Graciela Paraskevaidis, Libres en el Sonida, Ensemble Adventure

The striking originality of composer Graciela Paraskevaidis is apparent from even the first note of her album Libres en el Sonido (Wergo WER 7362-2). Seven compositions of varying chamber density are performed with dedication and characteristic elan by Ensemble Adventure.

Doubtless I am not the only one new to her and her music so a little background no doubt is in order. Graciela Paraskevaidis (1940-2017) was Argentinian born, of Greek ancestry. She lived and worked in Uruguay. She studied composition with Roberto Garcia Morillo at the National Conservatory in Buenos Aires, then later on with Gerardo Gandini, Iannis Xenakis and Wolfgang Fortner.

The end result is Paraskevaidis, not exactly something predicted by her compositional mentors, except perhaps a kind of unswerving rare-ification that you can also hear often enough in Xenakis. With Graciela though the means and more or less the ends show no real derivative qualities so much as affinity.

Ritual-gestural-brutal? Wolfgang Rudiger in the liners describes the unprecedented nature of what we hear in the opening bars of the first work on the program, "Libres en el Sonido Presos un el Sonido." "Raging scales in the woodwinds seem like rain squalls lashed upwards by the windstorm, braced on the one side by widely stretched tri-tone-fourth-chords and spurred on by the obsessive minor second repetitions in the piano. . . " This most aptly describes the sort of brutal-fanfare-ritual infernalities of her music we get from time to time on this program. These interludes of manic determination break off and may follow by contrasting sparsenesses that are quiet and filled here and there with more or less empty spaces.

Each of the seven works of the program falls within a ten-minute or less timespan. "No Lado, Otre Lado" is for piano alone; "...il Remoto Silenzio" for solo cello. The rest are scored for three, four, five, and eight chamber instrumentalists.

The music can we insistently manic as suggested above but giddily light as well, sometimes both within the same composition, sometimes not. The quiet passages can almost seem hallucinatory, dream like, unreal. And throughout there is a most singular vision or series of them at work.

There is nothing out there quite like this music. It stands on its own almost obstinately and it marks Graciela Paraskevaidis as a remarkable artists in a set of one. This is music you must meet more than half-way. But if you give it a fair hearing I think you will be surprised and pleased with the invention and singularity of the composer. Recommended for all those who are open to the avant guard aspects of Modernity.

Castelnuovo-Tedesco, Cello Concerto, Transcriptions for Cello and Piano, Houston Symphony, Brinton Averil Smith, Kazuki Yamada

Generally speaking since Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco's death in 1968 his worldwide reputation has somewhat ebbed. In the last decades on the other hand there is some indication that there is a slow but steady momentum gathering strength bit-by-bit, some signs that his music is once gain finding favor in concert halls and via recordings. After 80 years between professional performances, the 1935 Cello Concerto awakens us to reconsider his music again in the current World Premiere Recording by cellist Brinton Averil Smith and the Houston Symphony under Kazuki Yamada (Naxos 8.573820). We are surely not done with the composer yet!

Castelnuovo-Tedesco, as the liner notes to this CD remind us, found his Italian homeland increasingly dangerous as Mussolini and the Fascists came into power and banned his music than due to his Jewish heritage. So he came to the United States and lived the second half of his life there. And like all war refugee composers he found that the USA allowed them to live on and continue to compose, but not always to build a reputation that Europe made possible before fascism. Things could go either way, as you might gather by comparing the fate of Stravinsky and Hindemith vs. Korngold and Bartok.

Circumstances help explain how the "Cello Concerto in F major, Op. 72" has been forgotten completely, Written for the famed cellist Piatigorsky and premiered by him under Toscanini such auspicious beginnings did not translate into long term recognition. Some 80 years later we now stand before the nicely performed and well recorded evidence that the "Cello Concerto" is in no way deserving of such neglect. It is a work of boldness, heroic virtuosity, thematic wealth and dramatic arc. Cellist Smith, conductor Yamada and the Houston Symphony give us ample means to appreciate this music. . . though it may not be at the very cutting edge of the Modernism of the times. It may in fact be Impressionist and Late Romanticist more so than not, yet not unoriginally so. It is powerful and engaging fare, well worth the price of admission for its 30-minute three-movement presence.

