Classical Changes – Art Deco Trio

Art Deco Trio: Ian Farrington (Piano), Peter Sparks (Clarinet) & Kyle Horch (Saxophone)

The Bite of the Flumblebee (After Rimsky-Korsakov)

Valerie Takes a Ride (After Wagner’s WWV 86B)

Elise’s Blues (After Beethoven’s WoO 59)

Arrival Revival (After Handel)

One Night in Seville (After Bizet’s WD 31)

Jiffy Dance (After Bizet’s WD 31)

Saturday in the Park with Elgar (After Elgar)

Country Breaks (After Beethoven)

Jim’s Nobody (After Satie)

Hungarian High-Five (After Brahms’s WoO 1)

3am Lullaby (After Brahms’s Op. 49 No. 4)

There’s a Storm Brewiing (After Vivaldi’s RV 315)

A Sea Shanty Shake-Up: I. What Shall We Do with the Drunken Sailor II. Lowlands & III. Sailor’s Hornpipe

Lay my burden down:

I. When I Lay My Burden Down

II. Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child

III. Amazing Grace

IV. Steal Away

V. Every Time I Feel the Spirit

SOMM Recordings is pleased to announce Classical Changes, a second disc by the Art Deco Trio, which treats favourite classical pieces to delightful and often dazzling jazz-accented re-workings in variegated arrangements by Iain Farrington. Comprising three remarkable instrumentalists – Peter Sparks clarinet, Kyle Horch saxophone, Iain Farrington piano – the Art Deco Trio is a virtuosic powerhouse in performance and made its acclaimed label debut with Gershwinicity (SOMMCD0631) in 2021. Also featuring five African-American Spirituals and three sea shanties, Classical Change takes the early-20th-century fashion for ‘Jazzing the Classics’ at face value with a collection of 20 first recordings of scintillating new arrangements, translating the works’ ‘original sober environment into one that was more intoxicated’, as Farrington tellingly comments in his booklet notes. Familiar pieces by Beethoven, Brahms and Rimsky-Korsakov are respectively refashioned in the, by turns, evocative, exuberant and ecstatic ‘Elise’s Blues’, ‘Hungarian High-Five’ and ‘The Bite of the Flumblebee’. Similar treatment is afforded Bizet (the excitable ‘Jiffy Dance’ and sultry ‘One Night in Seville’), the ceremonial pomp of Handel (‘Arrival Revival’), grandeur of Elgar (‘Saturday in the Park with Elgar’), and grandiosity of Wagner (‘Valerie Takes a Ride’) alongside vivacious re-imaginings of Satie and Vivaldi. The trio of sea shanties in A Sea Shanty Shake-Up and the five-part Lay My Burden Down, drawn from African-American Spirituals, prove pleasingly amenable to Farrington’s jazz-laced re-fashioning of their various messages and moods.