Welcome to Kickshaw Records, the online home of the new release of Rick Sowash: Full Circle, which features music for clarinet and piano by living American composer Rick Sowash. We also feature all of Rick’s recordings on RSP Classics, including Checkerboard, Ronstadt Plays Sowash, Vol. 1 featuring cellist Michael G. Ronstadt, and Voyageurs, the Upland Trio’s release of the final three Trios for clarinet, cello & piano. We are also proud to offer the Sylvan Trio’s recordings “A Pirate’s Christmas” and Music for Flute, Cello & Piano by Women Composers, as well as the debut recording by Trio Quelque Chose of works for violin, horn, & piano by Johannes Brahms, Charles Koechlin, Johann Friedrich Nisle, Harry Bulow, and Astor Piazzolla.
Rick Sowash: Full Circle
“Modern classical music doesn’t have to be atonal or challenging. Rick Sowash continues to compose very accessible and enjoyable classical music.” — Rocky Lamanna, KWAX, Eugene, OR
“Full Circle” is dedicated to clarinetist and Sowash’s friend Kirk Kassner, who had begun pressing him a few years ago to write something deeply serious that he could play and share. Taking up the challenge, Sowash wrote a five-movement clarinet sonata. “As I finished it,” Sowash wrote, “I sent it to him, and he loved it. He began practicing it, but became unwell, and before he was able to perform it, his health sank rather quickly. Only two or three months after his diagnosis, he was gone, and had not had the chance to premiere” what Sowash decided to call the “Kassner” Sonata.
The album also includes tributes to some of Sowash’s favorite composers, Giacomo Puccini, Richard Rodgers, and Gerald Finzi, as well as the title track, Full Circle, a suite that expands and rescores eight art songs Sowash had written fifty years earlier.
Rick Sowash: Checkerboard
“[Sowash] draws on many sources from the past without losing a sense of his own identity. His music is exclusively tonal, but the approach to harmony is different in each work, and he is never sentimentally nostalgic.” — James Manheim, AllMusic.com
A checkerboard consists of a pattern of contrasting squares of white and black. Taking its cue from this, each movement of Rick Sowash’s Checkerboard Suite offers two starkly contrasting musical elements. The third and final movement opposes the style of Baroque music with the style we call Ragtime, namely the styles of J.S. Bach and Scott Joplin. Checkerboard is also the title of this album of recently-composed pieces for two through seven instruments by Rick Sowash. Also included are a swashbuckling tribute to the adventure film scores of Erich Wolfgang Korngold, a Vocalise in the tradition of Rachmaninoff and Villa-Lobos, and The Loveliest of Tunes, a beautiful meditation on Shenandoah, a tune that has found its way into many of Sowash’s chamber works over a span of sixty years of composing.
Sylvan Trio: Music for Flute, Cello & Piano By Women Composers
“Three fine musicians, and three fascinating people.” — Fred Child, Performance Today
The Sylvan Trio (flutist Suzanne Bona, cellist Josh Aerie, and pianist Greg Kostraba) presents a recording of music by women composers spanning three centuries. Enjoy a Flute Sonata by Princess Anna Amalia of Prussia, plus trios by the trailblazing composer Mel Bonis, whose music caused a stir in fashionable Parisian salons, and one of the 19th-century’s greatest pianists, Clara Schumann. The recording also features works for flute and piano, including a Nocturne, Five Bagatelles, and a Reflective Rag.
