Graciela Paraskevaidis, Libres en el Sonida, Ensemble Adventure

The striking originality of composer Graciela Paraskevaidis is apparent from even the first note of her album Libres en el Sonido (Wergo WER 7362-2). Seven compositions of varying chamber density are performed with dedication and characteristic elan by Ensemble Adventure.

Doubtless I am not the only one new to her and her music so a little background no doubt is in order. Graciela Paraskevaidis (1940-2017) was Argentinian born, of Greek ancestry. She lived and worked in Uruguay. She studied composition with Roberto Garcia Morillo at the National Conservatory in Buenos Aires, then later on with Gerardo Gandini, Iannis Xenakis and Wolfgang Fortner.

The end result is Paraskevaidis, not exactly something predicted by her compositional mentors, except perhaps a kind of unswerving rare-ification that you can also hear often enough in Xenakis. With Graciela though the means and more or less the ends show no real derivative qualities so much as affinity.

Ritual-gestural-brutal? Wolfgang Rudiger in the liners describes the unprecedented nature of what we hear in the opening bars of the first work on the program, "Libres en el Sonido Presos un el Sonido." "Raging scales in the woodwinds seem like rain squalls lashed upwards by the windstorm, braced on the one side by widely stretched tri-tone-fourth-chords and spurred on by the obsessive minor second repetitions in the piano. . . " This most aptly describes the sort of brutal-fanfare-ritual infernalities of her music we get from time to time on this program. These interludes of manic determination break off and may follow by contrasting sparsenesses that are quiet and filled here and there with more or less empty spaces.

Each of the seven works of the program falls within a ten-minute or less timespan. "No Lado, Otre Lado" is for piano alone; "...il Remoto Silenzio" for solo cello. The rest are scored for three, four, five, and eight chamber instrumentalists.

The music can we insistently manic as suggested above but giddily light as well, sometimes both within the same composition, sometimes not. The quiet passages can almost seem hallucinatory, dream like, unreal. And throughout there is a most singular vision or series of them at work.

There is nothing out there quite like this music. It stands on its own almost obstinately and it marks Graciela Paraskevaidis as a remarkable artists in a set of one. This is music you must meet more than half-way. But if you give it a fair hearing I think you will be surprised and pleased with the invention and singularity of the composer. Recommended for all those who are open to the avant guard aspects of Modernity.

Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Cello Concerto, Transcriptions for Cello and Piano, Houston Symphony, Brinton Averil Smith, Kazuki Yamada

Generally speaking since Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco's death in 1968 his worldwide reputation has somewhat ebbed. In the last decades on the other hand there is some indication that there is a slow but steady momentum gathering strength bit-by-bit, some signs that his music is once gain finding favor in concert halls and via recordings. After 80 years between professional performances, the 1935 Cello Concerto awakens us to reconsider his music again in the current World Premiere Recording by cellist Brinton Averil Smith and the Houston Symphony under Kazuki Yamada (Naxos 8.573820). We are surely not done with the composer yet!

Castelnuovo-Tedesco, as the liner notes to this CD remind us, found his Italian homeland increasingly dangerous as Mussolini and the Fascists came into power and banned his music than due to his Jewish heritage. So he came to the United States and lived the second half of his life there. And like all war refugee composers he found that the USA allowed them to live on and continue to compose, but not always to build a reputation that Europe made possible before fascism. Things could go either way, as you might gather by comparing the fate of Stravinsky and Hindemith vs. Korngold and Bartok.

Circumstances help explain how the "Cello Concerto in F major, Op. 72" has been forgotten completely, Written for the famed cellist Piatigorsky and premiered by him under Toscanini such auspicious beginnings did not translate into long term recognition. Some 80 years later we now stand before the nicely performed and well recorded evidence that the "Cello Concerto" is in no way deserving of such neglect. It is a work of boldness, heroic virtuosity, thematic wealth and dramatic arc. Cellist Smith, conductor Yamada and the Houston Symphony give us ample means to appreciate this music. . . though it may not be at the very cutting edge of the Modernism of the times. It may in fact be Impressionist and Late Romanticist more so than not, yet not unoriginally so. It is powerful and engaging fare, well worth the price of admission for its 30-minute three-movement presence.

Filling out the release are a number of cello-piano transcriptions. Most of the music will be quite familiar to most all readers, yet in this configuration it is all made anew. So we get Castelnuovo-Tedesco's reworking of Mozart's Serenade from Don Giovanni, two arias from Cherubino's Le Nozzi di Figaro (as arranged by Smith for his recording), the fourth and fifth movements from Ravel's "Miroirs," and a version of Rossini's "Figaro" from The Barber of Seville.  And finally the program ends with Heifetz's arrangement of the first part of Castelnuovo-Tedesco's  "Sea Murmurs."

The second half of the program is not going to set your brain on fire exactly, yet it is a thoroughly enjoyable and well-played segment. The main attraction is definitely the "Cello Concerto" and it will be a boon to any Castelnuovo-Tedesco fan! Recommended.

Duo Noire, Night Triptych, Thomas Flippin, Christopher Mallett

In something a little under an hour guitar Duo Noire treat us to six New Music duos for classical guitar. All this in the new album Night Triptych (New Focus FCR210), the title of which is derived from the composition of the same name by Golfam Khayam.

