Salastina Releases World Premiere Recordings in Sept & Oct 2024

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Press Contact:

Adrienne Andisheh, Sounding Point
adrienne@soundingpoint.com
(310) 871-9281

TJ Sclafani, Sounding Point
tj@soundingpoint.com
(732) 501-4159

Additional Press Materials HERE

 

SALASTINA CELEBRATES 15TH ANNIVERSARY
WITH TWO WORLD PREMIERE RECORDINGS

fragile certain songs, Sep 27
Weinberg: Flute Works, Oct 11

Featuring Music by Philip White, Jeremy Cavaterra &
Mieczyslaw Weinberg

 

LOS ANGELES, CA - Salastina, one of Los Angeles’s foremost chamber music ensembles, will celebrate their 15h anniversary by releasing two world-premiere recordings in September and October 2024. fragile certain songs, an album featuring the world premiere recordings of the song cycle of the same name by LA-based composer Philip White and Jeremy Cavaterra’s Three Neruda Arias, releases on September 27. Weinberg: Flute Works, an album featuring flute-focused chamber music by the late Soviet-Polish composer Mieczyslaw Weinberg, releases on October 11. These recordings pre-empt the release of Salastina’s world premiere recording of Eric Whitacre’s You Feel Like Home: Suite from The Sacred Veil, which releases on October 18 through Whitacre’s label, UNQUIET. You can learn more about You Feel Like Home: Suite from The Sacred Veil here.

Each release features music that Salastina has performed live, either recently or over the past 15 years. “These releases are about our musical family and the many years that have gone into nurturing those relationships. As we approach our 15th anniversary season, we're taking stock of both to reflect on why we do what we do,” says Salastina’s Co-Artistic Director Maia Jasper White. “This consequential anniversary struck us as the right time to bring our body of recorded works in a better proportion with our live performances in the Southern California community.”

The first release, fragile certain songs, features music by California-based composers for voice and chamber ensemble with text from 20th-century poets. Philip White’s fragile certain songs sets texts from E.E. Cummings for mezzo-soprano, tenor, and piano quintet, while Jeremy Cavaterra’s Three Neruda Arias sets poems by Chilean poet Pablo Neruda for soprano, string quintet, winds, and harp. Both pieces were commissioned and premiered live by Salastina: the Three Neruda Arias were premiered on Salastina’s inaugural concert at Zipper Hall on June 17, 2010, and fragile certain songs was premiered on Salastina's fifth-anniversary concert, “5 Years / 5 L.A. Composers,” on October 5, 2014.

The first single from fragile certain songs, “O Distinct,” released on September 24, 2024 and can be heard here. The second single, “wherelings whenlings,” releases on September 25, 2024 and will premiere here.

Considered to be "the third great Soviet composer, along with Prokofiev and Shostakovich" by Classical Net Review, Mieczyslaw Weinberg’s music has only been re-discovered recently in the Western world. His music was primarily known only to Soviet composers and musicians behind the Iron Curtain in the mid-20th century. Salastina’s Resident Flutist Benjamin Smolen, who specializes in Weinberg’s music, became enamored with the composer while studying abroad in Moscow. On Weinberg: Flute Works, Smolen and Salastina perform the world premieres of chamber versions of Weinberg’s Concerto No. 1 for Flute and Strings, Op. 75 and 12 Miniatures for Flute and Strings, Op. 29.

fragile certain songs and Weinberg: Flute Works will be available to stream on Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube, as well as Salastina’s HearNow page. The albums will be available to purchase at salastina.org.

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fragile certain songs
Release Date: Sept 27, 2024
Credits:
Recorded by Louis Ng at the Village Studios
Produced by Maia Jasper White & Kevin Kumar

Track Listing:
fragile certain songs (Philip White)

1. since feeling is first
2. wherelings whenlings
3. tictoc
4. i am a little church
5. O Distinct
6. now i lay

Three Neruda Arias (Jeremy Cavaterra)
7. Ausencia de Joaquín
8. Pájaro
9. Aquí

Performers: Salastina (Maia Jasper White, violin; Kevin Kumar, violin; Benjamin Smolen, flute; Meredith Crawford, viola; Yoshika Matsuda, cello; HyeJin Kim, piano); Clara Osowski, mezzo; Chris Hunter, tenor; Elizabeth Futral, soprano; Rob Brophy, viola; John Walz, cello; David Parmeter, bass; Rong-Huey Lieu, horn; Timothy Hagen, flute; Julie Smith Phillips, harp.

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Weinberg: Flute Works
Release Date: Oct 11, 2024
Credits:
Recorded by Louis Ng at the Village Studios
Produced by Maia Jasper White & Kevin Kumar

Track Listing:
12 Miniatures for Flute and Strings, Op. 29 (Mieczyslaw Weinberg)

1. Introduction (Maestoso)
2. Arietta (Andante Con Moto)
3. Burlesque (Allegro Moderato)
4. Capriccio (Marziale marcatissimo)
5. Nocturne (Andantino)
6. Waltz (Allegro Molto)
7. Ode (Largo)
8. Duet (Andante tranquilo)
9. Barcarole (Moderato comodo)
10. Etude (Presto)
11. Adagio
12. Pastorale (Allegretto)

Flute Concerto No. 1, Op. 75 (Mieczyslaw Weinberg)
13. Allegro
14. Largo
15. Allegro comodo

Performers: Salastina (Ben Smolen, flute; Kevin Kumar, violin; Maia Jasper White, violin; Meredith Crawford, viola; Yoshika Matsuda, cello); Ted Botsford, double bass

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Salastina is a visionary chamber ensemble and presenting organization based in Los Angeles. The winner of San Francisco Classical Voice’s Audience Choice Award for “Best Chamber Ensemble” and “Best Streaming Series,” Salastina is a 21st-century reimagining of the chamber music salon: a place where musicians and audience members gather to share in the beauty of the art form through performance and conversation, whether in-person for intimate, local audiences or online for tens of thousands around the world. Salastina presents up to 25 public performances per year, most of which are live-streamed online. 

