David Lang: love fail

After years of performing and touring the modern masterwork, on April 24, 2020, Quince Ensemble released their 4th studio album David Lang: love fail on Innova Records.

Described as "beautiful, beguiling" by music journalist Steve Smith [FULL ARTICLE], love fail (2012) is a 50-minute meditation for four treble voices who play percussion created by Pulitzer-Prize-winning post-minimalist American composer David Lang about the timelessness of love that weaves together details from medieval retellings of the story of Tristan and Isolde with stories from more modern sources.

Hushers

Released in 2016 on New Focus Recordings, Quince Contemporary Vocal Ensemble's second recording, Hushers, posits a new paradigm for a capella vocal music, in which text setting and linear structure exists side by side with works that use the voice as a multi-timbred instrument. In music by Kaija Saariaho, Kate Soper, Warren Enström, and Giacinto Scelsi, Quince delivers strong performances of music that fuse the ever present warmth of the human voice with compositional aesthetics more typically heard in instrumental works.

Motherland

Released in 2018 on New Focus Recordings with recordings by Laura Steenberge, Gilda Lyons, Cara Haxo, and Jennifer Jolley. To us, Motherland means our natal home, worthy of love, critique, and support. It represents the terrain of those who identify as women, as mothers of varying types - creators and producers and life-givers and life-sacrificers. Mother-land is both embodiment and inversion of Emily Dickinson’s “Nature, the gentlest mother” - capable of supporting all life, and of obliterating it with forces as simple as a breath of air. 

Realign the Time

Quince Ensemble’s debut album, Realign the Time, features music written specifically for the ensemble by composers Amanda Feery, Anthony T. Marasco, David Grant, Max Grafe, Morgan Krauss, Ravi Kittappa, and Jonathan Sokol. Check out these reviews from The Box is Empty (Jeremiah Cawley) and i care if you listen (Jason Charney).

Vinyl copies available.