Volti, House of Voices, More New Directions in American Choral Music

Volti is a choral group from San Francisco devoted to the contemporary muse. They are under the capable direction of Robert Geary. Their latest disk, House of Voices (Innova 834) offers six compositions in what one might call "new form tonal" American music, five of which were specially commissioned by the group.

I've said this before but it still applies: the voice in the form of the choral ensemble affects our inner ear in interesting ways. Perhaps because we are neurologically-psychologically wired to respond to the human voice, choral music gets our primal attention. Simple to moderately complex melody and harmonic sequences, when sung with the expressive focus of a good choral ensemble, have a heightened affect it seems, more so than an instrumental group might have playing the same music.

The point is that good choral music should probably be approached differently compositionally than pure orchestral or chamber instrumental music. Perhaps that is a commonplace in composition classes. But that may explain why some scat singing by less than perfect jazz singers can fail utterly. To try and approximate instrumental style and content with the voice needs absolute perfection to come across to the listener with credibility. So for example an excellent Indian classical vocalist spends many years perfecting his or her art--so that he or she can rival classical instrumentalists in complexity of phrasing and execution. The same could be said of bel canto opera soloists. If they aren't totally great, it doesn't work.

That's not to say that Volti are less than terrific. They are excellent. But the compositions represented on this disk operate in a folk-choral-multi-part universe that is new by virtue of its treatment of familiar melodic-harmonic forms. Each composer, it is clear, has internalized the choral tradition at its best and done something new with it.

So we get six fairly short works all written in this past decade--by Yu-Hui Chang, Ted Hearne, Donald Crockett, Eric Moe, Wayne Peterson, Mark Winges, not exactly household names at this point but all capable of turning out interesting choral work, all getting sensitive and excellently executed performances at the hands of Volti.

Each composition in its own way emphasizes vertical-horizontal phraseology that sounds well in the choral context. Some of it is ravishing. All of it is a testament to the excellence of the Volti ensemble. The music has a direct, straightforwardly aesthetic quality that should be accessible to a larger-than-usual audience for new music. So bravo, then!

Peteris Vasks, Vox Amoris, Works for Violin and Orchestra

Peteris Vask, Latvian composer, has been forging an identity based on a mystical, lyrical diatonicism, a music both tender and perhaps world-worn, a contemporary music that, like Arvo Part's but in its own way, marks a return to the tonal roots of music over its long history, that manages at the same time to engage and transcend that history.

Those are the feelings and thoughts I have after a number of listens to his Vox Amoris, Works for Violin and Orchestra (Wergo 67502). The disk present three works written between 1996-2009. Each fits together with the others to form a kind of three-dimensional portrait of the composer and his present-day style.

"Vox Amoris," concerned with love and its transcendent powers, consists of long, flowing minor-diatonic lyric passages, an endless, heartrending melody where the strings set up a lush but luminous carpet for the singingly beautiful solo violin part. Like the other works on this disk, there is a neo/post romanticism at work that functions more as a soundscape than a linear symphonic discourse, again more in that sense like Part than, say, Sibelius.

"Tala Gaisma--Distant Light" is similar in mood and momentum with a feeling of time suspended, a soaring yet restrained violin expressivity and suspended clouds of minor-toned light in the string orchestra.

"Vientulais Engelis--Lonely Angel" brings the program to an end with the shortest work but perhaps the most beautiful violin expressions of all, against the backdrop of a hushed melancholy in the strings.

This isn't expressly happy music; it is deeply internal, a state of feelings that express themselves in intensely lyrical minor reflectiveness. Vasks's string writing is superbly wrought; both orchestra and soloist evoke an almost timeless weightlessness, a long and lingering kind of musical prayer.

It is excellently played by soloist Alina Pogostkina and the strings of Sinfonietta Riga under Juha Kangas.

Based on the music on this disk I would have to say that Peteris Vasks is a compositional voice to be heard, one of the more singular voices out there, a masterful crafter of sad, contemplative beauty. Recommended.

Chris Pugh, Jack Gold, Penumbra/Heqat

Today, music from Seattle. It's a split disk by composer guitarist Chris Pugh, drummer Jack Gold, and Trio Recherche. Penumbra/Heqat (Sol Disk 9406) divides between "Penumbra," an extended duo free improvisation between Pugh on a rather electric guitar and Gold on drums, and the avant concert work "Heqat", a Pugh composition performed by string trio.

