SKU: PR.14440218S

UPC: 680160027170. 9.5 x 13 inches.

The concerts and exhibits of the Cleveland Museum of Art were an important formative influence for me during my student days. So when the invitation came to create a new work celebrating this institution on its seventy-fifth anniversary, I was not only happy to accept, but knew immediately that I wanted to write a piece that would somehow relate specifically to the museum. I decided to make the work a reflection on a painting in the museum's collection: Zurbaran's The Holy House of Nazareth. My quartet is not program music in a narrative sense, but rather a kind of meditation that takes its tone from this painting's remarkable integration of intense affect, mysterious repose and secret geometry. Besides Zurbaran's painting, the piece is occupied with a purely musical object of contemplation: the hymn tune Picardy, best known with the text Let All Mortal Flesh Keep Silence. This tune permeates the harmonic and melodic life of the quartet, sometimes appearing in a very simple, straightforward fashion, but often hidden amidst more complex structures. I was attracted to the melody for its musical qualities, but later realized that the hymn's text also resonates with the mood of the painting; the words speak of a reverent awe, of cherubim with sleepless eye, and of the mystery of the Incarnate Word who must suffer: King of kings, yet born of Mary...

SKU: CA.3108119

ISBN 9790007136345. Key: E minor. Language: German/English.

Bach composed the cantata Jesus schlaft, was soll ich hoffen [Jesus sleeps, what hope have I] BWV 81 for the fourth Epiphany Sunday, 1724. The cantata is structured as a little drama: In the beginning, fear prevails. The seas rage and Jesus is asleep. The threateningly foaming waves are vividly depicted in the soughing string accompaniment of the tenor aria. Jesus's words Ihr Kleinglaubigen, warum seid ihr so furchtsam? [You of little faith, why are you so fearful?] are set as a bass arioso at the center of the cantata; they provide the turning point. In the subsequent bass aria, the towering seas are silenced. A recitative - Wohl mir [Well for me] - leads into the closing chorale with its certainty Unter deinen Schirmen bin ich vor den Sturmen aller Feinde frei [Under Your protection I am spared the tempests of my enemies]. Score and parts available separately - see item CA.3108100.

SKU: CA.3108107

ISBN 9790007045449. Key: E minor. Language: German/English.

Bach composed the cantata Jesus schlaft, was soll ich hoffen [Jesus sleeps, what hope have I] BWV 81 for the fourth Epiphany Sunday, 1724. The cantata is structured as a little drama: In the beginning, fear prevails. The seas rage and Jesus is asleep. The threateningly foaming waves are vividly depicted in the soughing string accompaniment of the tenor aria. Jesus's words Ihr Kleinglaubigen, warum seid ihr so furchtsam? [You of little faith, why are you so fearful?] are set as a bass arioso at the center of the cantata; they provide the turning point. In the subsequent bass aria, the towering seas are silenced. A recitative - Wohl mir [Well for me] - leads into the closing chorale with its certainty Unter deinen Schirmen bin ich vor den Sturmen aller Feinde frei [Under Your protection I am spared the tempests of my enemies]. Score available separately - see item CA.3108100.

SKU: CA.3108114

ISBN 9790007045494. Key: E minor. Language: German/English.

Bach composed the cantata Jesus schlaft, was soll ich hoffen [Jesus sleeps, what hope have I] BWV 81 for the fourth Epiphany Sunday, 1724. The cantata is structured as a little drama: In the beginning, fear prevails. The seas rage and Jesus is asleep. The threateningly foaming waves are vividly depicted in the soughing string accompaniment of the tenor aria. Jesus's words Ihr Kleinglaubigen, warum seid ihr so furchtsam? [You of little faith, why are you so fearful?] are set as a bass arioso at the center of the cantata; they provide the turning point. In the subsequent bass aria, the towering seas are silenced. A recitative - Wohl mir [Well for me] - leads into the closing chorale with its certainty Unter deinen Schirmen bin ich vor den Sturmen aller Feinde frei [Under Your protection I am spared the tempests of my enemies]. Score and part available separately - see item CA.3108100.

SKU: CA.3108112

ISBN 9790007045470. Key: E minor. Language: German/English.

