featured chamber music albums
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- John Zorn
- John Zorn: Rimbaud
- Rimbaud is a terrific collection of Zorn's stylistically diverse, wildly imaginative, mostly manic works inspired by the 19th century French Symbolist poet.
- So Percussion
- Where (we) Live
- Where (we) Live, So Percussion's collaboration with Grey McMurray, stretches the boundaries of percussion music (almost) past the boundary of recognition.
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- eighth blackbird
- Meanwhile
- This release offers an engaging collection of new chamber music that will appeal even to mainstream classical audiences.
- ALIAS Chamber Ensemble
- Boiling Point: Music of…
- Inspired by American vernacular music, Kenji Bunch's eclectic works are warmly interpreted by the ALIAS Chamber Ensemble.
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- London Baroque
- The Trio Sonata in 18th-Century…
- The London Baroque executes all the ornaments crisply here and a highlight is the Couperin, where it does a beautiful job catching the dashes of harmonic color.
- Beata Moon
- Saros
- Dickinson's poetry, seemingly regular yet highly intricate and personal, is a perfect match for Moon's music here. Very nicely recorded for a composer-issued…
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- Kim Kashkashian
- György Kurtág, György…
- For this ECM New Series release, Kim Kashkashian presents solo works for viola that set melancholic and brooding moods.
- Sergei Nakariakov
- Widmung
- Sergei Nakariakov pays tribute to his idol, Timofei Dokshitser, in this program of trumpet and flügelhorn transcriptions.
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about chamber music
Broadly speaking, chamber music is any ensemble music suited to a small room rather than to a large concert hall. Chamber ensembles range from two to eight or nine musicians, within families of string, wind, brass, and even percussion instruments, or combining diverse instruments. The most characteristic form is the string quartet (two violins, viola, and cello), perfected by Haydn. Chamber music of the Romantic era came mostly from composers who extended the forms they inherited from Mozart and Beethoven. Perhaps the greatest 19th century composer of chamber music was Brahms, whose depth of musical thought influenced even his most experimental successors.
Chamber music in the 20th century showed composers making each piece of music into a miniature sound world of its own in a medium that would display what they were doing with maximum clarity. More new works are written today for chamber ensembles than for orchestra or the stage.