MEMETERIA by Thomas May

Music & the Arts

July 11, 2025 • 12:28 pm Comments Off on Anne Akiko Meyers: Champion of Contemporary Music

Anne Akiko Meyers: Champion of Contemporary Music

Even before the year reached its mid-point, Anne Akiko Meyers had released her third album of 2025, each strikingly different and, characteristically, showcasing new works she has commissioned.

My profile of this extraordinary violinist – and human being – is the cover story of this month’s Gramophone:

‘Curiosity’ doesn’t do justice to the force that drives Anne Akiko Meyers. A better word might be the German Neugier (literally, ‘greed for the new’), which suggests not just a hunger for the unknown, but an urgent, almost ravenous pursuit – a term that has a more active and impassioned meaning than does its English counterpart…

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Filed under: Anne Akiko Meyers, Gramophone, violinists

April 1, 2025 • 1:06 am Comments Off on Review of Schubert’s “Great” C major Symphony: Edward Gardner and CBSO

Review of Schubert’s “Great” C major Symphony: Edward Gardner and CBSO

My Gramophone review is now posted:

Edward Gardner’s complete Schubert cycle reaches its conclusion with this fourth volume, marking the culmination of a project that began in 2018 – just as he was wrapping up his well-regarded five volume Mendelssohn survey with Birmingham. …

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Filed under: CD review, Gramophone, Schubert

September 7, 2024 • 4:39 am Comments Off on “Last Days” by Oliver Leith

“Last Days” by Oliver Leith

For Gramophone‘s September issue, I reviewed Oliver Leith’s Last Days, based on Gus Van Sant’s 2005 film riffing on Kurt Cobain’s suicide.

‘A place where flecks of magic are chipped or hacked from mundanity – where the familiar and domestic are heightened or warped’ is how Oliver Leith sums up what he wanted to convey with Last Days, his debut opera…

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Filed under: CD review, Gramophone, new opera

July 11, 2024 • 6:25 am Comments Off on “Urlicht” with Samuel Hasselhorn

“Urlicht” with Samuel Hasselhorn

I reviewed baritone Samuel Hasselhorn’s latest harmonia mundi release, Urlicht, for Gramophone:

Samuel Hasselhorn’s first orchestral release, this album follows his inaugural instalment of the ambitious ‘Schubert 200 Project’ (Harmonia Mundi, 11/23). Die schöne Müllerin, which won the 2023 Diapason d’Or, launched the young baritone’s collaboration with the pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz to record all of the lieder penned by Schubert in his last five years, with the undertaking to culminate in the bicentennial of the composer’s death in 2028….

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Filed under: CD review, Gramophone, Mahler

May 24, 2024 • 12:17 pm Comments Off on Editor’s Choice: “Girls of the Golden West”

Editor’s Choice: “Girls of the Golden West”

My review for Gramophone of the new concert recording of John Adams’s Girls of the Golden West, which has been selected as an Editor’s Choice for June 2024:


The opera repertoire would be considerably diminished if composers had abandoned their ‘problem children’ at the first sign of trouble. John Adams confronted one of the biggest disappointments of his career when Girls of the Golden West was panned by a chorus of critics at its premiere in 2017….

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Filed under: CD review, Gramophone, John Adams

February 29, 2024 • 7:46 am Comments Off on Philip Glass: Solo

Philip Glass: Solo

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My Gramophone review of Philip Glass’s recent release has been posted:

‘If I’m to be remembered for anything’, Philip Glass has remarked, ‘it will probably be for the piano music, because people can play it.’ …

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Filed under: CD review, Gramophone, Philip Glass, piano

November 4, 2023 • 1:13 pm Comments Off on Brooklyn Rider and Kinan Azmeh: Starlighter

Brooklyn Rider and Kinan Azmeh: Starlighter

My review of Starlighter, the latest Brooklyn Rider release featuring the quartet’s collaboration with clarinetist/composer Kinan Azmeh, is in the November issue of Gramophone:

Ever since they formed nearly two decades ago, Brooklyn Rider have been reimagining the string quartet’s potential both in their playing style and in their devotion to new repertoire. …

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Filed under: Brooklyn Rider, CD review, Gramophone, Kinan Azmeh, review, string quartet

September 10, 2022 • 8:18 am Comments Off on Album Review: Sarah Plum’s Personal Noise

Album Review: Sarah Plum’s Personal Noise

My latest review for Gramophone is of violinist/violist Sarah Plum‘s new release, Personal Noise:

A slim discography barely hints at violinist Sarah Plum’s prolific career as a ‘new music specialist’ but confirms her engagingly adventurous sensibility….

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Filed under: CD review, Gramophone, violinists

February 16, 2022 • 10:33 am Comments Off on Lowell Liebermann’s Frankenstein

Lowell Liebermann’s Frankenstein

My latest CD review for Gramophone is of the recording by the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra of Lowell Liebermann’s lengthy ballet score Frankenstein:

Within just five years of its publication in 1818, Mary Shelley’s classic horror novel inspired a stage play that became a hit – the first of a seemingly endless stream of adaptations for other media that has flowed ever since. While the most popular of these are associated with the screen (going back to a 1910 short silent film from Edison Studios), Frankenstein has additionally spawned operas, musicals and this full-length ballet, premiered by the Royal Ballet in 2016….

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Filed under: ballet, CD review, Gramophone

October 28, 2021 • 11:54 am Comments Off on Christian Baldini’s New CD

Christian Baldini’s New CD

The talented young conductor Christian Baldini conducts the UC Davis Symphony Orchestra on this newly released album — a challenging and fascinating collection of music by Lutosławski, Ligeti, Varèse, and Baldini himself. I was delighted to review it for the November issue of Gramophone:

Having proved himself an engaging Mozartian with his previous release (a collection of arias and overtures with Elizabeth Watts and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra – Linn, 7/15), Christian Baldini here displays his expertise in modernist and contemporary fare…

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Filed under: CD review, conductors, Gramophone

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