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Anna Larson 🎻| Kaden Larson 🎹
Creating opportunities to share the joys of music with others in an open collaboration project 🎶

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Karol Szymanowski: Mythes, Op. 30, 2. Narcissus
Mythes Op. 30 (1915) by Karol Szymanowski was written for violinist Paul Kochanski. It stands out as one of the most progressive and innovative works for violin and piano from its time. Its use of quarter tones, trilled double stops, harmonics, and other special effects for the violin are remarkable for the atmospheric effects that take the listener far beyond the notes. The piano writing is equally challenging for its dense harmonies, arpeggios, and extended trills, weaving in and out with the violin in textures that are often polyrhythmic and polytonal yet completely complementary. Out of this complexity comes music that’s wholly evocative and entrancing, depicting scenes of Greek mythology.

🔗Link in bio to read more about the album and order CDs!

#chambermusic #violin #piano #fyc #newrelease by @ensembleconsonari

Kari Cruver Medina: Tell Me a Story: “Three Billy Goats Gruff” (2024)
“Three Billy Goats Gruff” comes straight out of my Nordic roots. It’s a classic Norwegian folktale that tells the story of the three goats Gruff, Little, Middle, and Big, who outwit a hungry troll. Listen for the happy patter of their hoofs “trip-trop” as one by one they are met by the loud cry: “Who’s that crossing my bridge?” Each in turn convinces the greedy troll to wait for the next, bigger goat (who will make a better meal) until finally the largest goat comes along and butts the troll right off the bridge into the ravine below. The clever goats cross and frolic in the fresh grasses of the neighboring field.

The five pieces contained in Tell Me A Story: Folk, Fairy, and Tall Tales were commissioned by consonari in 2024 and premiered in June 2025 at the Interlude Summer Music Festival in Bellevue WA. The pieces were conceived as accessible works intended to introduce classical music and imaginative listening to children and the young at heart.

🔗Link in bio to read more about the album and order CDs!

#chambermusic #violin #piano #fyc #newrelease by @ensembleconsonari

Rebecca Clarke: Lullaby (1909)

The British composer and violist Rebecca Helferich Clarke (1886–1979) left the world with a focused yet extraordinary body of music. As one of the first professional orchestra players ever in London, she also made a name for herself as a top chamber music player whose touring success included playing alongside many of the other top musicians of the day. Her first major compositional success was the Violin Sonata, which garnered immediate attention in a 1919 competition sponsored by Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge. Clarke continued to publish and perform her music to great acclaim, and has been acknowledged for its poetry, color, and emotional and structural cohesion.

🔗Link in bio to read more about the album and order CDs!

#chambermusic #violin #piano #fyc #newrelease by @ensembleconsonari

George N. Gianopoulos: City Vignettes, Op. 29d, 2. Dusk
American lyric poet, Sara Teasdale, first published her set of three miniature poems City Vignettes in 1911 in the collection Helen of Troy and Other Poems. Though Teasdale regularly had bouts of depression throughout her life, which ended in suicide, she was the first person, man or woman, to receive the first ever Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1918.

City Vignettes (1911) by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)
2. Dusk
The city’s street, a roaring blackened stream
Walled in by granite, thro’ whose thousand eyes
A thousand yellow lights begin to gleam,
And over all the pale untroubled skies.

🔗Link in bio to read more about the album and order CDs!

#chambermusic #violin #piano #fyc #newrelease by @ensembleconsonari

Kari Cruver Medina: Tell Me a Story: “Tall Tales” (2024)
This piece is a celebratory tribute to the American tradition of “Tall Tales,” legends that featured exaggerated, outrageous, humorous accounts of folk heroes like Paul Bunyan, John Henry, and Pecos Bill, and their superhuman feats of bravado. The work is a joyous, playful work of Americana.

The five pieces contained in Tell Me A Story: Folk, Fairy, and Tall Tales were commissioned by consonari in 2024 and premiered in June 2025 at the Interlude Summer Music Festival in Bellevue WA. The pieces were conceived as accessible works intended to introduce classical music and imaginative listening to children and the young at heart.

🔗Link in bio to read more about the album and order CDs!

#chambermusic #violin #piano #fyc #newrelease by @ensembleconsonari

Nikolai Medtner’s Three Nocturnes (1907) for violin and piano are inspired by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s poem Nachtgesang, which translates to Night Song. Ranging in emotional character from the serene to the stormy, each of these night songs relies on real partnership between the violin and piano as they sing in near-constant imitation of each other, weaving through variations of entrancing melodies. Protean rhythmic effects and lush harmonies create a dreamscape; a space outside of the world, often cathartic and equally ethereal.

🔗Link in bio to read more about the album and order CDs!