What is interesting, first off, is the confluence between avant improv-rock-freedom and closely mapped-out avant concert music. The CD covers both as if a matter of course. We have as precedent key figures like Zappa and Zorn, who never shied away from moving in either direction or both directions at the same time as the spirit moved. And more and more composer-instrumentalists are doing the same lately (see my review on the Gapplegate Music blog on the latest music by Wadada Leo Smith, for example, a particularly moving and excellent new musical example).

There are musicians who have grown up and lived with all manner of genres and hear music bi-stylistically, so to speak. I am one, which is why I cover new music/classical, jazz and rock on the three different blogs and find the overlaps of great interest.

In any event the guitar-drum duet is not distinguished by the technical prowess of Mr. Pugh on electric guitar but more by the sounds and ideas he puts forward freely. Jack Gold plays a dense barrage of arrhythmic drums for the first half, and he is very adept at his role. Chris Pugh develops motifs to repeat while working through a rock and avant vocabulary. The second half of the improvisation concentrates on quiet, non-pitched sounds and though this may be a bit overextended, it does afford contrast.

Then the CD switches gears to a string trio composed by Pugh, "Heqat", performed in concert by Trio Recherche. It has a piquant kind of Darmstadt feel to it, wide leaps, continually shifting string articulation techniques and an atonal-12-tonal sound. The performance is quite serviceable, the music is difficult and occasionally it sounds as if the mix is slightly off in parts, though this may be intentional as the less present string lines at those points have a reverberent quality, so perhaps they are filtered electronically and are meant to be in the background. It's a post-Webernian flurry of jagged musical events and it shows some definite compositional prowess in potentia if not totally in presentia. I would certainly want to hear more of Pugh's new music compositions if given the opportunity.

Penumbra/Heqat gives the listener two very different sides of what is going on today in the avant garde. It is by no means a perfect disk, but gives a fascinating glimpse of the promise of these young Turks for the close listener.

Conrad Chow, Premieres, Music By Bruce Broughton, Ronald Royer, Kevin Lau

Canadian violinist Conrad Chow brings his impressive talent to bear on a series of Premieres (Cambria CD-1204) of works by Bruce Broughton, noted LA film composer, and the Canadian composers Ronald Royer and Kevin Lau. Royer himself conducts the Sinfonia Toronto. Broughton accompanies Chow on piano for the two final chamber works.

Chow has a sweet, pleasing, just slightly hollow tone for the lyrical passages. He generates great torque and excitement for the virtuoso fireworks that some of the movements contain.

To the music: Broughton combines neo-classicism in a post-Stravinsky mold, Scottish fiddle style and Prokofiev-ian drive and bittersweetness for his "Tryptich: Three Incongruities for Violin and Chamber Orchestra." The incongruities work together for a fascinating spin. You experience well put-together movements, each of which plays against the other while also playing on internal stylistic tensions within the movement to create vivid contrasts. In the process there is a connecting thread of linear thrust that unifies this very interesting work.

Royer's "Rhapsody" has a late-romantic, early-modernist lyrical liveliness that makes it something more than a hearkening back. His "In Memoriam J.S. Bach" returns the program to a neo-classical (neo-baroque) stance, with a slightly tart modern touch, passages in five and an otherwise updating and impressionistic treatment of the Master-as-inspiration.

"Joy" for Violin and String Orchestra introduces the music of Kevin Lau to us. Attractive, largo-esque lyricism is at play here for the short work. It has an earthy appeal but goes by all-too-quickly.

For the final works Chow and Broughton team up for some concluding contrasts. The pianist's "Gold Rush Songs" treat loosely, creatively and imaginatively three folk songs associated with the San Francisco area Gold Rush of the 1800's. The music has great charm. Finally as a bonus the two perform a violin-piano transcription of Chopin's "Nocturne" in C-Sharp Minor, which sounds quite lovely in their hands.

So there you have it. Conrad Chow is a voice of distinction, impeccable in technique and a most vivid painter of tone. He has a glorious sound and handles each of these works as if he was born to them.

The works themselves are very refreshing to hear. The roots of the classical and folk past undergo imaginative transformations, so that each work in its own way makes it all new. Each composer has a clear vision of how present and past can transform to a future of repeated pleasure for our appreciative ears. The Sinfonia sounds disciplined and well-disposed toward these works.

A great surprise! Recommended.

