The Crossing, I Want To Live, Contemporary Works for Women's Choir

Contemporary music has come some distance in the new century and the few decades preceding it. One trend is centered around tonal musics to be had nowadays that aren't doctrinaire neo-romanticism or typically minimalist in a mesmerizing sense, though repetition may be a factor. You can hear some of it in a somewhat unusual release by the women's choir known as The Crossing, conducted by Donald Nally. It's a collection of works entitled I Want to Live (Innova 856).

The choir is very good, the soloists quite adequate but the overall ensemble the strongest element. They come forward appealingly in a program of short works, some grouped in multi-part sets, by David Lang (of Bang-on-a-Can fame), William Brooks, Paul Fowler, and Pelle Gudmundsen-Holmgreen. "I Want to Live" is one of five interrelated Lang works, Brooks is represented by "Six Medieval Echoes," Fowler is represented by two short works, and Gudmundsen-Holmgreen by the eight short segments that make up "Statements". The music was written between 1970 and 2010, with the bulk from the present century.

There are at times hints of an early music influence (especially the Brooks suite) and a minimalism where recurrence is not as pulse-periodic as it is stanza-like in a more song-like conceptual framework, or gradually unfolding in short bursts of melody.

It is music of high interest performed with a gently spirited or more stirring presence as called for. It is a very good example of the "new tonality" to be heard today, helping reserve a rightful place of the style alongside other stylistic currents in new music right now. It is a very good listen in any event, atmospheric and evocative, sometimes overtly emotive but consistently introspective-atmospheric.

Recommended.

The Dowland Project, John Potter, Night Sessions

There are genre bending, category conflating, creative hybridizations out there to be heard these days. Some do what they do very well. Others don't quite manage to make it all hang together. John Potter and The Dowland Project is most definitely the former kind of gathering. They combine Dowland era vocals and lute music with adventurous free improvisation, old English poetic recitation and a very keen sense of stretching that works fully.

Their recent album Night Sessions (ECM B00 18701-02) came about as a result of an extemporaneous nighttime recording session after the group had completed what eventually became the album Care-charming Sleep. The unplanned nature of Night Sessions gives the music a special spontaneity.

Who are The Dowland Project? The center of it all rests with John Potter, talented vocalist. He was a long-time member of the famed Hilliard Ensemble and brings a great deal of early music expertise and artistry to the ensemble. Then there is Stephen Stubbs, a lutenist of skill and finesse, player of the baroque guitar, chitarrone and vihuela. Further and critical are the presence of two major figures in open-form jazz today, John Surman on soprano saxaphone and bass clarinet, and Barry Guy on double bass. Rounding out the group is the important inclusion of a two-person violin section of Maya Homburger and Milos Valent (the latter also on viola), creative improvisors and bringers of early and rustic stylistic echoes from a time long gone.

What is uncanny is the range of combinations the group achieves here. From straightforward lute music and lute-vocals characteristic of Dowland's era to such sounds with freely tonal improvisations woven around it, improvised or loosely articulated estampies and the like, and then there are completely idiomatic modern free improvisational expanses, sometimes with John Potter dynamically reciting texts of the earlier period, sometimes fully instrumental. Somewhere in between are very free early style vocalizations with very open improvisational interactions.

Barry Guy is inspired. John Surman, too. The whole band was lucid that night. John Potter holds it all together. Successful interpenetrations of this sort do not happen often. This session comes through with unique character, a kind of stylistic homogenization that no doubt comes out of musical sympathy and a mutual, intuitive understanding of where and when to push back boundaries and how far to do so.

A marvel, this one is. Those that know and love early music will find a way into modern improvisational approaches; those in the latter camp will find the combination with the venerable quite bracing. It's the sort of musical event that's very suitable for anyone who wants a different listening experience. Such people will find much to stimulate and to open up new mental-aural musical panoramas. Bravo!

Tokyo String Quartet, Dvorak, String Quartet No. 12; Smetana, String Quartet No. 1

Bedrich Smetana (1824-1994) and Antonin Dvorak (1841-1904) were instrumental in putting the area now known as the Czech Republic on the map musically. They both combined the prevailing romantic ethos of the time with their own musical personalities and the feel of local folk musics they experienced in their lives. Of all the so-called nationalist composers, they were among the most brilliantly successful in matching real musical inspiration with an internalized musical culture absorbed from the air around them.