Duo Noire, aka Thomas Flippin and Christopher Mallett are talented exponents of the contemporary classical guitar, with technique to spare and an interpretive acumen that serves them well in bringing to us the subtleties and sonic pleasures of each composition in the program. As I listened repeatedly to the offering I was reminded that there is something of a consensus nowadays as to the firmly grounded middle ground upon which contemporary classical guitar music currently stands. The edge of conventional soundings are a part of the presentation, a harmonic-melodic adventuresomeness, and a kind of synthesis of what the guitar has been and can be classically but also as drawn out of general guitar practice in the past century. The result is a sort of state-of-the-art view of what we can understand and appreciate today.

So as a whole there are bellwether bench marks and distinctive sound universes to be had in the program at large. It gives us Clarice Assad's "Hocus Pocus," Mary Kouyoumdjian's "Byblos," Courtney Bryan's "Soli Deo Gloria," the previously mentioned "Night Triptych" Gity Razaz's "Four Haikus," and finally Gabriella Smith's "Loop the Fractal Hold of Rain." All the composers are living and all the works show a great respect for the traditional and more modern idiomatic world of the guitar and its special sounds.

This program is a bit of a sleeper. Nothing introduces itself with skyrockets and 28 tuba fanfares, and so much the better because the music and performances stand out after a while of listens. It is thoroughgoing, most musical in design. It is not music to upset the applecart of assumptions in the contemporary music spheres. It does not need to do that because one gets something of lasting worth not just a shock blast of newness! I most definitely recommend this to any with an interest in New Music for guitar. Bravo!

Christian Wolff, Two Orchestra Pieces

Take the Cage School composers for granted at your own peril. Earl Brown, Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff avoided Serialism and forged stubbornly their own paths. And I believe time will be kind to their reputations as a result. They are some American originals and they sound ever fresh.

That is all well and good yet moreover now I find that later Christian Wolff constitutes some major sleeper works, judging by the startlingly interesting new release, Two Orchestra Pieces (New World 80796-2).

What first of all marks this release as special are the performances. Later Christian Wolff carefully scores every note and the interpretation must be exact yet moving. "John, David" (1998) gets focused attention from the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiberg under Lothar Zagrosek. Robyn Schulkowsky dramatically and adeptly handles the important solo percussion role.  "Rhapsody" (for three orchestras) (2009) gets similar careful understanding by Ostrvska banda with three conductors doing a fine job.

The liners sum up how both works exemplify several trends in New Music performance by the Modern Classical orchestra. "John, David" is a masterful unravelling of the expanded sonarities of the expanded symphony orchestra and the percussion part further opens up the timbral spectrum so that we enter a fantasmagorical terriane that is not only exemplary but strikingly special in its deep subtle expression.

"Rhapsody" groups the total orchestral forces into three unusually mixed concentrations, decidedly not the sections one has become so used to from the orchestrational practices of the standard repertoire.

All that would be not unusual to hear nowadays, of course. What sets this music apart is the special facticity of the combined utterances. Nothing is exactly what you might expect in High Modernism of the standard sort. There are no moments of rote note-spinning. Every moment in both cases has its way and brings to our ears and musical beings a kind of discerning difference that in the end makes these two works function in their own specially original ways.

It is a something you hear in the music from the first listen on. Later listens confirm the first impression and the non-cliche quality of every note makes every listen a near tabula rasa thing.

You who follow the New Music and Modernism, you should definitely consider this album. It is a high point of the "Modern Year" For me at least. It reminds me how Christian Wolff is a beautiful thing, a thing apart!

Henze, Violin and Viola Works, Peter Sheppard Skaerved, Roderick Chadwick

Hans Werner Henze (1926-2012)--he is an artist-composer whose full breadth must be gauged if we are to appreciate fully.. I will admit that in my case I am still in the process of exploring his output, as no doubt more than of a few of my readers are as well. Naxos has been instrumental in this wise and a new volume continues the exposure as they fight the good fight to cover a broad spectrum of New Music. I refer to the release at hand, namely Henze's Violin and Viola Works (Naxos 8.573886) as performed nicely by Peter Sheppard Skaerved on violin and viola and Roderick Chadwick at the piano.

The works cover a long stretch of time, from the youthful 1946 "Violin Sonata" to the Millennial-eve 1999 "Peter Doll zum Abschied" for solo violin. We are treated to four major works and a couple of miniatures. 

Perhaps the most interesting of the four is the "Violin Sonata" of 1946, mostly because it is unexpected if you do not know his early period well. Henze was subjected to the angst and poverty of the German post-WWII period yet was in the middle of study under the tutelage of Wolfgang Fortner at the time he wrote the sonata. The work has an expressive Modern feel that is decidedly pre-Serialist  and so shows a bit more direct a melodic clout.  It is memorable for that. The liners point to this work as a sort of prelude to the "Violin Concerto" that was to follow shortly thereafter. However it stands well on its own in any event.

On the other hand the "Pollicino: Violin Sonatina" of 1979 manages to be extraordinarily expressive and haunting while being more contemporaneous to the Serial world of High Modernism still then in full flush at the time.

