max richter

Second Inversion hosts share a favorite selection from their weekly playlist. Tune in on Friday, May 12 to hear these pieces and plenty of other new and unusual music from all corners of the classical genre!

Missy Mazzoli: “Orizzonte” (Cantaloupe Music)
Performed by Lisa Moore

Missy Mazzoli’s “Orizzonte”—Italian for “horizon”—features gently undulating sine waves to create an audible landscape, over which pianist Lisa Moore plays a hypnotic line of understated landmarks.

During a residency at a squat in Amsterdam, the piano on which Mazzoli worked had been left to the elements for a year as part of an art installation, so some of the keys didn’t work. She wrote “Orizzonte” for that piano. The piece includes no bar lines, so the rhythm changes with each performance. It’s the perfect music for refocusing your mind as you watch power lines rise and fall through your car window. – Brendan Howe

Richard Carrick: “Sub-merge” (New World Records)
Performed by Richard Carrick with DZ4 Wind Quartet

Have you ever wondered what a wind quartet would sound like underwater? Richard Carrick did.

His two-part “Sub-merge” is written to sound like an ensemble under the ocean, illustrated through sinuous sonic distortions and contorted musical textures. Scored for winds and piano, at times you can actually hear the individual instruments being pushed and pulled away from one another in the currents, creating rich harmonies and microtonal echoes that sparkle like a sunken treasure.
– Maggie Molloy

Tune in to Second Inversion in the 12pm hour today to hear this piece.

Max Richter: Sleep: Path 5 (delta) (Deutsche Grammophon)

This Max Richter piece reminded me of the cravings for still, peace, and introspection which often seem to come as an involuntary reaction to prolonged stress and business. In this track, I hear both the defensive, convalescent retreat and the hopeful, rejuvenating centering that come with sleep, often in the same night. Taking in this small portion of the piece makes me want to investigate the larger (8 hours!) work, perhaps overnight. Perhaps I should “sleep on it.” – Seth Tompkins

Tune in to Second Inversion in the 4pm hour today to hear this piece.

Allen Vizzutti: Snow Scenes for Trumpet and Orchestra (De Haske Records)
Performed with the Budapest Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Jan De Haan

Vibrant and jazzy, Allen Vizzutti’s Snow Scenes for Trumpet and Orchestra is another effortless performance by this master trumpeter. Vizzutti, who has performed on hundreds of motion picture soundtracks and TV shows (as well as with Sinatra, Streisand, Prince, and on and on…), is a bonafide savant when it comes to the trumpet. Don’t believe it? Let countless YouTube videos of Vizzutti performing while rotating the trumpet, or playing it upside down, or just teaching “trumpet clinics,” make the case. His talent is stupefying.
– Rachele Hales

Tune in to Second Inversion in the 6pm hour today to hear this piece.

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich: Memorial (Soundbrush Records)
Performed by the Canticum Novum Youth Choir

Here is a stunning work of music that cannot be ignored. Ellen Taafe Zwilich’s Memorial for the Victims of the Sandy Hook Massacre is scored for a regular SATB chorus that begins singing the Requiem aeternam text, and is then joined by a children’s choir with a heartbreaking task: reciting the names of the young victims of the school shooting.

Subject matter aside, the music is fascinatingly beautiful, with shifting colors and long, drawn-out suspensions. There is an enchanting interplay in the voices that only serves to heighten the power of Zwilich’s reaction to this tragedy, and makes this short work a must-hear. – Geoffrey Larson

Tune in to Second Inversion in the 9pm hour today to hear this piece.

by Rachele Hales

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From Sleep is an offshoot of Richter’s durational album Sleep, which clocks in at 8 hours – about the amount of sleeping time scientists recommend for adults. While Sleep is intended as “a personal lullaby for a frenetic world” and meant to be listened while one is counting sheep and through the duration of the sleep cycle, From Sleep is a more modest 60-minute ambient daydream. It’s a warm blanket of hazy, cozy sound. Richter calls it his “manifesto for a slower pace of existence.” The two albums share a common landscape, but with a much shorter run-time From Sleep is less of a political statement.

The album contains seven selections that sound different enough to be their own pieces but flow seamlessly together, enough so that it’s difficult to tell when one piece has ended and the next begins. Richter has composed a delicate musical cocoon with no sharp edges. From Sleep opens with “Dream 3 (In the Midst of My Life).” The gentle, pulsing piano feels like a lone boat bobbing up and down in a vast ocean. The vaguely aqueous feel continues into the next selection, “Path 5 (Delta),” which offers up synthesized vocals from soprano Grace Davidson that sound like they could have been recorded underwater. As the song goes on her voice even begins to sound less human and more like a beautiful, sorrowful, looping whale song.

“Space 11 (Invisible Pages Over)” is a simple drone that serves as a bridge to “Dream 13 (Minus Even),” where we are again treated to Richter’s tranquil piano. This time the piano is less pulsing and more like a lullaby with the cello taking its time to join in like a tranquil foghorn. The fog begins to lift at about the halfway mark and you can almost feel the warm sun dappling the aural scenery.

The looping structure of the album mirrors the looping within the songs as we move from “Dream 13 (Minus Even)” to another bridging drone (“Space 21 (Petrichor)”), to more slow, precious, circular piano in “Path 19 (Yet Frailest)”, and finally return in “Dream 8 (Late & Soon)” to silky strings, moody organ, and Davidson’s lamenting vocals floating in and out like a zephyr.

Given its graceful serenity, From Sleep could be used as ambient background music for students, a meditative companion for yogis, or the soundtrack to a relaxing evening walk. And yes, you can also use it as a sleep aid. Hit play on this dulcet album in any situation where the end goal is to relax, open up the mind, and disengage from the busy whirring of everyday life.