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Mark Abel

The Cave Of Wondrous Voice

Delos

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1 Intuition's Dance  
2 Tsvetaeva -- The Sibyl  
3 Tsvetaeva -- Two Trees  
4 Tsvetaeva -- O Sorrow  
5 Tsvetaeva -- God Bent Under  
6 The Elastic Hours -- What Friday Brought  
7 The Elastic Hours -- Saturday's Circumference  
8 Clarinet Trio -- The Unfolding  
9 Clarinet Trio -- Taking Flight  
10 Clarinet Trio -- In Good Time  
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Chamber Music and Songs of Mark Abel

David Shifrin, clarinet • Carol Rosenberger, piano • Hila Plitmann, soprano  Fred Sherry, cello • Sabrina-Vivian Höpcker, violin Dominic Cheli, piano • Sarah Beck, English horn

This album sings and dances, with Mark Abel's "colorful blend of styles that serve the emotional nature of each work to bracing and poignant effect" (Gramophone) and further clarifies why Abel is "one of the most interesting figures in American contemporary music" (Pizzicato).

Abel's idiom eludes easy pigeon-holing-its contours extend from art song to larger forms with orchestra to a full length chamber opera, Home Is a Harbor.

The program begins with Intuition's Dance, a combination of frolic and dreamy ruminations featuring the incomparable clarinetist David Shifrin and pianist Carol Rosenberger. (Together again for the first time since their memorable albums for Delos, recorded in 1984!) Next comes the remarkable Hila Plitmann singing the powerfully moving Four Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva-the first-ever setting of Tsvetaeva's poetry in English translation. Plitmann is joined by Rosenberger and English hornist Sarah Beck.

  • In 'Trois Femmes du Cinema,' Mark Abel creates disquieting portraits of three extraordinary women / Journal of Singing
    Posted At: March 15, 2023
    Journal of Singing's Kathleen Roland-Silverstein writes…..Mark Abel, whose works frequently have been reviewed in this column, is a gifted and fascinating composer. Abel, whose peripatetic interests have led him to a wide range of literary sources, chose to write his own texts for these songs. The texts are effective and insightful, drawing the listener into the intriguing life stories of three women, icons...

  • Mark Abel's 'Spectrum' is deeply engaging and unfailingly fresh / Journal of Singing
    Posted At: March 8, 2023
    Journal of Singing's Gregory Berg writes……It is good to have another recording of music by Mark Abel, a composer who has a lot to say and has some very intriguing ways of saying it. The collection at hand features a mix of vocal and instrumental works, and everything here is deeply engaging and unfailingly fresh. The composer tells us in his liner notes that this recording represents “both an expansion...

  • Mark Abel's 'Spectrum' featuring: Hila Plitmann
    Posted At: February 20, 2023
    Mark Abel’s music writing is beholden to no school or discernible influence. Even if his music sits comfortably within an ongoing continuum in the classical tradition, Abel is his own man, a composer who brings his sensibility and highly developed command of craft to a particular idea and then illuminates it in a strikingly imaginative way.Abel’s versatility of works is fully apparent on his sixth recording...

  • Mark Abel's sixth album for Delos: 'Spectrum' is a rare treat / theWholeNote
    Posted At: December 22, 2022
    Acclaimed American composer Mark Abel’s sixth album for Delos - Spectrum extends his growing command of chamber writing and displays his expanding palette of expression while also delivering three major new vocal works. Abel has put together this fine recording featuring:  Hila Plitmann • Isabel Bayrakdarian • Kindra Scharich • Dominic Cheli Carol Rosenberger • David Samuel • Trio Barclay • Jeff Garza ...

  • Mark Abel continues to demonstrate his versatility of works on new Delos release: 'Spectrum' / GRAMOPHONE
    Posted At: December 5, 2022
    Acclaimed American composer Mark Abel’s sixth album for Delos - Spectrum extends his growing command of chamber writing and displays his expanding palette of expression while also delivering three major new vocal works.MARK ABELHila Plitmann • Isabel Bayrakdarian • Kindra Scharich • Dominic Cheli Carol Rosenberger • David Samuel • Trio Barclay • Jeff Garza • Adam MillsteinMax Opferkuch • Christy Kim • Jeffr...

  • 'Spectrum' functions as a fine exemplar of Mark Abel's work on the whole / textura
    Posted At: November 14, 2022
    While appreciation for Mark Abel's music is undeniably enhanced by familiarity with releases such as The Cave of Wondrous Voice (2020), Time and Distance (2018), and Home is a Harbor (2016), it's not required when the double-CD set Spectrum, the sixth album on Delos by the American composer, offers a compact, stand-alone account of his artistry. Comprised of three vocal works and three chamber pieces, the r...

