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  San Francisco: In & About the City

  The Bernal Hill Players is an adventurous chamber music group from San Francisco whose three core members play clarinet, flute, voice, piano and percussion. Their fascinatingly diverse repertoire includes European classics, Latin American favorites, and newly commissioned pieces by Californian and Mexican composers. The unifying theme of this CD is the neighborhoods of San Francisco. Chus Alonso was inspired by the peacefulness of Ocean Beach, the frenetic rush of Downtown and the Latin flavors of the Mission District. Peter Josheff was drawn to the massive presence of Sutro Tower in the fog. Katrina Wreede liked the diverse mix of shipyard history and new businesses in China Basin. Beth Custer wrote an ode to the plants growing on Bernal Hill, and Erik Pearson wrote an expansive three part piece named after the hangliders at Fort Funston Beach, the street in Cole Valley where the fog magically ends, and the experience of alternately waiting and running for the #33 bus.

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  • Price: 23.13 EUR excl. shipping
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  Sonorities: The 20th Century Piano Sonata

  SONORITIES: The 20th Century Piano Sonata What could Russian romantic virtuoso Sergei Rachmaninoff, caught in the turmoil of 1913 just before his escape from Russia during World War I, have in common with American modernist composer Elliott Carter, contemplating the end of World War II in 1945-6? The answer is that each wrote a 42-page piano sonata, fascinatingly similar in technique, structure, and expression. Both introduce booming bass octaves in Bs, A sharps, or B flats, continue with scurrying sixteenth notes, then segue into a melody marked "Meno Mosso" (less movement). In both, a chordal slow movement, expanded with improvisatory passagework, breaks into a fiendishly difficult finale. The "great big sound" of these works, as Carter put it, is an exploration of bell-like sonorities. Motives in thirds are built into a panoramic soundscape. The music resounds with the turbulent clashes of twentieth century conflict, fought by similar rules but with very different conclusions reached.

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  • Price: 21.58 EUR excl. shipping
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  Sonaten für Violine und Klavier

  Hindemith's Violin Sonatas fascinatingly mirror the various stages in the development of his musical language from the vocabulary of late Romanticism to the monumental, contrapuntal and revivified Baroque idiom of his maturity. They are performed here by virtuoso German violinist Tanja Becker-Bender who has made a speciality of the music of the early twentieth century.

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  • Price: 17.22 EUR excl. shipping
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  Crisantemi-Italienische Streichquartette

  An essential disc for Puccini-fanciers ... these chips off the workbench fascinatingly illuminate what we know of the opera composer ... recorded sound is very vivid and immediate for the excellent Raphael Quartet.

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  • Price: 8.47 EUR excl. shipping

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