Violist Matthew Lipman's debut, solo album "Ascent" explores music filled with imagination and fantasy. It's an album that has everything from York Bowen and Robert Schumann's now-standard works, a previously unknown impromptu by Dmitri Shosakovich, Franz Waxman's explosive Carmen Fantasie recorded for the first time with viola, and new music from Garth Knox and Clarice Assad.
I definitely think that this album is a portrait of me as an artist because of its varying styles, but also definitely of the amazing and wide range of expressions that you can find in the viola. The idea behind the album actually started first on a recital tour playing a fantasy themed viola and piano program, and I also wanted to commission a piece to kind of go into that vein of style. And so then the album kind of grew out of that. So even though all of the pieces are wildly varied, I do think that there is a common thread between them that they are kind of enraptured with abandon and fantastical in nature.
Matthew Lipman talks about Ascent:
