Future Releases

Siblings Gil and Orli Shahams’ new release 'Nigunim' is a wonderful and thought provoking offering of Hebrew melodies. Jewish folk music has always played an integral part in the Shaham’s life - as a small child, Gil fondly remembers hearing Achron’s Hebrew Melody being sung by his grandparents in Jerusalem. This music, more often than not, vividly evokes troubled origins, the music providing an escape of sorts and the violin the perfect voice which transcends the world from which they sprang. “One very powerful aspect of this music is its soulfulness”, Orli Shaham says; “Regardless of your background, I don’t think you can listen to it without feeling that connection”.

This release includes masterpieces by Ernest Bloch, Joseph Achron and Leo Zeitlin. They all started their musical lives as child prodigy violinists, as their idiomatic writing for the violin might suggest.

The centrepiece of the disc comes from the work sharing the album’s title Nigunim. Commissioned by Gil and Orli from Israeli composer Avner Dorman, it shares the universal appeal of the wordless melodies on which it was named. Unlike Bloch, Achron and Zeitlin, Dorman is a composer/pianist and this can be clearly heard in the equality he gives the piano in this engaging 4 movement violin sonata. “He has created a masterpiece and in my experience everybody who hears the piece falls in love with it – they’re electrified by it”, Gil explains. Indeed, when he performed the work, San Diego Today affirmed that “it was hard to miss [its] visceral excitement and structural elegance”, the Boston Globe admiring the “uncommonly intriguing sounds”.

John Williams is the only composer here who does not share the Shahams’ Jewish heritage, but his mastery in the score Schindler’s List is such that, according to Orli, in this piece “he has absolutely captured the feeling of ghetto life and what that looked like and how people interacted … the pieces included here are so authentic that they are a part of this tradition”.

Orli and Gil’s musical partnership is a lifelong one. The violinist recounts: “Orli and I used to play together at home when we were kids, but we didn’t give concerts together until we were in our 20s”. In addition to countless concert appearances, in the recording studio their collaborations include two previous Canary Classics recordings, The Prokofiev Album (CC02) and Mozart in Paris (CC01) and Dvorák for Two (Deutsche Grammophon).

PARTHENIA is a collection of pieces for harpsichord and virginal composed by the three famous English composers Byrd, Bull and Gibbons, printed in London in 1613 and dedicated to the marriage of Maria Stuart and King Frederick V. The Chilenian harpsichordist Catalina Vicens celebrates the 400-year anniversary of this unique edition of English renaissance keyboard music on her debut album. To make this already diverse collection even more colorful, she uses not less than six different instruments, 3 of which are 17th c. originals. Enjoy this delicate bouquet of early keyboard pieces played on virginals, harpsichords, spinettino and Muselaar, just as the royal couple may have enjoyed it for relaxation and amusement in good company.

Rarely heard in concert or on disc, 20th-century Mexican composer Carlos Chávez’s spectacular Piano Concerto, completed in 1940, receives an insightful and compelling performance from Mexican-born pianist Jorge Federico Osorio, with his native country’s flagship orchestra, the Orquestra Sinfónica Nacional de Mexico and its music director, the dynamic young conductor Carlos Miguel Prieto.

For performers and audiences alike, Chávez’s powerful Piano Concerto is a thrill ride of surprising tempo changes amid a whirlwind of styles. Legendary pianist Eugene List, who gave its world premiere in New York in 1942, marveled at its “immense rhythmic complexity, great technical difficulty and unrelenting thrust and pressure.” Reviewing the premiere, The New York Times called the work “imaginatively scored” and praised its “elemental strength and the originality of its orchestral coloring.”

Chávez (1899–1978) wrote “extraordinarily varied works of Mexican character,” notes Grove Music Online. In addition to Chávez’s epic concerto, Osorio plays three works for solo piano on the new CD: Chávez’s early Meditación; Mexican nationalist composer José Pablo Moncayo’s Muros Verdes (Green Walls), from 1951; and contemporary Mexican-born American composer Samuel Zyman’s Variations on an Original Theme (2010)