New Release: Alchemy from Wayne Alpern

 

New Release: Alchemy from Wayne Alpern
Label:  Henri Elkan Music
Release Date:  December 19, 2025
Website:  https://www.waynealpern.com

Endowed with the gift to set poetry to music reminiscent of Tchaikovsky, Mozart and Stravinsky, compounded by the acumen to interlace, juxtapose, and coalesce improvised components with the instincts of Broadway Theatre's perennial trailblazers like George and Ira Gershwin and Leonard Bernstein, composer-visionist-stylist Wayne Alpern continues to flex his creative imagination and infatuate audiences with his twelfth musical album Alchemy on his label Henri Elkan Music.  A collection of a dozen pieces of original music for woodwind quintet, the recording is produced by Judith Sherman and performed by the Grammy-winning Imani Winds, whose members are: Brandon Patrick George (flute), Toyin Spellman-Diaz (oboe), Kevin Newton (French horn), Mark Dover (Clarinet), and Monica Ellis (bassoon). 

The frilly winds circling across "Stomp" close with a smooth "Rhapsody in Blue" wail, and the animated character of the woodwinds frolicking, leaping and flittering along "Gigue" have a "Sorcerer's Apprentice" flicker recalling of the Disney film Fantasia.  So many elements in the tracks mark Alpern as a trailblazer in his own right, demonstrating an active imagination, layering and intertwining the horns into a trance-like whirlwind.  "Burlesca" is his tribute to the Hungarian-folk composer Béla Bartók, meanwhile the bopping strut of "Masquerade" is coalesced with the serpentine squiggles of the clarinet harking of "Arabian Dance" from Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker.  His instinct for recomposing music familiar to him is laudable, simulating the bright and upbeat Rococo style of Mozart in "Overture," and the bubbly Ragtime pulse of works by the Gershwin's and Bernstein echoed through "Rag," originally titled "Honey Pie" by Alpern 50 years prior when he wrote the piece.  Alpern describes in the press release that the recording is "a musical rainbow within the chaos and confusion of contemporary music and society itself, metaphorically ruled by the demon, the vulture, and the serpent. This album is that musical rainbow."  A musical rainbow that never ceases to infatuate audiences.