Recordings

 Because

Through the work of musicians like Price and Burleigh as well as W. C. Handy, Thomas A. Dorsey, Duke Ellington, William Grant Still, and so many others, music of the Black diaspora made its way into the world’s musical consciousness. In that effort, no other genre has succeeded as dramatically as Jazz. Firmly founded in the Black American experience, Jazz is the ultimate musical syncretism, a living magnet, drawing people together through its infectious swing, changing and growing with everything it touches. It is a tree with deep roots in the fi elds and slave cabins of American South, with vibrant, flourishing branches that stretch across generations and across the world.

In this album, Reginald Mobley and Baptiste Trotignon fearlessly and lovingly focus the lens of Jazz on Spirituals, Gospel, art songs, and even a Motown classic. It is music of a thousand brilliant facets – each one dazzling our eye, daring and challenging us to refl ect on where we have been and what we can still become.

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Peace In Our Time

2018 marked the 400th anniversary of the beginning of the Thirty Years War - one of the longest and most destructive in European history. Yet, in the darkest shadows of war, and in the still unstable period following The Peace at Westphalia (1748), we see the immense power that music has to motivate, unite, comfort, heal, and lift people out of the depths of their grief.

This program explores stylus fantasticus a new compositional emphasis on the range and depth of human emotion and its evocation in music that evolved and grew in the countries and territories ravaged by the Thirty Years War. From the heartwrenching sorrow of Johann Christoph Bach's lament Ach, dass ich Wassers gnug hätte, to the feelings of resignation and yearning for a better day to come in David Pohle's Herr, wenn ich nur dich habe, we get a chance to share in the myriad emotions of these musicians, and the people at large, who were affected by terrible conflict .

There is also music of hope for a brighter tomorrow, including the virtuosic and passionate Ciaccona from Johann Christoph Bachs cantata Meine Freundin, du bist schön, written for a Bach family wedding, and the barely-contained overflowing joy of Johann Pachelbels legendary Canon and Gigue.

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A Lad’s Love

A delight in the friendships of one's youth, the pain of unrequited love, and the destruction, horror and futility of war, are themes that run through A Lad's Love, a release that brings together the profound beauty created by Britain's poets and composers during the turbulent years of the early 20th Century. Praised for his lovely tone and deep expressivity by the New York Times, American tenor Brian Giebler has established an impressive career singing virtuosic and eclectic repertoire with shine and clarity (Opera News). Whether performing Handels Semele with Harry Bicket and The English Concert or Stravinskys Threni with Franz Welser-Möst and The Cleveland Orchestra, "Brian Giebler use[s] his high-placed tenor with great skill (Opera Magazine)."

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Cantica Obsoleta

ACRONYM presents Cantica Obsoleta, from the Düben Collection. The Düben archive consists of approximately 2300 music manuscripts, assembled by and named after a family of composers who served in succession as Kapellmeister (literally: “chapel master,” the director of music) to the Royal Swedish Court in Stockholm.

Much of the music within the collection is unique, and the vast majority of it has neither been published in modern edition nor recorded. ACRONYM previously scoured the Düben Collection for sonatas that can now be heard on the ensemble's Paradise (Bertali) and Wunderkammer CDs. For this recording, they searched this treasure trove of seventeenth-century music for the most beautiful and fascinating works available. It is likely the first time any of these "forgotten songs" have been heard in hundreds of years

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