Hope Littwin - Hidden Treasure Hidden Treasure  is too mind-numbing to engage with a concert hall audience, and too cliché to be separated from any other generic singer-songwriter. Singer-songwriter Hope Littwin breaks the line between contemporary classical music and standard folk/pop music. Hidden Treasure  is a short song, originally written for her on guitar and vocals and later orchestrated for the chamber ensemble Alarm Will Sound . All in all, Hidden Treasure  is a cute song which throws just about every possible lyrical cliché at the listener. Littwin's old-fashioned rhyme scheme borders on irritating while taking away from any actual meaning in the lyrics, not to mention her insistence on randomly-placed surface-level references, including name-dropping the writer and Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, continue to make Hidden Treasure  more like any other dime-a-dozen pop song. While Littwin does at least have a solid control over her voice ...

 Lei Lang - Hearing Landscapes/Hearing Icescapes album review Award-winning composer Lei Lang is the ultimate embodiment of a multidisciplinary artist. Hearing Landscapes/Hearing Icescapes draws inspiration and musical material from painting, folk song, and scientific disciplines. While an engaging sonic result, little of Lang's research-based composition creates anything meaningful to the listener. The album is successful in terms of sound, but only if one does not have to engage further with the music. Lang accidentally demonstrates that complex compositional methods will often still create just a general wash of sound. My only question is, does the album's desired reflection of the relationship between humanity and nature actually come across, or do we just think it does after having read the liner notes? Out of the two works, the first, Hearing Landscapes , is significantly more successful in terms of how Lang utilizes his source material to retain interest. In three parts...

 Evan Williams - Piano Trio No. 2 Evan Williams ' Piano Trio No. 2 (2023) was commissioned and premiered by the Lions Gate Trio , in residence at The Hartt School. At best, the newly commissioned work can be written off as another boring, simplistic piece thrown together at the last minute. Williams names the movements of the Trio  after a Baroque dance suite, though one has to thoroughly strain to hear any deep connection. It seems the names of the movements are more to do with furthering Williams' appeal to postmodern quotation. The opening "Allemande" takes assumptions of how old music sounds to an uneducated audience and badly forces it into a minimalist soundscape following a standard pop song progression. In a similar vein, the closing "Courante" places a driving eight-beat rhythm over a drone, ending in bored apathy poorly disguised as a repetitive climax.  The lack of the Trio 's success is not entirely the fault of the composer. Despite the accl...

 David R. Peoples - A Final Year for President Lincoln David Peoples , composer and professor at the University of North Georgia, has brought an antiquated sense of humor to the modern song cycle. A Final Year for President Lincoln , performed by Benjamin Schoening , baritone, alongside the composer at the piano, feels eerily familiar, with all four songs reminiscent of early Americana campaign tunes, plucking along in simple perpetuity. The cycle brings together performance with Schoening's research interests, having published on how music functions in political campaigns past and present. His strong, demanding voice holds interest throughout the cycle, as the repetitive melodies and quasi-strophic settings begin to tire. Schoening's clear projection in all registers ensure the audience never misses a work of the text. While Peoples is a strong composer, and has created some fine works, his musical awareness while accompanying is slim, creating a barrage of sound over which Sc...