Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review

Miklos Perenyi, Britten/Bach/Ligeti, Music for Unaccompanied Cello

2012-02-29T05:26:00.000-08:00

An hour of unaccompanied cello? It could be painful in certain hands or with a lackluster program. Thankfully that is far from the case on Miklos Perenyi's Britten Bach Ligeti
(ECM New Series B0016483-02). That is thanks to the artistry of Maestro Perenyi and the well-conceived, well-paced program.

Benjamin Britten's Third Suite, Opus 87 (1971) starts things off brightly, with a diverse series of bravura virtuosi miniatures that gives full scope to the excellence of Perenyi's artistry without descending to the status of mere showpieces. It also alludes to J. S. Bach at the beginning, so setting the stage for the Suite VI in D Major that follows. The Suites for Unaccompanied Cello are some of Bach's most interesting writing, given the challenge of working around his usual complex contrapuntality through the limitations of what can be done with four strings. Of course the music is extraordinarily memorable and Perenyi's ringing tone and impeccable expressive technique allow the music to stand out as it deserves. Perenyi puts himself into the character of every movement as an actor playing a number of distinct parts in a play: jaunty, contemplative, tender, majestic in turn accordingly.

Ending with Gyorgi Ligeti's Sonata (1948-53) is another solid programmatic move, since the contrast of baroque masterpiece and contemporary masterpiece freshens the ears and heightens attention. This is a short but seemingly difficult piece to play well and Perenyi triumphs by phrasing the whole so that the musical logic does not get distracted by what could be abruptly contrasting changes in articulation and executive mode. He heightens also the double-pronged contrast wrapped into the two short movements of the work: a singing, lyrical quality and an exciting dynamic aspect. To this end he gives forth with a truly gorgeous, clarion tone at times, and an empassioned expressivity at other times.

The hour goes quickly. In the end it is a testament to Miklos Perenyi's fine artistry and a fascinating glimpse into three different takes on the cello alone, an aural centerpiece unveiling the sheer beauty of the instrument in the right hands.

Grazyna Bacewicz's Violin Concertos Nos. 1, 3, 7: Modern Works By A Composer We Should Know Better

2012-02-28T04:48:00.000-08:00

Grazyna Bacewicz (1909-1969), Polish composer of the last century, not well known in the States, returns (see September 13, 2011 posting) to our blog with an additional volume of Violin Concertos (Chandos 10533) as played by Joanna Kurkowicz and the Polish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Lukasz Borowicz conducting. This time out it's the 1st (1937), 3rd (1948) and 7th (1965) concerto, plus an orchestral overture from 1943.

Kurkowicz's playing can be poised and lyrical or firey and tempestuous as needed, the orchestral sound and execution are very good and Maestro Borowicz conducts with elan and authority.

As with the previous volume, the works span the length of her career. The seventh shows the most modern leanings and chromatic intensity, the third a lyrical modernism contrasted with chromatic-diatonic fire--with a very dance-like final movement--and the first showing a more neo-classical style, though expanded harmonically and melodically, and always fully Bacewiczian in sound. The debt to Stravinsky is sometimes apparent; other times, there is a definite originality that makes her stand out.

Taken together the two volumes of violin concertos are a revelation. Here is a composer we should NOT miss--and here are performances that give us many reasons why.

She orchestrates well but the solo violin is nearly always the central focus.

Recommended.

Carolin Widmann Alexander Lonquich, Schubert Fantasie / Rondo / Sonate

2012-02-27T04:37:00.002-08:00

After a near-lifetime of listening to particular works by Franz Schubert, it strikes me that his brilliancy is something we shall probably never experience again on this earth. At least not quite like this. His melodic-harmonic genius, his feeling for development, are and perhaps always will be unparalleled. That of course is not to say that others have not and will not do other brilliant things, but there is a purity of intent in Schubert's best works that one can only marvel at, and if you are like me, experience as a high point of musical life.

These thoughts cross my mind as I listen to a new recording of Schubert works for violin and piano by Carolin Widmann (violin) and Alexander Lonquich (piano). The Fantasie D-Dur / Rondo h-Moll / Sonate A-Dur (ECM CD B0016487-02) recording by the duo is as brilliant as are the works, as is Schubert. Widmann and Lonquich are hardly self-effacing in their treatment of these three pieces; they revel in the passionately expressed interpretation that brings out the architecture and poeticism of the works while simultaneously showing the performers' considerable musicianship and togetherness. Their brilliance is put brilliantly to the service of Schubert's brilliance.

The "Fantasie" and its haunting opening theme is marked by passionate bravado in the violin and some extraordinary execution of the surrounding piano cascades. The "Rondo" has a stately yet quite subtle brio to it in Widmann and Lonquich's hands. The "Sonata" has a bittersweet quality that the duo brings out beautifully. Schubert uses some themes, as in the opening movement, that echo strains of Austrian popular music, yet are brilliantly transformed and developed throughout. Widmann and Lonquich's bring out the contrasting thematic moods with playing exemplifying sympathetic and loving attention to the music at hand.

This is wonderful Schubert, ravishingly performed. I surely will return to this recording time and again as a beautiful example of poetic and spirited performances of the works. A triumph!

MC Maguire, Nothing Left to Destroy

2012-02-24T04:45:00.001-08:00

Mixology, MC style, has come of age as an avant art form. It's come quite a distance from the disco days when a dj could get a couple of recordings going in synch and augment one finished production with another, or with the same disc on a second turntable. Not to take away from those days and the subsequent early development. It could be cleverly done. But it wasn't art. Not then. Today you have DJ Spooky and other sophisticated mixologists who aspire and sometimes attain the status of composer, even "serious" composer.

MC Maguire, with the aid of his CPU (read computer) has most assuredly catapulted over the top of dance music to create two full length concertos on Nothing Left to Destroy (Innova 813). It's a melange of collage materials, acoustic, natural, electronic, noise, music as a kind of orchestra pitted against violinist Benjamin Bowman for "The Discofication of the Mongols" and against flautist Douglas Stewart for "S'Wonderful (That the Man I Love Watches Over Me)."

These are madcap juxtipositions of the aural kitchen sink avec soloist. The first piece starts with a "slower" quasi-modal tonal centered violin part and a soundscape that ever-transforms in virtuoso sound manipulation sequences. It gets more and more frenetic as it goes along, more and more there is the CPU orchestra as contrarian, even antagonist to the soloist. It's a fascinating listen.

The piece for flute and CPU bears some relation, now covert, now somewhat overt, to some old pop standards (hence the title). It is busy and turbulent, with the beauty of the flute part making itself known over the trashcan aesthetics of the CPU virtual orchestra.

The music may come out of a DJ stance, but its principal forbear I suppose you could say is John Cage and his live and tape manipulated collage pieces consisting of various prerecorded "found objects"--in his 1950's electronic mix pieces, and in the second phase, with live collaging beginning notably with "Variations IV." But I suppose you could also say John Cage (aided by his often-assistant David Tudor) was the first MC!

What counts in the end is the finished work--the two pieces presented for us on this disk. They are noisy, chaotic, anarchic but not formless. And in their own way they are beautiful.

Recommended for the Gyro Gearloose in everybody. Welcome to the future?

Sofia Gubaidulina, Canticle of the Sun, Kremerata Baltica, Riga Chamber Choir

2012-02-23T05:04:00.003-08:00

Sofia Gubaidulina is one of the originals of our era. A new release comes to us from ECM this week, confirming and extending that idea. Canticle of the Sun (ECM New Series B0016445-02) presents the title work as performed by the Riga Chamber Choir, Maris Sirmais conducting, with Nicolas Altstaedt as cello soloist plus two percussion and celesta. The disk also features the world premiere recording of "The Lyre of Orpheus" with Gidon Kremer as violin soloist, Marta Sudraba, cello soloist and the Kremerata Baltica.

Both works are substantial, well performed and sound terrific.

Gubaidulina makes a music with much space, ethereal headzone quietude and her own kind of tutti confluence. All the hallmarks of her mature style coexist in both works/performances: "Orpheus," a kind of meditative orchestral piece with prominent violin and cello solo parts; "Canticle," a choral essay combining echoes of Orthodox chant and post-serial expressivity, the old and the new. Ms. Gubaidulina so deftly interweaves such things in her best work. This is part of what makes her one of those great new Eastern European composers to my mind, contemporary in the most current sense.

It is an enthralling set of performances of music that helps define the world we are in.

Axiom: Society of Composers, Inc., An Anthology of New Music

2012-02-22T04:51:00.001-08:00

Axiom (Navona 5856) is the 26th volume of the Society of Composers, Inc. CD anthology series. It consists of six diverse compositions by six composers from around the world. You may not be familiar with the composers (I certainly wasn't with most of them) and in part that is the point, to introduce music by composers who deserve a hearing. So there are works by Michael Boyd, Joo Won Park, Israel Neuman, Liviu Marinescu, Jay C. Batzner, and Peter Van Zandt Lane.

There are electro-acoustic soundscapes, pieces for conventional instruments and electronics, pure electronic music and a chamber work. All are worth hearing. If this is a gauge of where new music is today, it shows that there is a multi-stylistic eclecticism prevailing. This of course doesn't contradict my experience of surveying the music being recorded and listened to over the last decade, and in many ways that has been true of the overall situation in the last 100 years. New styles coexist with older ones, composers work in any number of directions in any given synchronous "now".

Perhaps though we have today a world where no one style dominates as the main innovative force, such as serialism did in the '50s of last century, or late romanticism did in, say, the '10s. We live in the present, necessarily. Someday music historians may look back and identify a style trend happening right now as what was important for the era. It is not clear on the ground if that will be so and, if so, what that will be. Certainly not in terms of this anthology. The works represented here do not show a marked tendency to incorporate non-formalist vernacular into the modernism the works espouse, for example. We've seen that can be a factor in the music heard lately in other circles. This hardly matters in terms of the music presented in this anthology. It is well-wrought and advanced music in the best sense. Whether it represents the most viable trends in composition world-wide is probably moot. It's interesting music, after all, and what more should we expect?

Recommended.

Javier Perianes, Noches en los Jardines de Espana (Nights in the Gardens of Spain) and Solo Piano Works

2012-02-21T05:06:00.000-08:00

Pianist Javier Perianes, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and conductor Josep Pons collaborate for a beautiful version of Noches en los Jardines de Espana (Nights in the Gardens of Spain) (Harmonia Mundi) for piano and orchestra. Maestro Perianes gives us a rather delightful selection of de Falla's solo piano works as well. The end result is top-notch de Falla, played with luminous transparency, with the Spanish element and the interpretive impressionist element balanced well.

The Jardin orchestral work in this performance is filled with the perfume of the flowers, the fresh but sultry feel of a tranquil space in time in the season of full blooming, with the magic of the night and its reveries. It is a very sensuous and not-too-romantic version, which to me most closely approximates de Falla's intentions and reveals the work in all its originality.

The piano solo pieces are marvelous companions to the main work. They too have shimmer and a very Spanish melodic and rhythmic element. The works cover a broad spectrum of de Falla's career, from the rather early but highly evocative 1906-09 "Cuatro piezas espanolas" to the 1935 "Pour le tombeau de Paul Dukas".

Javier Perianes seems an ideal de Falla interpreter. And this is some of de Falla's most spellbinding music. Highly recommended.

Dream Zoo, the Avant Cabaret Music of Valerie Kuehne

2012-02-20T05:04:00.000-08:00

Life in the United States, in my generational view anyway, is a life of continual loss. You lose things. A piano, friends, a house, a job, parents, your car keys, that important note you wrote to yourself, your youth. And then you (one hopes) gain things too. There's always new music, for example. Here today is something to gain. It's the music of Valerie Kuehne, in the guise of the group Dream Zoo. She writes the music, plays cello, and sings what is variously dubbed classical, experimental, melodramatic popular song, avant cabaret.

Like Friday's music it has a bit of a sprechstimme (speech-song) aspect, which of course cabaret always has had, presumably well predating Schoenberg's "Pierrot".

So there's a six-song self titled album Dream Zoo (self-released) which you can listen to on Facebook and My Space, and can buy as a download on Bandcamp (Facebook links you to them). Now I must caution you that this music may be an acquired taste (it was for me) so that hearing some of it while staring at a computer screen may not be the best way to experience the music.

It's music that has a cerebral-emotional intensity, modern expressionist chamber music if you like, and the first hearing, especially in less than ideal circumstances, may put you off. The lyrics are about a dissociative surreal metaphysical angst in an everyday dream world. I am not sure Ms. Kuehne would put it that way, but it hit me that way.

It is music that grew on me to the point where I now appreciate it...like it, even. First time through I almost hated it. But that's something I lost as I listened time and again.

If you download the album and do as I did, you may find that you feel the same way.

William Vollinger, Raspberry Man

2012-02-17T06:41:00.000-08:00

Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire" brought the art of sprechstimme into the vocabulary of new music. Speech-song stays with us in various ways. One highly idiomatic and funny way is with William Vollinger's Raspberry Man (Navona 5857), a short ten minute, two work single CD.

The title work is a chamber piece for small group and singer-recitator. The composer does the vocal part; the Juventas Ensemble takes on the instrumental parts. "Raspberry Man" is a wryly funny sung-spoken story that skillfully combines modern chamber music compositional style with an amusing story about a fellow who stood outside Jack Dempsey's Restaurant in Manhattan and gave passers-by the raspberrys.

The second short piece, "Emmanuel Changed" has a similar trajectory.

It's interesting, funny, well performed and well written music with a definite twist.

Hubert Howe, "Clusters," New Music for Electronics

2012-02-16T04:53:00.000-08:00

Electronic music? It still continues on out there. The great composers who worked in the medium helped change the texture and periodicity of music last century and helped accustom audiences to sounds that now form a routine part of rock, pop and hip-hop records listened to by mass audiences. Of course the structural-timbral advances that such composers made possible live on in the original works. Now that we all are familiar with the sounds, we can return to the originals and evaluate them as music rather than as a shocking new aurality.

At the same time there are composers still working fruitfully in the field. One of them is Hubert Howe. His album Clusters (Ravello 7817) gives us seven relatively brief works realized in the six years between 2006-2011. All relate to one another as soundscapes of sustained electronic clusters (hence the title of the album), the electronic music equivalent of orchestral harmony, albeit in exotic timbres with as much or more noise-aggregate simultaneity than conventional harmony per se. Howe composes and realizes these aggregates in ways that show an inventive sonoric ear and a feel for variety in continuity.

You who know little of electronic music and you who have sampled and studied a great deal of it--you both will benefit from this very interesting set of pieces. Give it an earful.

Neil Thornock, "No Stopping, Standing, or Parking:" Music for Saxophones

2012-02-15T04:40:00.000-08:00

There is no stopping new music. Leaving aside the question of who would want to do that, if we look for it, it is everywhere. It may not get much media coverage. It may not be listened to by millions of teaming throngs of admirers, but it continues on day-after-day, year-after-year, its creators making a living at it in some way if they are to continue, hoping for a time when their music is recognized, or perhaps basking in the limited sort of recognition available to them in the contemporary world.

Today we take a look at another such composer and another such group of performers--all going at it with conviction and perhaps some courage. I speak of Utah composer Neil Thornock and a group of performers that includes the United States Coast Guard Saxophone Quartet (didn't know they had one!). The album is called No Stopping, Standing or Parking (Navona 5861). It's six of Thornock's works, all involving at least one saxophone. There is a piece for solo soprano sax, one for flute and alto, one for alto and harpsichord, one for alto, tenor and piano and two for sax quartet.

Thornock has a tendency to write music that moves along (so the title of the album is quite appropriate) in ways that have to do with the interlocking motion of Balanese Gamelan, certain forms of avant jazz and rock, and minimalism (though here the repetition factor does not play a prominent role in the music and mostly is only present for a moment as a soon-to-be varied or developed motif). Now that movement does not apply especially to the slower movements and passages that are peppered here and there throughout the program. But it does serve to encapsulate the Thornock musical personality on display.

What his music does often do is develop developmental music dialogs that get punctuated by short tutti phrases of a rather emphatic nature. Sometimes there are longer emphatic interactions as well, especially in the pieces for sax quartet.

It is music that is in its own way "in the air." There's a hectic pace of life in much of the post-industrial/industrial world we are in, and art in this case imitates life. That is not to say that Thornock's music is not original. It is. It's driving. It's exhilarating. It charges forth. And it's very well played on this disk.

Recommended.

Benjamin Broening, Recombinant Nocturnes for Two Performers on Pianos, Duo Runedako

2012-02-14T04:16:00.000-08:00

Benjamin Broening gives us in his work Recombinant Nocturnes (Innova 784) a long series of meditative, spacious, night reveries for two performers on one, two and four pianos and a subtle use of electronics. His music has something in common with mid-to-later Messiaen and George Crumb in its use of gently repeating, transforming, non-insistent motives surrounded by sustain-pedaled luminous darkness in expressive pianistic sound and cavernous pedal resonance.

Duo Runedako performs the work with sensitive and dynamically brilliant execution. Ruth Neville and Daniel Koppelman work as one with results that charm the ear. There are 13 noctural emissions in all and they vary from the quietly mysterious, with quasi-Asian inside-the-piano dampening punctuations, to the dramatically powerful. This is the music of night magic, of exotically perfumed flowerings in unseen glades.

It is music of beauty performed with sureness, with poetic conviction and gestural grace.

This is well-worth having! It is music of special appeal.

Andrew Violette, Sonata for the Creation of the World, For Solo Organ

2012-02-13T04:29:00.000-08:00

Andrew Violette wrote a monstrously long work for organ, Sonata for the Creation of the World. He performed it last year at the Baptist Temple in Brooklyn, NY. It was recorded and can now be had as a three-CD set on Composers Concordance Records (COMCON6). It begins with some long drones and held chordal blocks, gets moving somewhere around midway with sonorities that show a lineage with Messiaen's celebrated music for the instrument, and then concludes with a lengthy chromatic/diatonic movement that has a chorale feeling to it, though it does not break readily into smaller phrase lengths but rather gives out with harmonic progressions that seem almost infinite. The melodic content becomes more ornate as it progresses and it does have a kind of mystic feeling to it suitable to the genre and programmatic content.

At three full CDs this is a huge amount of music to digest. I've spent nearly a month listing to each section rather intently and in the end I still have not wrapped my ears around the whole. There's so much of it and it would be quite difficult to listen to the whole thing in one stitting. I never did, anyway. The final movement can be downright tiring on the ears.

I come away from it with a feeling that there are parts that appeal to me (the first four movements) and parts that do not because they do not seem entirely coherent and/or digestible (the very long final movement). It will certainly interest diehard collectors and appreciators of the organ repertoire. Whether on listening repeatedly they will become convinced that the whole is cohesive, coherent and justifies its colossal sprawl I do not know. I will leave that up to them. As for me, I may stick to the earlier, shorter movements.

Gene Pritsker, "William James's Varieties of Religious Experience" Chamber Opera, 2012

2012-02-10T05:13:00.000-08:00

Chamber opera has the advantage of immediacy but of course does away with the "grand" spectacle of a full production. In many ways the chamber format is the ideal medium for Gene Pritsker's William James's Varieties of Religious Experience, the recording of which will be officially released in several weeks (Composers Concordance 007) (but would appear to be available already on the internet, at least as a download). I say ideal because it is a dramatisation and operatic treatment of a lecture given by the American philosopher William James in the early days of the last century. The lecture itself was meant for a small attentive audience and the testimony it quotes from at length describes first hand a number of different lived religious experiences; the intimate nature of the lecture and the disclosures seem best suited for the smaller chamber opera situation.