The somewhat more radically abstract "Solo, Violin Sonata" of two years prior is a gem of constructive architecture, rangy and harmonically expanded-ambiguous as one might expect of his central style of the era, yet too most definitely a product of an actively brilliant musical mind. It is theatrical piece where there is a  homage paid to the humanist Italian Renaissance poet Poliziano and "death is admitted into the cheerful world of the pastoral" in the composer's words.

The final "Viola Sonata" (1979) brings out the burnished woodiness of the viola in a landscape where the piano makes an equal set of statements for a kind of constant unfolding, a noting of consistent insistence and significance.

The total impression is wall-to-wall worthiness, High Modernism of the highest caliber played with total conviction and passion by Skaerved and Chadwick. This is a very enlightening release for Henze appreciators and something to explore without fear for those who wish to broaden their appreciation. Keep in mind you will need to hear this a number of times if you expect to get a full understanding of what is happening. It is worth the trouble, surely. Henze was in his own way brilliant. He shows us how here.

Mieczyslaw Weinberg, Piano Sonatas opp. 8, 49bis & 56 (Nos. 2, 4 and No Number) , Elisaveta Blumina

As much as there seems to be a renaissance or perhaps even a naissance surrounding the works of Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-1996) it is comforting to me. I happen to share in the budding and gathering enthusiasm about his music. I will not rehearse here the difficulties he encountered with his existence as a Jewish-Polish transplant to the USSR during WWII and his subsequent compositional and personal struggle with forces that did not favor him in spite of his extraordinary talents. That is a backdrop to explain why most people were not aware of his music at all until recently. But in the end of course the music is what lives for us now.

So there are further reasons to appreciate his body of works with a recent, excellently performed recording of three of his later Piano Sonatas opp. 8, 49bis & 56 (CPO 555 104-2). In other words, these lovely recordings are of his Sonata No. 2, Number 4 and 49bis, the latter of which is not as of now numbered. Elisabetha Blumina gives us these new readings on the heels of her recording of his Sonata No. 1 and his "Children's Notebooks." I have not heard that recording but based upon the one at hand I imagine it is very worth hearing. I've reviewed Weinberg's complete piano opus and one or two recordings of some of these sonatas (type "Weinberg" in the search box above). They remain essential in each their own way

But I am especially impressed as I listen a good many times with Elisabetha Blumina's performances. She is exacting as one would expect but also there is a virtuoso mastery to be heard that makes these rather wonderful pieces come very much alive. My first superficial hearings of Weinberg as a whole made me think, "Oh, he was very influenced by Shostakovich." He was a good friend of his fellow composer and Shostakovich spoke very highly of his talents during his lifetime. And with the piano works you most certainly do here something of an affinity with Prokofiev as well. With all three at their best you hear an uncanny brilliance in how they derive a sometimes very lyrical demeanor but tempered also with a hard and perhaps even brittle despair, not to sound too pat but it is something I do love about all three of them. What at first sounded a bit derivative I now feel is equally special, original and it could well be that Shostakovich influenced Weinberg but equally Weinberg in turn influenced Shostakovich? I say this after listening very intensely to Weinberg's music.

The sonatas here are uniformly worthwhile. If you love Modernist solo piano and seek something new and very worthy, get this! If you do not know Weinberg, get this. If you do not have any of his piano music, get this. Or even if you do, for the performances, get this!

Kalevi Aho, Timpani Concerto, Piano Concerto 1, Turku Philharmonic Orchestra

In the course of doing this Modern Music blog site since 2011 I have been fortunate to come upon the music of Kalevi Aho (b. 1949), the Finnish composer whose music we again encounter happily today (type his name in the index search box above for earlier reviews of his music). The CD at hand covers two notable concerted works, the recent "Concerto for Timpani and Orchestra" (2015) and the 1988-89 "Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Orchestra" (BIS-2306). Both are performed with precision and enthusiasm by the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra under Erkki Lasonpalo (Timpani Concerto) or Eva Ollikainen (Piano Concerto). The solo parts are most capably handled by Ari-Pekka Maenpaa (Timpani) and Sonia Fraki (Piano).

What a repeated series of listens have revealed to me are two concertos (he has written 28 in all thus far) of real weight and striking expression. Whether or not anyone would agree with me I hear Aho as a kind of original Modern successor to the later works of Carl Nielsen. Both have a certain "characteristic" manner of proceeding chromatically in ways that bring out a thorough orchestrational command and a clearly forwarded thematic presence. Aho understandably is the more Modern in his harmonic edginess and lesser tendency to resolve the whole in some absolute sense.

There are few works in the repertoire for solo timpani either accompanied or unaccompanied. Elliot Carter's  "Eight Pieces for Four Timpani" is an exception. I rack my brain without coming up with another., which doesn't mean there are no others, just that my minds blanks at the prospect. Aho's concerto gives us a very stimulating and rather demanding solo part with intricate melodic contours and idiomatic articulation. The timpani carries the concerto without being a continually dominant voice. The orchestra has a great deal to say and says it well. There are times when the snare drum intertwines with the timpani part and it all sounds right. If you expect later on to whistle the timpani melody while you go through your daily rounds, think again. This is quite complex Modern music after all. If any new timpani piece might be expected to enter the repertoire this could well be it. Aho carries the day handily and in a most lively way.