  • 'Spectrum' features a wide spectrum of Mark Abel's work / Culture Spot LA
    Posted At: October 29, 2022
    Celebrated sopranos Isabel Bayrakdarian (four times a Juno Award winner) and Hila Plitmann (a pair of GRAMMY® Awards and a longtime Abel collaborator) are joined by mezzo-soprano Kindra Scharich in pre- senting the song cycles Trois Femmes du Cinema and 1966, and debuting Two Scenes from The Book of Esther, a provocative excerpt from an opera in develop- ment.The album’s impressive array of instrumentalists...

  • 'Spectrum' is instantly engaging, enhanced by Mark Abel's dramatic, modern harmonic language / STEVEN KENNEDY
    Posted At: October 27, 2022
    Spectrum is a collection of chamber music from composer Mark Abel.  It is the sixth release of his work on the Delos label and here focuses on a balance of song cycles and smaller instrumental works. Artists featured here are also intimately connected to the label in some way or another which makes the collaborations here have an additional personal layer.  The lyricism of Abel’s music creates ins...

  • Mark Abel chats with TheClassicalStation's 'My Life in Music'
    Posted At: February 27, 2021

    It's not every day that you hear of someone actually trying to avoid The Beatles. Or of a rock band guitarist turned journalist becoming a classical composer. But that's California-based Mark Abel. His newest album is entitled The Cave of Wondrous Voice and features chamber music as well as a song cycle based on Russian poetry. In February's My Life in Music, Rob Kennedy speaks with composer Mark Abel ab...

  • Mark Abel's 'The Cave of Wondrous Voice' makes 'beyond criticism: summer's end recap'
    Posted At: September 7, 2020

    Let me not dwell on this most disorienting summer of all our lives except to say that I hope you're coming through. At Catch of the Day, we've been chugging along, chalking up many fine discoveries. On a discouraging note, Radio Free America shut down on August 15. Thus, the seven-day streaming option I just announced has abruptly ceased to exist. For the foreseeable future, "Catch of the Day" is...

  • Diverse tonal and stylistic storytelling is featured in Mark Abel's 'The Cave of Wondrous Voice' / theWholeNote
    Posted At: August 29, 2020

    California-based composer Mark Abel explains in the liner notes that his father was a "devotee" of such classical chamber music composers as Mozart, Brahms, Beethoven and Dvořák, which clearly influenced his emotionally driven compositions grounded in modern and classical styles. Abel is renowned for his vocal works. His exciting song cycle Four Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva features four Rus...

  • After 40 years, David Shifrin retires as director of Chamber Music Northwest / OREGON ARTSWATCH
    Posted At: August 13, 2020

    A hearty encore for David Shifrin. After 40 years, the clarinetist supreme retires as director of Chamber Music Northwest. His colleagues give him a round of applause. Even the most ardent classical-music enthusiasts may not know several details about celebrated clarinetist David Shifrin, who retired this summer after 40 years as artistic director of Portland's Chamber Music Northwest. He uses sy...

  • Mark Abel chats 'The Cave of Wondrous Voice' with 89.7WCPE
    Posted At: August 11, 2020

    'The Cave of Wondrous Voice' sings and dances, with Mark Abel's "colorful blend of styles that serve the emotional nature of each work to bracing and poignant effect" (Gramophone) and further clarifies why Abel is "one of the most interesting figures in American contemporary music" (Pizzicato). Abel's idiom eludes easy pigeon-holing-its contours extend from art song to larger forms w...

  • A Russian poet's work makes a debut in Mark Abel's four musical adaptations / russian life
    Posted At: August 10, 2020

    From Poetry to Song: A Russian Poet's Work Makes a Debut A new album by classical composer Mark Abel features four musical adaptations of Tsvetaeva's poetry- a first for the English-language genre. Mark Abel For most in the English-speaking world, the name Marina Tsvetaeva is obscure. While often revered as one of the greatest Russian poets of the early Soviet period, Tsvetaeva's work...

  • David Shifrin sits down with WMBR: Boston to discuss Mark Abel's 'The Cave Of Wondrous Voice'
    Posted At: July 28, 2020

    The Cave Of Wondrous Voice - Chamber Music and Songs of Mark Abel features David Shifrin, clarinet • Carol Rosenberger, piano • Hila Plitmann, soprano  Fred Sherry, cello • Sabrina-Vivian Höpcker, violin Dominic Cheli, piano • Sarah Beck, English horn. This album sings and dances, with Mark Abel's "colorful blend of styles that serve the emotional nature of each work...

  • Mark Abel heads into 'The Cave of Wondrous Voice / Hollywood Soapbox
    Posted At: July 25, 2020

    Mark Abel, the composer who has been making and recording music for several years, recently released a new album of chamber music called The Cave of Wondrous Voice, featuring three pieces - "Clarinet Trio," "Intuition's Dance" and "The Elastic Hours." The recording effort serves as a quality example of Abel's recent fascination and mastery of the chamber art form. The recording has been in the works ...