The nearest contemporary work analogous to Pritsker's Experiences would be to me Michael Nyman's The Man Who Mistook His Wife for A Hat, like Experiences a one-act chamber opera, in this case based on a well received book by neurologist Oliver Sacks describing a rather different set of lived experiences.

Experiences builds around a chamber ensemble of two electric guitars (Gene Pritsker and Greg Baker), cello (Dan Barrett) and contrabass (Larry Goldman). An announcer and a narrator (as William James) take on spoken parts. The four testimonials are sung by Marc Molomot, Lynn Norris, Chanda Rule and Charles Coleman, respectively.

As is often the case with Gene Pritsker's music, the stylistic range is broad and the synthesis effective. Like his offshoot work VRE Suite (which I reviewed some time ago on my Gapplegate Guitar site
(http://gapplegateguitar.blogspot.com)
there is a contemporary rock element present in the interlocking parts for two guitars. Then there is the contemporary classical element in the cello & contrabass parts, an operatic and a gospel element in the vocal parts.

All this comes together nicely and memorably in the work.

It is yet another convincing example of Gene Pritsker's originality and distinctiveness as a composer. It should interest and delight those who seek the "new" in new music. This is indeed new!

Charles Koechlin, Les Heures Persian, for Piano Solo, Ralph van Raat

2012-02-09T04:29:00.000-08:00

Charles Koechlin (1867-1950) was a maverick. While the cutting-edge music of France was the impressionism of Debussy and Ravel, Koechlin went beyond into a territory few occupied at the time, and none like he did. His Les heures persannes, in the version for solo piano, was written between 1916-19. The 16 pieces have a modern bite to them, a more complex and pan-tonal harmonic-melodicism than the impressionists, and a broader dynamic from very soft to fire-drill ultra fortissimo.

Pianist Ralph van Raat has recorded the cycle, which is great because it is available on Naxos (8.572473) at their budget price.

Van Raat gives us a sensitive yet turbulent reading, lingering over the hushed mysteries and driving with passion in the edgier sections.

This is first-rate Koechlin and it is first-rate Ralph van Raat.

Xavier Montsalvatge, Canciones & Conciertos

2012-02-08T04:40:00.000-08:00

Xavier Montsalvatge (1912-2002) does not ring many bells among modern classical listeners over here in the States. Why his music has not been exported very much I do not know. I only know that I too am not very familiar with his music. So when I had a chance to review the disk produced for the centennial of his birth, Canciones & Conciertos (Hanssler Classics 98.642), I readily accepted. It is a full disk of orchestral songs and concertos. The NDR Radiophilharmonie takes the virtual stage here, Celso Antunes conducting.

From the evidence of this music, Montsalvatge has a somewhat eclectic stylistic range that he occupies with grace. Often prominent is his use of the rhythms and tonalities of his native Spain--Catalonia, to be specific. There is an element of neo-classicism a la Stravinsky present in the "Poema concertante," the "Cinco canciones negras" and "A la espanola," the latter a brief movement from his "Tres danzas concertantes." There is much to like in these three pieces. Rachel Barton Pine handles the solo violin part elegantly for the first work; mezzo-soprano Lucia Duchonova convinces on the song suite.

The final work, "Concerto breve" combines romantic bravura with Spanish rhythms and a touch of the modern harmonic tang. Jenny Lin does a good job with her impassioned pianism, and there are passages that delight the listener with well crafted melodic turns, stirring orchestral tuttis and lyrical atmospheric quietude. The occasional Rachmaninovian piano bombasts to me mar what otherwise is some very interesting, captivating music.

So there is my take. This shows us a very good compositional craftsman with intimations of brilliance. The music is well played and there is little doubt that here we have a modern Spanish composer who deserves to be heard more often.

Fretwork, Bach's Goldberg Variations Arranged for a Consort of Viols

2012-02-07T04:22:00.000-08:00

The sheer truth of the matter is that Johann Sebastian Bach's Goldberg Variations, like many of his other keyboard works, has such brilliant part writing that it readily lends itself to arrangement for different instrumental combinations. That is brought home forcibly with Richard Boothby's version for a consort of viols, performed movingly by the group Fretwork for I believe a 2-CD set (my download review copy is 90-minutes of wonderful Bach) on Harmonia Mundi. There have been versions of other Bach works for expanded instrumentation, his "Art of the Fugue" and "Musical Offering" come to mind as especially well done in previous years. This Fretwork recording earns a top position as one of the most distinctive of them all.

The special early music archaicism of the consort gives this music a radical new resonance, bringing out the parts in colorful pastels and throwing in relief the distinctive intertwining of part with part.

It convinces me that Bach's architectural keyboard counterpoint retains and even increases its brilliance if arranged for the right sort of instruments and played with expressive care, which is certainly the case here.

It is a joyous experience. Bach adepts and general music lovers will find this recording a sweet revelation I would think. I did.

Howard Hanson Symphony No. 6, Symphony No. 7, Seattle Symphony, Schwarz

2012-02-06T04:28:00.000-08:00

Howard Hanson (1896-1981), American composer, came into his most original incarnation in his later years. His Symphony No. 6 (1968), Lumen in Christo (1974) and Symphony No. 7 "A Sea Symphony" (1977) mark out a Late Romanticism that was wholly his own.

Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony Orchestra and Chorale give us some nicely done interpretations of all three works on their final volume of his complete symphonic cycle (Naxos 8.559704).

The Sixth has an extended sonority that stands out for its orchestrational brilliance, expanded tonality, thematic dramatics and effective use of the percussion section. Lumen in Christo has some beautifully contemplative passages for chorale and orchestra, flowing, a waystation into Hanson's mature contemplation of the mysteries of his belief and faith, beautifully sung and played under Schwarz's masterful evocation. The Seventh is the symphonic farewell, a symphony of the sea. Hanson works out an encompassing and original harmonic-melodic sequencing, initially stating a thematic cell with quiet juxtipositions of fifths that ultimately deviate like waves breaking their symmetrical linearity, with waves of gradual crescendo and decrescendo for chorale and orchestra that give us a mimesis of the ebb and flow of the sea, of the tides in their ceaseless action. It is a very poetic and moving work.

Those who don't know Howard Hanson's music would do well to start here. Schwarz and the massed forces of the Seattle Symphony give us a modern but romantically empassioned reading of the works in fine sonic spendor. A very fitting capstone to Schwarz's symphonic cycle and well recommended.

Drew Baker, "Stress Position"--Piano Music Played by Marilyn Nonken

2012-02-03T05:03:00.000-08:00

The piano meets a new world of sound on Stress Position (New Focus 116). Pianist Marilyn Nonken acquits herself well as the piano soloist, ably assisted on "Gaeta" by Drew Baker, second piano, & Sean Connors and Peter Martin on water percussion.

It's an interesting collection of works in the new avant classical mode, which means it seeks to realize sound textures more than produce an abstract canvas of expanded, jagged tonality. So in "Gaeta" we have atmospheric water percussion murking and droning to set up inside the piano and otherwise contextual key-sound expansions. "Asa Nisi Masa" has very quiet beginnings and a wistful sort of sparse note and cluster ambiance. "Gray" continues the mood with very quiet emptiness punctuated by delicate tone reminiscences from an unspecified life-past, if you will. "National Anthem" has more of that and completes the mood. The finale, "Stress Position" amplifies the piano for a rhythmical tattoo that starts in the very lower register and builds, adding higher frequency clusters. Not to be flip, but it does remind me of the sort of thing one did on the piano as a kid to imitate Native American music. It's well done at that, though.

In the end one is left with a feeling that a very definite compositional mood-set and ambiance has been put forward with success and a discerning sound-tone painting talent. Don't expect Chopin and listen on its own terms and you will no doubt get something good from it.

Giovanna Pessi, Susanna Wallumrod, "If Grief Could Wait," Singular Arrangements of Purcell, Cohen, Drake, Wallumrod

2012-01-31T04:37:00.000-08:00

If Grief Could Wait (ECM New Series) offers a remarkable nexus of historically diverse stylistic elements, subjected to the crucible of Giovanna Pessi's arrangements, her harp and the pure-tongued vocal songbird beauty of Susanna Wallumrod. To be more specific, the two have made a most interesting selection of the songs of Henry Purcell, plus the 20th century ballads of Leonard Cohen and Nick Drake, and several by Ms. Wallumrod herself, and gone on to create arrangements of sheer beauty that manage to transcend both early music performance practices and those of the folk songwriting of the modern era to bring us to a place somewhere without location in concrete time.

The ensemble of Pessi's harp, Jane Achtman's viola da gamba and Marco Ambrosini's nyckelharpa gives off a resonant, contemplative sweet-sorrow in keeping with Late Medieval-Renaissance song ethos. When conjoined with the deeply thoughtful lyrics & Ms. Wallumrod's vocal unpretentiousness and beauty, a spell of magic weaves its way through the performances that puts it in a world of its own.

One is vaguely reminded of the folk qualities of Joanna Newsom and early Joni Mitchell as one is simultaneously put into a sweet melancholic mood brought on by the nearly timeless quality of the songs, of the new world meeting the old without scullying the impact and essence of either sensibilities.

The ensemble arrangements, the gentle beauty of the harp ensemble, Ms. Wallumrod's movingly restrained, wistful voice and the lyric beauty of the songs make for an extraordinary listening experience.

This is one of those rare albums that transcends time and place to transport us into a never-never land of forgotten worlds, of the impossible longings of people both here and no longer here. In the process Henry Purcell's songs never sounded so appealing, nor has Leonard Cohen's for that matter.

It will be available in the States in about a week. By all means, if you are a musical dreamer, do not hesitate to get it and immerse yourself in its joyous sorrows. Pessi and Wallumrod bring us to a place both fragile-vulnerable and strongly transcendent. Do not miss it!

Isabelle Faust, Berg/Beethoven Violin Concertos, Claudio Abbado, Orchestra Mozart

2012-01-30T04:55:00.000-08:00

Isabelle Faust brings something to the violin concerto repertoire that cannot really be taught--a restrained passion and dreamy quality to her playing, along with a ravishing tone. In a few days her recording of the Berg and Beethoven Concertos (Harmonia Mundi) will be released, accompanied by the Orchestra Mozart under the baton of the estimable Claudio Abbado.

The Berg Concerto has the quality of wistful sorrow and a poetic remembrance of loss, of things past (its subtitle is "On the Death of An Angel" and it was dedicated to the memory of a young lady Berg knew, stricken and taken from the world at an early age). Ms. Faust and Maestro Abbado bring out those qualities superbly with a kind of liquidity and flow to the performance I can't recall ever hearing so affectively handled. It is a most moving performance, one of the very best I have heard.

Beethoven's concerto of course has another series of moods which Faust and Abbado handle nicely. Isabelle comes through with a more bravura version of her sweetness of tone, and Abaddo and Orchestra Mozart give us all the nuances of this masterwork in all the right places.

All I can say is "Bravo!" An excellent recording in excellent sound. The Berg is stunning. The Beethoven uplifting and upbeat.

Reto Bieri, "Contrechant: Music for Clarinet Solo"

2012-01-26T04:35:00.000-08:00

New music/modern classical music makes demands upon the performer in ways no style of music has previously known (though new jazz can do so as well, sometimes in quite different ways). The expansion or absence of pitch centers at times means that musicians and vocalists must develop an extraordinarily advanced sense of intervallic acumen and a more complex sense of the relationships between multiple tones in a piece (beyond conventional harmonic recognition). The often irregular and otherwise advanced precision rhythmic figuration places demands on the performers that can be considerable. And for many if not most instruments and vocalists as well a body of new sound producing techniques have arisen over the past 100 years, which need to be mastered along with those of conventional classical music. In contrast to an ultra-precise production of pitch, color, timing and dynamic, there are works that expect performers to develop a keen aural imagination and ability to improvise in the course of realizing a piece.

All these things come to the fore in woodwind performance practice, including of course music for the clarinet. With this in mind we look at a recent CD of very modern music for solo clarinet, Contrechant (ECM New Series 2209), performed by Reto Bieri. There are seven demanding works by six composers, some of the latter well known and some not as well. Luciano Berio, Heinz Holliger, Elliott Carter, Peter Eotvos, Gergely Vajda and Salvatore Sciarrino are each represented, Heinz Holliger with two works.

Clarinetist Rero Bieri, Swiss National, Julliard trained, unleashes a formidable arsenal of modern techniques for the clarinet in a recital where brilliant musicianship and aural poetics conjoin nicely. He has mastered the modern idiom in ways that put him at the forefront of virtuoso wind exponents practicing today. The works make considerable demands. Bieri saturates the performance soundstage with a dazzling array of color, contrast and expressivity.

It is most certainly a tour de force performance. The works are varied and ever reshaping one's notion of the subtle nuances of the instrument and its expressive capabilities today. Of course a large part of that has to do with the exceptional abilities of Maestro Bieri.

Contrechant deserves landmark status as a marvelously invigorating melding of technique and aesthetic sensibility, composition and performance, musical abstraction and concrete sound color invention. Bravo!

Elliott Miles McKinley, String Quartets, The Martinu Quartet

2012-01-25T04:52:00.000-08:00

The institution of the string quartet has remained a central if sometimes more "inner-sanctum" oriented part of classical music since Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert wrote their highly involved masterpieces for the configuration. It remains an idiomatic kind of musical retreat, often a special space for the most seriously new-form-seeking aspects of a composer's works through to today.

Elliott Miles McKinley embodies that "today" with at least six string quartets in hand. The Martinu Quartet commissioned Nos. 4-6 and perform them with great spirit and presence on the Navona (5855) release of same.

This is music of considerable depth and subtlety. High modernist for the most part, rhythmically sophisticated, the works in a way are the equivalent to some of the painterly abstractions of the New York School and beyond, in that they are intended as pure music, untrammeled by considerations of extra-musical references or vernacular expressions. Like Mozart referenced Haydn, McKinley most certainly has given some attention to the quartets of Bela Bartok and Elliott Carter. It's a lineage he fits in with and to me does not at all suffer by the comparison, but rather finds a way to extend the modernist tradition with his own inventive take.

I don't feel that a detailed analysis in this space is practical; nor do I think that it would make a great deal of difference to your appreciation of works you have not yet heard. Why? First of all because it would take me some weeks to do the music justice and secondly because my blogs tend to point the reader toward good and interesting music, more than they try to express the verbal equivalent of that music in any detailed way. Since the map cannot be the territory and overarching form becomes apparent in many sophisticated modern works through a study of the scores, etc., I shall remain mute on the details, except to say that there are many sublime moments to be heard here.

Suffice to say that Elliott McKinley has gone the distance in creating three original modern quartets and the Martinu Quartet do a fabulous job recreating them for our ears.

This one is definitely recommended!

Lisa Smirnova, Georg Friedrich Handel's "Die Acht Grossen Suiten": Handel's Eight Suites, Beautifully Performed on Piano

2012-01-24T04:51:00.000-08:00

There was a time in my purist-thinking youth when I distained the performance of Baroque era harpsichord works on the piano. No, I thought, this is inauthentic. So I stuck with my Wanda Landowska LPs and sported a holier-than-thou attitude. Then I heard Glenn Gould play Bach, and Jorge Demus...and I quickly changed my mind.

Russian-Austrian pianist Lisa Smirnov brings up-to-date the tradition of using the expressive and sonoric possibilities of the modern pianoforte to bring out the glowing musical phraseology of a Baroque masterpiece--in this case Handel's Die Acht Grossen Suiten (ECM New Series 2-CD 2213/14), which is also known as "The Eight London Suites" or "Suites de Pieces pour le Clavecin."

She worked on the entire opus for five years. What she does with it is in part what you expect from a world-class pianist, to use the dynamic swell of the modern piano and its variable articulation responsiveness to build up a very expressive music ediface. The music sings, the inner and outer parts are laid out before us with clarity, logic and poetic charm. The full suite is rarely presented in its entirety and with Ms. Smirnova's interpretive acumen, it gives the listener a new way into the brilliance of Handel the keyboard virtuoso.

The music is extraordinarily and perhaps I realized that as if for the first time on extended listenings to this release. Handel is surely one of the brilliant melodists of his or any time. Ms. Smirnova helps us come to terms with that brilliance in performances that let the principal melodies sing forth, the contrapuntal support and figuration assuming more of a supporting role. And her deft use (but not over-use) of rubato heightens the experience.

Here we have more than two-hours of musical bliss! Sterlingly beautiful performances of a great work of the Handelian mastermind, recording with sparkling audio presence. I come away from it a happy man.

Heavy Pedal: Works for Organ

2012-01-23T05:02:00.000-08:00

Long before there was heavy metal...there was heavy organ sounds. There's a CD that reminds you of how the concert organ can hold forth in ways that Led Zeppelin, say, cannot. And we take a look at it today. With a title like Heavy Pedal (Navona 5853) you know you are in for some dynamically BIG sounds. And that is what you get on this all-organ release. Thanks to in part nearly 100 years of Gothic horror films, many of us (myself included) associate the grand cathedral organ at full pedal with an eerieness that of course was sometimes there to begin with. After all the function of classic cathedral organ music at times was to represent the mystery of the faith, the awesome power of the godhead, the ineffable presence of the sacred unknowable in aural terms. Before the large symphony orchestra held sway it was the loudest music, more or less, that one could hear in one's everyday life. That is, if one lived in at least a moderate-sized town with a suitably large cathedral housing a grand organ.

This album has some of that. But of course none of it was composed to strike fear in our hearts. Rather it is the grandeur of the full organ sonority that is on display.

There are eight compositions composed by five 20th-21st Century composers. You probably are not overly familiar with them unless you are an organ repertoire specialist. We get works by Tadd Russo, Curt Cacioppo, Ron Nagorcka, Wilhelm Middleschulte and Michael Summers. There are big modern Gothic roars (Tadd Russo), a piece evocative of Australian Native Residents, complete with didjeredu (Nagorcka), a virtuoso piece for pedals alone, based on a theme of Bach (Middelschulte), English folksong variations (Summers) and more besides. It's not really music to invoke images of horror, nor is any of it intended to be. It is modern, but not avant garde music that takes as a starting point a certain reverence for the classic cathedral organ and the works that went before. You don't hear a great deal of Messiaen as influence, but there is the presence of the French composers that preceeded him and their winding chromatics. Then too there is a channeling of the contrapuntal classical masters Bach and Buxtehude in direct and indirect ways. All serve in part as reference points.

It is a sure-fire winner for those who cherish the organ tradition and crave the spice of modernity. And some of it sounds downright spooky. It will get a prominent spot on my CD racks somewhere between Alain and Messiaen.

Craig Madden Morris, "Dreams:" Modern Chamber Music

2012-01-20T04:36:00.000-08:00

There are times when music may not be ultra-advanced catagorically yet be so captivating that one doesn't care. The composer Craig Madden Morris and his chamber music on the album Dreams (Ravello 7813) gives us such a time.

There is lyricism, formal heft, the beautifully played parts (for example Christine Kwak's violin performances are quite lovely) and an idiomatic craftsmanship/inspiration that makes it all a joy to hear.

The piano reduction version of Morris' "Violin Concerto" is a perfect example of this. A ravishing violin presence, an intimate, harmonically early modern-later romantic context played sensitively by Eduard Laurel on piano, all facets come together for a work that brings beauty into your world, one note at a time.

