Darynn Zimmer / Savage Nightingale
Street Date November 16 10
Soprano Darynn Zimmer and guitarist Eliot Fisk team up to create an album
of cross-over folk music
Spanish, French and Native American folk music collected by Federico Garcia Lorca, Julien Tiersot and Charles Wakefield Cadman all go to make up a rich and passionate album by Darynn Zimmer and her distinguished collaborators: guitarist Eliot Fisk, percussionist Rex Benincasa and pianist Jed Distler. Among the featured cuts are the flamenco songs “En El Café de Chinitas” and “Anda Jaleo” (“Let’s Make a Racket”) which became an anti-Franco anthem in the Spanish civil war as well as part of a couple of famous flamenco ballets; also included are a couple of racy medieval French lyrics and Cadman’s American Indian-inspired “From the Land of the Sky-blue Water”, one of the most popular songs in American history.
Ieva Jokubaviciute / Music of Tribute Vol. 6 – Berg
Street Date October 26 10
Music of Tribute is a Labor Records historic series that pays homage to great composers by linking their works with music--often unknown, rediscovered or previously unrecorded--that pays tribute to them through dedication, homage, or thematic reference.
A new recording by the young Lithuanian pianist Ieva Jokubaviciute pays homage to a veritable mountain of early 20th-century Modernism—Alban Berg. Weaving an intricate tapestry of scintillating performances of Berg’s piano sonata and Opus 2 songs and of works written in tribute to him by Giacinto Scelsi, Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, Ross Lee Finney, Jacob Gilboa, and Hans Erich Apostel, Volume 6 of the series explores the wide-ranging, global connections between Berg’s monumental musical world and the creative music that it has influenced.
REVIEWS
New York Times
The London Sunday Times
David DeBoor Canfield, FANFARE
Peter J. Rabinowitz, FANFARE
www.musicweb-international.com
Amazon
Gheorghi Arnaoudov / The Way of the Birds
Street Date September 28 10
Bulgarian composer Gheorghi Arnaoudov has forged a profound body of work deeply rooted in minimalism and, at the same time, creating an intensely imaginative, vibrating sound world that constantly defies convention. His vital use of a variety of literary sources, aesthetic ideas, and collaborations with other art forms distinguish his music in today’s European concert culture. Labor Records’ latest release The Way of the Birds presents four sound-poems growing out of collaborations with Bulgarian choreographer Mila Iskrenova. These works, from Bulgaria’s most cosmopolitan compositional voice at the height of his powers, musically capture the freedom of flight and engage in timeless conversations with poets, philosophers, and folk traditions across the ages.
REVIEWS
Musicweb International
Jeremy Marchant, FANFARE
Barnaby Rayfield, FANFARE
Kultura
Heiner Stadler / Retrospection
Re-mastered from original sources by Malcolm Addey
Street Date September 28 10
Compositions recorded during a period of just over ten years from the early sixties to the mid-seventies. Stadler, a composer, record producer and impresario, moves across the borders of jazz, blues world and classical music with ease and skill. In Retrospection he emphasizes classical and modern techniques set inside large scale structures within which improvisation plays an integral role.
"...clicks as an absolute must for anyone who likes Dee Dee Bridgewater at all."
–Eugene Chadbourne, Cadence
Benedikta Bonitz / Il Flauto Dolce
Street Date July 27 10
Benedikta Bonitz
“Il Flauto Dolce”
An album of unusual early baroque and contemporary music for recorder solo accompanied by cello and harpsichord
Baroque and contemporary music from Italy, France, England, Japan, Germany and New York performed by an outstanding virtuosa of the recorder noted for her powers of musical articulation and expression. Included in the program: A series of Italian works, mostly from the period just after 1600, and considered to be among the earliest published music specifically designed for instrumental performance. Also on the program are a set of variations on Greensleeves from seventeenth-century England and modern works by Walter Steffens, Somei Satoh and Heiner Stadler.
Walter Steffens / Guernica and Other Paintings
Street Date May 25 10
Labor Records latest release Guernica and Other Paintings: Picasso, Munch, Bosch, Chagall explores German composer Walter Steffens’ labyrinthine worlds of sound and image and his extraordinary project that stretches and deepens a tradition that began with musical paraphrases of pictures. Steffens’ interest in “transposing” visual impressions into music arises from his life-long occupation as a composer for theatre, operas, and ballets. His compositions are not simply “paraphrases of pictures,” rather Steffens draws upon his extensive musical vocabulary and his uncommonly strong emotional response to art to produce a musical statement on this recording ranging from the orchestral grandeur inspired by Picasso’s “Guernica” to the large scale symphony for organ after Mark Chagall.
REVIEWS
Jeremy Marchant, FANFARE
Barnaby Rayfield, FANFARE
www.cmzimmermann.blogspot.com
Jean-Claude Kuner - The Broken Promise (Blood Feud in Albania)
A Radio Documentary
Street Date May 25 10
The centuries-old custom of blood feuds - responsible for thousands of Albanian deaths in the past - has started blighting lives in the Balkan nation again in recent years. The Broken Promise (Blood Feud in Albania) is both a guided tour and a kind of audio or media poem that takes us through the horrific modern revival of the Kanun, the ancient tribal code dating back to the fifteenth century.
© 2011 Labor Records. All rights reserved.