Neoclassical Suite is a column that will present 7 recent, distinctive tracks of the neoclassical-modern classical-contemporary -and beyond!- music field. 

The Players

Canovass

(neoclassical)

Canovass attended his first music classes when he was 6 years old, going with boys almost twice his age. He began to play the piano with a neighbor who taught and since then he has not been able to separate himself from the instrument. He studied at a music conservatory where he stayed for 10 years, although he had to leave it to study engineering and work. He never forgot music, he was in groups like La Mota or Nebraska but he always needed to express his own feelings with music and the piano, and compose. That is why this work was born, because it is time to show it to the world.

Jonathan Roberts

(neoclassical, epic music, ambient)

Originating from the Peak District and based in the North West, Jonathan Roberts is a composer and pianist who writes a combination of beautiful, yet haunting, piano melodies and cinematic soundscapes.

With a background in classical and popular music, Jonathan creates refined orchestral scores with modern synth sounds and thematic melodies.

Ron Verboom

(neoclassical, cinematic)

Based in the Netherlands, Ron Verboom is a composer and producer whose work is featured on top global labels and library compilations. He’s collaborated with talented vocalists such as Tiff Lacey and Andrea Britton, among others. It is, however, in the Scandinavian nature that Ron has found the inspiration for his latest neo-classical project. He has been on multiple vacations in Norway and Sweden and often returns to the grandiose, serene and raw nature, as a contrast to the flat fields of Holland. Inspired by the nature in the Nordic countries, his expression on the piano is truly organic, fragile and embraces the feeling that we are just a little dot of the big map.

Ben Cosgrove

(neoclassical, solo piano)

Four years after the release of his quiet, acclaimed piano record, Salt, landscape-inspired composer and traveling pianist Ben Cosgrove has returned with The Trouble With Wilderness, a lush, textured, and expansive set of twelve new songs that consider the role of nature and wildness in the built environment. “I found I was spending a lot of time on stage talking about national parks and oceans and wilderness areas, and not enough about the places that people are more likely to encounter in their everyday lives,” explains Cosgrove, whose career has included artist residencies and collaborations with Acadia and Isle Royale National Parks, White Mountain National Forest, the Schmidt Ocean Institute, the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology, and the New England National Scenic Trail, as well as solo performances in 48 states.

He assigned himself the challenge of writing a set of songs that would allow him to correct this oversight, and quickly found the decision to be eerily well-timed: almost immediately after he began writing and recording demos, the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic would force virtually everyone on the planet both to find a new appreciation for the world just outside their front door and to reconsider the impermeability of whatever boundary they might have imagined to exist between the natural world and the human one. It also put Cosgrove, a musician who has traveled constantly for over a decade, in the unusual and terrifying position of having to sit still. “It really made me kind of have to walk the walk, in terms of the ideas I was trying to illustrate with this new music. Instead of driving eight hours to someplace new each morning, I was going on these daylong rambles all over the outskirts of town pretty much every day for months. I was amazed to find what strange, beautiful, and interesting things I noticed as I passed all the same ordinary-seeming places again and again and looked at them more and more closely.”

Michael Maas

(modern classical)

Michael Maas is an established powerhouse of electronic trailer & production music. Born in 1983 in Germany he was a multi-instrumentalist from the age of 6, and although his early musical education was fundamentally classical, his style is undeniably modern. Fusing mind-bending sound design with pulsating electronic and orchestral compositions has become his trademark, and has won him numerous placements on major-league trailers and TV spots.

Bruce Stark

(neoclassical, solo piano)

Bruce Stark is a classically-trained composer, whose music ranges from solo piano to symphonic works. He graduated from Juilliard, lived over twenty years in Japan, and returned to the U.S. in 2013. His music shows diverse influences from classical, jazz, and contemporary styles. Also a pianist, he has recorded his own compositions and improvisations for Hearts of Space, MA Recordings, and others. He has won several composition prizes and commissions, and currently lives in Redmond, Washington.

website: brucestarkmusic.com

Reza Safinia

(neoclassical, cinematic)

Reza Safinia is a multi-instrumentalist composer and producer based in Los Angeles. With eclecticism at the heart of his methodology, his work spans multiple genres as well as industries, ranging from classical compositions for major film scores to electronic music production. Safinia has worked with several acclaimed artists such as , and , and has toured with .

In the film and television industry, the artist has worked as a composer for soundtracks on projects such as the 2016 Nicolas Cage film The Trust, the 2014 film adaptation of Stephen King’s Mercy, and on the Cinemax period martial arts show, Warrior, originally conceived by Bruce Lee and produced by Justin Lin.

Reza has a lifelong interest in Eastern philosophies and martial arts. As a yoga teacher as well as a Daoist, the producer’s artistry is often expressed as a fusion of two worlds, marrying classical orchestration with elements of contemporary electronic music. This melding of diverse soundscapes allows for an immersive and cinematic harmony in his music.

Safinia will be releasing two albums in 2021, Yin and Yang. The former is a classical music album which studies the feminine energy, expressed in a tranquil contemplative musicality. The latter takes on a masculine form as an electronic production, consisting of progressive house, techno, and electronica, with both albums working as a holistic and meditative body of work exploring cosmic connections.

The Music

Christos Doukakis