The same is true of the other works presented here: solo piano on "Dream Songs" and "Tropical Dances," cello and piano on "Cello Rhapsody." All serve to map out Morris's most definite stylistic parameters, and all bring a timelessness into play that does not always apply to those working along more-or-less traditional lines. I would love to hear the orchestral versions of the several piano reductions but for now this is something to appreciate repeatedly and happily.

Aaron Novik, "Floating World Vol. 1," New Music-Prog-Song Suite

2012-01-18T04:26:00.000-08:00

There is a "serious" cabaret music style that goes from Kurt Weill to Carla Bley and others. Aaron Novik's Floating World, Vol. 1 (Porto Franco PFR 021) fits in there somewhere. It's a suite of songs for female vocalist--mostly Carla Kihlstedt or Katy Stephan--along with a cabaret-rock-old-time styled chamber group.

The lyrics have to do with everyday life and/or whimsical-philosophical takes on modernity.

It sometimes veers a little to the side of "cute" and that you need to get past if you are to appreciate the very musical side of it all. It's not in an operatic vocal style but (like Weill and Bley) a vernacular one. And the music toys with theatre and vernacular while it transcends that with an original take on where to place it all.

This may not get enough attention, I fear, but it is quite different and needs to be heard.

"Sculpting the Air:" Modern Works for Wind Instruments

2012-01-17T04:54:00.000-08:00

Winds and brass. They have a sound, of course. Modern composers have most certainly made them as fundamental as string and keyboard instruments in the mix of timbres they seek to realize. Not that there is anything really new there. But never as consistently have they been a part of the chamber and orchestral action.

It is to the chamber part of the action that we look today, in a nice anthology of modern works that incorporate winds and brass as principal components, Sculpting the Air (Navona 5852). Eight work by eight composers, widely varying in style from later romantic-neo-classical to classic modernism, and in varying configurations from the wind quintet to wind-piano combinations and others as well. There is much of interest for the lover of the modern and/or the wind enthusiast.

There is one "ringer" on the program, and that is Samuel Barber's lovely "Summer Music." It should be well known to many. The rendition given here is warm and expressive. On from there we hear pieces by James Adler, Russ Lombardi, Jan Van Der Roost, Barry Seroff, Brian Gillett, Juan Sebastian Lach Lau, and Richard Crosby, all relatively undersung, all living, all contributing works of interest and personality, the works all well performed.

It is an appealing program.

Christopher Shultis, "Devisadero:" New Music from New Mexico

2012-01-16T05:12:00.000-08:00

New-Mexico-based composer Christopher Shultis gives us something original and good for the ear on his CD of four contrasting compositions, Devisadero (Navona 5849). There's a four-part suite for wind symphony ("Openings"), a song cycle for soprano and piano ("Songs of Love and Longing"), a reflective work for soprano sax and winds ("a little light, in darkness") and a suite for solo piano ("Devisadaro").

Generally this is a modern, original take on American post-impressionism, with tone painting that evokes the stunning landscape of New Mexico.

"Openings" has plenty of contrast, some very dynamic percussion-winds interplay, chorale-like grandeur, and orchestrational depth and transparency. "Songs of Love and Longing" pits a homespun charm against contrasting blocks of emotive expressiveness, American Chopin-Liszt-and beyond pianisms of idiomatic writing, some of the simplicity-in-sophistication of the Ives-Barber lineage, and a hint of later Strauss songsmithing for a kind of exquisite expression of lack.

"A little light in darkness" nicely juxtiposes acapella soprano sax with alternately sparse and full wind thematics. There is an introspective drama in the quiet parts, a little more espisodic urgency in the sectional, multi-solo tuttis. "Devisadaro" makes good use of recurring motifs in a series of poetic through-composed soliloquies.

Throughout Shultis goes after a modern shimmer, the small sounds of the landscape and the large, a sensitivity to the micro and the macro, in ways that reference past classical styles while harnessing them to the insistent and consistently inventive musical imagination of Christopher Shultis.

Anonymous Four, "Secret Voices," 13th Century Vocal Polyphony Beautifully Performed

2012-01-13T04:25:00.000-08:00

Containing a wealth of songs, organum, elaborate polyphony, sacred Latin chant, the 13th century Codex Las Huelgas was originally intended for a convent of aristocratic Castilian women. In spite of a ban on women singing polyphony, they most certainly sang it, as well as a fascinating cross-section of sacred and secular repertoire.

The acclaimed vocal quartet Anonymous Four, women all, give loving performances of 11 works from the Codex, with the very sonorous and detailed vocal presentations for which they are known. Secret Voices (Harmonia Mundi) is the latest in an ongoing series of beautiful recordings by the quartet. It will I hope serve as a bellwether for excellence in medieval vocal performance practice.

I will not rehearse the actual titles of the selections. Suffice to say that the gamut of vocal possibilites are run, from simple but sometimes ornate unison chant and song form to sophisticated four-part polyphony.

Anyone who loves the music of the Middle Ages will find this a delight, as did I.

Stephen Barber, "Astral Vinyl," A Special Sort of Eclecticism

2012-01-11T04:49:00.000-08:00

As time moves on, the idea of "something different" changes. The avant garde of today might be something considered conservative 30 years ago. Time changes things, perspectives shift and we find different aspects of music to gauge so-called progress. Sometimes, that is. Someone like Edgar Varese may be ahead of his time for a long time, perhaps for all the time our civilization has. Who can say? The chances are slim that "Arcana" will be the background music for a coffee commercial any time in the future, at any rate. And should that matter to us, really? I don't think so. You don't find microbiologists lamenting how little their work has entered the pop mainstream. Why is modern classical any different?

The music of composer Stephen Barber, on the other hand, is advanced in its eclecticism. Astral Vinyl (Navona 5850), a recent compilation of his compositions, bears this out. He has big ears. He has been absorbing the music around him. He casts a wide net. The compilation showcases 12 of his works, all for diverse combinations. There are string quartets, vocal music with piano and steel drums, chamber ensembles that let in rock elements a la Zappa, brass choirs, some electronic filtering here and there, an occasional harmonically expanded tang to the sound.

In all of these works there is eclecticism, yes, but there is a tonal Americana lurking in the wings. Maestro Barber is the son of Ives, Copland and the other Barber, spiritually. Oh, also a little Schoenberg, Webern, Berg and Stravinsky, at least to my ears. Yes, also Frank Zappa. And he brings a musical personality into the mix that pleases as it hones a lyrical craftsmanship and artistry of which, for his most characteristic works, perhaps we will say someday, "oh yes, that's Stephen Barber's music. I can tell."

Be that as it may, right now I find the music very pleasing. Posterity will do what it will, willy nilly.

Prism Quartet, "Dedication," 31 Minatures in Celebration of the Saxophone Quartet's 20th Anniversary

2012-01-10T05:41:00.000-08:00

The all-saxophone Prism Quartet recently celebrated its 20th anniversary as a group. Dedication (Innova 800) notes fittingly the passing milestone with the quartet performing 31 short compositions penned especially for the occasion. Most pieces are a little over a minute in duration, though some are longer. Time passes quickly and rewardingly when listening.

Jazz adept Greg Osby joins the group for some effective solo work on alto for his piece "Prism #1 (Refraction)," presented in two interesting takes.

In addition there are short pieces by Ken Ueno, William Bolcolm, Jennifer Higdon, Tim Berne, and a host of others. As might be expected, some directly channel the sounds and influences of modern jazz, others take on various characteristics as the particular composer deems fit. All are contemporary, seem specially suited for the quartet, and sparkle like small but brilliant stones in a modern cabinet of curiosities.

Dedication showcases ideally the excellence of the Prism Quartet with their exceptional tonal blend and precise agility. A most fitting way to kick off the next 20 years!

Alexander Berne and The Abandoned Orchestra, Flickers of Mime/Death of Memes

2012-01-09T04:50:00.000-08:00

After years away from music, reedman/ composer Alexander Berne got the call in his being to go into the studio and put down music that had in whatever way gestated within him for more than a decade. The product of many hours of layering sound carefully and doubtless arriving at a combined "orchestration" meticulously as he painted tone colors on a digital canvas, the result is a remarkable 2-CD set, Flicker of Mime-Death of Memes (Innova 804). It's a battery of standard, altered or radically modified wind instruments along with prepared piano, wine glass, vacuum cleaner, lap steel guitar and so forth--that he uses to build up startling ambiances and resonant, ever-shifting space-drone transformations.

It has a primal quality, as he makes note of in the accompanying liners, but it also is extraordinarily sophisticated in its use of transformed sounds--not through electronic filtering but through careful layering and mixing over time. It's a sound-color tour de force, at once mystic and concrete, an orchestra of odd provenance creating otherworldly sounds.

It's rather remarkable, very listenable and pretty much like nothing else in its poetic, sound-sculpting consistency. One of the most original extended soundscapes I've heard.

Anna Thorvaldsdottir, "Rhizoma," High-Mode Musical Abstractions

2012-01-06T04:55:00.000-08:00

Some music requires that you clear your head of distracting influences and open up. Clearly that is the case for Anna Thorvaldsdottir's Rhizoma (Innova 804). It is a series of works for various forces: percussionist on grand piano (Justin DeHart), chamber ensemble (KAPUT, conducted by Snorri Sigfus Birgisson), or full orchestra (Iceland Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Bjarnson). "Hidden" consists of five rather brief movements, scattered across the disk, as played by Mr, DeHart. "Hrim" and "Streaming Arhythmia" are for chamber ensemble, and "Dreaming" is for symphony orchestra.

Ms. Thornvaldsdottir's music is ethereal, often sparse, with a timeless, floating quality. They are so much of a piece that if one listens without reference to how the tracks are parsed, one piece flows into the other with sound colors changing, but a feeling of stylistic continuity dominates. The music sometimes reminds me of a set of wind chimes on a mildly breezy day, though nothing sounds like wind chimes really, and you do not hear the sound of wind. And it's not a random quality one hears either. Instead there is a very irregular and unpredictable contrast between musical utterence and quiescence, too directed to be the product of chance operations, but also too experiential-serendipital to be a product of logical-linear thinking.

Those factors make it essential that one listens in a state of relaxed concentration. My first several hearings of the disk were in hectic multitasking situations and I came away with no impression at all. It is not background music. When I went back and concentrated on the music I found my aural footing and was able gradually to come to appreciate what was happening.

This is, in it's own way, the music of Iceland (from which Ms. Thorvalsdottir hails). If that explains anything however I am not sure what, except that perhaps Anna spent some time in a less noisy world than ours, and has come to understand that relative silences and the silent actions of memory are implicit framing points and lead to a different mind-set than the continual periodicic, unreflecting action-sound we are used to hearing.

In the end, one leaves this music with a feeling that one is in the presence of an original voice, a poetics of desolation and isolation, an a-strophic language of free-verse, a series of sound color pieces that have more in common with natural forces than human-made machinery, that at first puzzle and then confirm.

Anna Thorvaldsdottir. She is whispering something in your ear. It will take many hearings to make out what she says to you. It is worthwhile that you listen, anyway.

Leos Janacek, Choral Works, Daniel Reuss and Capella Amsterdam

2012-01-05T05:16:00.000-08:00

Leos Janacek was one of the most original of 20th century composers, in his own way a titan, yet at least in the States his music is not as regularly performed or recorded as one might wish. So it is especially welcome when there is a well-performed set of something one does not often find on disk, namely his Choral Works (Harmonia Mundi) as performed by Daniel Reuss leading the Capella Amsterdam. The recording just became available and it is a good one.

There are 72 delightful minutes of works not often heard on this side of the planet: they include "Six Moravian Choruses (Sechs Klange aus Mahren);" "Vlci stopa (The Wolf's Trail)," for soprano, female chorus & piano, JW 4/39; "Elegie na smrt dcery Olgy (Elegy on the Death of My Daughter Olga)," cantata for tenor, chorus & piano; "Rikadla (Nursery Rhymes)" (18) for 9 voices & 10 instruments, JW 5/17; "Otcenas," for tenor, chorus, harp & organ, JW 4/29, plus assorted miscellania.

Some are earlier works that are nonetheless of interest, some many are of the mature period and have the characteristic Janacekian contrasts, all are well performed and deserve a thorough hearing.

Recommended.

Light and Shadow: Modern Orchestral Works, 2011

2012-01-03T04:45:00.000-08:00

Starting off the new year of music is not a simple thing. The accumulated baggage of the preceding year of releases reviewed weighs on me and a kind of symbolic casting away and a new beginning seems requisite. On a 7AM after the official end of the holiday season here it seems doubly important to retrace steps and make a fresh start down the path to the year ahead.

As a kind of palate cleanser, today's CD, Light and Shadow: Modern Orchestral Works (Navona 5847) seems right. It's a series of shorter works by lesser-known composers of today: Rain Worthington, Rebecca Oswald, Adrienne Albert, Tadd Russo, Russ Lombardi and Daniel Perttu, played quite decently by various symphony orchestras.

These are what I might call character pieces--sketches of orchestral character, of the character-characteristics of each composer at a particular point in time addressing a musical subject. The pieces tend toward the tonal-descriptive side of modern orchestral writing.

And if there are roots to be uncovered in these works, it would tend more toward Aaron Copland than Gustav Mahler. There are off-stage allusions to rooted, earth-folk elements, vernacular elements radically transformed to the orchestral-modern idiom.

Not to sound patronizing, but you might liken these pieces to performances of character actors in golden-era Hollywood films. They have a role to play in the overall matrix; they come into the frame and do their bit and do it well. They constitute an art form in themselves and they are appreciated by contemporary audiences and remembered later for their contributions by film buffs. They aren't the leading actor-artists of their time but without them the films would drag along with too much weight and not enough light.

Each musical work is vivid, colorful, and evocative. None of them are designed to be the heavy "masterwork" opuses of our era. They are the finely executed miniatures that stand alongside the gargantuan klangs of the epoch.

And so to me this CD is a fitting start for the new year. After the revelry and frantic gestures of good cheer in bad times, a simple set of premises, the well-turned phrase, the orchestral color sketch.

These may not be works that will change the nature of music making for the future, They aren't. They are exceedingly evocative day trips into imaginative musical realms. And so they please.

Howard Hanson, Symphony No. 4, Symphony No. 5, Schwarz, Seattle Symphony

2011-12-30T04:32:00.000-08:00

Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony continue their Hanson (1896-1981) Symphony Cycle with the release of Symphony No. 4 and Symphony No. 5 (Naxos 8.559703). There was a time when Hanson's stature as an American composer was perhaps a little more assured than it may be today. His affiliation with Eastman School of Music and his many recordings for Mercury in the '50s had something to do with it. The "Requiem" Symphony No. 4 and the "Sinfonia Sacra" No. 5 were written in 1943 and 1954, respectively, more or less as he approached the height of his reknown. They are essentially Romantic in nature. He and Samuel Barber are the principal such composers of the American 20th century as far as I am concerned, and both sooner or later came into a version of it that was pretty wholly theirs.

The middle period Hanson sometimes strikes me as being a sort of rich Nordic dessert. It is lush, sated, majestic, filled with glorious peaks and pithy quietude in alternation. The Requiem is understandably somber and elegaic; the "Sinfonia Sacre" has a slightly broader range of expression. Both occupy a kind of middle ground between some of the eclecticism of the earlier works and the breakthough of new elements and the evolving sonic palette of the last symphonies.

Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony give us detailed and broadly passionate readings that sound well in the contemporary digital recording mode. The inclusion of two more middle-length works, "Elegy in Memory of Serge Koussevitzsky" (1956) and "Dies Natalis" (1967), is a nice bonus.

At the Naxos price and with the detailed, enthusiastic readings of Maestro Schwarz, one could hardly go wrong with this disk. These recordings were originally released on Delos International in the '90s if I am not mistaken. I look forward to his versions of No. 6 and No. 7.

Lawrence Moss, "New Paths," Recent Chamber Music from the Octogenarian Composer

2011-12-29T05:02:00.000-08:00

The 83-year-old US composer Lawrence Moss shows no signs of slowing down, based on the 2-CD compilation of his recent chamber works, New Paths (Innova 777). In fact quite the contrary. Nor is he converting to a more conservative style of writing, as tends to be current these days. In the composer's words "New paths in old forests. These are not the paths to Neo-Romanticism or any other 'old growth' but rather walks along the trails that lead from Stravinsky and Schoenberg to Varese and Ligeti."

The music certainly reflects those sentiments. One CD is devoted to instrumental chamber music; the second features the solo voice in a variety of contexts. I was most impressed with the music on the first volume; the second took me a bit more to get used to.

Disk One brings to our ears a number of gems. "The Woods" features the Capitol Woodwind Quintet in four lively movements that make use of bird song and a little humor in Moss's brief bowdlerization of the nursery song "Four and Twenty Blackbirds." There is an understandable influence of Messiaen, and yet the music does not sound imitative, instead rather Mossian. The program goes on to present Moss's somewhat quirky modernism in relatively short pieces for solo piano, oboe-viola-piano, trumpet duo, solo flute with electronics and his "String Quartet No. 4," a work that has sonorous brilliance.

The second disk has several more short, interesting instrumental works, two for string duets and one for violin and piano. The bulk of the disc is devoted to songs and song cycles for soprano and percussion, one for two sopranos and piano, and the five-movement "Another Dawn" for soprano and chamber ensemble.

It always has seemed to me that the solo vocal performance of highly involved modernist works constitutes one of the musically most challenging tasks in the Western world. The sopranos in the works represented here certainly are up to the challenge. There were occasions, however, where I thought the voice qualities occasionally seemed over- or under-matched to the music at hand, though perhaps those vocal qualities were what Maestro Moss had in mind. In any case I would like to hear some of these pieces in the hands of other vocalists for comparison. Nevertheless the works themselves hold interest throughout. The three movement "Emily's World" has very interesting two-soprano writing, where close harmonies sounding within the advanced, expanded musical universe as set up by the piano part give the music an almost otherworldly quality.

The set concludes with the sonoric and phraseological gem "Another Dawn," which takes on the serialist counterpoint of classic mid-twentieth century ultra-modernism and converts it to a Mossian poetry of means. The (chamber) orchestration has brilliance and the contrast of the resonantly chambered soprano voice and the texturally diverse chamber group is convincing and dramatically engaging.

So here we are. Lawrence Moss at 83. The music comprises to me a rather essential set for those looking for high modernism and what it has become in our era. Definitely recommended.

Ernesto Cordero, Caribbean Concertos for Guitar and Violin. Romero, Figueroa, I Solisti di Zagreb

2011-12-28T04:53:00.000-08:00

I imagine that guitarist Pepe Romero and violinist Guillermo Figueroa were pleased to receive the respective dedications from Puerto Rican composer Ernesto Cordero (b. 1946) for the latter's two Caribbean Concertos. They went on to record the works with I Solisti di Zagreb, which is now available in a new release entitled Caribbean Concertos for Guitar and for Violin (Naxos 8.572707).

The two works, "Concierto Festivo" (2003) for guitar, and "Concertino Tropical" (1998) for violin, sandwich a third concerto, here given its world premier, "Insula: Suite Concertante" (1998), again for violin.

In all cases there is a very fluid interaction between the string orchestra and soloist. This is music that tries (successfully) to capture something of the landscape of island Puerto Rico and its natural and cultural comings and goings. It has some of the strong tonal flavors of Spanish speaking-Latin America and a very sunny disposition that relates to the impressionist composers from across the pond. The lightly textured quality of the string orchestra writing helps the music breathe; both Romero's guitar parts and those for Figueroa's violin heighten the impression of dazzling sunlight and movement over the land.