#chambermusic #violin #piano #fyc #newrelease by @ensembleconsonari

The burial of the stars (2024) by Matthew Schultheis

This miniature’s title and inspiration came from Walt Whitman’s On the Beach At Night (different to On the Beach At Night Alone), which, like many of the smaller works in Leaves of Grass, images of cosmic grandeur are presented in a very short space. As such, many passages in the music (especially in the piano part) suddenly open out to huge sonic proportions before shrinking back just as quickly. The opening and closing bars of the piece are a violin “setting” of the poem’s first and last stanzas, with one note per syllable.

🔗Link in bio to read more about the album and order CDs!

#chambermusic #violin #piano #fyc #newrelease by @ensembleconsonari

Karol Szymanowski: Mythes, Op. 30, 1. Fountain of Arethusa
Mythes Op. 30 (1915) by Karol Szymanowski was written for violinist Paul Kochanski. It stands out as one of the most progressive and innovative works for violin and piano from its time. Its use of quarter tones, trilled double stops, harmonics, and other special effects for the violin are remarkable for the atmospheric effects that take the listener far beyond the notes. The piano writing is equally challenging for its dense harmonies, arpeggios, and extended trills, weaving in and out with the violin in textures that are often polyrhythmic and polytonal yet completely complementary. Out of this complexity comes music that’s wholly evocative and entrancing, depicting scenes of Greek mythology.

🔗Link in bio to read more about the album and order CDs!

#chambermusic #violin #piano #fyc #newrelease by @ensembleconsonari

Rebecca Clarke’s Midsummer Moon (1924) was written for Hungarian violinist Adila Fachiri. Clarke wrote of this piece saying, “I’m calling it ‘Midsummer Moon,’ which is the best title I can find that describes it.” The work incorporates the atmospheric tone and harmonies frequently found in the music of her contemporaries, the Impressionist era composers such as Alexander Scriabin and Claude Debussy. The hazy atmosphere of the opening leads into quotations of a British folk-tune in the piano, accompanied by virtuosic arpeggios and bird call-like grace notes in the violin. The ending brings a faint memory of the folk tune underlined with rich harmonies.

🔗Link in bio to read more about the album and order CDs!

#chambermusic #violin #piano #fyc #newrelease by @ensembleconsonari

George N. Gianopoulos: City Vignettes, Op. 29d began as a work for the mezzo-soprano and guitar group, the Malkin-Trybek Duo. The arrangement for piano was born out of necessity and practicality, and the cycle was subsequently arranged on request for various instruments, including the violin.

City Vignettes (1911) by Sara Teasdale (1884-1933)

1. Dawn
The greenish sky glows up in misty reds,
The purple shadows turn to brick and stone,
The dreams wear thin, men turn upon their beds,
And hear the milk-cart jangle by alone.

🔗Link in bio to read more about the album and order CDs!

#chambermusic #violin #piano #fyc #newrelease by @ensembleconsonari

For Your GRAMMY® Consideration: Best Chamber Music / Small Ensemble Performance

TELL ME A STORY from chamber duo consonari (violinist Anna Larson and pianist Kaden Larson) explores music inspired by literature, legend, and folk tradition. Evoking the timeless power of storytelling, the album features 20th and 21st-century works rooted in nocturnes, lullabies, and musical depictions of the moon and stars. The program weaves together African American folk idioms in Florence Price’s Fantasies, Greek mythology in Karol Szymanowski’s Mythes, nocturnal atmospheres from Rebecca Clarke’s Midsummer Moon and Lullaby, and the cosmic grandeur of Walt Whitman in a newly commissioned piece by Matthew Schultheis. George N. Gianopolous’ City Vignettes and Nikolai Medtner’s Three Nocturnes highlight evocative poetry by Sara Teasdale and Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The album concludes with Kari Cruver Medina’s whimsical Tell Me A Story: Folk, Fairy, and Tall Tales.

“We have come to love every one of these pieces and the human connection that they inspire. This album was recorded as true chamber music, balanced live with both parts in the same room, to capture the raw emotions and impressions of the music the best way that we know how — together. We hope that you will feel the joy, peace, and comfort of each note. Happy listening!”

– consonari by @ensembleconsonari

Fantasy No. 2 in F-sharp minor by Florence Price

While the first fantasy suggests inspiration from African American styles, Fantasy No. 2 in F-sharp minor (1940) is distinctly subtitled “based on a folk melody.” While that melody is not identified in the manuscript, her writings suggest that the tune is one she set as “I’m Workin’ on My Buildin’,” a song she transcribed “as sung to Fannie Carter Wood of Chicago / by her grandmother Malinda Carter / a former slave of Memphis Tennessee.” After an extended chromatic piano introduction, the violin introduces the tune but is interrupted after the 2nd phrase, and completes the tune a few measures later. The folk tune returns in pieces throughout the work, worked into different textures and harmonies, ending the fantasy again with a fiery finish.

🔗Link in bio to read more about the album and order CDs!

#chambermusic #violin #piano #fyc #newrelease by @ensembleconsonari