"The Piano Concerto No. 1" stands out as a boldly brash piece with a lithe mercurial piano part and memorable piano-orchestral exchanges of great excitement and contentful thematics. If the handling of themes seems slightly more hard-edged than is the case in the Timpani Concerto, one must assume that the inspiration of having every bit of the piano before the composer as the prime solo mover would have given him less fetters and allowed his imagination to soar more freely. It ends the two-part program in a most rousing way and if the motillic ghost of Prokofiev sometimes looms in the background it is stylistically natural and not in the least bit derivative.

So there we are with this one. The SACD/CD compatible recording sounds bright and well staged and the music is of the highest caliber. This will appeal to all Aho aficionados and would be fair and attractive game for any follower of the Modern with a capital /m/.

Vyacheslav Artyomov, The Way to Olympus

The album up for discussion today as far as I know is the third such album devoted to the music of Vyacheslav Artyomov on Divine Art Records. I've covered the other two on these pages so type "Artyomov" in the search box above to see those. Taken as a whole we find a composer of decided importance. He is Modern in Russian ways that perhaps come out of a lineage which includes Scriabin in his most mystical phase, but then no it is really an experience far more than of some lineage when you take it all in itself and for itself.

This new release is called The Way to Olympus (Divine Art 25171). The centerpiece of the program is the 33 minute "Symphony: The Way to Olympus." It is a beautifully paced, sprawling and highly evocative sound poem for orchestra, here recorded some time ago but sounding gloriously well. The USSR State Academic Symphony Orchestra perform the work nicely under the baton of Timur Mynbayev. The name of the orchestra indicates an earlier recording date, of course. The work is very dramatic, moving, original.

Artyomov's story has been a sad one of a life of unrecognition, state hostility to his art, a difficult and lonely time and a heroic determination that perhaps can be sensed in the deepest recesses of his orchestral expressions. I hear a penetrating inwardness and a contrastingly outward skyrocketing elation to the music.

"Gurian Hymn" has a lovely unfurling with three solo violins nicely weaving delicate filigrees of sadness and mystery over a rather strikingly evocative orchestral palette.

The piano "Preludes to Sonnets" follow and they have a searching post-Scriabinesque poetic clout that sets us up well for the rarified brightness of the following "Concert of the 13" for piano and chamber ensemble. The piano part is bracing! It is another significant segment to a very significant program.

I find the performances and recording quality highly appropriate and appealing.

Artyomov deserves our undivided attention. I would go so far to say without hesitation that Artyomov on the basis of this volume and the others comes before us as a tragically underappreciated Modern master, a Russian Ives in terms of creating  beautifully advanced music in spite of social neglect and isolation. His time has come. By all means listen to this album. Then if you are as impressed as I am get the others too!

Paul Moravec, The Blizzard Voices, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Gil Rose

In ideal circumstances what the Boston Modern Orchestra Project under Gil Rose is doing will redefine the US Modernist world by highlighting deserving works and composers from this century and last. I say ideally because I no longer know with the world in a certain chaos whether cultural institutions may always have the impact they would in earlier times. That includes the impact of music writers like me and then of course the general concert scene and the world of audio releases of works. I have been covering many of the BMOP CD releases and today I speak of another. It has been out for a little while and I have been meaning to cover it for a while. So today I do.

The release at hand is a recording of  The Blizzard Voices (BMOP Sound 1054), a rather monumental choral-orchestral oratorio from 2008 based on the poetry of Ted Kooser. The work was written by living composer Paul Moravec (b. 1957) The poems were adapted into a libretto by Mark Campbell. The theme is that of the Western Plains of the US and a blizzard that a group of would-be settlers experienced and in the end did or did not finally endure. The blizzard took place in historical terms in Nebraska in January, 1888.

The work is scored for in addition to orchestra six vocal soloists and an SATB chorus, the latter in the form of the New England Conservatory Concert Choir and Chamber Singers directed by Erica J. Washburn.

The soloists and body of performer do full justice to this rather involved work. As to the music itself? It has a monumental, heroic passion, and a roughly-hewn-of-granite strikingly bold quality. There is a subtle sort of Americana at play that alludes to the humble musical life of the Plains, of hymn tunes and songs sung in everyday settings that do not point to Grand Art so much as music on the ground floor of existence, the sort of music most people experience in a pre-industrial setting, not product, not "pop" in that there are no surveys taken, just music that exists among people because music is like that. The strain of folkishness is not obvious like perhaps some of Copland might be. It emerges subtly from time-to-time but the panorama of bleak and in the end lethal winter predominates with a harsh sobriety and heroic despair born of the place and time of the story. It is an aesthetically derived hardness that does not point back to the composer any more than Mark Twain "was" Huckleberry Finn.

In other words this is genuinely gifted aural story-telling. I sometimes remember Vaughan Williams in his best narrative mood mode, or yes, Copland in that vein, and some of the other later Operatic-Oratorio master that it would be pointless and even misleading to name because it would imply there is some imitation happening here which there is decidedly not.

It is masterful composing from someone I surely want to hear more of. The music seems destined for larger audiences. It is accessible and more comprehensible for its tethering to dramatic content than some purely abstract Modern tone poem. It is Modern in its thickly edgy harmonic fullness and post-Romantic unsentimental expressive feeling-fullness. The vocal parts stand out for the natural rightness. The orchestral parts work fully well as a fleshing out of the drama and an aesthetic canvas apart from the plot and its content.