This is some extraordinarily refreshing music, played with care and joy by the soloists and I Solisti. Ernesto Cordero has created three delightful works that explore and transform his musical heritage into rather brilliant musical energy.

Recommended. A Winter Vacation in a jewel box!

Joly Braga Santos, "Alfama" (and Other Symphonic Works), Alvaro Cassuto Conducts the Royal Scottish National Orchestra

2011-12-27T05:13:00.000-08:00

Portuguese composer Joly Bragos Santos (1924-1988), judging by the newly released Alfama (Naxos 8.573813), excels in the narrative color-drenched tone-poem of the last century as exemplified in Euro-Mediterranean composers such as Respighi, de Falla, Debussey and Ravel. This is only natural in a ballet score, that is meant to portray musically a particular story-line in ways that are vivid and danceable, and we see this perfectly in the world premiere recording of this Suite from the Ballet Alfama (1956), but it is even so of his later, more modernistic Variations for Orchestra (1976), which is also given its world premiere recording here. There are several disks out in the Naxos series on his symphonies and I have not as yet heard them, so there may be another side to his music as well.

Topping off the program are three equally interesting works, the Elegy in Memory of Vianna da Motta (1948), his Symphonic Overture No. 3 (1954) and his Three Symphonic Sketches (1962). The Royal Scottish National Orchestra performs capably under the baton of Alvaro Cassuto, and the sound staging is good.

Braga Santos most definitely deserves a hearing. This seems like a good place to start, as it has been for me.

Arne Nordheim, Epitaffio, Oslo Philharmonic Orchestra

2011-12-22T04:38:00.000-08:00

Norway, modernism and Arne Nordheim (1931-2010) go together. The composer Nordheim created a body of work that helped put the Scandinavian music scene on our maps from the 1960s through to his passing last year. A retrospective of some of his orchestral gems, aptly titled after his composition Epitaffio has come out (Simax Classics 1318) and is now readily available in the States. This is a happy occasion, tempered of course by our loss of him from this earth. The Oslo Philharmonic under Jukka-Pekka Saraste and Rolf Gupta definitively perform five of his works, from the "Canzona" of 1960 through to the 2003 "Fonos, Three Memorables for Trombone and Orchestra."

This is high modernist brilliance from beginning to end. To hear these pieces well-played on a state-of-the-art sonic stage is to come away quite impressed, indeed.

The Nordeim orchestral universe skillfully employs a wide spectrum of orchestral sonance and color to create sound poetry of great depth, palpable texture and dramatic expressivity.

His music has some of the discursive logic of Edgar Varese, in that the organized unfolding of the orchestral phrases and sectional entrances entails nothing short of a profoundly meaningful and ingeniously constructed series of human utterances, in this case of course musical. Instrumental colors enter and interact with one another in endlessly recombinatory ways. Nordheim is a master of the full orchestra-as-paint to his imaginary canvas.

Every piece stands out as singular and significant. I especially find the 2003 "Fonos" for trombone and orchestra a knockout as performed here by the philharmonic and trombonist Marius Hesby. As the last piece chronologically it is programmed second-to-last, which allows the ear to experience it as a kind of stirring life-finale, with the brief and poignant "Adieu" giving us a touchingly regretful coda to our evening's program.

Those who may have missed Nordheim's music are excellently served with this anthology. Those who have not will find the performances and sequences revelatory and enthralling.

Very much recommended!

William Grant Still, Symphonies Nos. 2 and 3, Wood Notes, John Jeter, Fort Smith Symphony

2011-12-21T05:22:00.000-08:00

In this third volume of the orchestral music of William Grant Still (1895-1978) by John Jeter and the Fort Smith Symphony (Naxos 8.559676) I found many reasons why Still's music still speaks to us today. As the most prominent Afro-American classical composer of his generation, he does not simply fit into a ready-made category. Listen to the three works on this set and you get Still the melodist, the impressive orchestrator, the impressionist-romantic-Americana voice of originality.

The marvelously evocative "Wood Notes" (1947) (here in its world premiere recording) puts four pastoral vignettes together that draw on the tonality of traditional black America as well as the rural invocation of nature. It is a delight.

The two symphonies represented here (No. 2 from 1937; No. 3 from 1958) similarly evoke folk-ethnic-natural imagery through tone painting of a high order.

This is music that will breathe fresh air into the cobwebs of your typical listening patterns. It is performed with balance and care by Jeter and the Fort Smith Symphony. Recommended.

Lee Actor, Saxophone Concerto

2011-12-19T04:54:00.000-08:00

Anyone familiar at all with jazz knows that the saxophone has in the last 120 years come of age. Yet in the classical field the saxophone figures less often in the scheme of works than might be supposed. This is not the place to examine why that is, but to appreciate its appearance and make note of it as appropriate.

So for example there is a recording out this year of Lee Actor's Saxophone Concerto (Navona 5848). Debra Richtmeyer is the alto saxophone soloist; Kirk Trevor conducts the Slovak National Symphony Orchestra. It's essentially a neo-romantic/proto-impressionist work of some lyrical and lively qualities. The solo part is alternatingly sinewy and plaintive, with a slight vibrato which recalls the sound of the saxophone on "Pictures at an Exhibition" and "Le Creation du Monde", or of course Debussy's "Rhapsody for Alto Sax and Orchestra." In other words the sound is a bit enmeshed in jazz sax style of the '20s and '30s. Once one accepts that, there is an engaging charm and memorable melodic thrust to the piece.

The CD contains a number of additional works by Lee Actor. The most attractive are the "Dance Rhapsody" and the "Concerto for Horn and Orchestra," with the latter featuring the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra and horn soloist Karol Nitran.

It's cleanly orchestrated, decently played music that hearkens back to the early 20th century with enough economy of means that it does not take on the monumental bloatedness of some typical late romantic works (the latter of which I do appreciate when done well), yet it's not quite neo-classical and it does not fall into a typically modernist camp either. There are some nascent impressionistic elements, and what one could call modernist-tonal-conservative elements.

The music is solid fare, decently performed. If one gets the feeling one has heard similar music before, of course that is a truth. This music has some originality in the details and some heavy ties to early modern tradition in its overall thrust.

It will no doubt please those who like a sort of souffle of earlier pre-modern/modern styles, well crafted. The Saxophone Concerto stands erect in a field where there are not many challengers. The other pieces are solid and welcome additions. This is not paradigm-changing music. It is quite enjoyable in its own way.

Leonardo Balada, Piano Music, Pablo Amoros

2011-12-16T04:56:00.000-08:00

Leonardo Balada (b. 1933) has written some extraordinary orchestral music. His solo piano music up until now has been unfamiliar to me. Pablo Amoros performs a cross-section of it spanning Balada's entire career on Piano Music (Naxos 8.572594). In the liner notes Balada makes reference to how he believes the piano as a solo vehicle is somewhat timbrally outmoded in the contemporary compositional scheme of things. Nevertheless in the six works represented on the album (covering the period from 1959 through 2010) he makes a go at carving out musical structures that suit his needs expressively.

The works are neither bravura showpieces nor are they parlor ditties for the well-motivated amateur. Instead they are a glimpse into the melodic-harmonic mind-as-workshop of Maestro Balada. Forms take shape, ideas come to the fore, concepts are worked out and in the process he leaves us with music that is as expressive as it is at times quirkily cerebral. In a way his solo music reminds me of parallel works by Carl Neilsen, or some of those by Heitor Villa-Lobos. They at first seem diffuse, disjointed (at least they did to me), the form and logic taking shape in the mind only after fairly considerable listening time.

It is music that can have a surreal, abstract air, for example in his reconstructive collaging on "Transparency of Chopin's First Ballade" (1979). Snatches of Chopin's theme come in and out of play in a matrix of transformed transformations. At other times a present-day equivalent of baroque line weaving and quasi-counterpoint come to the forefront, only modernized. Some of the music has a stream-of-consciousness "fantasy" quality, with mood and disjointed narrative dictating what elements appear in succession.

In the end you get a wealth of music and a side of Balada that extends and complements the orchestral side. Some of the music is difficult (to play and to grasp), some of it quite disarmingly straightforward. All of it is interesting and, I might add, well played by Pablo Amoros.

Mimi Stillman, Charles Abramovic, "Odyssey: American Premieres for Flute and Piano"

2011-12-15T09:15:00.000-08:00

The flute and piano duo offers the modern composer a sound-color spectrum of somewhat unparalleled variety when played by accomplished artists. Such is the case with flautist Mimi Stillman and pianist Charles Abramovic, and their Odyssey: American Premieres for Flute and Piano (Innova 2-CD 814). Eleven composers and the same number of corresponding, fairly brief works fill the program. A few are for solo flute, the rest for duo. Together they provide some noteful vehicles for the artistry of Ms. Stillman and the flawless accompanying work of Mr. Abramovic. Andrew Rudin, Richard Danielpour and a host of lesser-known composers provide contrasting tonal universes ranging from folk allusion to modernist agility. Each piece has interest.

In the hands of Mimi Stillman these works ring out. She has a very ravishing tone, masterful control over the full range and articulatory possibilities of her instrument. She and Charles Abramovic realize an overarching concept of the compositional whole of each work. There are some brilliant musical contrasts in play throughout, and in all cases the Stillman-Abramovic duo triumphs.

The sensual, tactile riches contained in performances like these, the architectural approach to each work. and the expressive virtuosity that never overshines outside the parameters of the compositions make for a program that will afford listeners virtually endless pleasure. That is most certainly how the music affected me. Not a moment is wasted! Highly recommended.

Boris Yoffe, "The Song of Songs," with the Rosamunde Quartett and The Hilliard Ensemble

2011-12-13T05:17:00.000-08:00

There is a group of contemporary composers, headed by Arvo Part, who have some rootedness in early music. The music tends to be thoroughly (post)modern, yet there is something of the ambiance, timbre set and periodicity of Medieval-Renaissance and sometimes early Baroque music.

One of these, judging by the new release The Song of Songs (ECM New Series 2174 4764426), is Boris Yoffe. The composer grew up in Russia, emigrated to Israel and then Germany, where he studied with Wolfgang Rihm.

His ECM debut presents a modified sort of song cycle "The Song of Songs." It deftly alternates and conjoins the Rosamunde String Quartett with the quartet of vocalists well-known as the Hilliard Ensemble. At times the strings sound like a consort of viols from the Renaissance. The vocal configuration of countertenor, tenor, tenor and baritone have a sound that of course recalls early music as well. Yoffe puts these possibilities into play in a way that has one foot in the distant past and one foot in, if you will, the future.

The music has modern harmonic-melodic elements but at the same time hearkens back. The use of space and a reverberant, cathedral-like sonic stage reinforces that impression. This is a composer who thrives in the ECM production situation. There's something of Hindemith in there, but transposed both forwards and backwards, slowed down at times to a maximum of contemplative near-quiescence, a Morton-Feldman-like feeling of timelessness from another age. Ours.

Beautiful music, original music, this is.

Zimmermann, "Die Soldaten": A Modern Opera Masterwork Done to A Turn by Bernhard Kontarsky and Staatsorchester Stuttgart

2011-12-09T05:34:00.000-08:00

Bernard Alois Zimmermann (1918-1970) was a composer of some renown in Europe during his lifetime but got less attention here in the States at the time, compared with Boulez or Stockhausen. Yet several import recordings made their way over here and were appreciated by the devoted modernist cotery of the era. His untimely death in 1970 more or less put a period to his influence here. But not permanently.

His most impressive full-scale work surely is the opera Die Soldaten (2-CD Warner Classic/Teldec 2564 66708-0). The newly issued domestic release we'll look at today, a version by Bernard Kontarsky, Chor des Staatstheaters Stuttgart, Staatsorchester Stuttgart and soloists should go some way in cementing his reputation here.

The recording was originally released in the '90s, but should be much easier to find in the States now. It is an excitingly expressive, spirited and well executed performance by all concerned. Credit should go to Maestro Kontarsky, who is one of the very best of the new music conductors active today. The performance here, the second recording of the work extant, has a remarkable flow to it. The wide intervalic skips and rhythmically irregular serialist-edge-of-tonality vocal lines combine with the vividly imagistic orchestral and choral parts in ways that make sense of Zimmerman's music. Everything must be phrased as natural sounding and grouped according to the logic of the harmonic-melodic arch of the score for the music to work. Kontarsky has gotten a magical result that brings the music to life like one composite being, an eloquently speaking, naturally breathing, remarkable music-making creature of art. Deserving credit should also be given to the soloists, choir and orchestra. They are magnificent. But it's plain to hear that Kontarsky has spent painstaking time in rehearsal, working on the fine points and nuances of the score. He brings out the best in the performers.

As you listen a number of times to the result of such careful and expressive execution, you begin to appreciate what a musical masterpiece Die Soldaten is.

This is a marvelously ultra-modern work. The Kontarsky version will be hard to beat. Get this one by all means if you have a liking for the utopian new music in its classic phase.

Thierry Lancino, "Requiem," Inbal, Orchestre Philharmonic de Radio France

2011-12-08T04:43:00.000-08:00

Not having been acquainted previously with the compositions of Thierry Lancino, I was pleasantly rewarded lately by listening a number of times to his dramatic Requiem (Naxos) as performed by the massed forces of Choer de Radio France, Orchestre Philharmonic de Radio France, soloists and conductor Eliahu Inbal.

It's a 70-plus minute journey into an expressively modern treatment of the requiem form. The soloists express themselves with musicality and passion, the choir and orchestra are artfully served with a score that bubbles over like a cauldron of molten fire at times, and other times indulges in pianissimo murmurs that fit the sorrowful expression of the text by the solo vocalists. The orchestra reinforces and underscores the choir and soloists, as is fitting in such a work. A kind of murky gloominess in the score at times is virtually unremitting and perhaps that is exactly as Lancino intended, as temperamentally fitting for a requiem. The singers and choir emerge out of an often muddy orchestral oppressiveness that creates a powerfully unified mood, characterizes the work and sets it apart. And I don't mean that as necessarily a negative. It makes for a different work than otherwise might be the case these days. It gives it a unique quality.

The piece as a whole has a late romantic largeness combined with high modernity-Bergian dynamic sonority and occasionally an Orffian chanting insistence.

The performance is spirited and excellent. Lancino's music has undoubtedly some considerable merit. I would most definitely like to hear more of it. If I did not respond to this work with keen absorption, it may have something to do with my current mood. I appreciate it on a cerebral level, but it is not grabbing my emotions yet. Some works take many listens before that comes about, so I reserve some of my feelings for now. It is undoubtedly a work and a performance that merit the attention of modern music lovers. At the Naxos budget price you get further incentive to envelop yourself in its dramatic sounds.

Rautavaara, "Marjatta the Lowly Maiden," Works for Children's Choir

2011-12-06T05:26:00.000-08:00

The Tapiola Choir under Pasi Hyokki presents a program of Rautavaara's works for children's choir on Marjatta the Lowly Maiden (Ondine 1169-2). The Marjatta mystery play and the Children's Mass (Lapsimessu) form substantial bookends for the program, between which are a number of shorter incidental works. Sonorically delightful acapella sounds occupy a good portion of the program, with effective selected instrumental parts dotting "Marjatta" and a moving string orchestra part (by the Tapiola Youth Symphony Orchestra) sharing space with the choir on the "Children's Mass."

The choir sounds lovely, the bookend works give us rich examples of Rautavaara's 1970's style, and the incidental works shed additional light and give pleasure. It's an unusual but very enjoyable program, and should appeal to a wide spectrum of music lovers.

Bruno Maderna, Piano Concertos/Quadrivium, Carlo Miotto, Aldo Orvieto

2011-12-05T04:53:00.000-08:00

Since his sudden death in 1973 we may have been guilty of forgetting about composer Bruno Maderna's music just a bit. Yet his signal achievements in the thick of high modernism, and his position of pre-eminence among a small group of the most highly regarded Italian composers of his generation should have ensured him an enduring reputation.

All is not lost. There was a period of reaction for a time, where high modernism declined in fashion and his reputation suffered along with many others of his era. Yet his music never had a dogmatic quality. It drew on early music as well as it looked forward to a futurist avant-topia. At any rate he is a master figure in the music of his day. And things may be changing in how we perceive him and the modernist period in general.

As if to remind us of what an appealing composer he is, a new recording of his Piano Concertos and the Quadrivium piece (Naxos 8.572642) has emerged of late. On it pianists Aldo Orvieto and Fausto Bongelli (the latter for the two-piano pieces), the percussion ensemble Gruppo 40.6, and Orchestra della Fondazione 'Arena di Verona' under conductor Carlo Miotto put together a program of Maderna convering both early (1942-48) and later (1969) phases of his ouevre.

The early Piano Concerto (1942) in both a one and two piano version are given here, the second a world premier recording, and it shows those of us who may have forgotten, how his early work has an appealing modern-lyrical poignancy. The second version increases the sonority of the piano part and so is a most welcome addition to this disc. The Concerto for Two Pianos and Instruments (1948) sees Maderna moving forward to a more 12-tone oriented style with the percussion ensemble understandably supplying sound coloration aspects that set this work apart from the earlier concerto. Quadrivium (1969) is Maderna in full flower, a writer of a poetic quality, with mystery and an impressively evocative sonority. This is the Maderna of genius, beyond serialist dogma, a supreme painter of sounds.

The performances are excellent. The program fleshes out a picture of Maderna as a vital force within the music of his time. This recording is a very good one for those who don't know his music. It is equally stimulating for those that do.

Matthias Kronsteiner, "Modified," Music for Bassoon

2011-12-02T05:37:00.000-08:00

The bassoon has its many charms. It has a range of sounds all its own which, in the right hands, forms a singular timbral pallete of wide dimensions. For a time it was called upon to play the clown, especially in some late 19th century-early 20th century orchestral works. Those days are gone.

Matthis Kronsteiner is a bassoonist of stature, great facility and marvelous tone. He presents a recital of contemporary and near-contemporary compositions for bassoon alone, with small chamber configurations and with electronics on Modified, a part of the performer series on the new Composers Concordance label (005). Pieces by Villa-Lobos, David Lang, Gene Pritsker and others form a sequence that sets off Kronsteiner's virtuosity with a brilliance that keeps the ear continually attuned. In contemporary fashion the classical genre rubs shoulders with jazz, improvisation and rock, which is only fitting.

The contemporary bassoon is no jester. As incarnated in the presence of Matthias Kronsteiner, the bassoon is an eminently effective instrumental conduit of the best of today's concert music. That's clear from Modified.

Paul Hillier, Theatre of Voices, Ars Nova Copenhagen, The Christmas Story

2011-12-02T05:05:00.000-08:00

There have been a number of recordings over the years of the chronology of the Christmas Pageant as portrayed in song. Of course this is an old practice originating in England and elsewhere in the Nativity Play musical-dramatical festivities from at least medieval times onwards. Since we covered a Paul Hillier/Ars Nova Copenhagen recording two days ago, it is fitting that we turn to another more specific to the season. Maestro Hillier, ANC and the Theatre of Voices have gotten together to create A Christmas Story (Harmonia Mundi). As one might expect this is a definitive choral depiction of the story as portrayed in early music masterpieces and some from a little later as well. So you get plainchant, "O Come, O Come, Emmanuel," "Es ist ein Ros entsprungen," through the birth songs, the "We Three Kings" song and so on. It is wonderful music, mostly familiar to anyone who knows the tradition, with a few that may be unfamiliar, at least to listeners in the States, and anon.