Bach composed the cantata Jesus schlaft, was soll ich hoffen [Jesus sleeps, what hope have I] BWV 81 for the fourth Epiphany Sunday, 1724. The cantata is structured as a little drama: In the beginning, fear prevails. The seas rage and Jesus is asleep. The threateningly foaming waves are vividly depicted in the soughing string accompaniment of the tenor aria. Jesus's words Ihr Kleinglaubigen, warum seid ihr so furchtsam? [You of little faith, why are you so fearful?] are set as a bass arioso at the center of the cantata; they provide the turning point. In the subsequent bass aria, the towering seas are silenced. A recitative - Wohl mir [Well for me] - leads into the closing chorale with its certainty Unter deinen Schirmen bin ich vor den Sturmen aller Feinde frei [Under Your protection I am spared the tempests of my enemies]. Score and part available separately - see item CA.3108100.

SKU: CA.3108149

ISBN 9790007206864. Key: E minor. Text language: German/English.

Bach composed the cantata Jesus schlaft, was soll ich hoffen [Jesus sleeps, what hope have I] BWV 81 for the fourth Epiphany Sunday, 1724. The cantata is structured as a little drama: In the beginning, fear prevails. The seas rage and Jesus is asleep. The threateningly foaming waves are vividly depicted in the soughing string accompaniment of the tenor aria. Jesus's words Ihr Kleinglaubigen, warum seid ihr so furchtsam? [You of little faith, why are you so fearful?] are set as a bass arioso at the center of the cantata; they provide the turning point. In the subsequent bass aria, the towering seas are silenced. A recitative - Wohl mir [Well for me] - leads into the closing chorale with its certainty Unter deinen Schirmen bin ich vor den Sturmen aller Feinde frei [Under Your protection I am spared the tempests of my enemies]. Score and part available separately - see item CA.3108100.

SKU: FG.55011-878-2

Lasting 27 minutes, Kalevi Aho’s String quartet no. 4 (2021) is in four movements. The first, Nocturne, begins with a hazily muted melody dominated by the interval of a minor third on the second violin. Though the first movement begins in nocturnal mood, there is also some more forceful music around the middle. The second movement, Allegro capriccioso, is quick with quirky rhythms. At times tempestuous, it faces the players with the biggest technical and virtuoso challenges. The following Largo is slow. A couple of times in the first half it is dominated by soft, mysterious harmonies. The tempo marking of the virtuosic closing movement is Presto, leggiore. The movement begins with quick, flickering, will-o’-the-wisp-like music. It later builds up to an extremely violent climax dominated by tremolo figures on the second violin and thick chords on the other instruments. The flickering music of the beginning returns at the end, before dissolving into silence.

This product includes the full score (A4) and the parts (B4).

SKU: PR.41641542L

UPC: 680160632329.

Echoes of Silence was commissioned by the Albany Symphony Orchestra for the American Music Festival of 2012 as part of the Capitol Region Heritage Commissions project. The work takes as its inspirations the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall in Albany, NY, and the Albany Symphony Orchestra. The Troy Savings Bank was founded in 1823 and was one of the more important music halls in early-twentieth-century America. It was honored with performances by many world-renowned artists, such as Vladimir Horowitz, Yehudi Menuhin, and Arthur Rubinstein. The title, Echoes of Silence, refers to the echoes of these and other artists' great performances, which one might imagine still resonate in the hall. If the hall had a voice, it would also sing of the all the wonderful masterpieces that were performed there in the past. The main idea of this piece is to reflect the sounds that were absorbed by the walls of this concert hall during the past century of live performance. Some of the main pitch materials are derived from Alexander Borodin's Symphony No. 2, a masterpiece that was composed in 1823, the same year as the founding of the Troy Savings Bank. The main thematic materials of Echoes of Silence are developed from many small musical motifs found in Borodin's symphony. Another source of material is Igor Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, composed in 1930, the year in which the Albany Symphony Orchestra was founded. These borrowed materials are used as the main elements in maintaining the structural unity of Echoes of Silence. Because this concert hall has absorbed so much wonderful music from so many great performances, we can imagine even the smallest corner of the hall filling its silence with echoes.

SKU: PR.11441690S

UPC: 680160626021. 9 x 12 inches.

