New Releases
October 25, 2024The original score for Ken Burns’s two-part documentary Leonardo da Vinci, with new compositions by Caroline Shaw, features performances by the composer’s longtime collaborators Attacca Quartet, Sō Percussion, and Roomful of Teeth as well as John Patitucci. Shaw wrote and recorded new music for Leonardo da Vinci, marking the first time a Ken Burns film has featured an entirely original score. The film is directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon, who says: “Caroline’s existing body of music—joyful, daring, at times transcendent, and wholly unique—seemed to speak directly to Leonardo, a seeking soul who, 500 years after his death, can come across as strikingly modern ... The music Caroline created is dynamic, enthralling and filled with wonder."
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The original score for Ken Burns’s two-part documentary Leonardo da Vinci, with new compositions by Caroline Shaw, features performances by the composer’s longtime collaborators Attacca Quartet, Sō Percussion, and Roomful of Teeth as well as John Patitucci. Shaw wrote and recorded new music for Leonardo da Vinci, marking the first time a Ken Burns film has featured an entirely original score. The film is directed by Ken Burns, Sarah Burns, and David McMahon, who says: “Caroline’s existing body of music—joyful, daring, at times transcendent, and wholly unique—seemed to speak directly to Leonardo, a seeking soul who, 500 years after his death, can come across as strikingly modern ... The music Caroline created is dynamic, enthralling and filled with wonder."
On DAVÓNE TINES & THE TRUTH’s new work ROBESON, Tines’ solo recording debut, the musician grapples with the legacy of a hero. Exploding the musical repertoire of Paul Robeson, Tines and his band the Truth—pianist John Bitoy and sound artist Khari Lucas—take listeners on a trip from the stage of Carnegie Hall to the floor of a Moscow hotel room in an attempt to understand an icon not through aspiring to his monumentality, but through connecting to his vulnerability. “Like his predecessor [Paul Robeson], Mr. Tines has always been more than just a performer," says the Wall Street Journal, "using his richly expressive, wide-ranging instrument and theatrical skill to excavate his own stories, dark side and all.”
Laurie Anderson’s Amelia is the 2024 Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award recipient's first new album since 2018’s Grammy-winning Landfall. The record comprises twenty-two tracks about renowned female aviator Amelia Earhart’s tragic last flight. Anderson, who Pitchfork says, “sees the future, but she starts by paying attention,” wrote the music and lyrics. On the album, she is joined by Filharmonie Brno, conducted by Dennis Russell Davies, and Anohni, Gabriel Cabezas, Rob Moose, Ryan Kelly, Martha Mooke, Marc Ribot, Tony Scherr, Nadia Sirota, and Kenny Wolleson. An exclusive limited-edition print autographed by Anderson is available with Nonesuch Store pre-orders while they last.
"'Ghost' explores the weariness and anxiety of being a fully feeling human who is forced to live in our modern world and its tech-saturated chaos,” Ringdown, the Portland-based cinematic pop duo of creator-musicians Danni Lee Parpan and Caroline Shaw, says of its second Nonesuch single. “This is especially isolating in the world of internet dating, where the spotty texting tempo and normalized behavior of ‘ghosting’ someone can feel crushing. We used the clunky pedal sounds from a vintage piano as a heartbeat throughout the song. To us, this represents the yearning for connection beyond technology.”
Rectangles and Circumstance comprises ten songs co-written and performed by Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion. Shaw and Sō's Eric Cha-Beach and Adam Sliwinski "sourced a group of nineteenth-century poems that shaped its expressive mode [and] ended up using verses by Christina Rosetti, Emily Brontë, Emily Dickinson, Gertrude Stein, and William Blake," says Sliwinski. "The lyrics on this album by members of the band contain wordplay that explores the same profound feelings explored by Blake and Dickinson.” Shaw and Sō co-produced the album with Grammy-winning engineer Jonathan Low (The National, Taylor Swift).
The Tony Award–winning Broadway show Illinoise: A New Musical features music and lyrics by Sufjan Stevens based on his album Illinois, a book by Justin Peck and Jackie Sibblies Drury, and direction and choreography by Peck, with new arrangements by Timo Andres and music supervision and direction by Nathan Koci. The album’s band includes Elijah Lyons, My Brightest Diamond, Tasha, Christina Courtin, Sean Peter Forte, Domenica Fossati, Daniel Freedman, Kathy Halvorson, Nathan Koci, Eleonore Oppenheim, Brett Parnell, Brandon Ridenour, Kyra Sims, and Jessica Tsang. The New York Times exclaims: “The vocalists do not seem to sing so much as pour emotion into our ears.” Variety says: “A thrilling, genre-defying Broadway musical brings the Sufjan Stevens album to lyrical life.
On Après Fauré, Brad Mehldau performs four nocturnes, from a thirty-seven-year span of Gabriel Fauré’s career, as well as a reduction of an excerpt from the Adagio movement of his Piano Quartet in G Minor, along with four of Mehldau’s compositions that Fauré inspired presented in a group, bookended by two sections featuring the French composer’s works.
On After Bach II, Brad Mehldau performs four preludes and one fugue from J.S. Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier, as well as the Allemande from Partita for Keyboard No. 4 in D Major, interspersed with seven compositions or improvisations by Mehldau inspired by the complementary works of the Baroque master—including his Variations on Bach’s Goldberg Theme. After Bach II follows 2018’s After Bach album.