SEVEN DAYS | THE NEW YORK TIMES - REVIEW

5 Classical Music Albums You Can Listen to Right Now

A new take on Wynton Marsalis’s “Blues Symphony,” a piano cycle by Gregory Spears and Rosa Feola’s solo debut are among the highlights.

by: David Weininger | March 2025

Gregory Spears’s beguiling new solo piano work began life in fall 2021, as an app produced by 92NY. Users could hear one piece for each part of the day (morning, afternoon, evening) for an entire week. Now available in Pedja Muzijevic’s scrupulous and thoughtful recording, the piece can be experienced either day by day or as a self-standing, 21-movement cycle.

I tried both and found different things to marvel at in this openly expressive music. Spreading the experience over a week allows the music to structure the day, harking back, as Spears notes, to the liturgical tradition of singing the hours, such as Vespers and Lauds. There is some wonderful tone painting: the first rustling of dawn in “Monday Morning” and rays of light streaming through the windows in “Tuesday Afternoon.” The ticktock rhythm of “Friday Afternoon” must seem familiar to anyone who has felt impatient for the end of the workweek.

Hearing “Seven Days” all at once, though, makes it easier to appreciate its purely musical virtues, such as the subtlety with which Spears leavens his brightly tonal language with dissonance, and shifts rhythmic energy. When the ghostly sounds of “Sunday Evening” drift into silence, they seem to lead, ineluctably, to the middle C that begins the piece all over again — as naturally, you might say, as day follows night.