New recording, "Touch Harmonious," available for pre-order!
In a Circle Records proudly presents violist Nicholas Cords’ latest solo album, Touch Harmonious. A follow-up to Cords’ celebrated debut solo recording Recursions (2013), Touch Harmonious creates an engrossing journey bridging the Baroque era to the present day, including two premieres and numerous works arranged and recorded for the first time on the viola.
Drawing on his deeply varied experiences as violist of Brooklyn Rider and the Silkroad Ensemble (serving until recently as Co-Artistic Director of Silkroad), Cords returns to a solo role after a seven year hiatus. Though in planning for more than two years, much of the work on the album itself was completed as the COVID-19 pandemic took hold. Cords reflects:
“Music helps us weather solitude, pain, and loss just as readily as it ushers in life’s most joyous and transcendent moments. Though the cessation of live performance in a pandemic age seems trivial in comparison to the unfathomable human toll, music’s power to sooth and heal are nevertheless essential. Touch Harmonious is a celebration of the balming fount of musical tradition as seen through the particular gaze of the viola.”
From the Baroque period is an arrangement by Cords of a harmonically beguiling prelude from the viola da gamba virtuoso Carl Friedrich Abel, the luminous First Cello Suite of JS Bach, and, the iconic aria “Lascia ch’io pianga” from Handel’s Rinaldo.
Drawing on connections to the past are two works written specifically for this album. Dana Lyn’s “endlessly i would have walked” draws from a close study of traditional counterpoint and a deeply personal relationship to the solo string music of Bach as a violinist and violist herself. Uzbek composer Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky’s “Short Epitaph” is based on a La Folia, a progression likely born in the Renaissance but popularized in the Baroque era by luminaries such as Lully, Marais, and Vivaldi.
Two more works, both given new perspective on the viola, also share a connection to the Baroque. Benjamin Britten’s towering Third Suite for Solo Cello (1971) was inspired by Mstislav Rostropovich’s interpretation of Bach and key movements utilize characteristic Baroque musical forms. In a new arrangement for solo viola, Anna Clyne’s “Rest These Hands” is taken from a larger collection of works called The Violin and the melismatic middle section of her piece reveals a quote from the Presto of Bach’s Violin Sonata in G minor, BWV 1001.
Drawing on new and old in equal measure, Touch Harmonious seeks to frame the music as part of an unbroken tradition. And as Cords puts it: “We look to music as a reliable source of uplift in difficult moments because of the deep web of connections that it both draws upon and subsequently encodes into a living and breathing tradition. Especially now, in a divided and stricken world, music provides a much-needed sense of connection and comfort.”
Touch Harmonious is currently available for pre-order on Bandcamp (digital and physical): http://www.bit.ly/TouchHarmonious. The digital release will be available starting November 6 through iTunes, Spotify, Amazon (digital and physical), and other major outlets.
