Ring Out
Album Description
A world-premiere recording of original compositions by violist and composer Jessica Meyer, whose work The Strad has called "fierce and lyrical." The album features "Seasons of Basho," a haunting four-movement song cycle setting master haiku poet Matsuo Basho's verses for countertenor, viola, and piano—with Nicholas Tamagna's extraordinary voice exploring themes of discovery, longing, loss, and loneliness across the seasons. The album culminates in the title track "Ring Out, Wild Bells," recorded inside The Tank, an abandoned water vessel turned resonant music venue in Colorado, featuring Grammy-winning vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth. Debuted at #1 on the Billboard Traditional Classical Chart.
Press
"Pianist Adam Marks plays a solitary note to open Seasons of Basho, answered by shuddering scraps of melody from Meyer’s viola. Marks’s piano and the extraordinary countertenor voice of Nicholas Tamagna announce that “Spring” has sprung, along with tears of loneliness. “Summer” consists mostly of a shuffling viola solo, sonic dry heat; when the piano burbles to life, Tamagna speaks. The singer’s beautiful vibrato and remarkable timbre at high pitch make his reading of “Autumn,” a soaring slow movement, glow. Marks’s piano becomes a bell, tolling in and then, wonderfully, out of sync."
"In Seasons of Basho, countertenor Nicholas Tamagna mesmerises Meyer and pianist Adam Marks with moments of golden silence among his unwaveringly lovely sweet tones, using the cyclical changing of the year as a metaphor for the highs and lows of obsessive love."
"Seasons of Basho is a four-song cycle for countertenor (the excellent Nicholas Tamagna), viola (Meyer), and piano (Adam Marks). The four poems – Spring, Summer, Autumn and Winter – are set to texts by the Japanese poet Matsuo Bashō that examine the ups and downs of love and all its vicissitudes."
"Throughout the work, Meyer and pianist Marks draw bold emotional arcs, but it's the ultra-expressive singing of Tamagna that makes the strongest mark. His is anything but a polite, genteel performance."