Second Inversion’s Top 5 Album Reviews of 2016

Posted on December 28, 2016 by maestrobeats

You can count on Second Inversion for Album Reviews of the latest and greatest new releases. These are the top 5 most popular reviews of 2016!

#5: Jessie Montgomery: Strum (Azica)

The album combines classical chamber music with elements of folk music, spirituals, improvisation, poetry, and politics, crafting a unique and insightful new–music perspective on the cross-cultural intersections of American history. And while this album may just be the beginning for Montgomery, “Strum” certainly echoes with possibility. – Maggie Molloy

#4: Northwestern University Cello Ensemble: Shadow, Echo, Memory (Sono Luminus)

As the album continues onward from the Rachmaninov through the Mahler, it becomes clear that the Ensemble has achieved their purported goal of using the cello to express textures of dark and light, bring to life sounds and images from another time, and finally to aid listeners in revisiting their own histories. It does indeed provide a fascinating, haunting individual experience to those who are up for a little soul-searching. – Brendan Howe

#3: Contact: Discreet Music by Brian Eno (Cantaloupe Music)

As performers, Contact makes the music their own—and as listeners, so do we. With precision, patience, and the utmost reverence, Contact recreates Eno’s ambient masterwork as an echo chamber of circling motives and mismatched musical textures. Each ripple of the repetitious melody is a perfectly crafted piece of the larger pattern, a discreet but unique little gem in and of itself. – Maggie Molloy

#2: Boston Modern Orchestra Project: Mason Bates’ Mothership (BMOP/Sound)

Part of what makes this music great is its versatility: it’s at home in so many different settings, from the venerated orchestral concert hall, to the sweaty dance club, to your living room on a Tuesday night. – Geoffrey Larson

#1: Pink Floyd: “Wish You Were Here” Symphonic featuring Alice Cooper with the London Orion Orchestra (Decca)

Fans of Pink Floyd will definitely enjoy the musical fantasia of Wish You Were Here Symphonic. Those who are less familiar with Pink Floyd will also find a lot to love in this recording. You listen to this album for the symphonic arrangements and in every way they deliver.

This was Smith’s first go at producing an album by himself and I’d call it a great success. I hope to hear symphonic versions of Pink Floyd’s other classics in the future. Hint hint, Pete Smith. Tell us, where will you go from Here? – Rachele Hales

ALBUM REVIEW: Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” Symphonic featuring Alice Cooper with the London Orion Orchestra

Posted on March 21, 2016 by maestrobeats

by Rachele Hales

Wish You Were Here Symphonic is a project produced and masterminded by Pete Smith, who also helped produce the wildly successful Us and Them: Symphonic Pink Floyd. He’s joined this time by some friends and fellow Floydians. Makes sense. After all, it was Pink Floyd who pioneered the idea of inviting well-known musicians to make guest appearances on their albums (including Yehudi Menuhin and Roy Harper). Smith collected collaborators from around the world, including New Zealand’s maestro Peter Scholes, who arranged the music and conducted the recording.

Oddly, the album opens with a non-symphonic version of the title track with macabre vocals from Alice Cooper. Neither the vocal nor the instrumental versions of “Wish You Were Here” are symphonic, which is a damn shame considering the highlight of the album is the symphonic orchestration.

The brief orchestra warm-up following the title track is a nice touch, however. It serves to prepare your ears for the shift in tone as the guitar and piano are joined by a full symphony playing the instantly recognizable opening to “Shine On You Crazy Diamond, Pt. I-V.” The bare, industrial ambience of the original is in every way enhanced by the ethereal orchestration, which delivers the melody that the vocals supply in the original.

Alice Cooper returns in “Welcome to the Machine,” a bleak critique of the music industry and said industry’s corporate fatcats. Cooper’s style works better here in conveying a feeling of utter disaffection.

The London Orion Orchestra takes on “Have a Cigar” and we’re again treated to exhilarating symphonic arrangements with top-notch electric guitar work that gradually ascends in prominence.

Keeping things in their original album order, “Have A Cigar” fades out and an instrumental version of “Wish You Were Here” performed by Australian Pink Floyd begins. Kudos to Aussie Floyd for beautifully conveying the tenderness and melancholy of the original version. That said, after the lush symphonic thrills of the previous songs I found I missed that sweep and scale here.