There is light instrumental support as called for, but the ravishing vocals of the twin ensembles are the central focus. And the songs. This is first-rate fare. I am happy personally to have it. It will give you something of substance to lighten the dark nights.

David Lang, "This Was Written By Hand" for Solo Piano

2011-12-01T05:22:00.000-08:00

David Lang has increasingly struck me as one Bang On A Can composer who is especially bent upon forging a minimalist/post-minimalizt language all his own. The solo piano opus This Was Written By Hand (Canteloupe 21073) puts that forward somewhat emphatically. The album consists of the 13-minute title cut and eight shorter "Memory Pieces."

The title cut (2003) has a very pianistic left hand-right hand split, the right hand repeating and developing a central melody line, the left hand repeating and varying a figuration accompaniment for the most part. It is lyrical, reflective and appealing in its spare but musically impactful utterance.

The "Memory Pieces" (1992-1997) have a bit more in the way of motoristic movement, sometimes marimba-istic figuration that is more typically classic minimalist. Yet it is not linear, post-African trance groove that is coming out of the figurations for the most part. For the first piece it's a matter of rolling wide-interval trills (to stretch a term) that together form an overarching melodic movement that has a slower, more majestic trajectory. The second piece calls for rapidly articulated arpeggiations that again don't have groove as the intent, but rather verticalized harmonic sequences. Piece three is a kind of largo. Piece four slows the trill idea down and makes each pulse a more fortissimo chordal block. Number five is mercurial, a kind of drumming on the piano with Lang's own sort of rudiment-like execution. Six slows things down again for some delicate interlocking sequences of expressive meditation. Seven is a whirlwind of rapid cycles of piano drumming. The final piece returns in some ways to the feeling of the first, a kind of slower series of related melodic cycles, this time in the middle range of the piano, with punctuations in the upper and lower registers.

Pianist Andrew Zolinsky realizes the parts with a restrained poeticism that seems right for these two works.

This is music that keeps my interest while playing upon the more positive emotional affects that the solo piano has often evoked from the days of Mozart onwards. It should find a good number of adherents, I would think. And it is some of David Lang's most intimate and appealing music to date.

Ars Nova Copenhagen, Paul Hillier, "A Bridge of Dreams": Modern Choral Music from the Pacific Rim

2011-11-30T05:13:00.000-08:00

Paul Hillier happens to be the world's premier choral conductor to my way of thinking. As principal conductor and musical director of the choral group Ars Nova Copenhagen he shows himself as champion of new music that has been heavily influenced by early and/or archaic musical forms, an important trend from the last half of the 20th century through to today. The new CD A Bridge of Dreams (Ars Nova 6.220597) puts Hillier and the marvelous choral group in a rather wondrous zone for a program of music that shows the influences of both the classical past and the East Pacific. Subtitled a cappella Music from the Pacific Rim, for this CD the idea is that all composers-works represented here have important multiple associations with the coastal Pacific. All the composers hail from Australia, New Zealand, California, or China, respectively, and all in some way or another address Eastern Pacific thematics.

Lou Harrison's Mass for Saint Cecilia's Day is a work from his later period (1983) utilizing transformations of Gregorian Chant, resituated in part within Chinese and Balinese tonality. Ann Boyd's enchanted A Bridge of Dreams is based on an anonymous Medieval Japanese Woman's text of the same name. Jack Body's Five Lullabies have a strong medieval polyphonic influence as well as traditional Chinese elements. Ross Edwards combines psalm texts with aboriginal bird names for Sacred Kingfisher Psalms. Finally Chinese composer Liu Sola gives us The Seafarer, a suite from his opera The Afterlife of Li Jiantong.

All of this music has an ambiant quality, thanks in part to the pieces themselves, to Paul Hillier's/Ars Nova's highly melifluous renditions, and to the very resonant recording space of St. Paul's Church, Copenhagen. There is a constancy that is both post- and pre- minimalist, interestingly. These are very beautiful works, beautifully done. There is timelessness conveyed in the music, a confluence of past, present, and, perhaps, future. Don't neglect this one. A Bridge of Dreams may find you spanning the length of one somnolescently. . . repeatedly.

John Carollo, Transcendence in the Age of War

2011-11-25T05:16:00.000-08:00

John A. Carollo is an American composer that minds (and mines) modernist roots to forge an expressive personal style. I reviewed his Starry Nights on this blog last July 16, 2011. Now for a look at an earlier release, Transcendence in the Age of War (Navona 5817).

This one covers a wide spectrum of chamber and orchestral forms.

Carollo has a real knack for constructing melody/ensemble lines that have a modern ring to them and tend to soar expressively. This is quite true of the two short pieces for string orchestra, Desiderio and Let Thy Mind Be Still, which like Starry Night from the second album have a kind of Ivesian rootedness combined with a Carollian uniqueness. There is a denser, more active texture to String Quintet No. 1 for 10-String Guitar and String Quartet, but the inventive line knack is again at the forefront.

Fear of Angst for Flute, Cello and Piano has more chromatic expansiveness and a more expanded harmonic range for the first movement. It is also very well conceived. Movement two is quite beautiful, with striking pitch-timbre contrasts between flute and cello, the piano mediating somewhere at the center of the sound. The final movement has a more desolate quality, then some turbulent final bars.

The title piece, Transcendence in the Age of War for two pianos has a dense, restless, endlessly modulating quality appropriate to the subject matter.

So there we are. A very well played set of interesting compositions, some rather sublime, some rather edgy, all showing the inventive talents of John Carollo. If you can only get one of his two CDs, Starry Night would get my vote for its beautiful string pieces. Transcendence in the Age of War comes in a close second. Here is a composer of today that deserves your attention.

Harley Gaber, In Memoriam 2010

2011-11-24T04:26:00.000-08:00

The mature Harley Gaber as composer favors long continuous sound matrixes of electro-acoustic poeticism. His The Winds Rise in the North from the seventies was an extraordinarily dissonant and intense piece that involved continuously modifying tone blocks of strings. I saw My Mother Ascending Mount Fuji (Innova) was a long-term project that used more consonant soundblocks and electro-acoustics combined with conventional instruments to create a mystical sort of rarified equivalent of high altitude in sound (see my review in the July 13th, 2010 posting of Gapplegate Music Review-- http://gapplegatemusicreview.blogspot.com).

The new release In Memorium 2010 (Innova 243) was commissioned by Dan Epstein in memory of Nancy Epstein. It is an elegaic six-movement electro-acoustic tone poem of eerie beauty. There are the continuous sound blocks again, but the sonics are more drenched (to my ears) in the sounds one might hear in an underwater world (to Mt. Fuiji's air). It is a strangely intriguing, ever shifting world he creates, the musical equivalent of a set of memories recalled as if in a dream.

It is in its own way an electro-acoustic near-masterpiece of our times. Happy Thanksgiving.

Maki Ishii Live; Ryan Scott with Esprit Orchestra; Alex Pauk, Conductor

2011-11-22T10:57:00.000-08:00

The Japanese composers of the 20th century who did the most, to my mind, to bring together modern classical orchestral music and traditional Japanese music: Takemitsu, Mayuzumi and Maki Ishii. It is to the latter that we turn today, in a live performance of three of his gems by Ryan Scott, percussion, with Esprit Orchestra under Alex Pauk. Maki Ishii Live (Innova 809) is a well-captured performance first aired on Canada's CBC Radio. Three Ishii percussion concerti are represented. They have some very intricate solo percussion parts which Scott plays from memory.

So it's not just that Ryan Scott has memorized the parts, of course; he plays them with musicality and fire. The orchestra sounds well too. These are works that belong to the later period of Ishii's output when he was especially concerned with incorporating traditional Japanese elements. "Saidoko (Demon)" was completed in 1989, "Concertante for Marimba," 1988, and "South-Fire-Summer" in 1992. All three have an intensive dynamic between percussion virtuosity & fire, and orchestral luminosity. They are excellent examples of Ishii's mature style and are played here with brightness, hard-edged thrust and a mastery of tone-color blending.

This is one of those recordings that SOUNDS great. There is presence and a sound staging that translate well to the speakers-in-a-room world of home listening. First-rate music, first-rate performance, first-rate audio quality.

Duo Gazzana, "Five Pieces" by Silvestrov plus Music by Takemitsu, Hindemith, and Janacek

2011-11-21T05:23:00.000-08:00

The Italian sisters Natascia (violin) and Raffaella (piano) Gazzana turn in a rather stunning debut on Five Pieces (ECM New Series B0014656-02). They tackle Takemitsu's "Distance de fee", Hindemith's 1935 "Sonata in E", Janacek's "Sonata", and Valentin Silvestrov's "Five Pieces" (2004).

Takemitsu's work was written when he was under a marked Messiaen influence but it has a strongly poetic quality that Duo Gazzana brings out nicely. The Hindemith has the harmonic movement, sometimes quiet grandeur and motor drive typical of the composer at his best. The Janacek is a work of some passion, rolling dramatics and east-meets-modern sensibility. The duo does not overemphasize the dramatic-romantic element and instead gives a well-balanced reading. Silvestrov's "Five Pieces" compares favorably with the rest of the program, in turns tender, gently propulsive, and largo-istically expressive.

The combination of Manfred Eichner's full-depth production and the sensitive, lyrically ravishing phrasings of Duo Gazzana make for a rather heady, subtly absorbing program. These are some wonderful works and they get an especially moving performance at the hands of the sister duo.

Paavo Jarvi and the Cincinnati Orchestra, Baltic Portraits

2011-11-17T05:16:00.000-08:00

The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra visit five greater- or lesser-known contemporary composers from the Baltic region and five corresponding orchestral works on Baltic Portraits (Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra Media 946). Paavo Jarvi conducts his way through the works with a good feel for orchestral detail and a full-fledged sense of the whole of each work.

Arvo Part's "Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten" is the one work many will have probably heard in one or more versions. CSO gives us a full, heart-felt reading that veers more to the side of warmth rather than elevator-shaft spookiness.

Two major symphonies act as bookends to the program. Aulis Sallinen's Symphony No. 8 has a sort of contemporary saga quality, with a wealth of melodically inventive passages that engage with a narrative quality. There is a boldness of rhythmic dynamics and a neo-post-romantic discursive unfolding. Lepo Sumera's Symphony No. 6 has contrasting blocks of mysterioso pianissimo orchestral murmurs bumping against more agitated, complex sound bursts.

The shorter works help provide variety and set off the longer pieces well. Erkki-Sven Tuur's "Fireflower" has post-impressionist shimmer and very evocative sound-sculpturing. Esa-Pekka Salonen (more known of course at this point for his conducting) provides in "Gambit" a sure-footed orchestral conception with soundscaped tone-painting that make for one of the more intriguing pieces on the program.

All-in-all Jarvi and the CSO do well in presenting us with quite respectable performances of works that deserve the hearing they get. I suspect that none of these versions are definitive at this point, but they do reveal a most interesting set of sonic experiences I feel I am the better for hearing. Worth a listen!

Jason Vieaux Plays Piazzolla

2011-11-16T07:37:00.000-08:00

Guitarist Jason Vieaux, bandoneanist Julien Labro and the chamber orchestra A Far Cry make beautiful music together on their recent recording of the music of Piazzolla (Azica 71270). It's a nice program of three works for varying lineups. Las 4 estaciones portenas (The 4 Seasons of Buenos Aires) (arranged by Labro for guitar, accordion and chamber orchestra) brings the full force into play for an elegant dip into Piazzolla's inimitable brightly colored tango palatte. The bandoneon gets the lion's share of the melodic pie until the fourth movement, when Jason Vieaux also holds forth overtly, but the whole work is a delight and the orchestral parts have genuine dash.

The Concerto for Guitar and Bandoneon, "Hommage a Liege" begins with some worthy guitar parts, played elgantly by Mr. Vieaux. Bandoneon and orchestra join guitar in the charming second movement, where the guitar work again shines brightly. Piazzolla's melodic fluidity is at a very high point, as it is throughout. The final movement launches a very fetching tango that allows the orchestra to hold forth along with the soloists.

The final Histoire du Tango (History of the Tango) (arr. for accordion and guitar) has some suitably jaunty passagework for both the principal soloists. It's an interesting suite that brings out some very translucent playing from Vieaux and characteristic accordion melodising, not without virtuoso brilliance from both players.

I cannot imagine anyone interested in Piazzolla not reveling in this one. The guitar work is brilliantly sonic, the bandoneon shines, and the orchestra glows in some typically infectious music from the master of "new tango." Guitar-lovers will find Vieaux at the peak of his considerable expressive powers. This is some great feather-light music that will no doubt cheer you up, so do not expect anything ponderously heavy. Unless you are determined to feel morose or you hate the tango, do not hesitate! Enjoy.

Martin Bresnick, "Caprichos Enfaticos" for Piano and Percussion Quartet

2011-11-14T05:10:00.000-08:00

The 30-minute work Caprichos Enfaticos: Los Disastres de la Guerra (Cantaloupe 21075) is a meditation on the famed anti-war etchings of Francisco Goya. DVD projections of the Goya imagery are to be introduced in the course of a live performance of the eight movements of this work. Pianist/keyboardist Lisa Moore and So Percussion as a quartet give us a stirring performance, sans projections, of course. But though this may be somewhat programmatic music, it is music to hear, first and foremost, so the lack of visual correspondence is not a major factor.

There is an episodic, literary quality to the work which reminds me a little of some of George Crumb's chamber music. For example, there is a movement where the drums pound out the rhythmic ostinato from Holst's "Mars, the Bringer of War," but it becomes disjointed and disrupted as the piano interjects expressive chordal rejoiners as if to represent the forces that do not directly engage in the battles, those who perhaps do not whole heartedly approve of the carnage, or perhaps the victims?

It is well performed and well staged for the CD medium. Ms. Moore plays spiritedly and the rhythmic versus a-rhythmic elements balance nicely in her hands. She doubles on a harmonium in the later movements and gives out with a kind of earthy chorale folksiness. Similary the So Percussion Quartet provides a commanding performance of their part.

It is music as sound painting, a sort of "Pictures at an Exhibition" narrative style transposed to the post-modernist present. It is a work of power and a meditation on war and its horrors. If the music does not quite convey the macabre imagery and indignant disgust of the Goya etchings, I suppose we should not expect a literal correspondence.

What it is certainly bears hearing. Martin Bresnick writes music that stands out, that speaks with a grammar and syntax much his own. At this juncture in our history the subject matter is as timely as ever.

Ensemble Adventure, "Octandre": Six Composers Write Chamber Pieces Inspired By Varese's Masterpiece

2011-11-11T05:21:00.000-08:00

An unusual recording on tap today: the chamber Ensemble Adventure performs (Ars Musici 232211) Edgar Varese's modern masterpiece Octandre, followed by compositions in the spirit of Varese composed by six contemporary composers: Diego Luzuriaga, Thomas Bruttger, Coriun Aharonian, Mariano Etkin, Graciela Paraskevaidis, and Rolf Riehm. I am not familiar with these composers, but what they do and how Ensemble Adventure realizes them in performance is an experience that brings a kind of enlightenment coupled with pleasure. Varese is (was) not a composer given to writing music that espouses conventional western harmony, of course. In his music structures are fundamental to the makeup of a particular composition, especially with "Octandre". How those structures relate to one another is the important thing, like a set of related buildings in a city block. The movement in and out of pitch centers or tonality is not really relevant. It is music of an architectural sort, and a wonderful thing for the development of modernity.

The six composers represented here take the structural, architectural idea of Varese's "Octandre" and run with it, to each his or her own. So you hear "Octandre" performed with a kind of lingering care, then you hear the six compositions that bear tributary resemblance to that work.

The performances are excellent, the music very stimulating, and the recording bright. It's a great idea, greatly realized. Those who love the high modernism of Varese will find this CD a real treat.

Jason Kao Hwang, Spontaneous River: "Symphony of Souls"

2011-11-09T05:31:00.000-08:00

Jason Kao Hwang is not afraid to do something new. Improvising violinist, composer, conductor, he's formed Spontaneous River, an orchestra of improvising artists. There are currently 38 string players. Jason on solo violin plus 14 violinists, including Sarah Bernstein; five violists; five cellists, including Daniel Levin and Tomas Ulrich; six contrabassists, including Michael Bisio and Ken Filiano; seven guitarists, including Dom Minasi and James Keepnews; plus Andrew Drury at the drums, making a total of 39 instrumentalists. The point is that these are some of the most actively interesting and accomplished string improvisers on the New York scene.

They join together to play Maestro Hwang's 11 movement composition Symphony of Souls (Mulatta 022). I am deliberately posting this review on my modern classical site because I think it's important that this work be heard by new jazz improv conoisseurs but also those who follow and appreciate contemporary classical works from the present day. I believe that both groups with their overlaps can well appreciate what is going on in this music, given repeated listens and concentrated attention.

What then of the music? It has composed modern orchestral sections; it has some flat-out ultra-modern jazz orchestralities, it has opportunities for the collective aggregate of musicians to improvise together freely in various combinations, and it has passages where the written and the improvised work together in contrasting and synthesizing ways.

The sum total musical impression the work makes in this recording is of a free adventure, a virtually limitless but conceptually consistent exploration of the various possibilities such an ensemble presents. There are open improvisational sections where the entrances and exits and the nature of those musically are guided by Hwang's conductions. The personal stamp of the improvisers' styles are an important part of the sound. Since I am quite familiar with some of these players I can recognize their improvisatory input. But even those I am not that familiar with help tailor the total sound for a rather unprecedented result. This piece performed by another group of improvisors would have the same sign posts but the results in the way the signposts are made to sound and the manner of the collective improvised sections would undoubedly sound different. From performance to performance even with the same group there would be variations in the total effect. And that's good!

There are cadenza-like improvisations from Jason Hwang, atmospheric string writing of tonal clusters and chorale-like blocks of sound that float as if in space, rhythmically driven ostinatoes, bluesy lines with various improvisations coming into play, complex color-texture sound events with particular improvisers soloing over them, pure improvisatory excursions with a great deal of atmospheric ambiance, rocking density, lovely cacaphonies of multi-expressions in a free zone, tutti motives that emerge from primal chaos, quiet passages of great beauty, pizzicato deluges of cascading pitches, smaller groupings of various improvisers providing a moment of interesting contrast, moments when drummer Andrew Drury shines forth, suspending soundclouds of complexely textured tones. . . .

In short this is complex, engaging music that covers much ground. It fills the interstices between new improvisatory music, modern jazz and avant orchestral-compositional practices. And it does so in ways that enthrall, excite, agitate and make tranquil, intrigue and overwhelm, and open up passages to new soundworlds.

It is the sort of music that takes time to assimilate and appreciate. It is, I believe, a milestone in the improvisatory-compositional nexuses we see coming together in this new century. The exceptional talents and sensitivities of Spontaneous River make that so, as does the imaginative and executional excellence of Jason Kao Hwang. Let there be more of this! In the meantime, do not miss this music if you want to have a feeling for, and appreciation of what's going on in the current decade!

Azerbaijani Piano Concertos, Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and Soloists

2011-11-08T05:26:00.000-08:00

The modern concert music of Azerbaijan does not often find its way to the west. There was a recent Naxos disk of the music of Amirov (see my review posting of April 9, 2010 at gapplegatemusicreview.
blogspot.com) and a few others, but not much else that I know of.

