Tag: Laura Strickling

Soprano Laura Strickling pays “homage to the feminine, gathering her audience in a warm and brilliant embrace of sisterhood” –American Record Guide

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American Record Guide  March/April 2021, pages 181-182 Confessions Laura Strickling, soprano; Joy Schreier, piano Composers: Assad, Lyons, Cipullo, Kirsten, Djupstrom, Larsen Randy Bellous: Executive Producer Yarlung catalog number 18798     61 minutes Laura Strickling dedicated this album to the memory of her aunt, Janet Strickling, who was a powerful supporter of the album but died from Covid-19 before she could hear the finished product. This album feels like an homage to femininity: the lovely, the messy, the American Record Guide 181 graceful, the rough-around-all-the-edges, and the sisterhood we share with others, with people who encountered it before us and have helped us navigate our own womanhood— and the legacy that we write in the colorful story of our actions and dramas and innermost contemplations. This is a collection of poignant works, pieces whose words and notes exhibit storytelling at its finest. If you see yourself in the texts, you’ll yourself feel Continue Reading →

Tim Bostwick writes about Laura Strickling’s “Confessions”

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Confessions is available at Yarlung Records, HDTracks, Amazon, Spotify and Apple. Tim Bostwick interviewed soprano Laura Strickling for NATS in 2020, asking her thoughts on surviving as a musician during Covid-19.  It is a terrific interview, and you can find it here.  Toward the end of Tim’s article, he reviews Laura’s new album Confessions, available as a physical CD, in high res as a download and on myriad streaming services.  The article describes the album in glowing terms: Confessions includes “four song cycles and two additional numbers. Clarice Assad’s Confessions provides the title and the initial cycle. Next, Songs of Lament and Praise by composer, visual artist, and singer, Gilda Lyons, followed by Tom Cipullo’s How to Get Heat Without Fire. Amy Beth Kirsten’s stand-alone To see what I see gives a powerful setting to Shakespeare’s Ophelia from Hamlet. In a lush portrayal of Sara Teasdale poems, Michael Djupstrom’s Three Continue Reading →

James Matheson on “New Music Box”

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BY JAMES MATHESON OCTOBER 19, 2016 Originally Published on NewMusicBox.com If experience is the primary generator of wisdom, it’s unfortunate that wisdom often comes at a high and sometimes painful price. All told, I can recall moving 22 times since I was an undergraduate, with at least another half dozen moves before then. Usually I would throw everything I owned in a car and drive. Eventually I started renting U-Hauls.  The last couple of moves I hired movers, like grown-ups do. Everywhere I went I took my crates of LPs. AC/DC, Zeppelin, Psychedelic Furs, Solti’s complete Ring Cycle with Birgit Nilsson, Dorati’s complete Haydn Symphonies, most of Zappa’s records – and many more. In one of the later moves, my Denon turntable broke. And I now had crates of CDs to drag around, too. Perhaps, dear Reader, you can feel where this tale of too-late wisdom is heading… In 2012 Continue Reading →

Laura Strickling shines in James Matheson’s “Times Alone”

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October 20, 2016 Voices from the Heart Mark Estren reviews Yarlung’s new CD “James Matheson” on INFODAD.com: …it is the vocal work, Times Alone, that is most immediately striking. It is a setting, in English, of five surrealist poems from the 1907 collection called Soledades, galerias y otros poemas by Antonio Machado (1875-1939). The emotional progression of the poems is handled particularly adeptly by [soprano] Laura Strickling and [pianist] Thomas Sauer: the first three poems are on the light, even playful side, but the last two become more thoughtful, serious and introspective, and the works’ imagery is well-reflected in Matheson’s nicely proportioned settings. Like the other works here, Times Alone was recorded live in performance…. …Matheson is a highly interesting composer whose work genuinely seeks to reach out to audiences, and this recording is as good an introduction to (or exploration of) the forms in which he works as anyone Continue Reading →

James Matheson Review: Stephen Greenbank, MusicWeb International, United Kingdom

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This is my first encounter with the music of James Matheson, an American composer whose music is both colourful and accessible. What better introduction could there be – a concerto, a string quartet and a song-cycle. The recording was sponsored by J and Helen Schlichting of California, who also commissioned the String Quartet. At 18 minutes the Quartet’s opening movement is the most substantial and ambitious. It begins with a swirling coruscation of sound, persistently driven and underpinned by motoric rhythms. There’s a feel of forward momentum and purposeful direction. In the central section, where the music is more relaxed, each instrument is given the opportunity to state its case. Then the energy returns in the form of declamatory sweeps. The slow movement is intensely lyrical, but the emotion is tinged with melancholy and sadness. At one point it reaches a passionate climax. The finale is, as it states on Continue Reading →