After the second half of “Shine On You Crazy Diamond” we get a little bonus song: a symphonic version of Dark Side of the Moon’s final track “Eclipse.”

I cannot write about this album without also mentioning the artwork. The iconic artwork in Pink Floyd’s 1975 release depicts two men in suits shaking hands (the handshake symbolizing empty gestures), while one man is on fire, literally “getting burned.” All this was meant to convey Pink Floyd’s musical critique of the music industry and a general feeling of absence. Tiernen Trevallion’s take on the artwork for this symphonic album conveys a similar vacuity and disgust but it is so much cooler! Replacing business suits with space suits? Smart. Taking lyrics from the title track and incorporating them into the artwork? Smart. The symbolism of a pig with a duct-taped butt gorging on a trough of money? Smart and funny! Trevallion just became my new favorite graphic artist.

Wish You Were Here Symphonic Back Cover

Getting back to the music… Fans of Pink Floyd will definitely enjoy the musical fantasia of Wish You Were Here Symphonic. Those who are less familiar with Pink Floyd will also find a lot to love in this recording. You listen to this album for the symphonic arrangements and in every way they deliver.

Wish You Were Here Symphonic Art Print

ALBUM REVIEW: Maya Beiser’s “Uncovered”

Posted on September 8, 2014 by maestrobeats

by Jill Kimball

One of classical music’s worst faults is its superiority, all too often on display. Many of those who perform and listen to classical music believe there is nothing more beautiful, more sacred. Some even believe everything else is noise.

Perhaps that’s why cellist Maya Beiser felt guilty and a little dirty after she heard rock music for the first time. As a child growing up in Israel’s Galilee Mountains, she listened to classical music and practiced on her cello diligently. But “the first time I heard Janis Joplin I felt shaken to the core,” she told her recording label, Innova. “Somehow her unique, raw expression snuck its way into the inner shrine where, until then, only the likes of Bach and Schubert were allowed to enter. It felt so sacrilegious that I was giddy with guilt.”

It was that feeling that inspired the cello diva’s latest album, “Uncovered.” It’s ten tracks of beautifully deconstructed classic rock songs, as spectacular a find for die-hard Led Zeppelin and Pink Floyd fans as it is for those who know absolutely nothing about classic rock.

Beiser has never shied from experimental music and has in fact made cross-cultural genre-bending her mission. She’s worked with the likes of Philip Glass, Tan Dun, Brian Eno and Steve Reich on new compositions. She’s the founding cellist of New York’s Bang on a Can. Her hometown was a cultural melting pot of Christians, Jews and Muslims, and she was born of a French mother and Argentinian father. With that kind of background, it’s no wonder her music resonates with people all over the world. (Her TED talk has been translated into 32 languages.)

“Uncovered” is another excellent chapter in Beiser’s genre-defying book, proof positive that traditionally classical instruments don’t always have to sound prim and polished. In the Nirvana cover “Lithium,” for example, Beiser’s cello scrapes rudely across the strings to channel Kurt Cobain’s gritty, slightly out of tune singing voice. She bends the notes perfectly to capture Jimi Hendrix’s essence in “Little Wing.” And she does a hell of a good AC/DC electric guitar impression on “Back in Black.”

Channeling, rather than imitation, is really what she’s going for in this album, and thank goodness: straight-up covers are often mocked, panned and condemned for their lack of creativity. The covers that everyone remembers are those that shed completely new light on a song, like Janis Joplin’s bluesy take on the Gershwin classic “Summertime.” That track inspired Beiser’s own cover, where she shreds and wails on the cello to create a melody that so accurately imitates Joplin’s raspy vocals.

Other tracks seek to imitate the mood of the original song rather than the vocal quality, such as the balladic “Wish You were Here,” a Pink Floyd cover, and the mournful “Epitaph,” by King Crimson.

In short, the cello diva has done it again. Without giving up her own originality, cellist Maya Beiser captures every rasp, every scream, every bit of edginess and ugliness…everything that made these rock songs so legendary. “Uncovered” is the ultimate homage to the perfect imperfection of rock music.