So the present release Azerbaijani Piano Concertos (Naxos 8.572666) is most welcome. It's the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra under Dmitry Yablonsky, with alternating piano soloists F. Badalbeyli and M. Adigezalzade, working their way through two full concertos and three shorter pieces.

The music reflects the cultural influences to be felt in the region in the 20th and 21st centuries. Much of it has an appealing minor tonality that is part of the heritage of eastern/mideastern traditional music, but there is also a Tchaikovskian-Rachmaninovian strain to be heard and in some pieces the influences of early modernity. Amirov and Nazirova's "Concerto After Arabian Themes" (1957) has much of the romantic-meets-mid-eastern flavor alluded to above. Adigezalov's Concerto No. 4 (1994) continues in that vein with a bit more modern elements. The three shorter, single-movement works are pleasing, with Guliyev's "Gaytagi" (1958/1980) generating the most excitement.

It is a collection of music that doesn't hit home as world-class singularity. It does give you an interesting view of what some Azerbaijani composers have been doing. And the performances are good. Those who like a little exoticism will find it here.

Andras Schiff Plays Robert Schumann's Piano Music on "Geistervariationen"

2011-11-04T05:13:00.000-07:00

Robert Schumann is not a modern composer, obviously. But I include this recording on the blog today because it involves high-romantic pianism played with the sort of renewed attention to the notes and phrasing that sounds modern. Pianist Andras Schiff plays some of Schumann's most ambitious and moving solo piano works on Geistervariationen (ECM New Series 2-CDs B0016115-02) in such a way that you hear clearly the phrasing and fully realized note values that Schumann intended. Truth be told, I have heard many performances of these works where the sustain pedal and an overarching dash of passion make up for lack of precision. Andras Schiff brings the MUSIC to our ears minus the overwrought expression, though his playing does not lack warmth and drive, and with the keen architectural attention to detail that allows us to hear the melodic-harmonic brilliance of the music.

It's a double CD with plenty of room for many of Schumann's best works, "Papillons," the C Major Fantasy, the Opus 11 Piano Sonata, Kinderszenen, Waldszenen and his final work, the Geistervariationem.

Andras Schiff is a remarkable pianist. Listening to this set, it is as if you are hearing these pieces for the first time. Highly recommended--even for those who are not confirmed Schumann-lovers.

Toshio Hosokawa, "Landscapes," for Chamber Orchestra and Sho

2011-11-03T04:50:00.000-07:00

The Munich Chamber Orchestra under Alexander Liebreich and Mayumi Miyata on the Japanese mouth organ, the sho, tackle four compelling Toshio Hosokawa compositions spanning the last two decades on Landscapes (ECM New Series B0016073-02). "Cloud and Light" (2008), "Sakura fur Otto Tomek" (2008) "Ceremonial Dance" (2000), and "Landscape V" (1993), are given lingeringly detailed interpretations.

Hosokawa's music combines the long sounds of Japanese ancient ceremonial Gagaku music and other traditional forms with the modern sound-coloristic, soundscape approaches that are an important aspect of contemporary concert music. It all works convincingly and movingly on Landscapes. Based on this program Hosokowa stands alongside Takemitsu, Mayuzumi and Ishii as an important modern Japanese composer who works with tradition in innovative ways.

It is music to contemplate, linger over, revel in. It is a very excellent example of the vital compatibility of tradition and modernism in the contemporary music world. Hosokawa shows us as he puts forward this series of tone-essays that, under the masterfully sensitive baton of Alexander Liebreich, his music is one of the most convincing new developments in modern concert music in this decade. By all means give it a listen!

The Pacifica Quartet: String Quartets by Dimitri Shostakovitch and His Contemporaries (The Soviet Experience, Volume 1)

2011-10-31T05:08:00.000-07:00

Bela Bartok and Dmitri Shostakovitch created a series of string quartets that hold their own today as singular masterpieces of that genre in the 20th Century. There are others too, of course. But nowhere else is the sublimity of the late Beethoven quartets so rivaled.

There is a new recording of the middle-period Shostakovitch quartets (nos. 6-8 of the 15 total) The Soviet Experience, Volume One (Cedille, 2-CDs 90000 127). The Pacifica Quartet play these and, for good measure, Miaskovsky's Quartet No. 13. The title of this set is understandable, yet perhaps a bit ironic. Stalin and his Social Realist minions hounded Shostakovitch through the bulk of his career for his modernism, which they deemed bourgeois and "formalist". Time and again in his more publicly visible symphonic and operatic premiers he was taken to task. Seemingly with the Quartets he defiantly proceeded to develop the music as he saw fit. And perhaps because the quartet premiers were less a public occasion the apparachniks had less to say about who could play them and when. In any case this music exists almost in spite of the "Soviet Experience," so the title is not a straightforward one.

What counts however is the music and its performance. The Pacifica Quartet do a marvelous job to bring out the excitement of the brio passages and the contemplative, tender sadness of the slower movements. This is a very fine performance of these quartets, one of the best I've heard, if not THE best. The Miaskovsky No. 13 is well played too. It may not be quite at the level of the Shostavovitch works but it sets them off well and provides an interesting contrast.

I hope the Pacifica Quartet go on to record the rest of the Shostakovitch cycle. For now we can be thankful that this recording of the middle works is with us. It is a must-hear!

Music For The Zombie Apocalypse: Naxos' Gothic, Macabre and Chilling Anthology for Halloween and After

2011-10-28T05:20:00.000-07:00

I generally shy away from anthologies with a particular theme. If it has an interesting mix that sets a theme off well, however, I take notice. Such an item is Naxos of America's Music For The Zombie Apocalypse, a rather bizarre mix of gothic dark side medieval-to-romantic classic gems and modern avant-eerieness, well suited to a zombie inferno and so a great choice for scaring the heck out of trick-or-treaters or putting the psycho-frosting on your Halloween party cake.

What's interesting and fun about this particular set (which runs almost two-hours time) is that it avoids the classical cliches of the season to dig deeper into the death-in-life zombie horror possibilities in the repertoire. Fune-orial requiem excerpts from Faure, Berlioz & Mozart, chant, minor-mode glass harmonica other-worldly-ness and haunted early-music counterpoint mix with the avant horror latent in works by Penderecki, Part, Schnittke, Gorecki, Varese and Lutoslawski.

Right now you can grab this one as a fine-sounding download at a great price. This Spring it will be out as a CD. Check the Naxos link for more info. I whole-heartedly. . . but wait, I am missing my internal organs, arghghghghg!!! ....I most certainly recommend you give yourself a fine set of nitemares with this set!! It's different enough that you can raise the hair on the back of many necks with it. Happy Halloween!

Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (Abridged), Naxos Audiobook

2011-10-27T05:11:00.000-07:00

Goethe's Faust has had a huge impact on both musical culture and the Western legacy at large. So it seems fitting that we mention a rather wonderful dramatic enactment of the work on a new Naxos Audiobook (0068). It's abridged, which is a fine thing since a full version would last a veritable eternity. In effect Naxos Audiobooks has done for Faust what some of the classic London recordings of the '60s did for opera. It conceives of the soundstage and special potential of the modern recorded medium and how they can heighten appreciation for the work in ways that the stage or the book format cannot.

So this production has very well conceived sound effects, music, voice alteration and excellent dramatic recitation by the actor-reciters. Listen straight through and you get a vivid experience of the Faust drama in ways you would not get in any other form. The English translation is melifluous and not stilted, and the recitation is terrific.

Anyone who has appreciated the various settings of Faust by Gounod, Berlioz, Schumann, etc., will revel in the full drama enacted in the spirit Goethe intended.

Of course this is a long work even in its abridged form. The ideal way to experience it first hand is in this audiobook. It makes what could easily be a bit of an ordeal an exciting and sonorously delightful experience, if you are a person of some patience.

Highly recommended. Paste this URL in your browser window to find out more or order a copy for yourself: http://www.naxosaudiobooks.com/0068.htm

Busoni, Doktor Faust: Sir Adrian Boult and a Stellar Cast Do A Bang-Up Job in This Historic Recording

2011-10-26T05:02:00.000-07:00

Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924) was a key transitional composer who bridged the gulf that opened between the romantic and modern-expressionist schools. His piano pieces are revered by connoisseurs. Then there is a major opera, Doktor Faust, left nearly finished at his death in 1924.

Noted conductor Sir Adrian Boult put together an abridged concert version of the work for BBC and recorded it in 1959 with the London Philharmonic Orchestra/Choir and an impressive cast of Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau, Richard Lewis, Ian Wallace, Heather Harper and John Cameron. The recording, fitting one disk at 74 minutes length, has been issued recently (LPO 0056).

It's a work of definite merit, with plenty of dramatic scoring and vocal presence. Boult and cast do a great job building the case for the opera as a fully worthy modern masterwork. The performance here is surely one of the very best on disk. One quibble: there is no libretto included. Of course nowadays one can readily find such things on the internet. Nonetheless it is a shame that it was omitted. Aside from this, though, Boult's version is a real winner!

Jim Connolly, "It is Only Gravity that Makes Wearing A Crown Painful"

2011-10-25T05:20:00.000-07:00

Judging from his new release It's Only Gravity that Makes Wearing A Crown Painful (pfMENTUM 061), composer Jim Connolly writes modern music for chamber ensemble that has a distinct Americana feel to it. The Gove County String Quartet along with Anna Abbey on piano and toy piano, and the composer on contrabass present a program of 20 miniatures that have a kind of naive diatonic quality. There is much charm. It isn't quite the sort of naive diatonicism that Erik Satie or John Cage sometimes put forward. It is closer in spirit to Aaron Copland in his more rustic moments, though not precisely. And of course Copland always had a kind of sophisticated way of going about things no matter what he did. Jim Connolly hews more to a folk lifeways in body as well as spirit, albeit transformed to a concert medium.

The music has more charm than it does rigorous form in the more academic sense. For the open listener I suppose this is neither here nor there in the end. The music beguiles and clears the air of any stuffy particulates. I find with successive listens that Connolly's chamber music is only facile on the surface. There is the feeling of an intimate evening of "plain" music in a rural homestead sometime in the unspecific past, but something original and involved going on underneath it as well.

The sound is as plainly presented as the music. It is not something to show off your system to visitors, if anybody does that any more, but it more than adequately conveys the spirit and nuance of the music at hand.

Very interesting, Give it a few hearings and decide for yourself.

Steven Mackey, Lonely Motel, Music from Slide

2011-10-24T05:14:00.000-07:00

Steven Mackey writes music that is contemporary in the best sense. He combines all manner of stylistic elements: the modern, the minimal and the post-minimal, a world-influenced style, a little rock-metal from his guitar and appropriate instrumentation, some contemporary musical theater elements and modern operatic sounds, all for Lonely Motel, Music from Slide (Cedille 90000 128). Rinde Eckert takes the vocal parts and also has written the libretto. The noted contemporary chamber ensemble Eighth Blackbird provides the body of instrumental-musical sound.

What is Slide? A song suite. There are music references (not quotations) to earlier masters and the Beatles. The lyrics center around a psychologist and have a kind of anxious quality. According to Mr. Mackey, they are "about the isolation created by the attachments we develop to our own fuzzy, personal views of reality."

This is the world premiere recording and all give an excellent performance of a work that needs time to assimilate. Instrumentally there is much to appreciate; the writing is original and diverse, detailed and broadly dramatic. The vocal part (and its performance) has a half-theater, half-modern-chamber-opera sort of vibe to it. It took a number of listens to this aspect particularly to start appreciating it. This is not music for someone who listens only once and expects to get it all before moving on to the next. That will not work with Slide.

At this early stage in the work's reception I must say that it has the makings of something that will be listened to and appreciated years hence. Or perhaps it wont. Either way it is an example of a new synthesis in concert music, a synthesis of some of the sounds we come upon today as serious listeners. A very good example. Those who wish to know where things stand these days should most definitely give this work a close listen.

Arvo Part, Piano Music; Ralph van Raat, Pianist

2011-10-20T04:54:00.000-07:00

Arvo Part no doubt occupies a rather central position as one of the world's foremost composers. He is known for many things, but his piano music is not especially one of them.

So when pianist Ralph van Raat offers up a new disk devoted exclusively to this part of his oeuvre, people like me take notice. Piano Music (Naxos 8.572525) covers most of his career: solo works begining with his Opus One, the fascinating neo-classical/modernist "Zwei Sonatinen fur Klavier" (1958/59), through other interesting works spanning the '50s, '70s. and the '00s. Finally there is the 2002 work "Lamentate: Homage to Anish Kapoor and his sculpture 'Marsyas', for piano and orchestra", for which van Raat is joined by the Netherlands Radio Chamber Philharmonic under JoAnn Falletta.

The Opus One set of sonatinas gives you the Part of not-so-latent talent, a gifted young composer who shows the influence of Prokofiev and Stravinsky. The later works increasingly reveal his own meditative style, which culminates in the fully idiomatic "Lamentate." It's a sensitively and skillfully executed program of some interesting music. It is not all brilliance and light. It does offer revealing glimpses of the composer's development, sometimes via a kind of rummage through the "attic" of earlier works, some neglected, but all well worth hearing and well performed on this disk.

The disk is worth it for the early solo works alone; it is also worth it for the performance and presence of Part's "Lamentate". Put the two aspects together and you have a highly recommended program!

Meira Warshauer, Living Breathing Earth

2011-10-18T05:31:00.000-07:00

Meira Warshauer combines a modern orchestral vocabulary with a poetic vision of life on this planet and her Jewish heritage. Her Living Breathing Earth CD (Navona 5842) pairs her Symphony No 1 Living Breathing Earth with Tekeeyah (a call), the latter of which is a concerto for trombone, shofar and orchestra.

Throughout there is lyricism and a bit of the bite and tang of contemporary harmonic thinking. The scores are evocative, engaging and filled with associative imagery. This is music, I would hope, of broad appeal, yet sufficiently advanced to satisfy those who look for the music of our time to engage in the sounds of our time.

The performances are very good and the music is highly recommended.

Ross Edwards, "Maninyas," Sibelius Violin Concerto, Played by Adele Anthony

2011-10-17T05:07:00.000-07:00

We hear in violinist Adele Anthony a bright young star launching into the firmament. She has beautiful tone, great facility, impressive phrasing and a rhythmic drive that is very fitting to the works at hand. For this, her recording of Ross Edwards's Maninyas and Jean Sibelius's Violin Concerto in D Minor (Canary Classics 09), she is joined by the sonorous and very well-prepared Adelaide Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Arvo Volmer. There is a marvelous give and take between soloist and orchestra on both pieces and Volmer draws out the orchestral nuances that in turn are used as a means for Ms. Anthony to take sonoric virtuoso flight in rather breathtaking ways.

Her cadenzas are marvelous. But it is in her interpretations of the central written parts that Adele especially excels.

Both the Edwards and Sibelius concertos have in common a folk element and a rhythmic vitality that orchestra and soloist bring out well. The allegro passages of Maninyas have a Stravinskian-Reichian rhythmic-cellular thrust that Edwards transforms to suite his own total-harmonic palette and the aboriginal theme. The center chorale is tender and lyrical. This piece was heretofore unknown to me. After hearing Ms. Anthony and Maestro Volmer proffer their version of it on this album I must say I am now a true believer.

The Sibelius concerto of course has been performed countless times since it was written. There have been many wonderful recordings. Anthony and Volmer offer an interpretation that ranks among the best. Adele draws out the romantic, rubato passion inherent in the score without sacrificing rhythmic motility. It is a singular thrill to hear her performance here. I have heard more of the folk element drawn out in other versions, but for the ravishing beauty of her execution Adele Anthony's interpretation nears the very best.

In short this disk is vibrant, impressive, and highly sonorous. It is an example of the excellence of Australia's Adelaide Symphony, the finely detailed interpretive nuances of Arvo Volmer's take on these two works, and the impressive powers of Ms. Anthony. Highly recommended.

Composer Jeremy Beck Performed By IonSound Project Ensemble

2011-10-07T04:43:00.000-07:00

There are more and more composers today that have embraced tonality and earlier styles with a vengeance. At first it seemed that most of those were retreating to a neo-romantic zone. Then there was minimalist linear tonality. Others combined tonality with its opposite. Jeremy Beck favors lyrical excursions into music inspired by Stravinsky's neo-classical period and perhaps a taste of Hindemith. But of course that's not all, there's a little of the S. Barber of Knoxsville and a general rhapsodic approach the puts Beck in his own niche.

The CD at hand IonSound Project (Innova 797) features seven mostly rather brief compositions scored for various instrumental and vocal combinations, as played (well) by the Pittsburgh based sextet IonSound Project.

It is very finely crafted music that leaves an impression in the end. There are glimpses of originality and very sensitive scoring for the various instrumental combinations. Now I do wonder what his orchestral works sound like. As it is, this is lovely music in a chamber mode.

A New Collection of Original Recordings (1928-44) of Weill's Threepenny Opera and Songs From Related Works

2011-10-03T05:52:00.000-07:00

Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht's classic Der Dreigroschenoper (Threepenny Opera) and the cabaret operas that followed form perhaps the single body of classic-modern works most in need of more authentic period interpretation. The pieces were conceived and performed in a '20s-'30s European-cabaret-two-step jazz style that musicians of today have no experience of for the most part; the style of singing--emphatic, declamatory, with vibrato-drenched sarcasm--is perhaps even more difficult to reconstruct. The result is, apart from Lotte Lenya's admirable revival recordings on Columbia in the later '50s, there have been mostly a host of well-meaning performances that essentially miss virtually everything but the melodic contours.

Thankfully we have recordings from the era that faithfully capture the full essence of the works as originally conceived. A 2-CD set available in the States just now is the Capriccio (5061) 2-CD Die Dreigroschenoper/O Moon of Alabama: Historic Original Recordings 1928-1944. It's one disc of various recordings of selections from Threepenny and a disk of selections from three ensuing works: Mahagonny, Happy End and Silbersee. With Threepenny you get the eleven-cut original cast recordings from 1928-30, which give you some definitive versions of around half the work, a 1929 arrangement for winds, selected foreign language versions from the era, and some instrumental dance arrangements. The second disk covers a selection of theater songs from three other productions as noted.

As far as a listening experience goes, one must keep in mind that especially on the first disk there are multiple versions of the most popular songs from the opera, all interesting but subject to a certain amount of repetition.

Beyond that however, this is is something all Weill admirers must hear and appreciate if they are to understand what a modern production must try and realize. Weill was an exceptional melodist but he was also a musical revolutionary in the way he adopted the venacular of the day. The powerful and not to forget, dangerous subjects of the songs and their subversive (to the Nazi thugs) criticism of the world around them are delivered fearlessly and with the kind of dramatic thrust that the theater-cabaret of the times encouraged. A special vibrato on the part of singers and instrumentalists, proper jazz-pop inflection by the instrumentalists, and a kind of fervent conviction are all up front on these recordings.

The sound is what it is--these are 78s that for the worst sort of reasons became rather rare by the end of WWII. The sources used for mastering are all in respectable shape, but one mustn't expect holographic digital clones of the reality of that era. This is as close as you'll come to that, though, barring the invention of a time machine. Essential listening!

Villa-Lobos' "Forest of the Amazon": Complete Version by the Moscow Radio Symphony

2011-09-30T05:32:00.000-07:00

Nearing the end of his life Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos wrote the symphonic soundtrack for a movie version of Green Mansions. When that movie failed, so the story goes, Villa-Lobos expanded the music into a full symphonic work, Forest of the Amazon. It is in its own way one of the composer's masterworks, though for a time it was not often performed, if at all. The definitive recording is still probably the one conducted by the composer and released on LP around 1959.