If I wind-up my description of the music to that for the present, it is not that there is nothing more to be said. I leave that to others. Many listens after the first one of The Blizzard Voices and I come away convinced that this is a work of importance, wonderfully rendered. Varese remarked long ago that "the present-day composer refuses to die!" It remains true. We owe something to that present-day by supporting our creators. So buy this.

Elizabeth A. Baker, Quadrivium

Quadrivium (Aerocade Music AM008 2-CDs) is a nicely sprawling, major dramatically vibrant work of the Modern Music world, brought to us by composer-performer Elizabeth A. Baker. She wrote all the music with the help of Nathan Anthony Corder (Sashay) and she has also written the poetry and lyrics that occur in the course of the work. In the process of the work's sounding Elizabeth performs on piano, electronics, voice, guitar, percussion and toy piano. So those are the particulars.

As to the work itself, after five listens I must say I am mightily impressed with it all. Elizabeth makes a point, rightfully so, of providing us with an elegantly worded plea for inclusion in our musical worlds--of all categories of humanity, women, LGBTQs, minorities, in short everyone inclusive. And Quadrivium assumes this viewpoint and at the same time portrays a world in the clutches (if I might interpret her aims) of a sometimes mechanized behemoth that neither accepts differences nor does it always have need for the creative artists who occupy our world and give it value where it otherwise might not or can not have it. If there is a kind of insistence on the creative underground that we advance as a whole both aesthetically and ethically, Ms. Baker surely is one of the champions of such things.

And all that would be admirable even if it were left there. But on top of it all Ms. Baker has a deeply conceptual imagination that allows her to fashion a rather monumental, musically and content-fully profound opus. Here is where we stand today, Elizabeth is saying. And that where includes recitations as well as solo piano and electronic, ensemble and small ensemble sections each of which is a sort of microcosm of where New Music is today. So tonality is there, but not for a look backwards, rather as a mainstay of human music making. There is abstraction, there is a repetition that layers subtly ever, a droning that we have in our heads now as much as a result of mechanical and electronic sounds of the environment along with a sort of cosmic centering.

This is beautiful music, exacted and not redacted if you will, not afraid to say what needs saying, to play what needs playing, to give us a very pleasureful and sometimes conflicted music representation of the earthtime now, for us, for us who listen.

In my case I do not just listen. The music has grabbed me so it says something much more than an organized series of tomes and tones. The work begins with the beautiful and discerning piano solo music that rotates in a very rangy way before sounding some tender diatonics. From there we segue quietly to ambient electronics with inside-the-piano whispers that are almost like a light-bulb afterburn in your mind's eye. The keyed piano returns with a cycle-not-cycle that expands and variationalizes what came before, yet there is new development and new thematic content too.

I will not describe the passage of section to section because there is too much and it might be slightly pedantic to rattle off a laundry list of what happens. That sequence in the end will be yours to apprehend anyway. It proceeds to a kind of continual opening up of expression, with electronics and recitation becoming ever more re-grounded and yet musically it feels as an unfolding, a very long and full unfolding rather than a kind of a-b-c-d-e-f-g thingness.

The music gives us a highly original take and the text-poetry dwells in the very-much-present.

I must say I do very much love this very living work. It is as contemporary as anything you will hear, and it is not afraid to combine deftly timbral and sound-color beauty in striking ways. The music is visceral. The words are frank yet poetic.

I take it that this is Elizabeth A. Baker's first album of compositions. It is auspicious for that. A brilliant and evocative piece that presages great things to come I would warrant. It is already here. She is here!

Antti Samuli Hernesniemi, Bridge (Silta), Compositions 3, Music for Clavinova and Piano

No one who knows the New Music world we live in today would tell you that you might expect just one possibility when you are exposed to a new composer these days. There are I suppose limits to what one might hear but I can say honestly that I do not detect what the boundaries might be. So every new exposure gives one a new possibility. I bring this up because the music of living Finnish composer Antti Samuli Hernesniemi as I am hearing it on his recent CD Bridge/Silta (MSR Classics 1615) opens up interesting ground on the piano/clavinova (MIDI driven piano) front. This is the third volume of his compositions released on MSR and the first I have heard.

It is an example of how open the New Music world really is. Hernesniemi writes/performs piano music that may be entirely independently generated but as I listen I am reminded of the whirring movement and fanfarish attack of the late very brilliant piano artist Cecil Taylor. Now he came out of "Jazz" of course, which is only to say that he was initially rooted in Jazz style and that his ensemble work included a rhythm section and other soloists. He studied in his formative years at New England Conservatory where he had Classical training--and so did Miles or Sam Rivers have this training among many others. That is not to say that we can in anyway explain Cecil Taylor by his exposure to both Jazz and Classical music and ideas. He is the sort of brilliance who would have emerged as an important artist no matter what his formal training might bhave been. And by the same token the piano music of Hernesniemi could have been derived out of that Jazz and Modern Classical exposure too. Or maybe he heard this regardless. In the end it does not matter except to remark that if you love the explosive motility of Cecil Taylor's playing then this music will attract you for its splattering sprawling energy.

