This New Music Friday, Navona and Big Round Records present a variety of chamber music releases exploring rarely heard classical works, intersections between art, language, and identity, and more.
Dive in and discover new music from Eric Schultz, Juliana Soltis, Johan de Meij, Julia Glenn, and Alexander Yee.
POLYGLOT
Eric Schultz, Iván Enrique Rodríguez, Johanny Navarro, Chia-Yu Hsu, Gabriel Bouche Caro, Johannes Brahms
Eric Schultz’s masterful clarinet playing speaks in new and known tongues on POLYGLOT, a concept album celebrating music as a language of cultural identity and the self. To Schultz, a quarterfinalist for the 2025 GRAMMY® Music Educator of the Year, music is a hallmark of metamorphosis that drives cultural change across history, the performer and composer working in tandem to create something inspired and new.
AMERICAN WOMAN
Juliana Soltis, Ruoting Li, Mary Howe, Amy Beach, Margaret Bonds, Helen Crane, Dorothy Rudd Moore, Florence Price
AMERICAN WOMAN sheds light on a treasure trove of rarely heard gems of cello-piano literature. The general tone is sweeping, romantic, expressive, at times fierce and energetic, then again tender and delicate. Juliana Soltis and Ruoting Li show extraordinary ability not only in bringing out the unique style of each composer, but also in uniting them all in a great artistic effort.
CASANOVA
Johan de Meij
At this point, it would only be fair to call Dutch composer and conductor Johan de Meij “the Dutch King of program music.” Widely known to audiences for his 1988 Symphony No. 1 The Lord of the Rings, De Meij now presents CASANOVA, the complete recording of his compositions and transcriptions for cello and wind orchestra.
INK TRACES
Julia Glenn
Inspiring curiosity, cultural interaction, and deep listening, INK TRACES reflects violinist Julia Glenn’s 15-year journey exploring Chinese culture and interactions between Chinese language and music, fueled by frequent trips and three years living in China. This Navona Records release reflects a greater interdisciplinary approach seen in Chinese arts — one that blends poetry, dance, painting, calligraphy, and music and shows fascinating interchanges between gesture and sound.
HOMAGE
Alexander Yee
Alexander Yee makes his recording debut with HOMAGE, an album of works he composed throughout 2023. Following his recovery from a fractured right hand, Yee experienced a newfound appreciation for his art, and so endeavored to compose one solo piano composition per month until he produced an album’s worth of material.