  • Mark Abel takes us on a journey to 'The Cave of Wondrous Voice' / New Classical Tracks
    Posted At: July 22, 2020

    Mark Abel has been composing for most of his life, even when he served as a specialist in foreign news at the San Francisco Chronicle. His music career has pollinated from rock to jazz. Then he found his way back to the classical music he grew up listening to with his Dad. It was that music that influenced Mark's first full-fledged chamber music recording, The Cave of Wondrous Voice.'  ...

  • Mark Abel's 'The Cave of Wondrous Voice' is compelling in narrative, depth, and energy / GRAMOPHONE
    Posted At: July 22, 2020

    Mark Abel's 'The Cave of Wondrous Voice' sings and dances. Abel's idiom eludes easy pigeon-holing-its contours extend from art song to larger forms with orchestra to a full length chamber opera, Home Is a Harbor.      The program begins with Intuition's Dance, a combination of frolic and dreamy ruminations featuring the incomparable clarinetist David Shifrin an...

  • Smartly played and engineered, Mark Abel's 'The Cave of Wondrous Voice' is music of expressive directness and charm / the arts fuse
    Posted At: July 1, 2020

    One would find it hard to beat the all-star line-up featured in The Cave of Wondrous Voice, a new, hour-long survey of vocal and chamber music by the California-based composer Mark Abel. David Shifrin, Carol Rosenberger, Hila Plitmann, and Fred Sherry headline the album but they're not its only stars. On the whole, The Cave of Wonderous Voice is smartly played and engineered. Abel's writing throughout is...

  • Mark Abel's 'The Cave of Wondrous Voice' is an invigorating trek that speaks to every individual / ConcertoNet
    Posted At: June 25, 2020

    "Borrowing its title from Marina Tsvetaeva's The Sybil, the CD is a wonderment of powerful words and musical footprints that has a ubiquitous outreach. Merely reading the poetic text by the Russian is emotionally crushing. … Abel's lines require an extremely high tessitura, music that's well-suited for Israeli soprano Hila Plitmann. It speaks directly to the writer's sorrowful life. In a propulsio...

  • Mark Abel's 'The Cave of Wondrous Voice' is a very worthwhile hour of contemporary music for traditional instruments / ALL MUSIC
    Posted At: June 25, 2020

    Composer Mark Abel has been known for his distinctive vocal music idiom, late Romantic in its aesthetic but often shading off into dissonance. Soprano Hila Plitmann knows his style well, and she is present here in Abel's Four Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva, with difficult but evocative texts translated into English here for the first time. Tsvetaeva was set by Shostakovich at the end of his life, and by S...

  • Mark Abel releases 5th recording for Delos - 'The Cave of Wondrous Voice' / PERFORMING ARTS MONTEREY
    Posted At: June 16, 2020

    THE HYPERTRAGIC NOTCH AFTER A BRIEF STAY at Stanford University in the late 1960s, Mark Abel was active on the New York rock scene during the 1970s and early 1980s, leading his own groups, producing the bands The Feelies and The Bongos, and playing on albums of Tom Verlaine and former Left Banke mastermind Michael Brown. He returned to California in 1983 and worked in mainstream journalism for two de...

  • Mark Abel discusses 'The Cave of Wondrous Voice' with FanFare
    Posted At: May 29, 2020

    California-based composer Mark Abel's life journey is a fascinating one. He started off as a rock musician, and it was during a stint as a newspaper editor in San Francisco that the classical side of his output developed. In 2012, Abel became affiliated with the Delos record label; since then there has been a steady stream of releases of which the most recent, The Cave of Wondrous Voice, forms the ba...

  • Mark Abel's 'The Cave of Wondrous Voice' is straightforwardly intricate, expressive and inventive in the best ways / Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review
    Posted At: May 26, 2020

    I've covered the music of Mark Abel on these pages before (see articles from April 13, 2012, June 13, 2014, August 20, 2018). I never consciously sought to cover so many. It was one-at-a-time and I've found myself liking and posting on each. Now there is another one, a new one of chamber works, entitled The Cave of Wondrous Voice (Delos DE3570). It features a song cycle and three instrumental wor...

  • Mark Abel's 'The Cave of Wondrous Voice' is itself a wondrous creation / CultureSpot LA
    Posted At: May 13, 2020

    The Cave of Wondrous Voice, the latest recording featuring new works by composer Mark Abel, is itself a wondrous creation. It features a variety of chamber music pieces in a traditional style but with a contemporary sound. The Delos CD includes three chamber works, two for clarinet, including Intuition's Dance for clarinet and piano and Clarinet Trio, as well as a piece for violin and piano, titled The E...

