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Our Review

Here's something truly special, very unique, and musically intense. Award-winning pianist Matt Herskowitz is a clever cross between classical brilliance and jazzy perfection. His improvisational Gabriel's Message mutates ten well-loved holiday pieces into organic entities, bobbing and weaving, stretching and receding, shrieking and sweetly coaxing. This instrumental piano music is ambitious, challenging, and superb. Herskowitz originally formulated Gabriel's Message in 2000, but this 2006 release is slightly reconfigured.

Often exploring the demarcation between classical and jazz, Herskowitz finds unity between the two, and the results can be harmonically disturbing. This music is not appropriate as background for a subdued holiday event; Gabriel's Message demands the listeners' attention in a big way. The artist's extravagantly creative improvisations take each well-known holiday number all over the map, but in an incredibly calculated fashion. Relatively mundane pieces like Frosty the Snowman become luminescent in Herskowitz's hands.

Gabriel's Message: Christmas Suite for Piano is a challenging masterpiece that will not appeal to everyone. For those who admire first-rate musicianship of the avant-garde sort, Matt Herskowitz is your man.

--Carol Swanson
(Reviewed in 2006)

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From the liner notes:

Gabriel's Message: Christmas Suite for Piano
Arranged and Performed by Matt Herskowitz

In 2000, friend and music lover David Lieber offered to produce a recording of my arrangements of Christmas carols after hearing me perform them at a Christmas party. We quickly went into studio, and it's there that Gabriel's Message took form as the suite I'd always wanted it to be. During the course of my numerous performances of it over the last five years I added a new arrangement, "Greensleeves," and immediately recognized its placed within the suite; it was as if it had always been missing Also, "Frosty the Snowman" had taken a decided turn for the Orient--toward India. So when Jacques Gagne of Disques Tout Crin offered to re-release the CD, I went straight back into the studio to record the new arrangements.

I'm very pleased to be able to offer them on this new version of Gabriel's Message; I believe they provide a beautiful and fitting completion to the suite, which has become and will continue to be an annual Yuletide journey of self-exploration.
--Matt Herskowitz

Classy, poetic and sometimes surreal, Gabriel's Message resurrects ten of the best known and most overplayed themes in western music, elsewhere flogged and left for dead by the usual Yuletide mercenaries. With this release, Matt Herskowitz has put the Easter back into Christmas.

When you first listen to it, it's like when people and things familiar from conscious life suddenly appear in the night, strangely reconstituted by the logic of dreams. It's a welcome reminder that the better part of your brain is in a constant state of improvisation. Gabriel's Message is the temporal equivalent of a Moebius strip, where the single surface is both past and present. But if the music sometimes seems as old as it is new, whenever you're exploring one of its darker, long-ago stretches, there's always a light up ahead so you can find your way back.

Contemporary and polished, Gabriel's Message is your best defence against the encroaching season. enjoy it as much as I have.
--David Lieber

Matt Herskowitz

Gabriel's Message: Christmas Suite for Piano

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Track List