Filling out the release are a number of cello-piano transcriptions. Most of the music will be quite familiar to most all readers, yet in this configuration it is all made anew. So we get Castelnuovo-Tedesco's reworking of Mozart's Serenade from Don Giovanni, two arias from Cherubino's Le Nozzi di Figaro (as arranged by Smith for his recording), the fourth and fifth movements from Ravel's "Miroirs," and a version of Rossini's "Figaro" from The Barber of Seville.  And finally the program ends with Heifetz's arrangement of the first part of Castelnuovo-Tedesco's  "Sea Murmurs."

The second half of the program is not going to set your brain on fire exactly, yet it is a thoroughly enjoyable and well-played segment. The main attraction is definitely the "Cello Concerto" and it will be a boon to any Castelnuovo-Tedesco fan! Recommended.

Duo Noire, Night Triptych, Thomas Flippin, Christopher Mallett

In something a little under an hour guitar Duo Noire treat us to six New Music duos for classical guitar. All this in the new album Night Triptych (New Focus FCR210), the title of which is derived from the composition of the same name by Golfam Khayam.

Duo Noire, aka Thomas Flippin and Christopher Mallett are talented exponents of the contemporary classical guitar, with technique to spare and an interpretive acumen that serves them well in bringing to us the subtleties and sonic pleasures of each composition in the program. As I listened repeatedly to the offering I was reminded that there is something of a consensus nowadays as to the firmly grounded middle ground upon which contemporary classical guitar music currently stands. The edge of conventional soundings are a part of the presentation, a harmonic-melodic adventuresomeness, and a kind of synthesis of what the guitar has been and can be classically but also as drawn out of general guitar practice in the past century. The result is a sort of state-of-the-art view of what we can understand and appreciate today.

So as a whole there are bellwether bench marks and distinctive sound universes to be had in the program at large. It gives us Clarice Assad's "Hocus Pocus," Mary Kouyoumdjian's "Byblos," Courtney Bryan's "Soli Deo Gloria," the previously mentioned "Night Triptych" Gity Razaz's "Four Haikus," and finally Gabriella Smith's "Loop the Fractal Hold of Rain." All the composers are living and all the works show a great respect for the traditional and more modern idiomatic world of the guitar and its special sounds.

This program is a bit of a sleeper. Nothing introduces itself with skyrockets and 28 tuba fanfares, and so much the better because the music and performances stand out after a while of listens. It is thoroughgoing, most musical in design. It is not music to upset the applecart of assumptions in the contemporary music spheres. It does not need to do that because one gets something of lasting worth not just a shock blast of newness! I most definitely recommend this to any with an interest in New Music for guitar. Bravo!

Christian Wolff, Two Orchestra Pieces

Take the Cage School composers for granted at your own peril. Earl Brown, Morton Feldman and Christian Wolff avoided Serialism and forged stubbornly their own paths. And I believe time will be kind to their reputations as a result. They are some American originals and they sound ever fresh.

That is all well and good yet moreover now I find that later Christian Wolff constitutes some major sleeper works, judging by the startlingly interesting new release, Two Orchestra Pieces (New World 80796-2).

What first of all marks this release as special are the performances. Later Christian Wolff carefully scores every note and the interpretation must be exact yet moving. "John, David" (1998) gets focused attention from the SWR Sinfonieorchester Baden-Baden und Freiberg under Lothar Zagrosek. Robyn Schulkowsky dramatically and adeptly handles the important solo percussion role.  "Rhapsody" (for three orchestras) (2009) gets similar careful understanding by Ostrvska banda with three conductors doing a fine job.

The liners sum up how both works exemplify several trends in New Music performance by the Modern Classical orchestra. "John, David" is a masterful unravelling of the expanded sonarities of the expanded symphony orchestra and the percussion part further opens up the timbral spectrum so that we enter a fantasmagorical terriane that is not only exemplary but strikingly special in its deep subtle expression.

"Rhapsody" groups the total orchestral forces into three unusually mixed concentrations, decidedly not the sections one has become so used to from the orchestrational practices of the standard repertoire.

