Stream of Stars

Stream of Stars

Description: 
Avid young turks set off on a brave voyage
Composers: 
Dylan Mattingly
Performers: 
Contemporaneous
David Bloom
Catalog Number: 
#822
Genre: 
new classical
new music
Collection: 
microtonal
violin
strings
Location: 

New York, NY

Price: 
$15.00
Release Date: 
Apr 24, 2012
Liner Notes: 
View
1 CD
One Sheet: 

An ensemble of exceptional and passionate young musicians, Contemporaneous is a New York-based ensemble devoted to the promotion of the most exciting music of our up-and-coming generation: energetic and fresh music that describes our world and captures our existence. Stream of Stars, the group’s debut album, consists entirely of world premiere recordings of works written specifically for Contemporaneous by its founding co-artistic director, Dylan Mattingly.

Stream of Stars opens with Atlas of Somewhere on the Way to Howland Island, an epic and beautiful poem for chamber orchestra that is an emotional depiction of Amelia Earhart’s final journey. You can hear Earhart’s journey in the music: her engine revving, crossing the endless blue, a stop in Tahiti, an elegy at the tragic end to the flight. The finale, though, features an incredible build to an overwhelmingly jubilant climax that sends Amelia’s spirit out into the stars. Six Night Sunrise (Music of Barges and Metallic Stars), for violin and piano, is a sonic picture of a single, intimate moment shared between the Pacific and the stars (and you). The last work on the album is Lighthouse (Refugee Music by a Pacific Expatriate), a down-to-Earth yet intricately sophisticated ode to the Pacific Ocean in a unique and riveting joyride for amplified string quintet.

A native of Berkeley, California, Dylan Mattingly (born 1991) has worked with John Adams, Kyle Gann, Joan Tower, and George Tsontakis. Among the performers who have played his music are Symphony Parnassus, Del Sol Quartet, Da Capo Chamber Players, Sarah Cahill, Soovin Kim, Mary Rowell, Geoffrey Burleson, and Other Minds. Upcoming premieres include new works for the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra and Berkeley Symphony. Recently, he was a finalist in Orpheus Chamber Orchestra’s “Project 440,” a crowdsourcing commissioning project sponsored by WQXR. Blogger Susan Scheid writes, “by my lights, Dylan Mattingly, young as he is, has, with Atlas [the first work on this album], earned his place in the pantheon of contemporary American composers.”

Reviews: 

GAPPLEGATE CLASSICAL-MODERN MUSIC BLOG
"Listening to the music of Dylan Mattingly is a bracing experience … The music has moments that drive forward with a sense of dynamic urgency. Other times, there is the flit of gentler motives in a state more or less of eventful repose. The album is well worth hearing [and] ultimately what matters is that this new music is original and worthwhile." [FULL ARTICLE]
Greg Edwards 

MONSIEUR DELIRE
"Rich, repetitive, insisting, [“Atlas of Somewhere on the Way to Howland Island”] takes root in your skull with the marimba taking over your frontal lobe ... “Lighthouse (Refugee Music by a Pacific Expatriate)” for string quintet [is] a splendid piece of heavy atmosphere and strikes of melodic lightning." [FULL ARTICLE]
Francois Couture 

KATHODIK “What emerges … is the sense of continuous flow, a scroll of unexplored beaches, the impression of being led by a long chain of feelings, thoughts, images, associated for mysterious reasons.” **** —Philip Fiery

AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE "[T]ruly touching ... and several tender moments."