JS Bach, Well Tempered Clavier, Book 1: A Composer's Approach, with Don Freund

JS Bach's Well Tempered Clavier, most will know, is one of the singularly brilliant sets of compositions our world has produced.

Composer-Pianist-Musicologist Don Freund has recorded the First Book of Preludes and Fugues from the series and added a DVD of his demonstration and analysis of the first eight sets on Well Tempered Clavier, Book 1: A Composer's Approach (Navona 5869). In all you get the two CDs of music and the DVD lecture disk, at a nice price.

The performances, on pianoforte, are committed and filled with moments where Maestro Freund will via rubato and emphasis, bring out phrases he finds to the point compositionally. It is an unpretentious, very decent reading, if not with the dash and fire of Glenn Gould or the pristine period zeal of Wanda Landowska.

What makes this set especially worthwhile is his lecture disk "Composition Lessons with JS Bach." It captures Professor Freund, presumably at Indiana University where he teaches, providing a very insightful lecture demonstration on the C, C-minor, C# and C#-minor Preludes and Fugues.

It's a DIY video of the lectures themselves, with split-screen presentations of Freund and his piano on one side and Bach's musical notation occupying the other half of the space. For each prelude, each fugue, Prof. Freund has color-coded the notation according to the structural-function of any given passage or line. So with a fugue, you can readily see the fugue subject and its various entrances in the matrix, its permutations, development, the non-structural passages, etc.

What's particularly engaging about the lectures is that Freund looks at each work in terms of compositional strategies. Bach is envisioned writing the actual work, coming to various points in the composition process where he must make choices.

Why he made a particular choice from a strategy standpoint and why Bach was an extraordinary composer for doing so is what the lectures are all about and there are some brilliant analyses. Each prelude-fugue is discussed with Don demonstrating the musical passage in question while you follow on the notation reproduction, then at the end of each set a full performance (from the CD version) is juxtaposed to put it all in perspective.

It serves as a rather brilliant introduction to Bach as a composer sees him, a fellow composer. And so there are moment of delight when we savor a dissonance that the fugal development leads Bach to, moments of free invention, the utter elegance of Bach in simplicity or the incredibly beautiful complexities of his four-part fugal writing.

In the end you go away from this set with insight into the compositional mind of Johann Sebastian Bach. Your appreciation of the Preludes and Fugues are heightened. And then you have some very serviceable and sensitive renditions of the whole of Book One to hear repeatedly.

Students and old hands at the Bach corpus should revel equally in the lectures and appreciate the performances. It's a worthy deal no matter how you look at it. Bravo!

Neil Welch, Sleeper

Sleeper (Table & Chairs) features a mid-sized chamber ensemble of tenor and soprano sax, alto and soprano sax, bass clarinet, trombone and two cellos. Neil Welch, Seattle-based, plays tenor/soprano in the ensemble and composed the 27-minute piece that the disk showcases.

The work addresses and reacts to the questionable death of an Iraqi General by US forces during the last Gulf War. The music has a somber cast at times but is also actively noteful with bursts of long-lined, asymmetrical cyclical phrases in the winds countered by dramatically slower moving and otherwise contrasting lines in the strings and brass.

From there new themes, more long-lined motor-driving passages, modern chorale-like sequences and long notes emerge and submerge. They form a musical-narrative counterpart to what might have been in another context a verbal essay.

It's highly personal music, somewhat understandably anguished at times, but ultimately transcendent, as music. Neil Welch has his own voice. It is expressive and musically rich. I hope we can hear more of his music soon.

Sophia Serghi, Night of Light

Sophia Serghi, Cypriot, composer, weaver of ostinatos, writer of lyrical, accessible music. Night of Light (Navona 5866) is a full CD of her orchestral works, all with soprano or soprano and mezzo soprano.

It's music that has resonance with Gorecki at times, a pizzicato-arco exotica reminiscent in its own way of Hovhannes now and again, and the extensive use of the minor mode--which no doubt relates to her musical roots.

There are four works, well performed by the Moravian Philharmonic under Vit Micka. Sopranos Alena Helerova, Lucie Silkenova, and mezzo Eliska Weissova sound well in their parts, especially to my mind Ms. Helerova.

The works are in many ways of a piece: minor diatonic, elegant simplicity, archaic, flowing, lyric and evocatively somber. They are not extraordinary complex or difficult to grasp and so may find a larger audience than is the norm for contemporary concert music.

It's music that should please many. I found it enchanting in its own way.