Review
The CCM Contemporary Music Ensemble brings experience and understanding to its telling performances of compositions by Gerhard Samuel, Richard Jordan Smoot, and Peter Ware. The Smoot and Ware are fine pieces, staking out their musical territories and exploring them fully. The Samuel is a small masterpiece, a richly evocative elegy and a fascinating essay in counterpoint and orchestration. Lynn Harting-Ware gives a finely nuanced performance of the solo part in the Smoot Concerto. Her playing is remarkably clean, with all details audible. This is a fine disc, one that repays close and repeated hearings. --American Record Guide
Product Description
Impossible Dream issues forth from a world beyond the present and into a realm where intimations of mortality and the after death are communicated through pure instrumental sounds. As the rigid confines of convenient earthly perceptions vanish, so too, the musical boundaries extend. When that commonly known tonality is disrupted, one senses a new emotional code in which time is suspended. Eyes closed, an uninhibited mind will find here an amazing virtual reality. Describing the Compact Disc's main piece, Peter Ware's string octet, Kabah, commissioned for the Pan American Games Art Festival, Joseph McLellan of the Washington Post writes: ";An exotically evocative piece with eerie harmonics, long held notes and often sparse harmonies conveying a sense of vast emptiness and antiquity." Featuring the CCM Contemporary Music Ensemble, conducted by Gerhard Samuel, this recording opens with Samuel's Nocturne on an Impossible Dream for mixed chamber ensemble and also includes Richard Smoot's Concerto for Guitar and Chamber Orchestra.
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