And there are some more inwardly tuneful works here that are a thing apart from that, yet in the main, there is an open formed "total tremolo" approach here that most characterizes the music.

All that is simple in basis yet the working out is original and exciting to hear. So if you want new that stimulates you invariably, there is Bridge. If you are an open soul I believe this will be much to your liking.

Gabriel Faure, Integrale des Melodies pour Voix et Piano

Music enthusiasts who favor certain artists and/or composers tend to respond well to a "complete" anything by those people. If you know you like the music of that person, it stands to reason that you would wish to hear everything that person might have created or performed in a particular category or genre. So I felt this way when I found I had the chance to hear and review the new Integrale des Melodies pour Voix et Piano by Gabriel Faure (1845-1924) (Atma Classique ACD2 2741 4-CDs). The first thing that hit me on opening up the set was the extremely attractive graphics and very practical setup with all four CDs and the booklet bound in gatefold style--in other words as a single, integral "hard covered" CD  book.

The artists and their readings are of course central to the success of such a project. A core aspect of that is the continual presence of Olivier Godin playing a gloriously sweet 1859 Erard instrument.
The vocalists, separately and on rare occasions in various combinations, are graced with beautiful voices that are not too operatic and seemingly perfectly suited to the song form as Faure practiced it. They are Helene Guilmette, Julie Boulianne, Antonio Figueroa, Marc Boucher. Each is a true artist and a wonderful Faure interpreter.

A confession before I get deeper into my experience of this music. When I started seriously listening to Classical and Modern Classical music I tended in part to get ever deeply into composers I was exposed to partly out of chance and partly from reading up on the history and development of the music. So for various reasons in the realm of French music I gravitated toward Franck, Debussy, Ravel, Satie, Milhaud, Honegger, Poulenc and Messiaen, etc. I at first missed Faure partly because it was easy without coaching not to understand completely  the continuity and change of the progressive unfolding of important French composers in the Late Romantic period, and partly because I came slightly later to vocal music--especially in the case of Faure, the songs and choral music that made him so important. So in time I came to listen to these things and came to love it, along with the solo piano music as well.

So in terms of my listening to the Faure song output, I listened closely to a select group of the songs sung by singers I respected very much, but in my hearing of the wealth of them I was missing a good many of them. So in the Godin and company complete song set I have happily the chance to hear the all of them. After repeated listens I am very glad to find that there is a consistent brilliance of compositional presence, a lyrical yet very focused intensity to them all Faure was a voice that sat between the heavily impassioned Late Romantic Berlioz and the dazzlingly dappled transparency of Debussy and Ravel. Faure in hi songs have a good deal of feeling yet always a kind of light touch, more translucent and so very much more French than some of the other great song masters of his times.

The 108 songs-melodies are a formidable gathering by any standard. The jacket notes inform us that this set is the first to respect Faure's specifications completely as to voice type for each song and the original key indications. The Erard is tuned to 435 Hz, which was decreed by the French Ministry as the standard in 1859. So in so many ways these are the works faithfully rendered as Faure intended them to be be heard. We begin with Op. 1, No. 1 and go from there to those last songs on the Op. 100s. Is there increased clarity, increased introspection as we go from early to late? I hear it something like that, though I have neither sat down and done some statistical aural correlations.Even then some of my perceptions are perforce subjective. I embrace that the music as all music sounds a certain way to me and for me as you must also have your own take. Intersubjectivity may confirm my impressions or it may not. No matter. I am neither qualified to write a PhD dissertation on such a thing nor at this point would I want to!

The point in all this is simple. The music is essential, all of it if you have the time to devote to it and want to expand your appreciation and understanding of the French Art Song in a period central to the development of Modernism. The performances are moving and poetic. The music impeccable, expressive, even ravishing in its beauty and expressive determination.

So if you have the inclination to get this, I believe you will be happy to delve into the wealth of fine music! Get this, then!

Almeida Prado, Complete Cartas Celestes 4, Aleyson Scopel

Once again I am happy to check in with you on another composer of true merit.  Before this CD series came my way recently I knew virtually nothing about the Brazilian Almeida Prado, or to give his complete name Jose Antonio Rezende de Almeida Prado (1943-2010). His sprawling series of works for the piano, the Cartas Celestes were some  18 in all, 15 for solo piano. They address the stars in the heavens, literally, and who would find that uninteresting in itself?

Aleyson Scopel has embarked on a complete recording of the piano works. I covered the first volume a while ago and I loved it. See my write up by typing Prado in the index search box at the top left of the page. And we look at today what seems to be the final volume, No. 4 (Grand Piano 747), which covers Nos. 13 and 16-18. Prado studied with Nadia Boulanger and Messiaen and their formative influences are in his music. The heavenly ambiance of Messiaen's beautiful piano style  has some bearing on what we hear in these works, along with something familial in George Crumb's "Microcosmos" piano works as well. Yet for all that the cosmic spaciousness and mystery of these final works in the series have a definitive originality about them.

No. 13 was completed in 2001; 16-18 in 2010 just before his death. All four have a place for the space about the stars and a place for the stars themselves-- a silence and reverberation for the mystery of the in betweens. Vacuum is never truly empty and the reverberation-silences are as much part of the music as the notes.

