Andrew Staniland, Talking Down the Tiger, and Other Works for Solo Instruments and Electronics

Andrew Staniland is a young Canadian composer of promise. His Talking Down the Tiger (Naxos 8.573428) presents five works for solo instrumentalists and electronics, the latter reinforcing and subtly adding to the live part in real time through recorded playback or alteration of the live sound.

"Talking Down the Tiger" features quiet toms and mallets (played by Ryan Scott), extended and altered via looping.

"Dreaded Sea Voyage" is for classical guitar (Rob MacDonald) and electronics, based on the recording on board the NASA reconnaissance space vehicle Voyager containing a sampling of "human music" in case the craft encounters other life forms in its travels through the universe. The guitar parts are altered versions of some of the music; the electronic part subtly adds to it.

"Flute Vs. Tape" has a most vivacious flute part, played with a dynamic energy by Camille Watts. The tape part is composed of the second flute, acting contrapuntally.

"Still Turning" is for cello (Frances Marie Uitti) and towards the end, a tape part that recalls themes from the other two works with which "Still Turning" forms a trilogy. In this, one of two movements that make thematic use of lines from T.S. Elliot's poem "Four Quartets," "Still Turning" captures via virtuoso cello the feeling of standing still while at the same time being in motion, for example if we stand motionless on earth as it travels rapidly in its orbit.

The final work, "True North," for soprano saxophone (Wallace Halladay) and electronics, captures in sound the fact that magnetic north or even "true north" changes position slightly over time according to changes in the earth's axis and other factors. A circle of four microphones corresponding to the four compass points feed into four-fold, widely separate speaker playback which the performer controls through playing in proximity to each microphone at will.

The music is basically tonal modern, with a bit of a harmonic-melodic edge, an attention to sound color and electronic enhancement, all of which subtly plays out on each piece.

Staniland certainly has imaginative conceptual creativity that he realizes in each of the pieces. The music sounds eclectically contemporary and retains interest. The electronic part generally reinforces the live music without calling much attention to itself. This may not be the album of the year among new music releases, but it is not uninteresting!

Ibert, The Ballad of Reading Gaol, etc., The Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, Adriano

Jacques Ibert (1890-1962) is perhaps best known for his "Escales," but there is quite a bit more music from him, much of which does not get a great deal of performance these days. One might suppose that there were so many brilliant French composers competing for attention during his lifetime that Ibert has been unduly neglected as a result.

All that can be rectified in part by a new volume of some of his lesser-known orchestral-choral music, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (Naxos 8.555568) as respectably performed by the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra under Adriano.

The title work, based on the poem by Oscar Wilde, was considered rather daring, having been first written as symphonic poem between 1920 and 1922, and performed soon after. Its deft handling of a bleak prison world and themes of the terror and anguish of an inmate who had murdered his wife were controversial at the time. As a first orchestral work it has touches of the influence of Debussy and Ravel but a well-crafted and dynamic originality as well. It was converted into a ballet and first performed in this vein at the Opera Comique in 1937.

We find some worthwhile additional works on this anthology, namely Ibert's "Trois Pieces de Ballet" of 1921-22, a three-part concert suite from the ballet score, meant to depict various characters who frequented his mother's salons, the brief "Feerique" and "Chant de Folie," both from 1924, and the lengthier "Suite Elisabethaine" (1944), written with early music touches for incidental performance in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream.

You can readily hear progression and development in Ibert's impressionist/quasi-romantic stylistic approach in these chronologically presented works. They are all quite pleasing if perhaps not exactly world-class 20th century masterworks. They do add a good deal to understanding and appreciating Ibert, helping to flesh out a multi-dimensional portrait of the man and his music.

It has its charms and will afford you a good bit of enjoyment, especially if you are of the Francophile contingency. It may not be particularly essential listening, but not everything can be that, after all. It pleases.

Lukas Foss, Complete Symphonies, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Gil Rose

By the time I became a bonafide, dedicated follower of new classical and avant garde music, that is in the early '70s, Lukas Foss (1922-2009) was at a peak in public recognition as one of the leading modern compositional voices in the USA. I am thankful for that because it gave me the chance to hear much of his work, as recordings of it were fairly plentiful and readily available. His notoriety faded somewhat in later years as did the popular attention to new music and subsequently too my undivided attention to it for a decade or so.

