FREEDOM AND FAITH | CD HOTLIST

This is a highly unusual album of works for string quartet, organized around the theme of “artists whose music represents resilience, resistance, and subversion; all of (whom) also happen to be women.” It opens with the world-premiere recording a relatively conventional string quartet by Jessica Meyer titled “Get into the Now”; “conventional,” that is in its three-movement structure, but wildly less so in its stylistic elasticity, which finds it veering from spiky dissonance to funky joyfulness. One segment of the program is titled Sancta Femina and consists of arrangements of sacred songs by Hildegard of Bingen, Chiara Margarita Cozzolani, and Francesca Caccini; another section is devoted to quirky arrangements of songs associated with Nina Simone, and there’s a very fun vocal-and-strings arrangement of the pop song “A Tisket a Tasket,” based on Ella Fitzgerald’s iconic recording. It ends with a truly lovely one-movement work by Shelley Washington titled “Middleground.” The whole album manages to be simultaneously a hoot and quite thought-provoking, and it evokes some of the Kronos Quartet’s best work of the 1990s.