However the first recording left off a good deal of the music due to the time limitations of the 12-inch LP format. The full score was never collated by the composer, as the parts originally recorded became the main concern. Conductor Alfred Heller, a Villa-Lobos protege during Heitor's final years, has reconstructed a critical edition of the score and produced an important new recording of the work, containing 50 minutes more music than the LP was able to present. Renee Fleming rivals original soprano Bidu Sayao in recreating the solo vocal part and the Moscow Radio Symphony does a good job with the now 74-minute version. The recording was around for a number of years but went out of print. It is now available as a Delos CD.

I've long listened to the original LP and it is still an exhilarating experience for this writer. However the full-length version is a revelation. Themes return, are more fully developed, and the enchanted mood of the score is that much more intensified. My only quibble is that the Moscow Radio Symphony does not always capture the fully Brazilian quality of some of the passages, especially those which bring in the chorus.

Nonetheless Alfred Heller has given us a dynamic and exciting version of the full score that rewards the listener with all the color of Villa-Lobos at his orchestral-orchestrational best.

Ideally one should have the original recording along with this one. If you can't manage to find both, then this one makes a fine substitute and gives you everything originally intended to be a part of the work. It should be heard by anyone with an interest in the composer and/or the modern orchestral palette.

Monteverdi's Vespro Della Beata Vergine, 1610, in a Bright New Recording

2011-09-28T05:08:00.000-07:00

Claudio Monteverdi's 1610 Vespro Della Beata Vergine (da concerto, composto sopra canti fermi sex vocibus et sex instrumentalis) has, after 400 years, become one of the staples of the Western Cannon, a masterpiece of extended sacred music. The Choir of New College Oxford under Edward Higginbottom has given us a freshly minted recording (Novum 1382, 2CDs), honoring the 400th anniversary of the work's first publication. 400 years! May something of what we do now musically be so remembered in 2410!

The work itself is a beautiful example of Monteverdi's writing for massed choir and small chamber ensemble. Choral counterpoint and homophony join with expressive solo vocals and instrumental interludes. Listening today one is struck by the asymmetrical phrasing that corresponds to the choral text, and the richly varied setting.

The Choir of New College Oxford distinguishes the recording by utilizing a boy's choir for the upper vocal lines, which gives the sound a special resonance.

It is a masterful performance, one of the very best. If you have no Monteverdi in your collection or, like me, you have a good deal, no matter. This one is a great addition to your library either way.

Joana Sa's Striking New Music from Portugal: "Through This Looking Glass" CD/DVD

2011-09-27T05:41:00.000-07:00

Before I received the CD/DVD Through This Looking Glass (blinker, Marke fur Rezentes) I did not know of the music of Joana Sa. Now that I have listened repeatedly and watched the accompanying DVD, I feel that I surely do. She hails from Portugal, performs the entire piece live for this production, and leaves no small impression. The piece was conceived and written for prepared piano, toy piano, electronics (mostly live), props (mechanical toys for the most part) and a mobile.

The tripartite influences of John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen and George Crumb make themselves felt as precursors throughout. You have ambiance, sound-painting and an exotic component in the work as a whole that all the above have something to do with, though she remains totally herself to my mind.

The release includes a CD version of the audio and a DVD film (directed by Daniel Neves) of Ms. Sa's performance. This is late high modernism at its best. The film heightens the performative aspects of the piece with a black and white clarity that gives you insight into the work and Ms. Sa's refreshingly poetic approach. You watch as she manipulates the piano with dexterity and confidence. There are the prepared piano passages, the playing inside the piano with bow hair, mallets, sticks, hands, inserted objects. There is Joana sounding the grand piano from underneath. There are the mechanical toys, the mobile. There is the sheer viceral aspect of performance.

It is a work of great charm. It is sound poetry. It is one of the most successful and attractive high modern keyboard works that I've heard in years. Joana Sa must be appreciated if you want to know where modernism has gone. It's here. Find out more by clicking on the Joanna Sa link on the right. Click on the Trem Azul link on that site to order a copy. Highly recommended.

Avant-Minimal Accordion Music from Finland: Antii Paalanen's "Beatbox"

2011-09-19T06:52:00.000-07:00

I don't suppose anyone would accuse this blog of getting stuck in a rut. And since it's people who make blogs, and they don't make themselves, it is this writer you can either thank or blame for it.

As if to make a point we travel to Finland today for a most interesting CD of accordion music by composer Antii Paalanen: Beatbox (Sibelius Academy 1005). It's Paalanen and his three row accordion, sometimes apparently multi-tracked, in a program of nine semi-miniatures.

What is compelling is how Antii combines minimalism, folk-like strains and quasi-rock rhythmic insistence into a heady mix that is all his own. There is a full use of all the parameters of sound that his instrument can produce and there is a definite virtuostic bent to the intricacy of the music.

It's melodic in the recognizable almost whistle-along sense. But it also has a power to it that makes it far from lightweight fare. This is serious music. It is seriously interesting. Seriously worth hearing.

Grazyna Bacewicz's Violin Concertos Nos. 2, 4, 5: Premier Recordings of Substantial Works, Well Played

2011-09-13T05:40:00.000-07:00

If you aren't all that familiar with the music of Grazyna Bacewicz (1909-1969) you are not alone. I have only come to her music recently. She left behind a body of works that may be more well-known in her native Poland than they are in the States, but that may be ending as her work becomes heard increasingly.

For instance we have the second volume of her violin concertos (Chandos), played with brilliance and sensitivity by Joanna Kurkowicz, with the Polish Radio Symphony under Lukasz Borowicz.

Bacewicz wrote extensively for the violin, and the concertos certainly show that she was well in command of expressive idiomatic writing for the instrument. The works cover a nine year span from the end of World War II through to 1954. The three works at hand (Concertos 2, 4, & 5) show originality within an overall Eastern European stylistic continuity. They have a moderately modernistic tone with a good deal of deftly handled, continually shifting chromaticisms and some melodic passages that echo Polish folks strains without exactly engaging them. The violin parts are virtuostic and expressive and her handling of the orchestra is sure.

The Chandos recording has good presence; the orchestra is in excellent form. It is a very good introduction to a composer that deserves more recognition in North America.

Cello Lounge by Borislove and Noizepunk: Gene Pritsker Conflates Category to Produce His Own Blend

2011-09-09T06:07:00.000-07:00

Romantic classical, hip-hop, and electronica combine is unusual ways on the new Composers Coincordance Records (004) release Cello Lounge. Here we have cellist Borislav Strulev and composer-instrumentalist Gene Pritsker under the nom de plume Borislove Noizepunk. It is an album of collage, of beats, electronic manipulation, sampling, keyboard, guitar and the art of the cello.

Gene presents extended and looped romantic-era melodics from well-known works (primarily with Boris's cello taking on those lines) along with what sounds like newly composed lines, all within the context of the sound of altered samples, electronic drum back-beats, and a kind of electronic orchestra. Boris adds written and/or improvised lines over the top as well.

This sounds like a kind of hip-hop concerto for cello at times; other times it exudes the dynamic rock guitar of Gene's in tandem with the cello and electronica.

It is music of a piece, a music unified in an unexpected and unprecidented way. It will not be for everyone. But those who are willing to leave preconceptions behind will find a very stimulating program of music. Go on a different sort of trip with this one. You will find the ride both fun and musically rich.

Heinz Holliger's New Recording of Bach's Concertos and Sinfoniettas for Oboe Satisfies

2011-09-08T04:56:00.000-07:00

The prospect of Heinz Holliger playing Bach's Concertos and Sinfoniettas for Oboe (ECM New Series) sounded quite promising to me when I heard of its release. After listening a number of times I must say it fully lives up to my expectations. You get ECM's fully resonant acoustics and you get a fully consistent approach to the music, thanks to Holliger's ravishing tone and execution and the sweetly sonorous Camerata Bern, conducted with feeling and exacting attention to detail by Erich Hobarth, who also plays the violin solo part in the Double Concerto for Violin and Oboe.

In addition to the work just mentioned the ensemble takes on a number of the sinfonia introductions that feature the oboe in various cantatas, the sinfonia from the Easter Oratorio and three Bach concertos reconstructed to feature the oboe as the principal soloist. Marcello's Oboe Concerto in D minor, a work Bach apparently admired, rounds out the program.

These are performances that linger over the musical elements with loving care. Holliger's sweetly lyrical approach is complemented by an almost langorous pouring outward in the strings and continuo. This is Bach with less brio and more of a loving familiarity, as one would read a favorite old story out loud to an intimate circle of friends.

It is most certainly not surpassed by any similar recording I've heard over the years. Holliger's long tenure in the limelight has given him a mature profundity that echoes sympathetically in his accompaniment. In every way this is a most satisfying performance, an instrumental centerpiece to anyone's Bach collection.

Robert Moran's Moving Trinity Requiem, for the Victims of 9-11

2011-09-06T05:44:00.000-07:00

With the 10th anniversary just days away we all no doubt will have moments where we pause and reflect, mourn, voluntarily or involuntarily relive the anguish and sorrow we felt in those terrible times. There are many scores of commemorative rituals that will be enacted. But to me it is music that can best express the inexpressible complexities. There are no doubt many musical meditations in the works. On Saturday the Union United Methodist Church in Boston will present a program by the excellent avant jazz outfit Trio X. And tomorrow, on the 7th, THE 9-11 church, the Trinity Wall Street church will be host to the world premier performance of Robert Moran's Trinity Requiem, a work which they commissioned. Those who cannot be there will be happy that a recording of Robert Moran's work has just been released (Innova 244), with Robert Ridgell conducting the Trinity Youth Chorus and members of the Trinity Choir, accompanied by harp, organ, strings and hand bells.

It is a moving, touchingly profound work that more or less starts with the sort of lyric luminosity and melodic strength of Faure's Requiem and builds on that legacy. Robert Moran has done some composing in the minimalist camp and he puts the ambient enveloped-sound you sometimes get in that style towards a more linear approach. The haunting timbral passion of the Trinity Youth Chorus carries us away from our worldly concerns and into a space where we can experience something akin to healing. The instrumental accompaniment supports the choral vocal lines with a fitting memento mori reflectiveness. It is music that stands on its own as no doubt one of the great requiems of or era. Perhaps a little silence (a moment) might be the right thing to conclude.

The Crossing: A Marvelous Choral Group and Their Release "It is Time"

2011-08-30T05:38:00.000-07:00

Romanian poet Paul Celan may not get a great deal of attention here in the States. In the cultural dark ages of the present that is perhaps to be expected. NO modern poetry gets much in the way of attention. Though we lament the dearth of poetry dissemination as a whole we must give recognition (when it is due) to those artists and composers who creatively adapt important modern poetic texts to musical settings.

The Crossing, an exceptionally well-poised chamber choral group, have done something of this nature for Paul Celan's poetry with It is Time (Navona 5845). We get the chance to hear some very beautiful, very post-modern/modern settings of Celan by six less-than-well-known composers: David Shapiro, Kile Smith, Paul Fowler, Frank Havroy, Erhard Karkoschka and Kirsten Broberg.

It was said of some actor or other (I forget who) that he could recite from the phone book and move people to tears; he was that good. In many ways The Crossing under conductor Donald Nally have similar gifts. They sound incredibly beautiful no matter what they are doing. But the compositions themselves on It is Time are by no means lightweight fare. This is the music of today, beyond formula and dogma, richly expressive and unmistakably of our own time.

The results are breathtaking. I do not jest.

Robert Aldridge's Opera "Elmer Gantry" Gets Lively Recording

2011-08-23T05:36:00.000-07:00

Robert Livingston Aldridge (b. 1954) has given us a substantial opera based on the Sinclair Lewis novel Elmer Gantry. William Boggs directs a new recording (Naxos 2-CD 8.669032-33) with soloists, the Florentine Opera Company (and Chorus) and the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra.

What to say about this work? In many ways musically it is ultra-conservative. It has all the earmarkings of something that might have been written in the 1930's. There is a touch of Americana in the sense that Copland's homespun nationalist strain can be heard not so much quoted from as assimilated. There's a slightly jazzy element that comes out of Gershwin. Otherwise it is highly romantic, even sentimental in its treatment of a subject that, at least when Sinclair wrote the novel, was meant to have impactful social-critical heft.

The story is set in pre-World War I small-town America. Elmer Gantry, as is clear from the beginning, is a man on the make, someone who sees the evangelical Christian revival spreading across the country as a chance to get himself ahead in life. He falls in with baptist priestess Sharon Falconer, who in the opera version at least, seems genuinely religious yet unable to recognize the plainly commercial and cynical transformation Gantry performs on her revival group. There is no space to go into details, but to me her character comes off as unconvincing.

In our world today, when right-wing evangelist groups have gained significant political clout in the United States and have great impact on the issues and policies of the United States government, the small-town shenanigans of Gantry seem tame and insignificant, especially as portrayed in the opera. He commits adultery with his old sweetheart, he raises much money for the tabernacle and uses the trappings of born-again Christian ideology for the accumulation of wealth. This may have seemed shocking to a 1920's small-town America but we have seen far worse since.

The music? There are effective moments of pastoral-hymn-folk-lyrical melody and they contrast perplexingly sometimes with the plot--when Gantry the cynical unbeliever declares his love for the incredibly gullible Falconer, when a parable of impending apocalyptic disaster is taken up in act two while the music expresses a kind of wistful sentimentality, in the course of the revival meeting, often at the height of Gantry's machinations.

The revival music can also take a kind of quasi-gospel, trite post-Gershwin "negro" jazziness, which historically is not accurate and sounds incredibly dated to boot. Other times it has a spiritedness that appeals. There are times when the opera comes off as a slightly highbrow version of a cornball small-town musical like The Music Man, complete with a sort of barbershop quartet's vision of nostalgic Americana. This is the kind of music that may hit a reverberant chord in the smaller centers of culture throughout the US today. And I am happy for the pleasure it may give many people. It disturbs me though that we can be made to feel nostalgia for the days when manipulative Gantries merely wanted to found a local ministry built on lies and deceit, and only make a million or two. Gantry was meant by Sinclair to personify an evil in America. The opera seems to like the fellow, just a little bit. I don't.

Nevertheless, from a musical point of view there are things that appeal and the dramatic climax of the last act is well wrought. It is very much a backward looking work, culturally, socially and musically. But it is a full-blown opera with plenty of crowd scenes, tender arias, duets, quartets and all the rest of what grand opera traditionally has had. And the performance seems quite good.

I don't believe this is the sort of thing that I would hold up as a model of what American opera is today. It's what American opera might have been 100 years ago, perhaps. Nevertheless, if it enjoys success, I am happy for the composer.

A Vital New Recording of Gesualdo's Third Book of Madrigals

2011-08-12T05:12:00.000-07:00

If Carlo Gesualdo di Venosa (1566-1613) had never entered his later compositional phase he would no doubt still be remembered for the architecture of his vocal polyphony, the charm and expressive inventiveness of his part writing. Along about the time of his Madrigals Book 3 (1595), he began utilizing dissonances, chromaticisms and expressive vocal phases that emulated sighs, laments and related outbursts of overwrought despair. In the era this was a notable departure from the norm. He was later looked upon (especially thanks to Stravinsky's late-1950's work Momentum Pro Gesualdo based on Gesualdo's music) as a precursor and prophet of expressive modernism.

Of course ultimately Gesualdo's music stands on its own. Remarkably beautiful, expressive, and of its own time as much or more than standing apart from it.

Marco Longhini and Delitiae Musicae give you a wonderful reading of the Third Book of Madrigals (Naxos 8.572136) for vocal sextet. The singing is quite engaging, with the countertenor part sung by the appropriate male exponent. (I've had versions where a mezzosoprano substituted and it did not quite suite the music as much. The unique timbre of the countertenor gives the music a more exotic, ancient sound and the parts seem more easily differentiated with that extra sound color added.)

Harpsichord continuo appears at appropiate points. (And again, I have had versions that leave this out to the detriment of the fullness and variety of sound you get with its inclusion.)

All in all this is a fabulous performance of music that should be a part of the musical library of anyone who wants a representative cross-section of early music. Marco Longhini gives us performances that are very near definitive. Bravo. Bring on Book Four!

Howard Blake's Vivid Music for String Quartet and String Trio, Nicely Performed by the Edinburgh Quartet

2011-08-11T05:09:00.000-07:00

Howard Blake made me take notice years ago with his dazzling score to the children's cartoon The Snowman. I have finally had the chance to hear more of his work via a couple of Naxos releases, one covered earlier on my Gapplegate Music Review Blog, the other up for discussion today. What I hear I like.

The one at hand covers some of his music for string quartet (and one for string trio) (Naxos 8.572688). The Edinburgh Quartet do the honors and they provide a nice balance between lyric expression and subtle shadings of string color. In many ways that's what Howard Blake's string chamber music is about.

His music has a modern tang to it and a kind of linear narrative quality so that you would never think you are hearing a piece by, say, Schumann or Brahms. Yet there is a very lyrical melodic strain to his compositions that put him apart from what is the norm out there today. The pieces ["Spieltrieb," "A Month in the Country," "Leda and the Swan," "String Trio, Op. 199," and "Walking in the Air"] include some early work (1975, 1977) and some recent (2008-2010). All have a pretty ravishing memorability about them.

The CD ends with the "Walking in the Air" sequence of The Snowman Suite and it is lovely to hear, especially if you are already familiar with the boy soprano, piano and orchestra version from the cartoon soundtrack. What it loses in sheer sensual beauty it gains with the paired-back clarity of the quartet.

This certainly is not the sort of cutting-edge modernism that can be had out there. It is a wonderful example of music from a composer who will give you a warm, almost folksy kind of feeling. a little like Vaughan-Williams in his more homespun mode.

If that sounds interesting to you, check this one out by all means.

Two Later Symphonies of Havergal Brian in a Recent Release: Listening to Symphonies No. 20 and 25

2011-08-10T05:19:00.000-07:00

English composer Havergal Brian lived a long life (1876-1972) and went his own way despite the winds of stylistic change that blew through his culture while he lived. A late romantic and gigantist he often summoned large orchestral forces to create sprawling symphonies of great length and complexity. He persisted despite his anachronistic status, leaving behind a large body of works, recordings of which in my experience were pretty rare until the advent of the digital era.

Naxos has been covering a cross-section of that output, the latest of which is a recording originally released on Marco Polo, Andrew Penny conducting the National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine in respendently respectable readings of Symphony No 20 (1962), No 25 (1966), and "Fantastic Variations on an Old Rhyme" (1907). The two later symphonies are broken into three movements apiece, a change from his earlier practice of conceiving his works in single long movements.

I have tried on a few occasions to digest a Brian symphony and found myself slightly adrift each time. The earlier works do go on. Sometimes listening is like witnessing a three-way battle between Richard Strauss, Elgar, and Mahler, with no winner on the field at the end of the melee save perhaps Brian himself. Thematically one sometimes feels as if one is playing a Where's Waldo as one threads one's way aurally through the rich and complex syntax of his symphonic vocabulary.

Listening to the new release at hand (Naxos 8.572641) I've come to realise that his music is almost all Waldos, so to say. The foreground/background, theme versus development and passagework, the sort of thing you expect to find in a typical romantic symphony, does not necessarily apply. Brian writes in long complex phrases, like a country lane that, yes, is meant to get somewhere but takes many twists and turns in doing so.