All that would be not unusual to hear nowadays, of course. What sets this music apart is the special facticity of the combined utterances. Nothing is exactly what you might expect in High Modernism of the standard sort. There are no moments of rote note-spinning. Every moment in both cases has its way and brings to our ears and musical beings a kind of discerning difference that in the end makes these two works function in their own specially original ways.

It is a something you hear in the music from the first listen on. Later listens confirm the first impression and the non-cliche quality of every note makes every listen a near tabula rasa thing.

You who follow the New Music and Modernism, you should definitely consider this album. It is a high point of the "Modern Year" For me at least. It reminds me how Christian Wolff is a beautiful thing, a thing apart!

Henze, Violin and Viola Works, Peter Sheppard Skaerved, Roderick Chadwick

Hans Werner Henze (1926-2012)--he is an artist-composer whose full breadth must be gauged if we are to appreciate fully.. I will admit that in my case I am still in the process of exploring his output, as no doubt more than of a few of my readers are as well. Naxos has been instrumental in this wise and a new volume continues the exposure as they fight the good fight to cover a broad spectrum of New Music. I refer to the release at hand, namely Henze's Violin and Viola Works (Naxos 8.573886) as performed nicely by Peter Sheppard Skaerved on violin and viola and Roderick Chadwick at the piano.

The works cover a long stretch of time, from the youthful 1946 "Violin Sonata" to the Millennial-eve 1999 "Peter Doll zum Abschied" for solo violin. We are treated to four major works and a couple of miniatures. 

Perhaps the most interesting of the four is the "Violin Sonata" of 1946, mostly because it is unexpected if you do not know his early period well. Henze was subjected to the angst and poverty of the German post-WWII period yet was in the middle of study under the tutelage of Wolfgang Fortner at the time he wrote the sonata. The work has an expressive Modern feel that is decidedly pre-Serialist  and so shows a bit more direct a melodic clout.  It is memorable for that. The liners point to this work as a sort of prelude to the "Violin Concerto" that was to follow shortly thereafter. However it stands well on its own in any event.

On the other hand the "Pollicino: Violin Sonatina" of 1979 manages to be extraordinarily expressive and haunting while being more contemporaneous to the Serial world of High Modernism still then in full flush at the time.

The somewhat more radically abstract "Solo, Violin Sonata" of two years prior is a gem of constructive architecture, rangy and harmonically expanded-ambiguous as one might expect of his central style of the era, yet too most definitely a product of an actively brilliant musical mind. It is theatrical piece where there is a  homage paid to the humanist Italian Renaissance poet Poliziano and "death is admitted into the cheerful world of the pastoral" in the composer's words.

The final "Viola Sonata" (1979) brings out the burnished woodiness of the viola in a landscape where the piano makes an equal set of statements for a kind of constant unfolding, a noting of consistent insistence and significance.

The total impression is wall-to-wall worthiness, High Modernism of the highest caliber played with total conviction and passion by Skaerved and Chadwick. This is a very enlightening release for Henze appreciators and something to explore without fear for those who wish to broaden their appreciation. Keep in mind you will need to hear this a number of times if you expect to get a full understanding of what is happening. It is worth the trouble, surely. Henze was in his own way brilliant. He shows us how here.

Mieczyslaw Weinberg, Piano Sonatas opp. 8, 49bis & 56 (Nos. 2, 4 and No Number) , Elisaveta Blumina

As much as there seems to be a renaissance or perhaps even a naissance surrounding the works of Mieczyslaw Weinberg (1919-1996) it is comforting to me. I happen to share in the budding and gathering enthusiasm about his music. I will not rehearse here the difficulties he encountered with his existence as a Jewish-Polish transplant to the USSR during WWII and his subsequent compositional and personal struggle with forces that did not favor him in spite of his extraordinary talents. That is a backdrop to explain why most people were not aware of his music at all until recently. But in the end of course the music is what lives for us now.

