Latest news with #Nonesuch
ABC News
4 days ago
- Entertainment
- ABC News
Together Alone with Crowded House and talking About Ghosts with Mary Halvorson
Brooklyn-based jazz guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson has released a new album About Ghosts. Featuring her long-time improvisatory band Amaryllis, this time she's also added two saxophonists into the mix. Mary speaks to Andrew Ford about what adding more horns allows her music to do, how an increased focus on composition has changed the way she improvises, and about some of her more surprising musical influences (people like Elliott Smith and Robert Wyatt). Together Alone is not Crowded House's most famous album, but for Barnaby Smith, it's their best. Recorded in the wild reaches of Karekare Beach in Aotearoa New Zealand, its sound and stories emerge directly from that place. Barnaby, who is the writer of 33 1/3: Together Alone, travelled to Karekare to absorb the atmosphere that precipitated the album joins Andy to make the case for this album in the output of one of Australasia's most successful bands. Title: Full of Neon Artist: Mary Halvorson & Amaryllis Composer: Mary Halvorson Album: About Ghosts Label: Nonesuch Title: Together Alone, Kare Kare, Skin Feeling, Catherine Wheels Artist: Crowded House Composer: Neil Finn, Mark Hart, Nick Seymour, Paul Hester, Ngapo 'Bub' Wehi Album: Together Alone Label: Capitol Title: Carved From, Eventidal, Full of Neon, About Ghosts Artist: Mary Halvorson & Amaryllis Composer: Mary Halvorson Album: About Ghosts Label: Nonesuch Title: Tedesca dita la proficia Artist: The Renaissance Players Composer: Marco Facoli Album: The Cat's Fiddlestick Label: Cherrypie The Music Show is produced on Gadigal and Gundungurra Country Technical production by Simon Branthwaite
The Guardian
10-07-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Steve Reich: Jacob's Ladder; Traveler's Prayer album review – at nearly 90, he's as energetic as ever
Three months ago, Nonesuch brought out an updated version of its superbly comprehensive survey of Steve Reich's collected works. The 27 discs included the first recordings of Reich's most recent scores, Traveler's Prayer and Jacob's Ladder, and now, for those who already owned the set from its previous incarnation, it has released those two works together on their own. Both pieces were composed during the Covid lockdown, and are scored for four singers and an instrumental ensemble; in both cases, too, they have Hebrew texts taken from the Old Testament. In almost every other respect, though, the two pieces are very different. Traveler's Prayer, first performed in 2021, is meditative and static, floating, almost ritualised. Those who associate Reich's music with insistent rhythmic movement will find little of that here, and Reich has described the result as 'closer to Josquin des Prez than Stravinsky'. The long, sinuously intertwining vocal lines for the pairs of sopranos and tenors make constant use of canons, yet harmonically the music stays rooted to the spot, without the magical shifts of tonality that give so much of Reich's music its allure. Jacob's Ladder, though, returns immediately to the propulsive, exuberant Reich, as the words from Genesis describing Jacob's vision of a ladder to heaven are intoned by the vocalists over busy, insistent string and wind figures whose gently clashing dissonances add just a little edge to the textures. This buoyant music is joyously, inexhaustibly energetic; it's hard to believe it was composed by a man who will be 90 next year. This article includes content hosted on We ask for your permission before anything is loaded, as the provider may be using cookies and other technologies. To view this content, click 'Allow and continue'. Listen on Apple Music (above) or Spotify