The earlier "Fantastic Variations on an Old Rhyme" takes the "Three Blind Mice" children's song and subjects it to extensions, convolutions and reworkings so that at many points it becomes unrecognizable, only to make a fragmentary return before Brian goes off again on a long digression-as-progression.

The Symphonies 20 and 25 are equally illuminating, for the listener who focuses on following the orchestrational and harmonic-melodic kaleidocopic linearity. The modern sonic staging of the rather large instrumental arsenal in these pieces allows you to revel in the sensuality of Brian's treatment of the orchestra. The clarity of Maestro Penny's interpretations helps you engage in the many episodic Waldo appearances and/or disappearances.

You come to realize that Brian only SOUNDS like a typical late romanticist. He is quite eccentric and even ornery in his refusal to present a symmetrical unfolding of themes and development.

That's what struck me listening to this fine addition to the Brian discography. It's a sonic epoch and gives you in short, relatively compact segments what Brian's music can be about.

And for all that I would recommend this one if you want to try a way into his music. This is no ordeal; it is music that has orchestral brilliance that makes for pleasurable listening. The vastly populated "Waldo-landscape" will challenge you and give you another sort of pleasure as well if you are willing to work at it.

Klara Min Plays Modern Piano Music from Korea

2011-08-08T05:36:00.000-07:00

One definite plus about a label like Naxos is that the price is reasonable enough that one can afford to explore the more adventuresome, less traveled byways of the classical repertoire. As your designated tour guide, I can help you negotiate via these reviews the more tangled thickets and avoid the crocodile-infested bogs along the way. At least I hope so!

Pianist Klara Min's new release is a good case in point (not of the crocodile bogs; the interesting by-ways!) Pa-Mun, Ripples On Water (Naxos 8.572406) exposes us to five Korean composers and eight solo piano works spanning the time period of 1958-2004. Isang Yun (1917-1995) will likely be remembered by those who followed the modern classical music of the '50s and '60s as it appeared on record. Other names may be less familiar: Younghi Pagh-Paan, Sukhi Kang, Uzong Chae, and Chung Gil Kim.

The pieces to a western ear do not sound especially Korean on the surface of things--that is, they do not especially resemble the traditional Korean classical and folk music one has heard. What all works have in common to some extent is a heightened feeling for sound and silence, quietude and movement, which of course need not be particularly Korean. Debussy, Ravel, Scriabin, Messaien all in their own way made good use of such contrasts.

But the composers here do not sound like them either. There are contemplative turns, there are quasi-neo-minimalist uses of repetition, and most of all there is a poetic approach to the piano, as if each phrase is the strain of some unknown and indirectly expressed poem.

Thanks to Klara Min for bringing out these qualities of the music on this disk. She is quite suited to the music she performs, as the music seems suited to her. These are not big, brash, bravura sorts of performances pieces. They are intimate. Klara Min conveys that sense with beautiful phrasing, a deceptively facile way of handling the difficult pages and a dynamic sense so important to the successful performance of this music.

Very interesting piano music. Very well played. Very recommended for those who have grown tired of the staples of the repertoire, or for that matter those who have not.

Orchestra 2001's "To the Point": Five Orchestral Suns Light the Musical Sky

2011-07-29T04:49:00.000-07:00

When summer heat becomes demonic my ordinarily acoustically conducive listening environment suffers greatly. Last week was such an occasion. The 100-plus-degree weather necessitated the noise of fans, air conditioners and an especially annoying blower on my computer that kicks in at a certain point and is so noisy that music listening becomes quite difficult.

The result is that though I went through the motions of hearing Orchestra 2001's To the Point (Innova 745) five times as per the usual with me, the quiet sections of the works ended up sounding like "music for blower with some kind of unidentified additions by unspecified instruments." But I am now listening again in a cooler planetary episode, so that all the lovely quietude comes through.

First things first. Orchestral 2001 is a relatively new organization, formed in 1988 by conductor and music director James Freeman. They are in residence at Swathmore College and concertize there as well as in Philadelphia venues when not touring.

They specialize in the music of the 20th and 21st centuries. There are a number of recordings out. To the Point is the first I have heard with any concentration. Five works come into play.The first is an effervescent little fugal overture by Jennifer Higdon, which forms the title to the album and frames the concert offerings in an anticipatory way.

Next up is Andrew Rudin, who I am ashamed to admit last came to my ears through his electronic piece Tragoedia, on an old Nonesuch recording from the late '60s. His "Canto di Ritorno (Concerto for Violin and Orchestra)," with Diane Monroe playing the solo part, has the sonic plaintiveness of the Berg concerto minus the tragedic expressiveness and instead with a good deal of gossamer and fairy dust for our midsummer revelries (or rather reveries, I should probably say).

Then there's the marvelous Gunther Schuller "Concerto da Camera," a very evocative work with the sort of orchestrational brilliance Mr. Schuller conjures up so well, and some more quietly playful and elegaic passages.

Romeo Cascarino's "Blades of Grass" has beautiful largo writing for strings and Dorothy Freeman on English horn. It's another meditatively quiet piece. Don't run the fan with it!

Finally there is Jay Reis's more bravura "The River Within (Concerto for Violin and Orchestra)".
Maria Bachmann takes on the solo part with admirable passion and presence. It is a more traditional sounding modern concerto it its dynamic thrust and the clarity of its orchestration, but nonetheless shares with its fellow works a kind of pastoral playful translucency at times.

In the end To the Point fully satisfies the ears with a quintet of works that have the newness of modernity but also grandly sonic post-romantic narratives of depth and colorful orchestral utterance. It is music mostly on the quiet side. It is a tribute to Maestro Freeman and Orchestra 2001, certainly a most formidable new music, new music institution.

This one deserves your undivided attention and pays off with works showcasing poetically the modern orchestra at its best. Recommended.

Extreme Avant Garde From Eli Keszler: "Oxtirn" in A New Expanded CD Version

2011-07-25T05:26:00.000-07:00

Granted there may not be a lot of music lovers out there that respond to Bach's Suite for Cello (covered in the last review) and Eli Keszler's Oxtirn (ESP 4061) with equal pleasure. Since I am one who does I figure there must be others. For those who would vastly prefer one over the other, you are of course equally welcome here.

I imply that there is a vast difference in outlook and result between Bach and Keszler. I suppose that would be an understatement. Oxtirn IS a body of music that, like Bach's Suite, is produced entirely through human hands playing instruments of a non-electronic sort (except perhaps there is feedback from microphones, not sure of that). In Keszler's case you get drums, crotales, guitar, clarinet, trumpet, tuba, trombone, piano, plus unconventional sound making devices--like motors, sheet metal, spring harp and other prepared metal objects. The conventional instruments are not played conventionally much of the time, either. It is a great symphonic cacophony of noise sculpture that results. The LP version came out last year and sold out. This new CD version adds a third sonic event, which is a good addition, not an afterthought.

Oxtirn does what it does with a certain amount of excellence. Many people may find it unbearable. It is not music to put on at all but the most Bohemian cocktail parties, and even then this might be something for the very end of that get together, as it may well drive out the guests.

Nonetheless Keszler and his several cohorts make a very good job of it. As far as extreme avant music goes, this one deserves a serious hearing. It has some of the home-made sonic iconoclasm of Kagel's Acoustica (for those who know that piece), only it is far more grating.

Be warned, be entraced, be infuriated. That's your job as the audience. It's not music that you'll forget quickly.

A Ravishing New Recording of Bach's Cello Suites by Ovidiu Marinescu

2011-07-21T05:24:00.000-07:00

As a confirmed Bachaholic since my early teenage years, I've long felt that the best place to experience the musical mind of JS was in his Suites for Solo Cello, the Sonatas and Partitas for Solo Violin and the Well Tempered Clavier. Now this is hardly a revelation. Nevertheless it is true that the brilliant line weaving and expressive contrapuntal elementality might be said to be shown most clearly in these works. Of course for the counterpuntal simultaneity you get that mostly in the clavier series. But for the brilliantly inspired melody that Bach could whip together in an almost otherworldly fashion, the cello and violin works are virtually unsurpassed.

Of course, in the hands of a player less than brilliant, this can be a very instructive but also slightly painful experience. In a recorded world you start remembering where an intonation lapse is going to occur, when the phrasing gets sloppy, and you start to cringe.

There is no danger of that when hearing repeatedly Ovidiu Marinescu's new recording of the Six Suites for Violincello (Navona NV5840). He is a player of impeccable accuracy and considerable expressivity. All six suites fit nicely on 2 CDs, which perhaps everybody knows but me, since I still have a couple of LP sets I listen to--and then it's a matter of THREE disks.

Everyone will I hope recognize the prelude movement of the first suite (usually heard more often on the "street" as a piano version from the Well Tempered Clavier), since it seems to have taken over from Satie's Gymnopedies and Pachabel's Cannon as the pop-co-opted classical piece of the moment. I've heard it on at least two commercials, the Mentalist, and a couple of other places. Naturally it is a prelude and not really Bach unleashing his full creative forces. Nonetheless it is of course quite lovely and Marinescu does a fine job interpreting the rockingly ongoing quality of it.

But then you get beyond that for some of the finest of the small-forces Bach and Maestro Marinescu really comes into his own. This is a warm, vibrant, expressively empassioned version of the suites and it is a true joy to hear.

Plus if you put the disk on a computer you get nice extras, like a full set of scores to follow along with, a digital booklet and etc.

If you are in the market for some glorious Bach, this one comes through. It's ready-to-hand (just came out, after all) and it will brighten your space dazzlingly. Very recommended.

Arvo Paert's Symphony No. 4: A Masterful Work in The Tradition, But Also in the Paert Tradition

2011-07-20T05:20:00.000-07:00

The new Symphony No. 4 (Los Angeles) by Arvo Paert has the sonic epic qualities of a high romantic symphony, but with the transparency and post-Minimalist soundscaped quality that Paert creates so distinctly.

The ECM New Series (2160 B0014663-02) recording of the work by the Los Angeles Philharmonic under Esa-Pekka Salonen has great majesty along with the proper ambiance Paert's music demands. You get those highly original Paertian harmonic progressions, the spaces, the dramatic contrasts. It portrays a somber, tragic-toned mood. That has something to do with its dedication to Mikhail Khodorkovsky, who has been incarcerated in a Russian prison since 2003 for reasons that may well be political.

It is an ambitious work, fully worthy of the symphonic appellation given (perhaps more so than some of his earlier symphonies). Fragments from Paert's Kanon Pokajanen round out the program.

Highly recommended.

John Carollo's Starry Night for String Orchestra: Beautiful Post-Ivesian Work

2011-07-18T07:42:00.000-07:00

John A. Carollo is an American composer whose music has not reached my ears until now. After hearing his Starry Night For String Orchestra (Navona 5844) several times for this review, I am glad to be catching up with him. The CD features six of his works. All have something to recommend them to our ears. The first and last compositions, two pieces for string orchestra, "Starry Night" and "Nothing Shall Come of This" form a kind of musical set of bookends to the pieces in between. The orchestral piece "Anguish in Every Household" fits in with these two in that all three have something of the crusty pioneers of American modernism--Ives, Ruggles and perhaps Henry Brant--embedded in them. (And others, too.) The thought is that he roots himself in the past in order to create another possible future for American classical music.

There is mystery and wonder painted with memorable tonal expressionism. Sometimes one is reminded of the Ives of "Central Park in the Dark" and "The Unanswered Question," not in terms of imitation but a kind of building upon the legacy of those masterworks. And there is the lushly full but cragged harmonies of the early masters too.

The middle pieces, Quartet No. 1 and "Moravian Sax in the Afternoon" have some of the rustic plainess of shape-note hymns, some of the rooted qualities of the American landscape (and in this case, since Mr. Carollo is Hawaii based, a hint of tropical island open spaces), and at times a sort of puckish good humor.

The piece for concert band, "Transcendence" has some restlessly modern modulating flourishes with latent power and forward thrust.

In the end I must say that the CD has made me into a John Carollo enthusiast. He builds bridges back to what is best in the pionering avant garde of 100 years ago, incorporates what is conducive to his creative and melodic-harmonic spirit, and makes of it all something new, and very American.

This is spirited, creative new American music, well performed and well worth a listen.

Beyond the Second Stage of Boredom: Arnold Dreyblatt's "Resonant Relations" and Regenerated Minimalism

2011-07-15T06:07:00.000-07:00

If I am in any way a typical listener, and I am not entirely sure I am, my experience of and reaction to musical minimalism conforms to a pattern that may be somewhat widespread. There were several stages for me. First I was perplexed and bored that "nothing was happening in the music." Then I became tranced and entranced with the best of it, allowing it to take me where it will and not worrying too much about my initial expectation of conventional event structure. Then there arose works and composers that to my mind did not discern rightly between what might be interesting musical motifs and combinations, and those that just keep on clobbering you over and over with a kind of banality that enervates. Then there came new works and new composers who found ways to keep it interesting. The trance element may no longer be as active a factor in the new works, but there are other things going on to compensate the listener for the time spent.

Belonging to this last category is Arnold Dreyblatt and his recently recorded work Resonant Relations (Cantaloupe). The CD contains the longish title work and a shorter "Twentyfive Chords in Ninety-Four Variations." The music is well performaed by the chamber ensemble Crash.

The composer seems to be working on a modified tuning (is it untempered?) and that gives the ensemble some complex aural beating between tones that adds to the sound greatly. Beyond that this is music with a consistent pulse (the title work, that is). It does not have a readily apparent processual bent--like Reich's early music and Riley's "In C" do. In fact along with the development of recurring motifs there seems to be a pre-minimalist attention to event periodicity. Not in some set of movements, but rather in terms of episodes. One sort of thing goes on for a while; then something slightly contrasting goes on for a while, and so on. Since there is not much trance-like sound happening in this music, the episodic structure keeps it from getting boring, as does the fairly complex interplay of instruments, counterpoint if you will.

The second piece ditches the pulse and articulates (untempered?) chord clusters singly with spaces in between (a little Asian-like/Cage-Feldman-like in that) in ways where the instrumental combinations, manner of articulation, and tone color are continually changing. It's quite interesting to hear and contrasts quite nicely with the title piece.

So here we have a rejuvenated sort of minimalism, one that does not sound much like the earlier works. It's original, in other words. Its tonality is overtone-like; its event structure is periodic; its aural makeup is engaging (thanks in part to the exotic tuning); and it changes over time in ways that are not like the superorganicism of early Reich. It's more like a sophisticated topsy, to the unmediated ear anyway.

I recommend this one. It has much to it that bears hearing. Arnold Dreyblatt has something going on that I hope we can hear more of over time.

Alfred Schnittke's Complete Violin Sonatas in a New Naxos Recording

2011-07-13T06:29:00.000-07:00

Of all the recognized Russian composers of the 20th century, Alfred Schnittke (d. 1998) often sounds the least Russian. He ordinarily avoids nationalist melodic, harmonic or rhythmic tendencies, preferring instead to carve out his own version of the expressive modernist international style in its later developments. This is especially true of his chamber music. Schnittke's four sonatas for violin and piano were composed over most of his active career, the first stemming from 1955, the last, 1994. It turns out they all fit nicely on a single 70-minute CD. Violinist Carolyn Huebl and pianist Mark Wait set out to do just that, and they have succeeded in giving us thoroughgoing, expressive and exacting performances of same on a new Naxos release (9.570978).

Other than the first (unnumbered) sonata from 1955, these are certainly on the surface of things firmly in a modernist tradition. They nevertheless bear the individual Schnittke watermark: often utilizing twelve-tone-serial-and-beyond techniques but in a very personal way, freely bending them toward his own harmonic and rhythmically lively ends while culling and synthesizing the full spectrum of concert music styles from the Baroque to the present, all in ways that are distinctly Schnittkian in their strikingly inventive thematic idiosyncrasies.

The violin sonatas are excellently representative Schnittke. The 1955 work a fascinating look at his early beginnings, the first through third sonatas masterpieces of 20th century chamber arts. Ms. Huebl and Mr. Wait do an excellent job bringing out the nuances of these very complex and vital works. The sound is very good as well. It's a treasure trove for an Schnittke enthusiast; it also serves as a good introduction to his music for anyone unfamiliar with it. At the Naxos price the disk is especially attractive!

Atlanta Symphony Orchestra's New Label Off to Good Start: the Music of Theofanidis and Lieberson

2011-07-11T05:38:00.000-07:00

Robert Spano and the Atlantic Symphony are doing excellent work. The orchestra's new label ASO Media is not only a good idea in a current climate where self-determination is often the best option; it is also providing in its first two releases some important interpretations of works by composers who deserve attention. The second release (CD-1002) is a good example. Christopher Theofanidis's "Symphony No. 1" and Peter Lieberson's "Neruda Songs" contrast nicely and make a fine listening experience individually as well.

Gongs, mallet instruments, chimes and winds set against translucent string writing on the ecstatic Theofanidis symphony. It has the multifold, lyrical sunlight-and-air feeling of the best Sibelius works, yet it manages to sound more contemporary by extending its musical syntax into long interwoven strands of motives and sound color with episodic linearity. Theofanidis's poetic command of the orchestral sounds available to him and the way he corrals then to his expressive ends impress and excite. This is ravishing music to chase away your dark moments.

Lieberson's "Neruda Songs" on the other hand is moodier, a little heavier, like a set of plush velvet curtains. Mezzo-soprano Kelly O'Connor seems a very proper instrument for this music, declamatory and full-bodied. Post-Wagnerian-Mahlerian-Bergian heft in the orchestra give gravitas to the poem settings. It's a satisfying listen.

Mediterranian sunlit dazzle versus Teutonic ponderousness. Theofanidis versus Lieberson. Fine performances, well-recorded. Everything seems right about this one. Highly recommended.

Joseph Schwantner's Later Period Wonderfully Represented in "Chasing Light"

2011-07-07T04:52:00.000-07:00

Joseph Schwantner has gone from the status of a very promising young modernist American composer in the late '60s to one of our very best today. The new Nashville Symphony recording of three of Maestro Schwantner's major later period works, Chasing Light (Naxos 8.559678), makes it clear why. He has developed a vividly colorful orchestral palette which he uses to cover musical canvases in ways that strike the ear and remain memorable long after they have been heard.

The CD gives listeners a generous 68 minutes of his music. The 1994 "Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra" brings together some very difficult and exciting percussion soloing (performed here by Christopher Lamb, for whom the work was originally intended) with orchestral brilliance. The National Symphony Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin (with Evelyn Glennie as soloist) did a version for RCA in the later '90s. That version was excellent, but Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony hold their own on the Naxos disk with a reading that is every bit as luminous, though I might give a slight edge to Glennie for her impassioned performance.

"Morning's Embrace," the second work on the program, is a 2005 work with some prominent percussion and even more brilliant orchestral light. It depicts a sunrise in rural New Hampshire and it does so with all the resources the orchestra can muster.

The final work (from 2008) shows that Schwantner does not stand still. His orchestral writing is confident, lucid and original. You can hear the development in his musical vocabulary in the 14 years represented on the disk, culminating in a rather thrilling dynamism and muscular energy that eschews trendiness and opts instead for a form of personal expression that cuts across catagorical niceties to go straight into a realm one can best call Schwantner music.

He is a gem, a blazing sun of orchestral music today. Chasing Light gives you three exemplary works, played with conviction. It should not be ignored.