Paradoxically, Dvorak is most remembered for two works inspired by his visit to the United States, his Symphony "From the New World" and his String Quartet No. 12, "The American." The latter has gotten a fresh new reading by the Tokyo String Quartet, along with Smetana's seminal First String Quartet, "From My Life" (Harmonia Mundi HMU807429).

Both works have had deserved popularity for their singingly memorable, expressively lyrical, yet robust thematic material, the clarity of structure and exemplary status as among the best in later romantic string quartet craft.

The Tokyo String Quartet give a fittingly impassioned reading of the works--flowing, emotive without erring on the overdone side, beautifully phrased and balanced. These are some of the finest performances I've heard of the two masterpieces. They are very much recommended.

Arthur Foote, Complete Piano Music, Kirsten Johnson

If Arthur Foote (1853-1937) is not known today as the "father of American classical music" it wasn't always the case. He was well regarded during his lifetime, surely a contender for the honorific of founder-figure. By the time of his death the modernists had become a force unto themselves. His music seemed old-fashioned. And eventually Charles Ives' music came to be recognized as both original and foundational. Foote's light had ceased to burn as brightly.

Indeed Foote today is not looked upon as a brilliant innovator. He took romanticism and a bit of impressionism and made a very well crafted version of his own. He is not the place to look for the American root source of the music that followed. Yet he bears a hearing. At his best he is a lyrical force that can do much to bring pleasure to your listening.

These thoughts have been on my mind as I have listened closely to Kirsten Johnson's three-CD set of his Complete Piano Music (Delos DE 3442). The pieces comprise well over three hours worth of music, from the beginnings of his career to the end. It is a major undertaking. Kirsten Johnson renders the works with sympathy and poetic attentiveness.

And as the program unfolded, I found myself responding increasingly to the music. The first works are firmly within a romantic Beethoven-Schumann-Chopinesque tradition. And there are works that sound like pedagogic etudes, studies in arpeggiation and such. But as he progresses there is more and more originality and an expanded sensibility that encompasses some of the impressionist openness.

The minor key pieces always seem right, but towards mid-point in his career on, much of the work has an inventive thematic songfulness to it. The breadth of the set coupled with Johnson's sincere artistry means that it is for now a kind of last word on Foote the composer of piano works. It provides much to like and a full picture of Foote the artist. In the end you stop caring whether his music was as advanced as some of his contemporaries and you fall under its spell happily.

Listen and you'll be taken on a most pleasant journey. This set won't upset the applecart of American musical history, but it no doubt will give you much pleasure if you accept it on its own terms.

Stephen Whittington, Music for Airport Furniture

The title of Music for Airport Furniture (Cold Blue 0038), Stephen Whittington's 20-plus minute EP CD single and the work of that name which the CD presents, is a kind of succinct, clever way of the composer to show his stripes, to allude to both Eno's "Music for Airports" and Erik Satie's "Furniture Music," which of course are pioneering works in the minimalist-ambient zone.

Whittington's work for strings, played well in this recording by the Zephyr Quartet, owes something to those root works, but in many ways goes in its own direction.

It is a long sustained meditation on a pivoting point of a series of alternating lush, close harmonic chordal blocks for the four strings, almost as if some portions of the adagio movement of a late romantic/impressionist string quartet were lingering in the mind, in a hypnagogic or dream state, stitched together imaginatively and stretched to endless sustains, melded together by the selective memory of them, like the afterimage of a bright light in the aftermath of its presence. Like that afterimage it is by no means static. There is recurrence but also development within the slow sequential unfolding.

That is what you get on first impression. Repeated listens open up the long structures underpinning the mesmerizing alternations. Parts remind me of Hovhannes's string writing, minus the Armenian roots, but that mostly has to do with the pizzicato punctuations and long sustains common to this work and a few of Alan H's.

The music is a kind of lament, gorgeous, reflecting, very gradually revealing itself in a state of profound quiescence. It has great beauty and expressiveness. It sounds much the better after you've heard it a few times and opened up to the sonic universe it inhabits.

There's nothing quite comparable to it. It succeeds in slow movement advanced tonal quasi-minimalist territory much more readily than some more well known composers' attempts have. And it does it in a way that delights and moves the musical emotional-cognitive listening apparatus--or mine anyway. Yours too, I would suspect.

Recommended!