Nonetheless I have found many of his works essential and my appreciation for his brilliance has gone undiminished. Looking back, I especially admire the "Time Cycle," which incorporated chamber improvisation, the "Baroque Variations" and its use of baroque musical sources to create an old-new amalgam, and his "GEOD" which nicely anticipated and offered a very personal solution to cyclical structures for a style that became in time known as minimalism. A proto post-modern poly-stylism characterized all of these works, for music that managed to be advanced yet highly appealing to most adventuresome ears. They and the majority of recorded works available then showed a composer acutely tuned to stylistic possibilities otherwise then mostly latent, and a vivid sense of drama and significant form, a personal originality and uniformly high level of craftsmanship and artistic inspiration.

Like anything else in music, the newness element fades and we are left with works that either still manage to speak to us, or, sometimes otherwise. To me Foss still sounds fresh and relevant, ever more so.

For whatever reason I never encountered his four symphonies. Some of course were not yet written, and there may have been some obscure recordings available of the first several at the time but I never came across them when I was most actively combing through the classical record store stacks.

Fortunately and most happily the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, a fine organization devoted to resurrecting now unjustly neglected orchestral gems in the modern zone, has under Music Director Gil Rose taken care to provide us with excellent performances of all four Foss symphonies in the two-CD set Complete Symphonies (BMOP Sound 1043).

The symphonies cover most of Foss's career, from 1944 through 1995, and were a platform where Lukas could synthesize, sum up and put into definitive form what stylistic universes he was either then traversing or was subjecting to retrospective attention. So we get the mysterious and atmospheric minimalism of "GEOD" refined, re-presented and integrated into a lush orchestral tapestry on his Symphony No. 4, "Window to the Past", or his own magnetically singular neo-classicist way in his 1944 Symphony No. 1.

Each symphony is a milestone, as it turns out, in the overall body of Foss works. I am delighted to get to hear them in their full and detailed glory so wonderously realized by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project under Rose. I am sure this volume will turn more than a few heads while also reminding us dramatically how important a composer Lukas Foss was, how central he sounds today.

It is with the heartiest recommendation that I present this set to you now. Anyone with an interest in 20th century modernism will gain I think great pleasure and insight by listening to this set. It is surely a candidate in my mind for the record of the year.

Dutilleux, Metaboles, L'Arbre des Songes, Symphony No. 2, Seattle Symphony, Ludovic Morlot

Henri Dutilleux (1916-2013) is often enough presented as a modern-day impressionist, a successor to Debussy and Ravel. That is doubtless true in that his music has a luminousness and vivid color palette that has something in common with the orchestral brilliance of those composers. He also has some organic affinity at times with the music of Messiaen. But on the other hand Dutilleux's music has an idiosyncratic quality, a modern approach that puts him in his own space in fine ways.

The volume at hand is an excellent example of this. It is a recent Seattle Symphony recording under Ludovic Morlot, presenting the works Metaboles, L'Arbre des Songes, Symphony No. 2 (Seattle Symphony Media SSM1007). The Seattle Symphony aims to record all of Dutilleux's orchestral works, and this volume is a part of that. As it so happens it is an excellent place to start, as the three works are very fine examples and the orchestra excels under Morlot in bringing them very much to life.

There is a continuity to be heard in the three works on the program despite having been written at contrasting points in time: "Metaboles" in 1964, "L'Arbre des Songes," a Violin Concerto, in 1985, and "Symphony No. 2 'Le Double'" in 1958. All three make excellent use of orchestration to bring out the shimmering quality of his constructions. The Seattle Symphony thrives in poetically realizing the full spectrum of sound colors inherent in the music, and the recording takes maximal advantage of the digital medium to give to us the detailed sound complexes in a gloriously full sound staging.

"Metaboles" and the "Symphony No. 2" share a rather mysterious, atmospheric liveliness that remains modern at all times in its sophisticated melodic-harmonic demeanor, with a kind of narrative unfolding that may suggest all manner of associations to the listener without evoking anything literal. It is sonic poetry of great depth and subsequently great appeal.

