Gheorghe Costinescu, Jubilus & Pantomime, DVD

Gheorghe Costinescu, Romaninian born-and-bred, student of Messiaen and Stockhausen, Berio, Ussachevsky and Chou Wen-chung, New York resident since 1969. . . and composer of note.

I have had the opportunity to experience his DVD Jubilus & Pantomime (Ravello RR7822), and I am glad of it. The program centers around a retrospective concert given at Columbia's Miller Theatre and the performance of two of his chamber works, "Jubilus" and "Pantomime," by the Ensemble Sospiso under the direction of Costinescu and Rand Steiger, respectively.

The in-concert performances are shown, followed by a discussion of the "Pantomime" score by the composer and, finally, a lengthy interview.

Costinescu's works on the DVD are quite theatrical and visual as well as aural. This music itself is post-serialist and architecturally intricate, filled with dynamic interplay and contrapuntal complexities. The music in itself is top-drawer modernism. With this DVD, however, we get to experience the visual impact of the performances, which is considerable.

"Jubilus" is rather short but quite dense. It is scored for vocalist, body percussionist and trumpet, who together create a tightly woven music of phonemic-pitched vocal utterance, a complicated series of coordinated hands, feet and mouth on the part of the percussionist to create an avant sort of pre-beat-boxing melange, and an intricate, wide-ranging trumpet part. The aural result is fascinating as is the visual imagery of the three in performance.

"Pantomine" is longer and considerably more involved in the visual and musical sense. It is a work for small chamber orchestra that calls for various coordinated movements of the non-stationary players across the stage. They circle, cross each other, assume various positions and clusterings and otherwise enact a kind of elemental ballet as they play their parts. The music has aleatoric elements and moments that are rigorously notated. The stylistic dimensions vary from serial preciseness to a kind of communal anarchy of shifting motifs, and on to a rather lovely chorale passage towards the end.

As the illuminating discussion of the score makes clear, there are quite precisely conceived "choreographies" of movement built-in to coincide synchronously with the musical simultaneities of the score. It is in that sense a logistical feat to give a spirited and faithful performance of the work. That's most certainly what happens here. On first experience the various shifts in position seem puzzling. Do the movements add to the appreciate of the performance event? The answer for me at least has been, yes, once the interrelationships of movement and sound are understood more fully.

The ensuing discussions with the composer are quite revealing. He is a prototypical avant gardist in that there is a strong conceptual element in his music, something that enlightens listeners when brought forward through discussion. Costinescu and the directors of Ensemble Sospiso make all that up-front in the ensuing dialog.

In the end Jubilus & Pantomine takes full advantage of the DVD medium to bring you some important Costinescu works in performance with all the critical visual elements in play. It also makes for a lively mini-portrait of Costinescu the man, the conceptualist and the composer.

Well done! Recommended.

Mieczyslaw Weinberg, Concertos, Svedlund, Gothenburg Symphony Orchestra

A hot Monday morning in the season and we return to the corpus of Mieczyslaw Weinberg's works for a fine disk of Concertos (Chandos). Thord Svedlund conducts the Gothenberg Symphony Orchestra for a notable grouping of four: the "Fantasia," op. 52 (for cello and orchestra), Flute Concerto No 1, op. 75. and No. 2, op 148, and finally the Clarinet Concerto, op. 104.

These are four works that stand on their own. The "Fantasia" has some extraordinarily memorable melodic work in the cello, well played by Claes Gunnarsson.

The second Flute Concerto is modern sounding in Weinberg's own way, which in this later period shows a synthesis between the general Russian modern milieu and his own originality. There are bittersweet flute passage of beauty and Anders Jonhall brings out his part with a projecting presence and fine tone.

The first flute concerto begins with a rather frenetic romp at breakneck pace, follows with an evocative slow movement and a dance-like finale. It's perhaps a bit more whimsical than the second and that gives the music some welcome contrast.

The Clarinet Concerto has a very bravura clarinet part and a bit more dash and stridency than the other works. Urban Claesson heightens the built-in contrasts and handles the various articulations with poetic grace.

Svedlund and the Gottenburg Symphony sound very much in sympathy with the music and give it all the proper flourish. The soloists are top notch and the music is first rate Weinberg,

Recommended.

Ola Gjeilo, Northern Lights, Choral Works, Phoenix Chorale

We talked about Ola Gjeilo's piano improvisation disk recently on these pages (see below). Now we backtrack to an earlier disk called Northern Lights (Chandos), where the Phoenix Chorale under Charles Bruffy perform a number of his choral works.

This is a kind of post-minimalist lyrical music. The chorale sounds marvelous a capella or with the accompaniment of string quartet, piano, etc.

The music is enchanting and moving in a way that no doubt has had wide appeal. Ola writes for the chorale with a sure hand, taking advantage of vocal ranges and their special qualities to map out an otherworldly vocal landscape.

This is not in any way avant music so much as pleasing and sometimes very moving sonances that bring to the forefront the beauty of the human voice.

If you revel in the possibilities of the new tonality, and respond to a great sounding chorus singing very strongly lyrical, well constructed music, you will no doubt love this one,

Marty Regan, Magic Mirror, Selected Works for Japanese Instruments, Vol. Two

The "East meets West" idea has been with us for ages, of course, but in music it is not the norm. A real interpenetration of musical cultures is not always an everyday happenstance. And of course there are degrees of success in the music making situation, as there are processes of exchange between musical cultures that can happen over long periods of time.

