Terrific press release

Here’s a really good classical music press release. Faithful readers will remember how exasperated I’ve been at bad ones (and, sadly, the vast majority of classical music press releases I see are really bad).

SONY CLASSICAL PRESENTS THE ACCLAIMED
COMPOSER/INSTRUMENTALIST EDGAR MEYER
IN COLLABORATION WITH PERHAPS
HIS MOST PROVOCATIVE PARTNER YET - HIMSELF

CDS IN STORES TUESDAY, APRIL 25, 2006

Three-time Grammy Award winner Edgar Meyer has won remarkable acclaim both for the music he has written and for an inexhaustible variety of recordings and live performances with everyone from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center to Garth Brooks, James Taylor, The Chieftains and Yo-Yo Ma, but his latest Sony Classical recording features what is perhaps his most demanding collaboration yet - with himself. Aptly titled Edgar Meyer, the recording presents the double bass virtuoso and composer performing 14 all-new instrumental pieces he has created for himself to perform, on an array of instruments, through the magic of multi-track recording. Recorded in the music room he built in his Nashville home, Edgar Meyer will be released on Tuesday, April 25, 2006.

Hailed by The New Yorker as "the most remarkable virtuoso in the relatively unchronicled history of his instrument [the double bass]," Meyer plays every one of the instruments on the new recording - bass, mandolin, guitar, piano, dobro, banjo and gamba. He says that the album he produced makes him happiest in the way he was able to realize the voice of the bass.

"It was immensely pleasurable spending time at home making music," Meyer says. "When you are dealing with an unusual voice such as the double bass, you usually have to clear the decks for it to work. You can't just put down some drums and some keyboards, and then put a bass on top of it. You really have to move stuff out of the way. I hate to ask that of people I work with, because they're so accomplished. So it's nice actually not being worried about asking anybody for anything, to be able to build a whole record around the voice of the bass without feeling self-conscious about it…I feel it's the happiest I've been with the voice of the instrument overall."

Each of the 14 tracks on Edgar Meyer evolved in a process in which composing, playing, recording and editing were fused and did not have to happen in a particular order, at a particular time. Meyer calls it a type of music-making "I couldn't have composed or planned." Some pieces are heavily composed, others developed as they were built, voice by voice. He notes that the first thing he recorded - a nine-minute piano improvisation - wound up, unchanged, as the foundation for one of the tracks, with other instrumental voices added. Just as the recording process was unpredictable, so was the music itself, which Edgar uniquely wove with classical, jazz and bluegrass threads.\

In addition to his virtuosity on the double bass, Meyer is a fine pianist, but working with the other instruments - banjo, mandolin, dobro, guitar - was a bit of an adventure. "I have stood next to a lot of my favorite players on these instruments for 20 years, so even though I couldn't do what they do, I had an idea of what those instruments could do, and what a good sound on those instruments is," he says. "So I knew what I was going for, and the trick was to find what suited my ability level for each instrument. That meant that each part is equally difficult. Whether it's a super-simple mandolin part or a very complicated bass part, I had about the same degree of difficulty playing each."

Edgar Meyer is an exclusive Sony Classical artist, and his most recent recording for the label is Music for Two, his acclaimed collaboration with his longtime friend and musical colleague Bela Fleck. The two also collaborated on the Grammy-winning Perpetual Motion, also released on Sony Classical. Meyer's catalogue of recordings includes a solo recording of unaccompanied Bach, a recording of the first Concerto for Double Bass and of his own Concerto for Double Bass and Cello with Yo-Yo Ma, and original collaborations with such musicians as Joshua Bell, Mark O'Connor, Mike Marshall and Sam Bush, as well as his work in the traditional classical rule as composer, including Hilary Hahn's recording of his Violin Concerto.

The album’s pretty nice, too.

And now someone’s going to say that this was too easy, that it’s easy to write an engaging press release for a project like this. As opposed, let’s say, to a new recording of the last three Beethoven piano sonatas.

To which I reply: Isn’t there something vivid and personal going on in those Beethoven performances? Something, that is, that could be turned into a vivid press release. And if something personal isn’t going on, why record the performances?