The concerted "L'Arbre des Songes" features an excellent performance by violinist Augustin Hadelich. As the later of the three works it shows a movement of Dutilleux's music from the profoundly sensual to the somewhat more concretely expressive, part of that stemming from the nature of the solo violin's role as Dutilleux conceived it. The orchestral passages remain vividly colorful. The rhythmic elements of the work are slightly more elaborately diffuse as violin and orchestra dialog with one another articulately. The violin's role is virtuostic and complexly declamatory in very musical ways, a showcase yes, but firmly tied to the musical vision of the composer. It is perhaps the most overtly "modern" of the three works at times, yet clearly partakes of the general thrust of the concerto form as it has evolved over the past century or so.

In the end we are treated to state-of-the-art Dutilleux, performed with great care and sensitivity to all the orchestral nuances that mark the composer's special sound.

It is a remarkable achievement. I surely look forward to the other volumes to come. In the meantime this one is ravishing, a stunner on all levels.

John McCabe, Piano Music

The late John McCabe (1939-2015), British composer, pianist and conductor, was a uniquely talented exponent of modern classical music, writer of some 250 works, belonging to no particular school but his own. I have covered several releases of his music on these pages (the search box above will bring you those) and now there is a third up for consideration, Piano Music (Naxos 8.571367), a collection of some six works written between 1963 and 1983, several in first recording (namely a good 40 minutes of later period works).

The composer himself is at the piano. Not surprisingly he seems to have the inner track on the kind of periodic event clusters he favors, groupings that often take the form of variations. The flow of events have some similarity to Messiaen's classic period piano works, but only in terms of sequentiality more than actual content, the latter of which is most certainly original McCabe.

There is a great deal of good music on the program, some 76 minutes worth. From the 1963 "Variations" to the 1983 "Haydn Variations" there is a progression and development to be heard, an increasing concentration of means and perhaps a certain increasingly brittle quality.

The variations range so far afield that it is not a simple matter to keep track of how each event relates to an original theme. They seem to grow out of each other to the everyday ear, and of course the important point is to savor the musical inventions each as a piece of the larger picture, which emerges only slowly. A brevity and terseness is especially out front on the not specifically variations oriented works included here, the "Five Bagatelles" (1964), "Aubade" (1970), "Gaudi" (1970) and "Mosaic" (1980). There are times when the tonality becomes atonality or borders on it. Unusual approaches to rhythm are often the case.

In the end we get a fascinating look at John McCabe thinking through his own modern approach to form and content on the pianoforte, using the instrument and his apparent love and understanding of the instrument to unveil structures that adhere within themselves more than they point outward to other musics.

In that we get a singular set of piano pieces that sound like no others. It is perhaps a most fitting volume to contemplate the McCabe musical universe as we regret his recent passing.

A strong volume that any modern classical enthusiast should find intriguing. Very recommended!

Krzysztof Meyer, Piano Quartet, Piano Quintet

One of the huge benefits of doing my music blogs is of course the chance to discover musical voices new to me and to pass that news along to my readers. In the past several years, Polish modernist Krzysztof Meyer (b. 1943) has been among the most important. His music is thoroughly crafted, inspired and inspiring. I do not know his symphonies as yet but his chamber music is essential listening. I covered earlier a volume of his complete string quartets that Naxos has put out and also a CD of his piano works. (Type "Meyer" in the search box above to see those reviews.) Encouraged by those happy encounters I turn to another one, the Piano Quartet, Piano Quintet (Naxos 8.573357) that just came out.

The Silesian String Quartet and pianist Piotr Salajczyk team up for these two works and do so impressively. The music is by no means an easy thing to play but the performances are flawless and shaped nicely as spirited totalities.

Meyer studied in his student days with Penderecki and Nadia Boulanger, and he has gone with their inspired advice to make something quite original of himself. The two works represented on this release have condensed intensity along the lines of later Bartok, Carter and beyond, rarified excursions into advanced form and overall musical momentum of great impact. The "Piano Quartet" is from 2009 and enjoys its first recording here. The "Quintet" is from 1991 and requires a good 40 minutes to unfold in a sort of grand tradition. Both have a seriousness of purpose and a heroic sort of gestural sublimity.