Ran's third string quartet was written for the Pacifica Quartet, who are featuring it in numerous performances from May 2014 through February 2016, across the country and abroad. Their blog page dedicated to the work also features the composer's notes, for more indepth insight. ...impassioned solos emerge from ominous quiet, and high arpeggios in the violins quiver alongside the earthy cello. Ms. Ran skillfully deploys these extremes of color, volume and pitch, yet the overall somewhat chilly impression is one of poise. -- Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times.
My third string quartet was composed at the invitation of the Pacifica Quartet, whose music-making I have come to know closely and admire hugely as resident artists at the University of Chicago.  Already in our early conversations Pacifica proposed that this quartet might, in some manner, refer to the visual arts as a point of germination.  Probing further, I found out that the quartet members had special interest in art created during the earlier part of the 20th century, perhaps between the two world wars.  It was my good fortune to have met, a short while later, while in residence at the American Academy in Rome in the fall of 2011, art conservationist Albert Albano who steered me to the work of Felix Nussbaum (1904-1944), a German-Jewish painter who, like so many others, perished in the Holocaust at a young age, and who left some powerful, deeply moving art that spoke to the life that was unraveling around him. The title of my string quartet takes its inspiration from a major exhibit devoted to art by German artists of the period of the Weimar Republic (1919-1933) titled “Glitter and Doom: German Portraits from the 1920s”, first shown at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art in 2006-07.  Nussbaum would have been a bit too young to be included in this exhibit.  His most noteworthy art was created in the last very few years of his short life.  The exhibit’s evocative title, however, suggested to me the idea of “Glitter, Doom, Shards, Memory” as a way of framing a possible musical composition that would be an homage to his life and art, and to that of so many others like him during that era.  Knowing that their days were numbered, yet intent on leaving a mark, a legacy, a memory, their art is triumph of the human spirit over annihilation. Parallel to my wish to compose a string quartet that, typically for this genre, would exist as “pure music”, independent of a narrative, was my desire to effect an awareness in my listener of matters which are, to me, of great human concern.  To my mind there is no contradiction between the two goals.  As in several other works composed since 1969, this is my way of saying ‘do not forget’, something that, I believe, can be done through music with special power and poignancy.    The individual titles of the quartet’s four movements give an indication of some of the emotional strands this work explores. 1) “That which happened” (das was geschah) – is how the poet Paul Celan referred to the Shoah – the Holocaust.  These simple words served for me, in the first movement, as a metaphor for the way in which an “ordinary” life, with its daily flow and its sense of sweet normalcy, was shockingly, inhumanely, inexplicably shattered. 2) “Menace” is a shorter movement, mimicking a Scherzo.  It is also machine-like, incessant, with an occasional, recurring, waltz-like little tune – perhaps the chilling grimace we recognize from the executioner’s guillotine mask.  Like the death machine it alludes to, it gathers momentum as it goes, and is unstoppable. 3) ”If I must perish - do not let my paintings die”; these words are by Felix Nussbaum who, knowing what was ahead, nonetheless continued painting till his death in Auschwitz in 1944.  If the heart of the first movement is the shuddering interruption of life as we know it, the third movement tries to capture something of what I can only imagine to be the conflicting states of mind that would have made it possible, and essential, to continue to live and practice one’s art – bearing witness to the events.  Creating must have been, for Nussbaum and for so many others, a way of maintaining sanity, both a struggle and a catharsis – an act of defiance and salvation all at the same time. 4) “Shards, Memory” is a direct reference to my quartet’s title.  Only shards are left.  And memory.  The memory is of things large and small, of unspeakable tragedy, but also of the song and the dance, the smile, the hopes.  All things human.  As we remember, in the face of death’s silence, we restore dignity to those who are gone.—Shulamit Ran .

SKU: CA.910900

ISBN 9790007165604. Language: German/English. Text: Claudius, Matthias. Text: Matthias Claudius.

The poem Der Mond ist aufgegangen by Matthias Claudius is equally well known and loved. In the setting by Manfred Langer sound is joined by the visual element. The moon risen - dimmed hall lights and candles. Than follows richly harmonious and atmospheric choral music. And when the moon has gone down - darkness, silence. One can scarcely imagine a more fitting conclusion to a concert.