio sounds, I rarely review recordings that are only available in Red Book quality in the US. But when the soprano is Sandrine Piau, whose voice conveyed the essence of springtime when I heard her live at UC Berkeley a little over six years go, and she sings as marvelously as she does on Chimère, her latest song recital with pianist Susan Manoff, I throw such self-imposed strictures out the window.
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July 4 Weekend Special: John Williams at the Movies
Jason Victor Serinus
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Jul 07, 2018  |  8 comments
For a major, decidedly American change of pace from our usual fare of Prokofiev, Debussy, Xenakis, Berg, and Beethoven (for starters), let's lighten up with Reference Recordings' latest hybrid SACD, John Williams at the Movies? Also available as a 176.4/24 download—the format in which it was recorded and which I auditioned for this review—the performances by the Dallas Wind Band under Jerry Junkin are so vivid and color-saturated that RR has chosen them for their first hybrid high-resolution wind-band SACD.
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Prokofiev For Two and a Half
Jason Victor Serinus
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Jul 02, 2018  |  33 comments
Why the title, "Prokofiev for Two and a Half," for a Deutsche Grammophon recording on which Martha Argerich and Sergei Babayan play Babayan's two-piano transcriptions of music from Prokofiev's ballet Romeo & Juliet and four of his operas? Because any recording that features the outsized pianism of the great Argerich immediately becomes one of extraordinary importance for artistic resources that are inherently doubled by at least 50%.
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Notorious RBG in Song
Jason Victor Serinus
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Jun 24, 2018  |  2 comments
Soprano/composer Patrice Michaels with Ruth Bader Ginsburg at Glimmerglass in 2016

First there was the epithet, "Notorious RBG," which NYC law student Shana Knizhnik coined in 2013 (in a sly riff on the name of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg's fellow Brooklynite and rapper, The Notorious B.I.G.) as the name of her Tumblr site. Then came Derrick Wang's, Scalia/Ginsburg, an opera based on the odd-bedfellows friendship of two SCOTUS justices and opera lovers from opposite sides of the political spectrum, Ginsburg and Antonin Scalia. This year has already brought the next two artistic steps in the process of honoring the 85-year old Supreme Court justice: the documentary RBG and, from Cedille Records, Notorious RBG in Song.

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Adams Takes the Violin Up, Down, Around, and Through
Jason Victor Serinus
Jason Victor Serinus  |  Jun 20, 2018  |  18 comments
Twenty-five years after the premiere of John Adams' Violin Concerto, the music remains as vital, exhilarating, and strangely moving as the day it was birthed. An extremely demanding work, its three contrasting movements present a triathlon challenge of sorts to anyone who dares try to play them.

Here, she who rises to the challenge is violinist Leila Josefowicz. Provocatively pictured on the CD cover as a curious cross between an athlete in repose and Rodin's reflective thinker...

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