Bruce Levingston - Elastic Heart Of Youth [CD]

The Elastic Heart of YouthPreface - Notes of RenewalIf we understood the world, we would realize that there is a logic of harmony underlying it's manifold apparent dissonances. - Jean Sibelius, In 1907, in conversation with Gustav Mahler.Originating in distinct musical dialects - Baroque, Classical, Nordic, Slavic, French, and contemporary - the works recorded here are bound together by a vivid, elastic heart: a profound spirit of vitality that endures through tension and release, stillness and motion, loss and restoration. Beneath their differing voices beats a kindred pulse shared with the natural world.Sibelius's Le Sapin evokes the spruce's calm and poise, it's hushed sonorities suggesting their own logic of repose. Janacek's Sonata 1.X.1905 bears witness - urgent, searching, unafraid-it's broken arcs invoking the dissonances of modernity's estrangement from nature and the fragile openings through which rebirth begins. Debussy's etude pour les arpeges composes and La fille aux cheveux de lin shimmer with shifting light and color, while Clair de lune unfolds in the moon's tender chiaroscuro, a meditation of light, shadow, and serenity. Mozart's Fantasy in D minor restores grace and clarity not by denying shadow, but by transfiguring it; it's improvisatory nature finds form through discovery. Scarlatti's sonatas dance with quick, inventive pulse: sunlight on stone, castanets crossing through the air. Their brilliance is youthful joy tempered by seasoned experience.Gross's Solace turns inward towards repose. Here the heart practices a different virtuosity - the courage to be calm, to let resonance and renewal begin. Even in this quietude, her music recalls nature's adaptability, it's patient recalibrations in the face of change. Missy Mazzoli's The Elastic Heart of Youth gathers all these energies into a radiant celebration of life. It's tensile rhythms and glowing harmonies echo the supple strength of the living world-the capacity to bend, to adapt, to begin again.