Between humor and menace: The art of Gaylen Hansen
Gaylen Hansen paints his alter ego as he confronts giant grasshoppers and a buffalo lurking behind the bed. » More ...
Sheri Boggs
Solstice Wind Quintet Live
The story of how the Solstice Wind Quintet got its name offers some clues as to what to expect from its debut CD, Solstice Wind Quintet Live. According to the liner notes, the quintet was first formed in 1978 in order to pre-sent a midsummer concert at Washington State University, and its name was designed to capture “the warmth and brightness of the summer solstice.” A strong sense of that initial sunny radiance pervades this recording, but just as the last few weeks of June are sometimes overcast, rainy, and given to thunderstorms, the lightness is balanced here in both selection and sound by a … » More …
East West Encounter
From the first quietly unsettling notes of Susan Chan’s East West Encounter, it’s clear that this is no ordinary piano CD. A delicate initial passage suddenly explodes into a dramatic and resonant section of lower keys; two contemporary pieces rooted in Chinese literature are an intriguing lead-in to Beethoven’s Sonata in E minor, op. 90 and Liszt’s Mephisto Waltz No. 1. That the structure and sound of music can operate as a sort of narrative language is quite evident here. These are selections that evoke the implacability of landscape, the sweet sharp pain of spiritual longing, and the heady delirium of early love.
Chan … » More …