Whether utilizing dodecaphonic serial, aleatoric or other post-1945 composition techniques, Meyer seeks to realize a special personal vision with each of his works. As you hear the music you think less of the means by which each has been created, the ladders enabling Meyer to climb upwards into creative soundings, and more of the musical rooftops he has chosen to occupy. This is very much true of the Quartet and Quintet.

I have now listened to this disk pretty intently five times, and each listen has given me increasing understanding and appreciation of what Meyer has set out to accomplish. The disk is essential listening for those who wish to experience high modernist chamber music in full originality, full flower. Meyer is important! Hear this music with concentration and you will be taken to very good places.

Arvo Part, Musica Selecta, A Sequence by Manfred Eicher

Some collaborations seem in retrospect inevitable. But at the time of the inception there was nothing that somehow guaranteed it or assured that it would take place. That is so of the close association of composer Arvo Part and producer/label owner Manfred Eicher.

Over 30 years ago Manfred had created a roster of jazz artists whose music had all in one way or another embodied a special ambiance and spaciousness that Eicher accentuated via his special sound-design productions. The result was the "ECM Sound" which was and remains extraordinarily influential as a style of music and a way of hearing it.

At that point he was fortunate to hear for the first time the music of Arvo Part, the Estonian composer who created a special kind of music that reveled in the sensuous properties of tone, drawing in part on the way early vocal-instrumental music performed in cathedrals gave out a special aura, drawing also on the sonic particularities of some of the minimal composers then coming to the fore, but ultimately going his own way to create a body of works that transcended all of what had gone before while capturing essentials from centuries-old traditions in an entirely unique way.

In point of truth perhaps Part's music struck an important resonating note with Eicher's own vision of musical sound and how one could capture and expand on it in the recorded medium.

Needless to say, the two bonded immediately. A series of now some 14 or so releases have come about since the first Part-Eicher recording was released in 1984. It spawned Eicher's contemporary classical label ECM New Series and effected a sort of revolution of what new music could sound like, both from the composer's perspective and that of the producer-engineer-sound sculptor. Nothing has been quite the same since; there have been many subsequent composers and recordings (including other composers on the New Series label) that were inspired by Part and Eicher's vision.

And so we after so many years are treated to a kind of Part/ECM retrospective that entails a special musical sequence created by Eicher to celebrate the many years of original first recordings made of Part's compositions thus far. The sequence tells via two CDs a kind of musical story that is both retrospectively exemplary in that it contains much excellent music by Part, a "best of" in some ways, but that in juxtaposing the sequence as Eicher conceived of it there is a heightening of the full scope of Part works as they contrast with one another.

The result is Musica Selecta (ECM New Series 2454/55 2-CDs), a collection of some 19 works and/or movements from works that Part has recorded with Eicher over the years, first recordings that have been definitive but of course spawned versions by other performers that often enough have some quality that makes them equally interesting but never quite bettering these inaugural releases.

Eicher via his sequence creates its own story line as it heightens contrasts between small (solo piano) and intimate works versus large and extraordinary full ones (choir and orchestra). Yet in the play of excellent performances there is continuity. The "small" ensembles hold in microcosm the attention to sensual and spiritual (for lack of a better word) tone painting that can be found writ large in the more massive ensemble works. Both take care to shift focus continually from the microscopic to the macroscopic in terms of sound staging and the use of vertical space, mass and the momentary but all-important silences between phrases.

I won't run down a listing of the contents of the set here. Suffice to say that it captures the full experience of Arvo Part, his music, and Manfred Eicher's meticulous sound-design productions of it all. Even those who like me have heard most all of it repeatedly get a fresh perspective on the music. That is what a retrospective if done well is supposed to do in the visual arts, and it is to be found in this audio collection as well. Needless to say it also forms an ideal introduction for those who for whatever reason do not know Part's music and have not the time nor perhaps the money to invest in the 14 albums that have come out.

It is an experience of musical beauty that is in its own special way transformative. These are the works and the recordings that have gone a great distance in creating a unified body of music not quite post-modern, modern or pre-modern, but rather Partian, so to speak.

Strongly recommended.