Critically acclaimed electronic violinist Lindsey Stirling has announced plans to release her first ever Holiday album titled Warmer In The Winter, set for release this Fall on Lindseystomp Music / Concord Records. Featuring a variety of special guests, the album will include renditions of Holiday favorites as well as some original numbers written by Lindsey. In support of the album, Lindsey will embark on her Warmer In The Winter Christmas Tour which is set to kick off in Albany, NY on November 8th. The show will feature a fully revamped stage production with elaborate Holiday themes as well Stirling’s signature brand of dance routines and on-stage visuals.

The Book of Genesis tells us that in the beginning was the Word and that the Word was sound. But what if it was music? What if God, in contemplating the creation of Creation, sang being into being? If so, it might have sounded something like the Sacred Songs of Valentin Silvestrov. In this seventh ECM album devoted to the Ukrainian composer’s music, we thusly encounter a sense of space unique to the Russian liturgy: the more the voices unify in movement, the more they lift from one another like temporary tattoos, leaving behind mirror images that wash away with baptism into infinite oneness with the Holy Spirit. Sin as sun. Firmament as fundament.

French artist Colleen is fearless in her willingness to explore new sounds and new ways of creating music as a solo performer. On her new album A flame my love, a frequency she introduces the most drastic change to her music since she began singing on her fourth album. A chance encounter with a Critter and Guitari synthesizer at King Britt’s Philadelphia studio on the Captain of None album tour cracked the compositional model wide open. Colleen bought a Critter and Guitari Pocket Piano with the aim to use it through a newly-acquired Moog filter pedal to create new and interesting rhythms to accompany her voice and viola da gamba. But it turned out the sounds of this viola and rhythm combination was not what she was looking for, so in typical Colleen fashion, she set the viola da gamba aside altogether and picked up an additional Critter and Guitari synth, the Septavox, dug out her her trusted Moog delay and dove right in.

“Loving Vincent” is the upcoming biographical animated film from newcomer directors Dorota Kobiela and Hugh Welchman. The movie follows Armand Roulin (Douglas Booth), the son of an acquaintance of Vincent van Gogh, as he attempts to deliver a letter from the painter following van Gogh’s death. Armand soon finds himself retracing the steps taken by Vincent in his final days in an attempt to unravel the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death. A film unlike any other, “Loving Vincent” is entirely hand painted – each of the movie’s 65,000 frames is an oil painting on a canvas created using the same techniques as Vincent van Gogh. Good Deed Entertainment is releasing “Loving Vincent” on September 22nd in New York before expanding to Los Angeles on September 29th and nationally on October 6th. In addition to being a wonder for the eyes, “Loving Vincent” is a treat for the ears. Scoring duties fell to English composer Clint Mansell (Requiem For A Dream, Black Swan), who has crafted a masterpiece.

Based in Paris, Ensemble Intercontemporain is one of the leading performance organizations devoted to new music, and is closely associated with composer/conductor Pierre Boulez, a leader of the European avant-garde establishment. Boulez developed the idea of the Ensemble during the planning stages for IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et de Coordination Acoustique/Musique).

Superstar violinist Anne Akiko Meyers is one of today’s most in-demand classical performers. Beloved by audiences around the world, with a reputation for groundbreaking recital programs and important commissions, Fantasia marks her 35th studio album and is one of her most important projects to date.

Andrew Bird has announced a new album: Echolocations: River is out October 6 via Wegawam Music. Bird recorded the eight-track instrumental LP while standing in the Los Angeles River underneath the Glendale-Hyperion Bridge. River is the second installment in Bird’s Echolocations series, which features site-specific pieces. Bird’s first Echolocations record, Canyon, was issued in 2015. Last year, he released Are You Serious. Last week, he debuted new music during an episode of “Live From the Great Room.”

On first hearing, the piano music of Peter Garland (b. 1952) creates a feeling of dislocation, then astonishment: It is so very different from the contemporary concert music we are familiar with. The composer's intent, his emotional directness is immediate - despite the unusual sound world and different sense of time that these pieces exhibit. Time itself appears to be suspended, and rhythm, melody and harmony are transformed into quite different entities in a universe parallel to our own - as accessible but not quite of it.

