Signum Records released its newest recording featuring the work of Pulitzer Prize winning composer Aaron Jay Kernis. AARON JAY KERNIS: DREAMSONGS features new concerti for violist Paul Neubauer and cellist Joshua Roman with conductor Rebecca Miller and Royal Northern Sinfonia.
Written for violist Paul Neubauer, Kernis’s long-time friend and colleague, the Viola Concerto follows up in some ways on the tone of the work that first brought them together – Still Movement with Hymn, commissioned by American Public Media. Kernis was also moved by Neubauer’s recording of viola music by Robert Schumann, which led him on an in-depth re-exploration of Robert and Clara Schumann’s music. The three-movement concerto’s final movement takes the performer’s own interest in folk music as inspiration. Based on the well-known Yiddish song Tumbalalaika, the final movement (A Song My Mother Taught Me) closes with the ghostly irony of a brief quote from Mahler, in a final blanket of opposing chords that reference Schumann one last time, and a pensive coda which completes the work.
The two-movement virtuosic cello concerto Dreamsongs was written for the cellist Joshua Roman and is Roman’s debut concerto recording. This work also takes on folk influences, especially in the last movement, Kora Song. Inspired by the music of the African kora, a plucked gourd almost similar in sound to the harp and pizzicato cello, it follows inspiration from sources including aboriginal ‘dreamsongs’ and the West African djembe drum.
Conductor Rebecca Miller leads the Royal Northern Sinfonia in the disc’s final work Concerto with Echoes, inspired by Bach’s Sixth Brandenburg Concerto, and in the composer’s own words “…comes from its very first measure – the opening passage with two spiraling solo violas, like identical twins following each other breathlessly through a hall of mirrors … this concerto mirrors the Sixth by using only violas, celli and basses, while gradually adding reeds and horns into a loop back to the sound world of the First Brandenburg Concerto.”
Learn more about the disc here