Harvest Home
Fiddler Jay Ungar, Guitarist Molly Mason
Nashville Chamber Orchestra
"Classical music" is not a single style, but an ever-widening variety. Take this CD by fiddler Jay Ungar and guitarist Molly Mason, which will match the spirit of any Thanksgiving gathering you may be planning. The music blooms with the excellent Nashville Chamber Orchestra, conducted by Paul Gambill. It's a fusion of mostly new music in a mostly folk style, with salutes to Yanks, Cajuns, and Copland. It also includes one tune you may already know from the Ken Burns film The Civil War, "Ashokan Farewell."
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/national/local-national-991191.mp3
Ungar wrote that tune as the closing song for the fiddle camp he runs in the Catskills. Its genius is that it sounds like it's an Appalachian or Scottish lament, hundreds of years old. It's a timeless melody, given a ravishing reading here with orchestra.
The Harvest Home Suite includes "Autumn," with a re-imagining of "We Gather Together to Ask Our Lord's Blessing," a Dutch hymn-text translated to Latin by Austrian Eduard Kremser (who composed the tune), then to English by the New Yorker Theodore Baker, the originator of one of the standard music-reference resources, Baker's Biographical Dictionary. New Yorker Jay Ungar now folds this classic Thanksgiving hymn into this lovingly played suite.
Everything on the CD is performed with beauty and sheen. That's something all classical audiences love.--Kile
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