This is a digital-only release with a street date of November 8, 2024. Special promotional CDs for press and radio are available here.

RSP Records RSP-14
“[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
Rick Sowash has been writing inventive, creative, evocative, and beautiful music for more than half-a century, with more than 500 musical compositions to his credit, as well as eight books, the most recent titled “How Music Means.” Kickshaw Records is proud to present an compilation of some of the composer’s finest music for the season, including a swashbuckling new piece written for the Sylvan Trio that fuses Christmas favorites with the ebullience of pirate songs.
PROGRAM NOTES BY RICK SOWASH:
TRIO #5 FOR FLUTE, CELLO & PIANO: “A PIRATE’S CHRISTMAS” (2023)
There’s a funny thing about certain Christmas carols: change the meter and they sound like pirate songs! Developing that notion and interspersing some original tunes that sound like they might be from the score of a swashbuckling film, I came up with my Trio #5 for flute, cello & piano: “A Pirate’s Christmas!” My friends, the Sylvan Trio, thought the piece was “a hoot and a holler” and recorded it with piratical gusto and glee.
KING ARTHUR’S COURT AT CHRISTMAS for violin, trumpet, cello & piano (1979, rev. 2011)
As befits an evocation of a mythic king and his court, the piece begins with a fanfare followed by a series of joyful dance-like tunes. The music has a medieval hardiness and sounds ‘Christmas-y’ without quoting any existing Christmas carols. The fanfare recurs at the end. This is from a larger work, my “Christmas Legend: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.”
A CHRISTMAS RONDO for string trio (1976, rev. 2011)
The recurring rondo theme, an original carol titled “The King Shall Come,” is given a variation each time it recurs. In between are my own treatments of some infrequently heard Christmas carols — “Wondrous Love,” “A Virgin Most Pure,” “The Holly & the Ivy,” and the stark, mournful shape-note tune “Fiducia,” over the top of which the violin renders, incongruously, “Good King Wenceslas.”
VARIATIONS ON “THE BOAR’S HEAD CAROL” for piano trio (1983)
This piece is a tribute to Cincinnati’s Christ Church Cathedral, which has hosted an annual “Boar’s Head and Yule Log Festival” on the weekend following Christmas since 1939. The event is a pageant put on by church members and centers on a boar’s head (a prop, not an actual porcine head!) with apple in mouth carried into a banquet hall on a silver dish to the sounds of trumpets, strings and choristers.