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Latest recordings full of great music by local talent
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Posted: Sunday, December 13, 2015 2:00 am
By Peter Jacobi H-T Columnist | 0 comments
We continue with recordings, taking a few more out of the crush of recent issues to consider for yourself or others around you that would gain pleasure from listening. And I’ll focus on a few that have local ties and origin.

• “Mystic Voices Soaring,” a disc of chamber music for the Native American flute, is the work of James Pellerite who, during his long years as principal with the Philadelphia Orchestra and a teaching career at IU’s Jacobs School of Music, favored the traditional modern concert flute; it was his mastered instrument. On retirement, he sought add-ons for his talent, coming upon the Native American flute that now is his consuming passion. He succumbed to its charms and, because of his celebrity among flutists, managed to give a boost in support for the haunting tones this old instrument produces.
The new CD contains a number of works for the Native American flute that Pellerite commissioned and offers proof the gentle virtuoso not only has become the instrument’s major practitioner but also managed to build a repertoire for its renewed life. Among the composers he’s convinced is a colleague from the Jacobs School, Don Freund, who composed “Medicine Wheel,” set to poems by Emily Bobo, who lives and teaches English in Bloomington (the local Ivy Tech). Bobo’s words — focused on animals that represent traits of character (such as a wolf as teacher, a buffalo as contrarian, a swan as grace, a whale as record keeper, and mouse as detailer) — and Freund’s remarkably agile and haunting music fuse into a package that Pellerite then exploits in performance, with collaboration from soprano Arwen Myers and mezzo Laura Beckel Thoreson.