Dave Brubeck, Brubeck & American Poets, Pacific Mozart Ensemble

Dave Brubeck lead a long and productive life and had the kind of success and recognition from a wider audience that very few other jazz artists in his generation attained. That latter fact has lead some over the years to question his artistry, since "popular" and "jazz" if occurring simultaneously tend to be looked upon with suspicion and misgivings, at least from the '50s onwards. Whether he "deserved" the kind of success that Miles Davis also had is probably an unfair question. When Brubeck was alive and in his prime he was a dominant force on the jazz scene. Leaving success aside one can survey and evaluate his career from a more detached perspective today.

He was an innovator; even his most popular work left a legacy behind that most certainly influenced others and enriched the music, both in the way he went about improvising on the piano, his small group approach, and his compositions and songs. "The Duke" and "In Your Own Sweet Way" are exemplary masterpieces in jazz form, widely performed since he introduced them in the '50s. And there has always been some incorporation of modern classical harmonies and pianism in his approach, probably stemming from his study with Milhaud at Mills College in his formative years. Milhaud encouraged combinations of classical and jazz. Brubeck responded. And there was always an adventurous strain in Brubeck's music. As early as the Octet days he showed that he was not content to stay within conventional bop and after channels. The '50s were a time when that was more encouraged than it might have been later on, so he wasn't discouraged as far as the public ear went. And Time Out was as influential as it was a popular success.

But even more directly he composed modern classical works per se, for performance with classical ensembles of various sorts, with or without the addition of his jazz ensemble. He left behind various recordings of this side of his work and especially as he and his music aged classical ensembles increasingly began performing these works independently. So the CD at hand today is in no way unprecedented. It does however consist of a singular series of songs for choral ensemble and piano, so we are in somewhat special territory nonetheless. The Pacific Mozart Ensemble under Lynne Morrow gives us fine renditions of 19 songs on texts by American poets. The recording in question is called Brubeck & American Poets (Sono Luminus 92160).

Poets like Langston Hughes and other moderns are represented, as well as more traditional bards, but ultimately it is the music itself that comes at you most directly. These are short, through composed songs that sometimes incorporate jazz forms but more often simply come across with a kind of straightforward charm. There is something naive about their often elemental demeanor. They sound like they could be performed without much trouble by high school or college choral groups.

But what comes through most is the Brubeck melodic-harmonic personality. Their direct simplicity coexists with some subtle twists and turns, so that a number of listens after the first one you keep finding things you didn't notice the first time coming to the fore of your musical-aural mind's eye.

Ultimately these spirited performances and the music they embody will disarm and captivate those who are open to them. They do not represent either the greatest things Brubeck ever wrote nor do they come across as startling new music for the most avid of modern music connoisseurs. They have little in the way of pretension and that in part accounts for their effectiveness. Very nice music. Brubeckians will appreciate, but so will those seeking straightforward, tuneful pleasures.

Like many Sono Luminus releases this one comes as a two-disk set: one for standard CD in conventional two-channel stereo, the other a Blueray disk with surround sound mixes.

Francesco da Milano, Il Divino, Works for Lute, Paul O'Dette

It occurs to me that lute music, Renaissance or Early Baroque, composed by a master and played well, is something I simply never tire of. I suppose that's also true of music for the viola da gamba. Be that as it may I have found much pleasure listening of late to a particularly good collection of solo lute music by the Renaissance master lutenist Francesco da Milano, nicknamed in his day "Il Divino," which sounded a bit much to me until I heard Paul O'Dette's fine recording (Harmonia Mundi). Now I am ready to hail Il Divino as well, at least by a short obeisance in front of my stereo while the CD is playing. I dare say the chances of actually running into the fellow are slim nowadays. But thankfully we have his music.

Da Milano was to the Italy of the period the lute composer of choice. Paul O'Dette has arranged the various works on the album into a series of suites consisting of a ricercar, a fantasia, and one or more Da Milano arrangements of popular songs of the day. It makes the music flow marvelously, not more so though than Maestro O'Dette's beautifully fluid playing. Two-part contrapuntal lute passagework, with which Francesco's writing abounds, is a marvel to hear in Paul O'Dette's hands (and fingers).

It is music of high sophistication yet direct charm. Paul O'Dette and his lute have enchanted me on this disk, and I am sure will continue to do so for many years to come. You should give this one a serious listen. It should grab you whatever your background.