Music for Strings and Brass

Consisting of intimate works for guitar and woodwinds, film scores for chamber orchestra, and everything in between, Brooklyn composer, arranger, and multi-instrumentalist Sammy Weissberg's catalog of contemporary classical pieces is based around lovingly arced melodies, striking chord progressions, and overall, a boundless musical imagination. Music for Strings and Brass, Weissberg's newest release (and his debut for Dear Life Records), features two works that redefine the scope of his artistry, incorporating techniques he has honed during his work arranging for songwriters (The Lemon Twins, Allegra Krieger, June McDoom, Frances Chang, and many more). The album features his commanding, impressionistic String Quartet No, 2 and a Brass Quintet that explores the poignant, voice-like expressivity of each of its instruments. In both contexts, Weissberg reveals himself to be a composer whose humanistic and immediate musical language requires no grand dramatic context to feel deeply emotionally resonant.

Taking inspiration from late-Romantic and modernist composers, Weissberg speaks in a musical parlance that sometimes sounds beamed in from another era. At different points, his work channels the graceful and catchy instrumental themes of Antonin Dvoiåk and Sergei Prokofiev, the atomic rhythmic interplay of Igor Stravinsky, and the luxurious harmonic worlds of Claude Debussy and Nina Rota. Unfailingly, though, he channels these nostalgic points of reference into contemporary-sounding, acutely personal chamber works that feel impossible to misunderstand—elaborate and unpretentious, exceptional and timeless.

His works mirror the most basic instincts and architecture of day-today existence—the sense in which we are always coming and going from somewhere, searching for simple underlying patterns that give complex phenomena their rhyme or reason, and longing for that sense of buoyancy that propels us beyond the familiar. Music for Strings and Brass is the perfect introduction to the way that Sammy Weissberg processes life in sound, one which should rank among the most warm-spirited and single-minded instrumental releases of the year.