The Story of Ancalagon Records
I founded Ancalagon Records in 1999 (I was the first classical solo musician to create their own label) because I wanted to have complete artistic control over every aspect of my recordings.
In the beginning I made a lot of mistakes. I am a musician first and a businessperson a distant second. I had no idea how to do a lot of it, and it took me a long while to find all the folks who helped then and now with Ancalagon L.L.C..
Sales were pretty strong. But it wasn't until iTunes got in touch with me in 2005 to ask for the Bach album (yep, they called me!) that sales became big enough for Ancalagon to get serious about the next project. With the Concerto Album spending weeks as #1 on iTunes Classical, and nearly a year in the top 20, I was pretty motivated to build on this new success.
It just seemed like the right time to record the complete Bach solo violin works. While it is true that a double CD set is a tall order for a small label, we had one big thing going for us – no need to pay the violinist! This was the first of many projects I have worked on together with Martha De Francisco, and we had some glorious days with the engineer Leslie-Ann Jones at Skywalker Sound, particularly since I am a lifelong fan of George Lucas. It was also my first SACD recording.
The Bach Solo did extremely well in 2007, allowing me to begin thinking about my next project, for which I wanted to go in a completely different direction. A violin concerto had come my way, courtesy of Faber, written by the Australian composer, Matthew Hindson. Scored for a huge orchestra with 28 percussion instruments, no North American conductors wanted to take a chance on it. My reaction was: well then, I'll just record it.
That was the genesis of the Hindson/Corigliano/Liszt/Kennedy project with the Royal Philharmonic of London and Sarah Ioannides conducting. Recorded at Air Lyndhurst Studios in Hampstead, London, it was a huge three days. Expensive to produce, I had to drum up some sponsorships for that record, because modern works just don't sell like Bach. I’m still proud of that one - it took a lot to get that album from inception to finished product, and it will always be the premiere recording of the Hindson. Also, it has a niche audience.
The natural follow up to this was to go with some rather better-known repertoire. “And why not the very best-known?” thought I. Coincidentally an opportunity had just arisen to do a recording with the seemingly unstoppable Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra in Venezuela. We recorded Vivaldi's Four Seasons and Piazzolla's Four Seasons* *(please see note)
2010 seemed like a good time to do a little Mozart back at home in New York City again, particularly the monumental Sinfonia Concertante, which I had been performing with my brother Scott since I was 10 and he 11. We had done a Bach concert together with the Knights in Central Park the previous summer, and their playing was fresh, young, enthusiastic and skilled. We each picked our favourite violin concerto, added the Sinfonia, and lo, the Mozart album was born.
It spent three months on the Billboard Classical chart and was the only independent label there at any point during that period. I considered that to be some sort of victory.
It also won the 2011 Juno award for Best Classical Album.
Later projects include one more Bach album which came out in 2012 – this time Sonatas for Violin and Harpsichord (without the 'sichord’) with Berlin Philharmonic principal Marie-Pierre Langlamet on harp, recorded in Berlin.
I also executive-produced my first album - a project with the Knights orchestra which released in later 2012. We called this oeuvre album A Second of Silence. It is a trip down the minimalism road and includes the music of Satie, Glass, Feldman, and some new transcriptions, as well as the Schubert Unfinished, and his third symphony.
I went back to Berlin in 2013 for a ‘Schubertiade’, an album featuring the soprano Anna Prohaska, Marie-Pierre Langlamet on harp, and cellist Ludwig Quandt, as well as myself.
(I really wanted to call it Harpeggione but it being such a very serious record, that didn’t end up happening.)
In late 2015, a project I had been working on for years with many composers and jazz/improv pianist Matt Herskowitz was at last released – with its working title: Shiksa (although it has 10 names – all of them meaning ‘foreign female weird-looking person ’) We made five videos from this album, all produced by my visual alter ego, Gangsta Squid (please see: Videos from the Shiksa Album)
It features traditional folk tunes from the Jewish Diaspora, Eastern Europe, the Balkans, the Caucasus and Middle East, reimagined for the concert stage. All About Jazz said “Music like this is beyond imagination and talent. It exists only in the loosely-held molecules found on the razor's edge of Creation." (I don’t often bandy quotes around – but I really loved that one.)
Matt and I then did a recording of the Beethoven Kreutzer Sonata and the Franck Sonata in the way we wanted (that one is called Key of A) and then, the Pandemic happened.
A Pandemic project of mine was listening to composers I was less familiar with because they were women. I listened to many, commissioned a few, arranged some, played some already written pieces and created an album for solo violin called She/Her/Hers (See videos here)
The next Ancalagon release will be the soundtrack for the documentary film Dear Lara.
There will be more! And it will no longer be anything resembling normal.
*In 2008 when I made the record in Caracas with the Sistema, I didn’t yet know about the abusive situations they all had to deal with. I now consider myself at the forefront of confronting child sexual abuse in North America, and I am upset that in Venezuela when I worked with the young folks I didn’t know anything yet, therefore did nothing to help them.
To be fair, I was still not open about my own abuse as a child, but my heart goes out to them to this day.