Integral to Salastina’s live concerts are context and storytelling, dynamically provided by Resident Host and Artistic Partner Brian Lauritzen (of KUSC fame), as well as ample opportunities for audience members and musicians to engage in conversation. As one audience member put it: “Where else can audiences have a personal conversation with a 'famous musician' who might have been a role model and inspiration? People oftentimes can't even pay money to talk to their favorite performers backstage. Yet Salastina has created an arena where musicians and audiences can connect.”

In keeping with Gustav Mahler’s definition of tradition as “not the worship of ashes, but the preservation of fire,” Salastina invests equally in the classics and the generation of new music. Salastina’s work in this area has been broadcast dozens of times nationally on Performance Today. Its tuition-free, highly-competitive Sounds Promising Young Composers Program has provided dozens of composers from Italy to Singapore with mentorship and world-class audio-video recordings of their work. Armed with these recordings in their portfolio, alumni have gone on to secure professional commissions. Salastina has also given presentations on career development to students at USC’s Thornton School of Music and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

In May of 2020, Salastina partnered with Project: Music Heals Us and UCLA Medical Center to create Vital Sounds, a program bringing the healing power of music to patients in UCLA’s Intensive Care Unit. Since then, Salastina has provided over 40,000 minutes of one-on-one virtual bedside concerts to over 2,400 patients.

To support Salastina’s work and learn more about upcoming concerts, visit salastina.org. Follow us on Instagram and Facebook at @salastinala.

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Multiple BMI Award-winning composer Philip White writes music for film, television, interactive media, and the concert stage. He has composed the scores for Tyler Perry’s A Madea Homecoming, The Loud House Movie (2021 HMMA nomination for Best Original Score for an Animated Film), Jexi, A Madea Family Funeral, Nobody’s Fool, Boo 2! A Madea Halloween, and Alex & Me. Most recently, he co-arranged “Wondrous Journeys,” the Disneyland fireworks spectacular celebrating 100 years of Walt Disney animation.

In television, Philip most recently scored The Winchesters for the CW and had the pleasure of working on Supernatural for its historic 15 seasons. Other major TV credits include Apple TV’s reboot of Fraggle Rock, Lost in Space, Ray Donovan, What/If, Bates Motel, Agent Carter, When We Rise, Revolution, and Dallas. He has written additional music for Superintelligence, Smurfs: The Lost Village, The War With Grandpa, Kevin Hart: What Now?, Identity Thief, HOP, Cats & Dogs: The Revenge of Kitty Galore, Disaster Movie, the French thriller La Horde, and the Smurfs holiday specials A Christmas Carol and The Legend of Smurfy Hollow. His interactive credits include James Bond: Quantum of Solace, Starhawk, Space Miner Wars, and The Sims 3: Pets Expansion Pack.

Outside his work in media, Philip enjoys composing for the concert stage. The Los Angeles Master Chorale performed two of Philip's choir pieces, On This Side of the Window and El Niño Mudo. His piece for voice and piano quintet, since feeling is first, premiered in New York in 2014 and received its West Coast Premiere by Salastina in Los Angeles later that year. His film music was performed live in concert at the 7th International Film Music Festival in Úbeda, Spain, in the summer of 2011. In addition, Philip collaborated with renowned Cuban jazz legend Arturo Sandoval as part of Christopher Lennertz’s Symphony of Hope: The Haiti Project.

Born and raised in Madrid, Spain, Philip began studying music through classical and Flamenco guitar. He graduated with dual degrees in Drama and Composition from Tufts University and the New England Conservatory of Music and later received his graduate degree from the USC Scoring for Motion Pictures and Television program. The Sundance Institute named him a fellow in the 2012 Feature Film Composers Lab. He is also an alum of the Nautilus Composer-Librettist Studio. He lives in Los Angeles with his wife, Maia Jasper White, their son, Galen, and their daughter, Naomi.

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Jeremy Cavaterra was born in New York City and spent his early life in New England before moving to Los Angeles, where he studied piano with Tania Agins and Robert Turner, as well as composition and theory with Mark Carlson. He returned to New York to study composition with Giampaolo Bracali at Manhattan School of Music.

His music has been performed throughout the US, Europe, and the UK. He has received commissions for works from such soloists as Gustavo Díaz-Jerez and Robert deMaine, from orchestras such as the Young People’s Symphony Orchestra, the Master Sinfonia, and the Mission Chamber Orchestra of San Jose, as well as from chamber ensembles such as Pacific Serenades, Salastina, People Inside Electronics, and the Myriad Trio.

From 2010 to 2018, Cavaterra was Composer-in-Residence for Salastina in Los Angeles. Beginning with Three Neruda Arias, premiered by soprano Elizabeth Futral, Salastina commissioned a total of twelve pieces from Cavaterra during his tenure, as well as fourteen arrangements, for various chamber combinations ranging from two to nine instruments. Since 2018, Cavaterra has been Composer-in-Residence for the Young People’s Symphony Orchestra.

Cavaterra is currently completing a cello concerto for Robert deMaine, principal cellist of the LA Phil, as well as a set of Fantasy-Études for pianist Gustavo Díaz-Jerez, the first two of which were recently premiered on Virtual Reality Piano, the world’s first VR classical music channel, to enthusiastic reviews.