Film composer Eleni Karaindou was born in the Greek mountain village of Teichio and raised in Athens, going on to study piano and music theory at the Hellenikon Odion. Relocating to Paris in 1969, she studied ethnomusicology for five years before returning to Greece to found the Laboratory for Traditional Instruments at the ORA Cultural Centre. Karaindrou's most successful collaboration was with filmmaker Theo Angelopoulos, with whom she first teamed in 1982, going on to score features including 1991's The Suspended Step of the Stork, 1995's Ulysses' Gaze, and 1998's Palme d'Or-winning Eternity and a Day.

Bent Sorensen’s piano concerto Mignon- part of his Papillons trilogy- reveals textural beauty and melodic elegance in a language both modernist and sweetly nostalgic. The piece was written for Katrine Gislinge, one of the most significant pianists in Scandinavia, and on this premiere recording she is accompanied by Lapland Chamber Orchestra, conducted by John Storgards. A former student of Per Norgard, Bent Sorensen (b. 1958) is one of the most internationally performed Danish composers. His works have been performed at Carnegie Hall, the BBC Proms, and other notable venues across the world by ensembles like the London Sinfonietta, Ensemble InterContemporain, SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiburg, and more. Sorensen is a highly decorated composer, winning the Nordic Council Music Prize in 1996, the ‘International Award’ at British Composer Awards 2011, and was composer-in-residence at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival 2011 and Trondheim Chamber Music Festival 2016. Of his previous album, Gramophone wrote: “…all-round excellence and a disc that’s unusually moving in one sitting.”

Actor and comedian Bill Murray met German cellist Jan Vogler on a trans-Atlantic flight. The two struck up a friendship and soon had the idea to work together on a project: New Worlds. On the album and in live performance, Murray as both singer and narrator brings his charm and wit to songs by Foster, Gershwin, and Bernstein as well as readings of classic American poetry and prose by Whitman, Hemingway, Twain and others, in dialogue with Voglers singing Stradivari cello. They are joined by violinist Mira Wang and pianist Vanessa Perez.

The Murail "Tellur" is a fantastic work, in fact when you hear the opening it doesn't sound like a guitar, more like electronic music,it begins in the high register,harmonics used, that slowly then decends, the impetus of the work is the flamenco style of playing mixed with these extended techniques, The French avant-garde, French composers are not prolific, they hone single works for months prior to writing, and really only write single works within any genre, (this is Murail's only work for the guitar) The Lachenmann by contrast is a early work before he really discovered his voice and relays, relies on the performers reciting text of Chris Caudwell,activist like stuff that today sounds very dated in a self-conscious way.

Catalan composer Bernat Vivancos's 'Blanc', released by Neu Records in 2013, was an acclaimed double album of premiere recordings by the Latvian Radio Choir, one of the world's finest chamber choirs, conducted by Sigvards Klava. This follow-up reunites the composer with these forces in a performance of his profound Requiem. The renowned musician Jordi Savall first encountered - and was greatly moved by - Vivancos's music through 'Blanc'. He says: "The innovative richness of the works by Bernat Vivancos are, I believe, the clearest and most striking proof of the vitality of a new musical Renaissance. His extraordinary talent and his profound spirituality are placed at the service of a process that is the invention of a new language which, in spite of its complexity and modernity, is capable of transmitting to us pure beauty and emotion." Vivancos composed his Requiem - scored for mixed choir, soloists, cello soloist (here Pau Codina), cello quartet, accordion and percussion - in memory of his father.

The Louisville Orchestra will release its first album in nearly 30 years next month. The album, called "All In," will be released on the Decca Gold label Sept. 22. It will include "United Field," a new composition by Teddy Abrams, the orchestra's conductor and music director, and Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto, with Abrams as soloist.

''I have no problem with notes… none at all'', was Feldman's cryptic comment on For Bunita Marcus. Throughout the seventy-two-minute duration of this extraordinary work, notes coalesce into wisps of melody which drift softly in and out of an immense silence. You are indeed, as pianist Marc-André Hamelin writes in the booklet notes, ''about to enter a world unlike any other.''