  • Russian professor's poetry translations set to Mark Abel's 'The Cave of Wondrous Voice' / Bowdoin
    Posted At: May 11, 2020

    The latest album by California-based classical music composer Mark Abel owes a lot to Bowdoin scholar Alyssa Gillespie, chair of the Russian department. "It was a wonderful experience collaborating with Professor Gillespie," he said. The Cave of Wondrous Voice, released this month on the Delos label, is a collection of chamber music recordings, featuring a song cycle based on four poems by the "great...

  • Mark Abel's 'Time and Distance' is rich with inspiration and under the spell of poetry / Gramophone
    Posted At: October 5, 2018

    Mark Abel's fourth CD on Delos is rich in those moments of inspiration when a composer first comes under the spell of poetry. His marriages of subtly charged music with an eclectic modernist twist to emotionally provocative, introspective texts work best in Those Who Loved Medusa, set to Kate Gale's haunting poem, in which Hila Plitmann gloriously evokes Medusa deep in a lover's night: ‘Turn me int...

  • Second Inversion speaks with Mark Abel about what art song is and why it's music for the 21st century
    Posted At: October 4, 2018

    Composer Mark Abel has been a lot of things in his life: a classical musician, a denizen of the post-punk music scene in New York in the late '70s and early '80s, a newspaper journalist, and a classical musician and composer again. All of these things have a home in his creative glossary. As with much of Abel's music, his latest album, Time and Distance, uses the centuries-old vehicle of art song to enga...

  • Mark Abel - Time and Distance has a unique LA sound and attitude / Culture spot LA
    Posted At: August 6, 2018

    Composer Mark Abel's 2018 DELOS CD release, Time and Distance (DE 3550), features acclaimed Los Angeles area vocalists, soprano Hila Plitmann and mezzo-soprano Janelle DeStefano. Their task was immense in this endeavor - to mediate operatic texts by Abel and area poets Joanne Regenhardt and Kate Gale that address difficult social, psychological and political issues. The collection has a unique LA sound a...

  • Mark Abel - Time and Distance is scorching stuff, savagely sounded, glittering and thunderous / beyondcriticism
    Posted At: July 17, 2018

    Time and Distance (Delos) consists of world premiere recordings of works for voice and piano, plus organ and percussion, by Mark Abel. "Those Who Loved Medusa," to verse by Kate Gale, recycles Greek mythology for the #MeToo era. Medusa, it seems, had many suitors back in the day but spurned them all, until the god Poseidon came along and raped her in a temple. "You wore red," the goddess Athena scolds af...

  • Mark Abel gives listeners food for thought on spellbinding new album / Fanfare
    Posted At: June 19, 2018

    In this spellbinding new album - Time and Distance, Mark Abel gives sensitive listeners food for thought, stimulates the ear with his signature fusion of classical, rock and jazz, and makes you feel, with his gut-grabbing expressions of potent emotion. GRAMMY®-winning soprano Hila Plitmann brings her full emotional range to three Abel works, including "Those Who Loved Medusa," - a powerful s...

  • Talented artists are again put to good use on Mark Abel's 'Time and Distance' / Opera Lively
    Posted At: June 11, 2018

    Mark Abel has released his fourth CD with Delos. This one contains two short song cycles and three additional art songs. Those familiar with his two works above-mentioned will find some old friends here. The poetry of Kate Gale had already been set to music and recorded by Abel, Plitmann, and Tadmor in The Palm Trees are Restless, and Janelle DeStefano sang the double roles of Linda and Lenore in the com...

  • Geometry explains Mark Abel's art songs on Time and Distance / San Francisco Classical Voice
    Posted At: May 22, 2018

    During a phone conversation with composer Mark Abel, geometry explains the variegated art songs on his new CD, Time and Distance.  Oscillating within a triangle whose end points are classical, rock, and jazz music, the San Simeon-based musician's fourth release under the Delos label curves to navigate text. Stark, sorrowful, soothing, soaring, and always poetic words written by Abel and Californ...

  • Mark Abel -Terrain of the Heart / Gapplegate Music review
    Posted At: June 13, 2014

    The art song cycle today? I don't hear all that much of it as composed in the present, which may just mean I am not getting exposed to it, or there isn't that much getting recorded and released. Either way West Coast American composer Mark Abel is an exponent who excels in the genre, judging from his song cycle recording Terrain of the Heart (Delos 3438). Two years ago I covered another of his fo...

  • Mark Abel - Terrain of the Heart / Sanluisopbispo.com review
    Posted At: March 26, 2014

    As a journalist-turned-classical composer, San Simeon resident Mark Abel knows how to set the scene. "I'm just trying to give people something to think about. I'm trying to place them somewhere temporarily," Abel said. In his 2012 album "The Dream Gallery: Seven California Portraits," Abel explored the psychological landscape of his home state. His new album, released by Delos Productions in February...
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