Songs from the Arc of Life —Yo-Yo Ma, cello; Kathryn Stott, piano (Sony 510316)
From the album notes: “A life is an arc of experience, from beginning to end and all the notes in between. The new album, Songs from the Arc of Life, is a musical journey shared by Yo-Yo Ma and Kathryn Stott, and a window into our universal adventure through life and time.” The artists are longtime friends, here offering familiar pieces alongside new discoveries. The program begins and ends with two, much-beloved settings of the Ave Maria, opening with the soaring, radiant Bach/Gounod arrangement and closing with Schubert’s more serene, contemplative version. In between is a remarkable spectrum of music that includes such enduring favorites as Brahms’s Lullaby, Dvorák’s Songs My Mother Taught Me, Elgar’s Salut d’amour, Gade’s tango Jealousy and Saint-Saens’s The Swan, as well as evocative works by Debussy, Delius, Fauré, Gershwin, Grieg, Kreisler, Messiaen, Schumann, Sibelius and Tchaikovsky. .
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