James Lyon Releases An Immersive Violin Album
- R.A.G.
- 2 minutes ago
- 3 min read
In a new release from James Lyon, the performer invites you to come through some amazing pieces for violin, bringing out a range of emotion and beautiful texture throughout its entire course.
James is an incredible performer who's had a career teaching at Penn State and has finally been able to release this set of works that spoke to him and let him express his passion and love, not just for the arts, but for performance itself and how being exposed to so much gorgeous classical music has affected him in so many different ways.
The record is called Turning, which for James has multiple meanings, but one of the more pertinent ones is the fact that he's inviting you to turn between composers.
It's an invitation. He wants you to join him in a musical Journey that's affected his life in several ways, and now he's finally had the privilege to perform it.
This is an album with eight works and five different composers.
The first set of pieces is by Albert Spalding.
The record starts with a beautifully haunting Sonata that feels alive and breathing, tense and graceful, simultaneously.
This first piece is performed with such heart yet such precision at the same time. The texture of the violin performance really has a wonderful way of wrapping itself around you.
As you get deeper into the record, you become engulfed in everything. As I mentioned earlier, there are these moods that the pieces go through, and because they are performed with such a love for the craft, everything comes through the way it was intended.
That first track is called "Alone: Moderato e con fantasia" which is a Sonata and E for violin.
This is followed by the next piece of the same title called "Allegro", and this piece, in particular, had an immersive kind of feel, probably simply because within the one piece, it took you through some of those different emotional backings. The moods change; you can hear shifts from dark to light and back again.
There is a brilliant connectivity between the performance and the piece. The Listener is able to really pick up on that, and part of the beauty of songs like this is that it lets your mind escape to wherever it wants to.
Everyone will interpret these pieces a little bit differently. Each listener will soak it in and be affected in a different way. Each person's mind will go off on its own tangent as pieces unfold.
Please do get really intense, including the fourth piece from Albert Spalding, "Alone: Allegro Vivace", which has these amazing bursts of energy and intensity that come and go, like hot flashes that jump at you.
It's pieces like this that affect your energy. This is mainly because you can hear the kind of energy it actually displays in its performance. I think James is absolutely astounding at, not just dynamic balance, but portraying these kinds of energies throughout even just one piece.
In the middle of the record we have a piece by Bruce Trinkly called "Courtyard Tango", which has such an amazing and graceful performance to it, crying out with classic emotion and this sense of desperation.
This piece has some gorgeous melodies and can really pull you into its atmosphere.
One of the things I love about this piece the most is that it is just single-string performances almost the entire way through. So you're really able to soak in the beauty and aesthetic of how the violin emotes.
A lot of these pieces can easily affect you. Their melodies and portrayals of emotion and intensity have unique ways of engulfing you.
I think that's one of the things that I liked the most about the record.
Each piece was different from the last, even when they came from the same composer. They all had a different portrayal of human experience.
And I think that's where all of this really comes from.
Other composers on the record are Nalah Palmer, Carolina Heredia, and Baljinger Singh.Â
And again, each piece feels unique and takes you on a different kind of journey. But all of them have that heavy-handed emotional backbone that you fall right into when you hear them.
This release celebrates James Lyon's 35-year tenure at Penn State, and if you want to hear something that will push and pull you emotionally, you should absolutely not be missing out on this release.
Take a deep dive into this one, listen to it with headphones on because it's absolutely the best way to do it, and see how this will affect you, because it will certainly do just that.