Source: BMOP.
Chinary Ung: Singing Inside Aura offers a remarkable opportunity to view the compositional development of Cambodian American composer Chinary Ung. A recording of five orchestral works spanning over 40 years, the disc demonstrates a successful musical integration of Eastern and Western traditions into Ung’s individual musical language. Using dance rhythms and folk tunes from his native Cambodia, Ung’s creative spirit is rooted in ceremonial and spiritual meaning. The album’s earliest piece, Annica, written in 1970 at the Tanglewood Music Center, represents a compositional period that Ung identifies with a post Webern tradition. Grand Spiral: Desert Flowers Bloom, Antiphonal Spirals, and Water Rings Overture were composed within a four year period and display Ung’s imaginative and intricate mature style. Singing Inside Aura, written in 2013, offers a glimpse into an ongoing collaboration with the composer’s wife, Susan Ung, exploring the expressive possibilities of simultaneous instrumental and vocal performance.
BMOP/sound is thrilled to add Mason Bates: Mothership to its growing catalog. Demonstrating genre defying artistry, Bates is a seminal force in American music. “It’s such a rare and cherished opportunity to write for orchestra…and rare still to have the pieces make it onto a CD,” writes Bates. “Until this moment, very few pieces could be heard outside the concert hall. So the release of this CD is an incredibly special moment for me. These five works provide a look into a part of my musical world that I’ve been eager to record for a long time.” The album includes several of Bates’s most performed works in addition to ones that marked artistic breakthroughs for the composer. The disc’s eponymous work, Mothership, premiered in 2011 in a worldwide broadcast from the Sydney Opera House by the YouTube Symphony, features Bates’s signature combination of orchestra with electronica, as well as improvisations by two outstanding solo artists, Jason Moran on FM Rhodes and Su Chang on guzheng. The all acoustic tone poems Desert Transport and Sea Blue Circuitry, as well as the electro acoustic Rusty Air in Carolina, exhibit powerful imaginative catalysts. Taken together, this collection demonstrates why Mason Bates has become one of the most performed orchestral composers of the present day.
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