Celebrated new-music sextet eighth blackbird, whose last three Cedille Records albums garnered Grammy awards, continues to soar with FILAMENT, a sizzling selection of four-world premiere recordings, plus a concert performance of Philip Glass’s influential Two Pages. The title FILAMENT symbolizes the strong ties of friendship and shared musical interests connecting the composers and performers on the album. FILAMENT offers first recordings of Bryce Dessner’s Murder Ballades, a fresh and surprisingly upbeat take on a macabre genre of folk music; Nico Muhly’s Doublespeak, an homage to Glass and the insistent, propulsive repetitions of classic minimalism; and short pieces by Son Lux, To Love and This is my Line, creative remixes of sounds from other tracks on the CD. Dessner, on guitar, and Muhly, on organ, join eighth blackbird for Glass’s Two Pages, recorded live-in-concert at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art.
A genre-spanning musician and composer, Dessner has worked with the Kronos Quartet and Bang on a Can All-Stars and created Cincinnati’s MusicNOW festival. In the pop-music world, he’s familiar as the guitarist with the Billboard-charting, critically acclaimed indie rock band The National. Muhly has worked with Glass and with pop musicians Bjork and Sufjan Stevens. Among his credits are 11 orchestral works and two operas, one of which was performed at the English National Opera and New York’s Metropolitan Opera.
A sextet of flute, clarinet, violin, cello, percussion, and piano, eighth blackbird combines the finesse of a string quartet, the energy of a rock band, and the audacity of a storefront theater company. The Chicago-based “super-musicians” (Los Angeles Times) are “a polished, personable, routinely dazzling sextet” (New York Times). In recent concert seasons eighth blackbird has performed at Carnegie Hall (Zankel and Stern Halls), London’s Barbican Centre, Washington, D.C.’s Library of Congress and Kennedy Center, Stanford University, the University of Texas at Austin, the Eastman School of Music, and Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and Millennium Park. The ensemble’s Cedille Records catalog includes the Grammy-winning albums Meanwhile, Lonely Motel: Music from Slide, and Strange Imaginary Animals and the albums Fred, Beginnings, and Thirteen Ways, eighth blackbird’s first commercial release.

We owe these two masterpieces to the musical friendships Mozart made during his years in Vienna. The celestial beauties of the Quintet K581 were tailor-made for the great clarinettist Anton Stadler, while the Quartet K421, more severe in tone, is one of the six Mozart dedicated to his ‘caro amico’ Joseph Haydn. Here then is the ideal programme for the four friends of the Arcanto Quartett to show their affinities with the Mozartian repertoire – for the very first time on CD.
After trying out several different chamber combinations, Antje Weithaas, Daniel Sepec, Tabea Zimmermann and Jean-Guihen Queyras founded the Arcanto Quartet in 2002. The four musicians, who in addition to their musical affinities also share a close personal friendship, attracted the attention of the musical world right from their first concert in Stuttgart in 2004. Since then the quartet has performed at all the leading concert halls, including the Beethovenhaus in Bonn, the Théâtre du Châtelet and Cité de la Musique in Paris, the Wigmore Hall in London, the Vienna Konzerthaus, the Berlin Philharmonie, and the Edinburgh, Helsinki and Montreux festivals, not forgetting regular tours to Japan and North America.
Jörg Widmann studied the clarinet with Gerd Starke at the Munich Hochschule für Musik and later with Charles Neidich at the Juilliard School in New York. He regularly performs chamber music with partners including Tabea Zimmermann, Heinz Holliger, András Schiff, Christian Tetzlaff, Renaud Capuçon and Hélène Grimaud. As a soloist, he appears with major orchestras under conductors such as Christoph von Dohnányi, René Jacobs, Christoph Eschenbach and Kent Nagano. Several clarinet concertos have been dedicated to and premiered by him, notably works by Wolfgang Rihm, Aribert Reimann and Heinz Holliger. Widmann studied composition with Wolfgang Rihm and Hans Werner Henze, among others, and has won many prizes for his works. The 2012/13 season saw the premiere of his opera 'Babylon' at the Bavarian State Opera under Kent Nagano, and performances by the HRSinfonieorchester and Paavo Järvi and the Berlin Philharmonic conducted by Sir Simon Rattle.