Art Deco Trio - Classical Changes (2023) [Official Digital Download 24/96]

SOMM Recordings is pleased to announce Classical Changes, a second disc by the Art Deco Trio, which treats favourite classical pieces to delightful and often dazzling jazz-accented re-workings in variegated arrangements by Iain Farrington.

Also featuring five African-American Spirituals and three sea shanties, Classical Change takes the early-20th-century fashion for “Jazzing the Classics” at face value with a collection of 20 first recordings of scintillating new arrangements, translating the works’ “original sober environment into one that was more intoxicated”, as Farrington tellingly comments in his booklet notes.

Familiar pieces by Beethoven, Brahms and Rimsky-Korsakov are respectively refashioned in the, by turns, evocative, exuberant and ecstatic ‘Elise’s Blues’, ‘Hungarian High-Five’ and ‘The Bite of the Flumblebee’.

Similar treatment is afforded Bizet (the excitable ‘Jiffy Dance’ and sultry ‘One Night in Seville’), the ceremonial pomp of Handel (‘Arrival Revival’), grandeur of Elgar (‘Saturday in the Park with Elgar’), and grandiosity of Wagner (‘Valerie Takes a Ride’) alongside vivacious re-imaginings of Satie and Vivaldi.

The trio of sea shanties in A Sea Shanty Shake-Up and the five-part Lay My Burden Down, drawn from African-American Spirituals, prove pleasingly amenable to Farrington’s jazz-laced re-fashioning of their various messages and moods.

Of the Art Deco Trio’s Gershwinicity, BBC Music Magazine declared “What’s not to love? It’s a winning combination and the arrangements are top- notch too. This is a recording that is guaranteed to get you moving”. Fanfare approvingly commented: “Not only are the arrangements superb, but so is the Art Deco Trio’s performance of them…. I think it’s a safe bet that any Gershwin aficionado will be as captivated with this disc as I was”.

TRACKLIST

1. Art Deco Trio - The Bite of the Flumblebee (After Rimsky-Korsakov)
2. Art Deco Trio - Valerie Takes a Ride (After Wagner's WWV 86B)
3. Art Deco Trio - Elise's Blues (After Beethoven's WoO 59)
4. Art Deco Trio - Arrival Revival (After Handel)
5. Art Deco Trio - One Night in Seville (After Bizet's WD 31)
6. Art Deco Trio - Jiffy Dance (After Bizet's WD 31)
7. Art Deco Trio - Saturday in the Park with Elgar (After Elgar)
8. Art Deco Trio - Country Breaks (After Beethoven)
9. Art Deco Trio - Jim's Nobody (After Satie)
10. Art Deco Trio - Hungarian High-Five (After Brahms's WoO 1)
11. Art Deco Trio - 3am Lullaby (After Brahms's Op. 49 No. 4)
12. Art Deco Trio - There's a Storm Brewiing (After Vivaldi's RV 315)
13. Art Deco Trio - I. What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor
14. Art Deco Trio - II. Lowlands
15. Art Deco Trio - III. Sailor's Hornpipe
16. Art Deco Trio - I. When I Lay My Burden Down
17. Art Deco Trio - II. Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child
18. Art Deco Trio - III. Amazing Grace
19. Art Deco Trio - IV. Steal Away
20. Art Deco Trio - V. Every Time I Feel the Spirit



Thanks to the Original customer.