The music of Marty Regan is something special because he achieves a most interesting synthesis and gives us some very enjoyable music at the same time. His second volume of "Selected Works for Japanese Instruments" is out. (I covered the first volume, Forest Whispers, on my Gapplegate Guitar blog on October 14, 2010.) Magic Mirror (Navona 5876) in many ways begins where the first volume left off.

It's music that uses traditional Japanese instruments like the shakuhachi, shamisen, koto, biwa lute, etc., for a music that has much of Japanese tradition built into it, but also has personal compositional ideas and juxtapositions that have a Western heritage. The most obvious place you'll hear that is with the piece for four shakuhachi, "Flamefox," or the piece for shakuhachi and string quartet, "Voyage." In both works Western harmonies and avant/traditional Western classical elements freely intertwine with Japanese musical sensibility.

That's true to some extent throughout the album. And it can be quite subtle, for example with the interjection of long-toned Gagaku sounds with other elements on the title cut.

It's another worthwhile effort from Maestro Regan, a very enjoyable, substantial musical repast. Regan gives us innovative writing that seeks to discover new relations between and within traditions. It succeeds!

Scott Miller, Pat O'Keefe, Willful Devices

We reviewed something by Scott Miller several days ago here (see index). Today, another. It's Scott on computer-interactive live electro-acoustics and Pat O'Keefe on clarinet, for a CD called Willful Devices (self-released).

The finished product is a series of compositions by Miller utilizing interactive electronics, and improvisations, both structured (frameworks composed by both artists, respectively) and free.

The title sums up the idea that computer interactive programs often have a will of their own in the way that they respond to sound-music stimuli. They here become a third variable, a third creative force in the generation of musical results.

The pieces have an overall ambiance and sound staging so that the improvisational, the composed and the computer derived aspects of the aleatory all run together in a continuum.

Music from Minnesota is what you might call it. But of course not just any old music. Pat O'Keefe is a most adventurous player, fleet and very attentive to the sound color possibilities of the clarinet, be it conventional tone, harmonics or expressive phrasing. Scott Miller creates an electronic orchestra of sorts; but not a sonic equivalent of a conventional orchestra as much as a wide but related spectrum of electronic tones and colors that blend together and with the clarinet and its electronic alteration in totalized ways. His sonic palette reminds at times of the classic electronic phase of Stockhausen, not in sound-structure per se so much as total impact.

This is high adventure avant garde music of the best sort. It is sonically advanced, musically intricate and most pleasing in an avant sort of way. Recommended.

Arianna Savall, Petter Udland Johansen, Hirundo Maris, Chants du Sud et du Nord

Arianna Savall made a reputation as the vibrant singer with the early music ensemble led by Rolf Lislevand, on Nuove musiche. She teams with Petter Udland Johansen for the album Hirundo Maris (ECM New Series B0016978-02). The title means "sea swallow." Savall and Johansen conceived of the album as a kind of musical journey from the Mediterranean to the North Sea, in a series of old chestnuts and original songs that run between folk and early music in engaging ways.

It's a fascinating ensemble combining the vocals and folk harps of Savall, Johansen's vocals, fiddle and mandolin, and three additional ensemble members who variously sing and play guitar, Dobro, double-bass and percussion.

You get a rather marvelous collection of songs, beautifully performed. Aside from the originals there are traditional Sephardic songs, Catalan songs, Norwegian folk, the Scottish song "the Water is Wide," and others, all done in more or less early music troubadour style with a small string ensemble conceived in traditional yet also innovative ways. There are touches of ethnic percussion as it appeared on the crossroads of cultures at the edges and there is an overall luminous ambiance to it all, as you might expect from an ECM recording.

It's very lovely music, timeless and timely, performed with style and feeling. Arianna's voice is quite terrific and Petter has a pleasing voice as well. They blend together in harmony or strike off on their own from song to song for plenty of contrast.

A beautiful album that I recommend highly.

Heiner Goebbels, Stifters Dinge

The recording today does not fit in easily with expections. Heiner Goebbels for his Stifters Dinge (ECM New Series B0016967-02) had five grand pianos mounted together on end, and pulled through a number of pools of water while digital devices activated the strings like a set of player pianos. Then through various other mechanical means unconventional sounds from inside and outside the instruments were obtained. Prerecorded voices of New Guinea tribesmen, William Burroughs, Malcolm X, Levi-Strauss, etc., further combine with natural and what sound like electronic alterations of natural-industrial sounds (but are most likely piano-mechanical based).

There are original music vignettes that the composer produced as well as quotations from other works (such as Bach's Italian concerto).

The work is named after writer Adalbert Stifter (1805-1868) who compiled a comprehensive catalog of natural sounds.

The ultimate effect is a rather uncanny combination of text-sound piece, collage, soundscape, electro-acoustic melange and work for five mechanical pianos. No one category makes sense of it, except perhaps music-sound-site installation, which has a rather inelegant ring to it.

What is uncanny about it is the strong feeling that all elements come together to create a kind of sound poem whose meaning does not seem able to be expressed, yet rather clearly lurks below verbal articulation. Regular machine-like industrial, natural, and human (voice and music) sounds combine in a landscape that divides into more or less discrete event horizons, yet does not signify in any conventional sense.

The overall effect is of a narrative in sound, an excursion into abstract hermeticism, a journey to an unknown zone.

It is, ultimately, haunting and original, alien yet accommodating, an aural puzzle that does not easily give up the key to its solution, if at all.

It will in this way puzzle the listener, enthrall, provide a total immersion, a total aural conundrum. And of course that will either satisfy and intrigue, or, if you do not surrender to it, frustrate expectations and confuse. For me the former prevailed.

In that it makes for the best sort of "new" listening experience.