Select a month

Back to The Archives

Baltimore Archive

Peter Brendler, doublebass – Message in Motion – Positone

by Audiophile Audition | Oct 8, 2016 | Jazz CD Reviews

Peter Brendler, doublebass – Message in Motion – Positone PR8156, 56:39 (7/15/16) ****: The bass leads the way. (Peter Brendler – doublebass/ Rich Perry – tenor sax /Peter Evans – trumpet /Vinnie Sperrazza – drums /Ben Monder – guitar) It is easy to overlook the bass in a jazz ensemble. It is the least noisy and attention-grabbing instrument. However, its importance can hardly be overstated. As always when I discover a new bassist, I listen in on my Sennheiser 600 headphones with rapt attention to the footfalls of the walking bass, which are a sure path through the music. The quarter-notes are a way of finding the complexities of the harmony. I like to think of the bass – especially in the absence of a chordal instrument– as the brains of the ensemble which thus thinks from the bottom up. A superior bassist exemplifies Henry David Thoreau’s dictum that “walking is a kind of thinking.” As long as the bass stays on the trail, one cannot get too lost. The CD under review here “Message in Motion” offers a good example of ‘basic’ virtues. The leader of the group, Baltimore-based Peter Brendler, was unknown to me before this debut recording […]

SCHUMANN: Cello Concerto in A minor – Amit Peled, cello/ Washington Ch. Orch./ Jun Kim – Centaur

by Audiophile Audition | Jul 7, 2016 | Classical CD Reviews

SCHUMANN: Cello Concerto in A minor, Op. 129 – Amit Peled, cello Washington Ch. Orch./ Jun Kim – Centaur CRC 3476, 25:35 (Distr. by Naxos) (11/13/15) ****: The soloist plays here the same cello previously owned by Pablo Casals, and heard here in its first recording. One of the highlights of this year’s Montréal’s Chamber Music Festival took place on June 16 when the the six foot, five inch cellist Amit Peled, playing for the first time in Canada on Pablo Casals’ legendary, drop-dead gorgeous Matteo Goffriller from 1733, performed a short set of cello pieces with pianist Alon Goldstein, mesmerizing the large Pollack Hall audience with his generous presence, effortless virtuosity, consummate poetry and the trademark eloquent, plaintive and deeply communicative sound of his famous instrument. A lot of the communication was coming from Peled himself. The Goffriller cello looked in Peled’s hands as if it were a violin with a ten-foot endpin; in reality, of course, both the cello and the fully-extended endpin were of conventional size (Casals’ own endpin, still on when Peled took custodianship in 2012, was a stubby wooden affair). Peled will release his first solo recital CD on the Casals cello in the fall, repeating […]