Familiar and Otherworldly The City of Tomorrow - heard by ANDREW SCHARTMANN '... funny, playful, and full of light.'

Ravello Records' new disc of contemporary pieces for wind quintet features The City of Tomorrow — an ensemble devoted to bringing new and recent works to audiences around the world. Although the selections are unlikely to please those who do not incline toward the avant-garde, listeners of all stripes can appreciate the quintet's virtuosity — and perhaps, even, the album's philosophical premise: 'Nature is a collection of works for wind quintet that inspire thoughts of the natural world: growth and evolution, dazzling beauty in infinite variation, dependence and interdependence, the susceptibility of our bodies to our environment, and the glacial flow of time.'

Growth, evolution, and virtuosity come to the fore in Luciano Berio's Ricorrenze — a piece the composer compared to 'a seed being sown and eventually maturing into a plant that bears fruit'. On its way to 'maturity', the music becomes progressively polyphonic, with instruments being cast in different directions from a common root...

LUCIANO BERIO

CHAMBER MUSIC

CONTEMPORARY MUSIC

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

NAVONA RECORDS