So there are further reasons to appreciate his body of works with a recent, excellently performed recording of three of his later Piano Sonatas opp. 8, 49bis & 56 (CPO 555 104-2). In other words, these lovely recordings are of his Sonata No. 2, Number 4 and 49bis, the latter of which is not as of now numbered. Elisabetha Blumina gives us these new readings on the heels of her recording of his Sonata No. 1 and his "Children's Notebooks." I have not heard that recording but based upon the one at hand I imagine it is very worth hearing. I've reviewed Weinberg's complete piano opus and one or two recordings of some of these sonatas (type "Weinberg" in the search box above). They remain essential in each their own way

But I am especially impressed as I listen a good many times with Elisabetha Blumina's performances. She is exacting as one would expect but also there is a virtuoso mastery to be heard that makes these rather wonderful pieces come very much alive. My first superficial hearings of Weinberg as a whole made me think, "Oh, he was very influenced by Shostakovich." He was a good friend of his fellow composer and Shostakovich spoke very highly of his talents during his lifetime. And with the piano works you most certainly do here something of an affinity with Prokofiev as well. With all three at their best you hear an uncanny brilliance in how they derive a sometimes very lyrical demeanor but tempered also with a hard and perhaps even brittle despair, not to sound too pat but it is something I do love about all three of them. What at first sounded a bit derivative I now feel is equally special, original and it could well be that Shostakovich influenced Weinberg but equally Weinberg in turn influenced Shostakovich? I say this after listening very intensely to Weinberg's music.

The sonatas here are uniformly worthwhile. If you love Modernist solo piano and seek something new and very worthy, get this! If you do not know Weinberg, get this. If you do not have any of his piano music, get this. Or even if you do, for the performances, get this!

Kalevi Aho, Timpani Concerto, Piano Concerto 1, Turku Philharmonic Orchestra

In the course of doing this Modern Music blog site since 2011 I have been fortunate to come upon the music of Kalevi Aho (b. 1949), the Finnish composer whose music we again encounter happily today (type his name in the index search box above for earlier reviews of his music). The CD at hand covers two notable concerted works, the recent "Concerto for Timpani and Orchestra" (2015) and the 1988-89 "Concerto No. 1 for Piano and Orchestra" (BIS-2306). Both are performed with precision and enthusiasm by the Turku Philharmonic Orchestra under Erkki Lasonpalo (Timpani Concerto) or Eva Ollikainen (Piano Concerto). The solo parts are most capably handled by Ari-Pekka Maenpaa (Timpani) and Sonia Fraki (Piano).

What a repeated series of listens have revealed to me are two concertos (he has written 28 in all thus far) of real weight and striking expression. Whether or not anyone would agree with me I hear Aho as a kind of original Modern successor to the later works of Carl Nielsen. Both have a certain "characteristic" manner of proceeding chromatically in ways that bring out a thorough orchestrational command and a clearly forwarded thematic presence. Aho understandably is the more Modern in his harmonic edginess and lesser tendency to resolve the whole in some absolute sense.

There are few works in the repertoire for solo timpani either accompanied or unaccompanied. Elliot Carter's  "Eight Pieces for Four Timpani" is an exception. I rack my brain without coming up with another., which doesn't mean there are no others, just that my minds blanks at the prospect. Aho's concerto gives us a very stimulating and rather demanding solo part with intricate melodic contours and idiomatic articulation. The timpani carries the concerto without being a continually dominant voice. The orchestra has a great deal to say and says it well. There are times when the snare drum intertwines with the timpani part and it all sounds right. If you expect later on to whistle the timpani melody while you go through your daily rounds, think again. This is quite complex Modern music after all. If any new timpani piece might be expected to enter the repertoire this could well be it. Aho carries the day handily and in a most lively way.

"The Piano Concerto No. 1" stands out as a boldly brash piece with a lithe mercurial piano part and memorable piano-orchestral exchanges of great excitement and contentful thematics. If the handling of themes seems slightly more hard-edged than is the case in the Timpani Concerto, one must assume that the inspiration of having every bit of the piano before the composer as the prime solo mover would have given him less fetters and allowed his imagination to soar more freely. It ends the two-part program in a most rousing way and if the motillic ghost of Prokofiev sometimes looms in the background it is stylistically natural and not in the least bit derivative.

So there we are with this one. The SACD/CD compatible recording sounds bright and well staged and the music is of the highest caliber. This will appeal to all Aho aficionados and would be fair and attractive game for any follower of the Modern with a capital /m/.