The soprano Mellissa Hughes is a dedicated interpreter of living composers, singing world and regional premières with the Brooklyn Philharmonic, New York City Opera, the St Lawrence String Quartet, JACK Quartet, Alarm Will Sound, Victoire, Newspeak and other ground-breaking ensembles. She also enjoys a busy career in early music, working regularly with the Clarion Music Society, Trinity Wall Street and others. She has been hailed by the New York Times as “ a versatile, charismatic soprano endowed with brilliant technique and superlative stage instincts”.

Nicholas Kitchen • Kristopher Tong, violins
Mai Motobuchi, viola
Yeesun Kim, Cello

The visionary performances of the Borromeo String Quartet have established them as one of the most important string quartets of our time. Formed in 1989, the Borromeo Quartet performs worldwide and has collaborated with many of the great composers and performers of our time. They have worked extensively with the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center and the Library of Congress and are the longtime ensemble-in-residence at the New England Conservatory of Music and the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum.

Three-year-old Rachel Barton was struck by ‘older girls in beautiful dresses who were playing violin at church’ and begged her parents for a violin. ‘Initially, it was the sound of it I loved,’ she recalls. ‘Its voice spoke to me as if this were preordained somehow. By age five, I knew this is what my life would be about.’ She was educated at home, able to devote eight hours a day to practising. Taught by Roland and Almita Vamos, Ruben Gonzalez, Werner Scholz, Elmira Darvarova and several specialists in early music performance practice, she benefitted from a rigorous and intensive programme of study.  At ten she made appearances with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and a number of television broadcasts. She was the youngest person (at seventeen) and first American to win a gold medal at the J.S. Bach International Competition, Leipzig, also winning top prizes in the Szigeti, Paganini, Queen Elisabeth, Kreisler, and Montreal International Violin Competitions. In 1996 she was an Olympic torchbearer and appeared as a soloist at the opening ceremony of the Paralympic Games in Atlanta.

Barton Pine professes a passion for guiding the future of music: accordingly she has undertaken much work with young people and has served on the boards of various schools including the Music Institute of Chicago. She recently received the prestigious Studs Terkel Humanities Service Award for her work in music education.

Her life has not been without its setbacks and drama. On 16 January 1995 her violin case strap became caught in the doors of a train. Having first been dragged more than three hundred feet along the platform she then fell under the wheels of the train, severing one leg and seriously injuring the other (the violin, miraculously, was unscathed). Saved by prompt-acting passengers, she was astonishingly able to rebuild her solo career after a two-year gap for recovery.

Barton Pine’s playing is at once suggestive of that of many great American virtuosi of the latter half of the twentieth century, tapping into a rich vein of pedagogy. The results—in security of technique, left-hand agility and complete mastery of all of the bowing styles demanded by the repertory selected here—are impressive, and her playing has a sense of spacious self-assurance, allied to an extremely rich tone, heavily reliant upon a very warm and wide vibrato. What distinguishes Barton Pine from some others, apart from her superlative basic skills, is her interest in lesser-known repertory and historically-informed performing practices. Her 2008 disc of concertos by Beethoven and Clement is an intelligent and interesting pairing, the almost-forgotten Clement having been published shortly before the enduring Beethoven. In a similar vein she marries the Brahms and Joachim (Op. 11) concertos on a 2003 GRAMMY-nominated disc; this pairing prompts listeners to appraise the claims of Joachim’s biographer Andreas Moser that Joachim exerted a profound influence upon Brahms’s compositional techniques and orchestration. Adding further interest, Barton performs the works on a violin previously owned by Joachim pupil Marie Soldat-Röger. It must be said, though, that audible references to nineteenth-century playing style are conspicuously lacking in all these performances, the only real concession being restraint in application of vibrato in the Clement work.

Similarly, the two miniatures by Amy Beach and Henry Huss selected here from Barton’s 2007 Tribute to Maud Powell disc evidence few discernible characteristics of Powell’s own playing (the title is appropriate to choice of repertoire), whilst Sarasate’s Introduction and Tarantella (from Barton Pine’s 1994 début recording) is equally conventional, if convincingly played. What is certain, however, is that her playing is always warm, rich and vibrant—this at least is in the spirit of the nineteenth century—and she is a fine representative of the top rank of today’s virtuoso performers.

© Naxos Rights International Ltd. — David Milsom (A–Z of String Players, Naxos 8.558081-84)

Christopher Thompson has defined himself as “a lyric baritone possessing a rare combination of velvet tone, comic timing, and elegant stage deportment.” He is an active performer, teacher, clinician, musical director, and conductor in a variety of genres including opera, operetta, musical theatre, oratorio, and recital. A proponent of new music, he made his Off-Broadway début in Fermat’s Last Tango, sang with Nine Circles Chamber Opera at Lincoln Center, and has recorded for Original Cast Recordings and Albany Records.

Baritone David Kravitz has sung with New York City Opera, Glimmerglass Opera, Boston Lyric Opera, Chicago Opera Theater, and other companies around the United States. His many concert appearances include the Boston Symphony Orchestra, the Philadelphia Orchestra, the Baltimore Symphony, and Emmanuel Music. He has recorded works of Bach, Harbison, and others for the Koch International Classics, BMOP/sound, Albany Records, and New World labels. His legal career included clerkships with US Supreme Court Justices Sandra Day O’Connor and Stephen Breyer.

Valerie Coleman, flute
Toyin Spellman-Diaz, oboe
Mariam Adam, clarinet
Jeff Scott, french horn
Monica Ellis, bassoon

More than North America’s premier wind quintet, Imani Winds has established itself as one of the most successful chamber music ensembles in the United States. Since 1997, the GRAMMY^® nominated quintet has carved out a distinct presence in the classical music world with its dynamic playing, culturally poignant programming, genre-blurring collaborations, and inspirational outreach programs. With two member composers and a deep commitment to commissioning new work, the group is enriching the traditional wind quintet repertoire while bridging European, American, African and Latin American traditions.

Mohammed Fairouz, born in 1985, is one of the most frequently performed, commissioned, and recorded composers of his generation. Hailed by The New York Times as “an important new artistic voice” and by BBC World News as “one of the most talented composers of his generation,” his large-scale symphonies, operas and oratorios all engage major geopolitical and philosophical themes with persuasive craft and a marked seriousness of purpose. Fairouz recently became the youngest composer in the 115-year history of the Deutsche Grammophon label to have an album dedicated to his works with the spring 2015 release of Follow, Poet. The album, which launched the label’s Return to Language series, includes two works that exalt the transformative power of language: his elegiac song cycle Audenesque and the ballet Sadat. The album has met with broad critical acclaim and received “highbrow and brilliant” distinctions in New York Magazine’s taste-making Approval Matrix. Fairouz’s solo and chamber music attains an “intoxicating intimacy,” according to New York’s WQXR. A composer who describes himself as “obsessed with text,” he has been recognised by New Yorker magazine as an “expert in vocal writing” and described by Gramophone as “a post-millennial Schubert.” His principal teachers in composition include György Ligeti, Gunther Schuller, and Richard Danielpour, with studies at the Curtis Institute and New England Conservatory. Fairouz’s works are published by Peermusic Classical. He lives in New York City.

Watch trailer: Composer Mohammed Fairouz talks about his work In the Shadow of No Towers