Aleyson Scopel reads these works with care and poeticism. The deepness of Prado in a Modern lyrical way can be well-gauged in this volume. Boulez might not have approved of his unification of tonality and edge tonalility but Boulez disliked Messiaen for that also. We do not have to espouse some all-or-nothing view. It is not a thing of our times after all to be multifold! And Prado is brilliant at it.  He does not fail to engage and delight, to cause you to ponder and drift into the universe around us. Bravo! Prado is a discovery if you do not know him. Very recommended.

Charles Wuorinen, Vol. 3, The Group for Contemporary Music

Ever since high school when I stumbled upon some excellent Charles Wuorinen records that had just come out, Maestro Wuorinen has been one of the most important of the American Moderns to me. I made sure to get a review copy of his music on Charles Wuorinen, Vol. 3 (Bridge 9490). And then, I did not notice that a number of review CDs had fallen off my pile into a no-man's land that I only now rediscovered. So if I am late reviewing this gem it is no reflection on the quality of the music.

Charles is a central figure in the High Modernist camp. A major force on the New York Music scene when I was younger, he remains one of the very best things to come out of Columbia's famed music department in the '60s. The recent music of Vol. 3 (2007, 2010, 2013) gives any dedicated New Music follower a wonderful set of compositions for study and enjoyment, excellently performed by the Group for Contemporary Music under the composer.

The first thing that hit me hearing this program is how well wrought is Wuorinen's music and the newer compositions are not at all lacking in this architectonic sublimity. Listen to the "Fourth Piano Sonata," a fiendishly difficult yet elation-bringing 20 minutes of otherworldly density and drive! There is so much going on in this work that you must hear it a number of times before the wind fully catches your sail. Anne-Marie McDermott acts in a Promethean-heroic way to realize the complex music with ultimate comprehensibility and rangy excitement. Who says High Modernism is abstruse? Not me. In truth I think I might well put this on for any musical person and they I think would take notice. It is not just for the rare few.

"It Happens Like This" has an extraordinary presence in its 40 minutes for a group of four vocalists and chamber orchestra. It perhaps is as Post-Serial as it is Late Serial in the exploding forward of expression. But then Wuorinen has never been a formalist or a formulaic voice. Some of his writing here for all four voices and chamber instrumentalists passes the usual expressionist heights to something unexpected and quite stirring! There is operatic dialog and a very rewarding interplay of voices and instrumentalists. It is a major theatrical-vocal work of our time I would assert.

And the opener is not as all-encompassing for length yet very much Wuorinen at his best. Vocalist and chamber players achieve a simultaneous horizontal flow that truly soars.

So are we hearing or will you hear just another High Modernist blip-bloop set of abstractions? Well I resent the question! Seriously the answer is. no it isn't and also, in contradiction, yes the very best of bleep-bloops! It is about time in my opinion that anti-Modernists out there (perhaps most now dead) get with the program and embrace what enquiring musical minds have been enjoying now for almost 100 years. Modernism has not failed, the Anti-Modernist voices are instead rendered obsolete. Perhaps the paradox of the Avant Garde in general as we look back is that the music was not ahead of its time so much as the audiences, most listeners at some point, were impossibly behind the times. We who have spent our lives in a mostly urban modern chaos respond to such masters as Wuorinen with some relief. What I mean to say is that for us such composers create sense and a higher order...sense and order and truly transcendent expression out of the muck of what seems at times a senseless chaos of life.

So all you who have need to understand where we are and how it relates to where we have been, Charles Wuorinen is a composer I might suggest you listen closely to on this album. Listen a few times, maybe more than a few times. Charles Wuorinen has been with us forever, it feels like. Yet no, he is in historical time, the same as what we live in now. And he still is here, happily for us. So listen to what he has given us recently! You will be glad of it, I do think.

Victor Herbiet, The Road to the Ethereal Gate

If one is an avid New Music explorer one does best I think when one approaches a new artist or composer with no preconceived ideas or expectations. By virtue of the newness of music we are given the chance to hear what "serious" music there is in our world and how it all is ever new. Not knowing Victor Herbiet and his music then, I put today's offering on the first time a few weeks ago and I was treated to a series of unexpected stylistic turns, all in the end leading one to a happy place of listening. I refer to the album on tap, The Road to the Ethereal Gate (Centredisques 25118).

This album showcases Herbiet as composer of music that features to my ears mostly alto and soprano saxophones. If he also plays tenor I somehow heard it as an alto. That says something about the brightness of his tone. Victor is a fine player and appears throughout as the solo saxist or the sax in the well-mapped chamber blends. His playing and writing for sax acknowledge the Jazz heritage but also the Classical sax inheritance. Think "Pictures at an Exhibition" and the like for the Classical sax style.

The music ranges widely yet with a personal stylistic fingerprint. "Tango a Trois" for example looks at the Argentinian tango and takes a trio of alto, violin and piano to a place that echoes the grand past of the dance music while saying something personal. "Twelve Tone Rag" does something similar with Ragtime.

From there we brush against further sax intersections with chamber configurations and solo flights. The second half of the program features a good deal of music for solo sax, technically demanding, lyrical, jazz inflected but in a Modern Classical framework for the most part. "The Four Elements," "Through the Ethereal Gate" and "On the Shores of Eternity," the later two with a set up where a theremin responds in an programmed way to the sax phrasings. . .  these three works define nicely for us a singular vision of the virtuoso possibilities of sax that have lyrical and expressive clout.

