BRUCE HORNSBY & YMUSIC: Deep Sea Vents (Thirty Tigers)
Best known for his 1980s hit The Way It Is, a song about economic strife and race relations in America, Bruce Hornsby’s days as a ‘Top 40 band guy’ are gone.
The singer and pianist now prefers a jazzier approach, and Deep Sea Vents is an experimental album about water and how it affects our lives.
The strings and woodwind of New York chamber music ensemble music are prominent, although these songs are a little too rarified. But there’s a lively rap about, of all things, a duck-billed mammal on Platypus Wow, while the funky Deep Blue is bolstered by trumpet and electric sitar.
Best known for his 1980s hit The Way It Is, a song about economic strife and race relations in America, Bruce Hornsby’s days as a ‘Top 40 band guy’ are gone
The singer and pianist now prefers a jazzier approach, and Deep Sea Vents is an experimental album about water and how it affects our lives
The strings and woodwind of New York chamber music ensemble music are prominent, although these songs are a little too rarified
SMETANA: Ma Vlust (Pentatone)
The Czech Philharmonic could play Smetana’s great nationalistic work in their sleep, but they are well awake here.
Russian-American conductor Semyon Bychkov, their musical director, is presiding over one of the orchestra’s great periods and Pentatone’s engineers are doing them proud.
Ma Vlast (My Country) starts with a harp solo evoking the ancient bards and continues with six sections portraying the legends, landscape and history of the Czech people.
Everyone knows the popular sections Vltava and From Bohemia’s Woods And Fields, but the other four parts of this mighty suite are equally well shaped and orchestrated.
Smetana makes good use of folk and traditional material, especially the noble Hussite chorale ‘Ye who are God’s warriors’, heard in the last two sections, Tabor and Blanik.
