Jennifer Higdon, Sky Quartet

These days composer Jennifer Higdon gets lots of attention. Her works are frequently performed. Of course like anybody there was a time when that was not so. She started out with the first works, a very promising student of the music, and worked her way into an individual style and widespread recognition bit by bit.

The Serafin String Quartet along with Charles Abramovic at the piano and Eric Stomberg on bassoon bring us an interesting selection of early to relatively early chamber works on the new release Sky Quartet (Naxos 8.559752). In it we hear Ms. Higdon immersed in poly-stylistic expression with surprising maturity and budding mastery.

Her lovely quartet arrangement of "Amazing Grace" (1998/2003) sets a tender initial mood that contrasts dramatically with the four movement "Sky Quartet" (1997/2000) that has both lyric archaicist neo-romantic lilt and dynamic modernism at its core, alternatingly. It depicts the panoramic sky of the Western US in its ever-changing moods with vivid, singular tone painting.

The 1990 "Sonata for Viola and Piano" brings a late-romantic expressiveness to bear in the slow movement; more animated and playful in the "Declamatory" finale. Here is a Higdon perhaps more influenced than influence, but inventive and captivating nonetheless.

"Dark Wood" (2001) is a quartet for bassoon, violin, cello and piano. It has great rhythmic verve, a mellow bittersweet rhapsodism and a dark, woody earnestness that brings us a solid look at the fully realized Higdon at her best.

The earliest piece of the batch, her "String Trio" of 1988, shows a modern, widely harmonic palette and an inventive imagination already then at work.

The performances match the scores for dedicated singleness of purpose. Ultimately a picture emerges of a bright young musical personality with an idiomatic feel for chamber music and string writing, a smart and warm musical demeanor and a stylistic expansiveness that signal and prefigure the ever-more satisfying works to come. There is no feeling of the sophomoric in these pieces. And they have great charm and lyric power.

Samuel Adler, Works for String Quartet and Other Small Ensembles

If you admire present-day chamber music, Navona has something you might think seriously of getting. American composer Samuel Adler (b 1928) has been prolific in this vein. A nearly three-and-a-half-hour set Works for String Quartet and Other Small Ensembles has recently come out on the label and it goes for $9.99 as a decent MP3 download at iTunes.

Of course it's not because it is inexpensive that I mention it. Samuel Adler's chamber music is quite well crafted and inspired. Fourteen works are represented on this retrospective set: string quartets, violin sonatas, piano trios, all very decently played by various artists in decent sound.

Adler's chamber output varies in style between neo-classicism and mainstream modern. In all cases it shows a lively and fertile, inventive musical mind at work. There's a booklet that comes with the download.

How can you lose? Good music, good performances, great bargain to boot. To find out more, go to http://www.navonarecords.com/artists-a.php click on "Adler, Samuel" and you'll see the album at the bottom to click on.

Mark Vigil, The Palest Rose

Surprises come in all sorts of ways. Today's came in the mail. The cover makes it seem like a new age album. It isn't. I am speaking of Oregon composer Mark Vigil's The Palest Rose (Ravello 7847). It's a compendium of his music for chamber aggregates and a couple for Gamelan orchestra.

I suppose you could say there's some of the impressionist in his music. There's a brightness, a lyricism, a refracted quality. It's mostly diatonic-modal, a music of tranquility yet not without vigor, quite accessible. There are three works for solo piano, the two "Fantasies for Solo Piano" have more adventurous harmonic-melodic content, a sort of modernism, than much of the other music on this disk. There are two "Trios for Flute, Viola and Harp," and a "Trio for Violin, Clarinet and Harp," all quite ravishing in a straightforward way.

The two Gamelan pieces have a Javanese sound to them. "Elizabeth" adds a woman's chorus that gives the work a more "east meets west" quality.

It's all very fetching music, skillfully crafted with an ear toward expressive simplicity, yet artful, like a Whitman's Sampler box. There are many that will find in this music a consolation for some rough days, with the touch of a genuinely talented composer. Relax and listen.

Paul Richards, Fables, Forms and Fears

Paul Richards is a younger composer (b 1969) (younger than I am anyway) and judging by his CD Fables, Forms and Fears (Meyer Media MMO7008) one of the more accomplished and interesting of his generation.

The CD presents seven of his compositions, written between 1996 and 2003. They are each in their own way quite eventful and inventive. They range from solo pieces ("The Great Octopus," for solo guitar) to small chamber configurations ("Hypercube" for percussion and piano; "Cypriot Structures" and "Falling On Lobsters in the Dark" for violin, guitar and piano; "Rush Hour" for horn and piano; and "Asphalt Gypsy" for violin and guitar) to larger groupings ("A Butterfly Coughs in Africa" for clarinet choir).

In all of it we hear Richards's own brand of neo-classical modernism, tempered sometimes by the motor-impulsive qualities of minimalism, but sans the repetition. It is music that bears the stamp of very solid compositional craftsmanship but also the lucid spark of inspiration. You do not hear the moments of less-than-inspired passagework that you might in a lesser composer. The thematic material is engaging and the development of it filled with drama and musical logic.

The artists involved in these recording acquit themselves very well. There are some excellent performances all around. The Duo 46 configuration of Matthew Albert Gould on guitar and Beth Ilana Schneider-Gould on violin, with or without the addition of Nathanael May at the piano, gives character and well-executed dynamics to the pieces they grace. But everyone puts in sympathetic readings, from Kenneth L. Broadway on percussion and Paul Basler on horn to the piano work of Kevin R. Orr and the University of Florida Clarinet Choir.

This may have been out for a few years, but it's well worth tracking down if the music-as-described sounds interesting to you. It's a CD that does not stint on musical content, yet has much charm as well.

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

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.