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.<\/p>\n
Written for violist Paul Neubauer, Kernis’s long-time friend and colleague, the Viola Concerto<\/strong> follows up in some ways on the tone of the work that first brought them together – Still Movement with Hymn<\/em>, 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<\/em>, the final movement (A Song My Mother Taught Me<\/em>) 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.<\/p>\n The two-movement virtuosic cello concerto Dreamsongs<\/em><\/strong> 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<\/em>. 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.<\/p>\n Conductor Rebecca Miller leads the Royal Northern Sinfonia in the disc’s final work Concerto with Echoes<\/em>, 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.”<\/p>\n <\/p>\n