After a good number of listens I am happy with this music, quite so. It does not seek a cutting edge view of what one can explore, yet in no way does it advocate for some status quo mainstream. One might say the music on the whole is quirky? There is a nicely stubborn individualism at work in that you feel that Herbiet does the music he does out of an inner conviction that each foray is right and for itself. So then in no way is this the music of a follower; more so a leader and sax advocate. I certainly appreciate the music. If you are open to a new-with-roots, yet a refusal to follow the beaten path, and especially if you love the saxophone, this one may well be for you. Bravo!

Rawsthorne and Other Rarities, The Music of Alan Rawsthorne and Others

Since it is the July 4th holiday here in the States, I come on to the blog somewhat briefly before I attempt to burn meat on a gas-fired device. I would be remiss though if I did not spend some time this morning writing about an unusual and gratifying release. I speak of the recent CD Rawthorne and Other Rarities (Divine Art 25169).

It is a most illuminating look at the music of the rather obscure 20th century English composer Alan Rawsthorne (1905-1971), plus eight more rare and rather whimsical compositions that fit in with the Rawsthorne, and all but one short work is here enjoyed in World Premier Recordings.

For the Alan part of the disk we hear his "Chamber Cantata," "Practical Cats" (as arranged and edited by Peter DIckinson), and finally his "String Quartet in B minor." These are idiosyncratic works with some nod to things like Schoenberg's "Pierrot" and Walton's "Facade," but not slavishly or even exactly obviously. More like something that was "in the air" in those days. Rawsthorne is quirkily Modern and very English, so quite charming and for the enjoyment of any and all Anglophiles in the musical world today.

Then the fascinating yet very obscure works we hear in addition have delight going on for us if we open up. That is in the main. Not all are quite masterpieces, but what do you expect? Odd and rarely heard works by Vaughan Williams, David Ellis, Malcolm Lipkin, Arthur Bliss, Donald Waxman, Karel Janovicky, Basil Deane, Raymond Warren and Halsey Stevens, names which may be somewhat or very familiar, others rather unfamiliar.

The whole hangs together in a quixotically stubborn way and one if like me smiles and nods. Here is something so well off the beaten path one might find oneself hacking through to make a clearing, but happily so! I recommend this if you want something Early-Modern-worthy and completely quirky. Performances I should mention are very first-rate!

George Antheil, Specter, Duo Odeon

Any serious student of Modernism has no doubt been exposed to George Antheil's "Ballet Mechanique" and one may get a great deal out of such music, which is only fitting. That there is a lot more music of his to check out I sometimes forget, partly because much of it is not always very available in recorded form lately. He may at one time have been an enfant terrible of American Modernism (in the earlier part of the 20th Century). It so happens though that his music has lasting power. It is more than a music of ideas, though it can be that. It is also a music of music!

George Antheil (1900-1959) in this light can most favorably be heard on the recent premiere recording of Duo Odeon and Specter (Sono Luminus 92222). It is an entire disk devoted to George's mid-40s compositions for violin and piano and it is in that wise a major undertaking. We get a chance to hear three substantial compositions played with true verve and understanding.

As it turns out, the three works have an important link in common as they also have a heightened importance for Duo Odeon. To start though, an inventory. The three works in question are Antheil's "Sonata for Violin and Piano" (1945), his "Concerto for Violin and Orchestra" (1946) here in the reduction for violin and piano, and the recently discovered "Valses from Specter of the Rose," (based on Antheil's 1947 film score of the same name) which was specially arranged by violinist Werner Gebauer. The latter was unearthed in 2016 by Marcus Gebauer (Werner's son) and enjoys a premier recording here, happily.

And in fact the presence of Gebauer is key to all three works. George and Werner were by then close collaborators and intimate friends. The two published works were specifically written for the violinist who gave them their first performances.

At the same time as this music is a celebration of the closeness of Gebauer and Antheil, it also has great significance in the origins of Duo Odean, a most auspicious blend of the talents of violinist Hannah Leland and pianist Aimee Fincher. Both were in the midst of doctoral studies in music at Arizona State University when they met as fellow members of the contemporary music ensemble there. Research into George Antheil and the two main works featured in this recording brought the two together and understandably became an intense focus that has its floration in the performances we hear on the disc.

The Sonatina is a major offering performed with an excellent insight into the music, which is illuminating certainly of Antheil's brilliant inventive talents.

The Concerto is most lively, and if I sometimes notice some passages very indebted to Prokofiev's First Violin Concerto, it is with a certain joy since Antheil integrates and revivifies the motifs to make something altogether his.

The Valses are a welcome addition. Three movements at a little over six minutes do not sound at all incidental but substantial in their brevity.

And in the end I come away from this CD with a real appreciation for Duo Odeon and their beautifully communicative Modernist musicianship and virtuosity, none of which they wear on their sleeve so much as integrate into an Antheil-centric presentation. And after all that is what it should be all about, bringing works alive as fully an expressively as possible. The Modernist Antheil has a beautifully thematic side and we hear it to great advantage on this premier Duo Odeon offering. Bravo!