John A. Carollo, Music from the Ethereal Side of Paradise

In John A Carollo we have the very living composer, resident of Hawaii, the fashioner of New Music that I consistently find worthwhile and disarmingly interesting. There have been a fair number of releases on Navona and other labels in the last few years and I have covered most of them (type his name in the search box above for the relevant reviews). Now there is a new one and it is one of his best. It is appropriately titled Music from the Ethereal Side of Paradise (Navona 6148).

The program is an interesting mix of ensemble configurations--string orchestra, guitar and violin, solo violin, guitar, choir, solo flute. Each work has its own personality, partly urged on by the varying potentials of the instrumental configurations, partly because the composer is firmly in a Modernist yet variably oriented camp. In the end there is always something personal and original that emerges from his work. But that can span a wide range of possibilities, sub-stylistically speaking.

Hearing his music involving guitar is a treat because he has an idiomatic vision of what the instrument can do and so too the guitar stands out as well as blends nicely with other instruments as called for, specifically the violin in this case. Christian Saggese performs the works on here that call for solo guitar. The "Romantic Passione Suite" is handled by the familiar, dedicated and talented Duo 46 (Matt Gould on guitar, Beth Schneider on violin). Christian sounds like he is made for the parts he plays. The corresponding "Guitar Prelude No. 3 - The Tai Chi Set" plus the "Guitar Etudes Nos. 7 & 9" are high points of the program with an inventive flow that stand out as quite noteworthy.

But there is lots of very good music to hear on this program, well performed and very Carollo-ian! I very much find the "Music for Choir" to my liking and so too the string orchestra works "Awakenings" and "Bright Stillness." Yet the small chamber works serve to separate out and contrast the larger ensemble works from and with the other. And so we also hear the musical sense and feeling highs of "Metamorphosis No. 3 for Solo Violin," and the "Metamorphosis No. 13 for Solo Flute."

It is all good, all worth hearing, all primo examples of what one might dub "Middle Modernism," or in other words New Music that treads a middle ground between eclectic Tonality and Avant dashings into outer space.

Carollo occupies his own turf consistently and originally. This is an excellent example of his way for those unfamiliar and an excellent addition to the collections of those familiar! Kudos!

Harold Meltzer, Songs and Structures

Today I am happy to report in on a new collection of compositions by Harold Meltzer (b. 1966) on an album entitled Songs and Structures (Bridge 9513). The title makes perfect sense with the music at hand, as there are two song cycles and then two instrumental chamber works one might note are marked by a nicely turned structural sense.

The song cycles are very well performed by tenor Paul Appleby, known as a luminary from Metropolitan Opera, and pianist Natalia Katyukova. Both cycles are quite nicely idiomatic, fluid, evocative and well realized. There is a dramatic arc in both instances. "Bride of the Island" comes out of poems by Ted Hughes, "Beautiful Ohio" a cycle with poems by James Wright. There is a pronounced, rather naturally engaged kind of Modernism at play in this music, tonal at base but very freely and expressionistically so. No one hearing this would imagine this as either a looking back to the past or a product of some other era. Yet there also is a kind of timelessness to it all, a kind of Ur laced declamatory flow that is appropriately inside the song cycle tradition, that shows a natural opening onto the way song cycles resonate and narrate when they are effectively wrought.

The two instrumental works present in this program have a good amount of structural complexity that the song cycles are not designed to have and so the contrast makes for a lively listen. The string quartet movement "Aqua" is a bit of a tour de force, with well conceived attention to the sound color and expressive possibilities of the four strings. There is a one-on-one overlap of noteful content and colorful execution that gets a glowingly sunny reading by the Avalon String Quartet. Mellifluous exertion and reposeful flow of calm reflection alternate and run one into the other in ways that mark the work as very original and moving.

The final piece is a nod to the violin brilliance of Fritz Kreisler in the violin-piano "Kreisleriana." It has an elemental primal quality in spite of its sophistication. We do not get some kind of pastiche of Kreisler evocations so much as a very forward moving original take on it all, and so we are very much on new ground. Yet the violin virtuosity and lightness of being that characterizes Kreisler at his finest is to be heard and appreciated in a new sounding.

And when all is said and done this program gives us the kind of pleasure that comes from immersion in a very musically situated depth and meticulous brilliance. I recommend this highly for you who want to keep current with what is new and very worthy. Bravo!

Alvin Curran, Endangered Species

Best to start out this article with my view, that Alvin Curran has been consistently one of the most innovative and provocative composer-performers I have known in my lifetime. From his pioneering work with MEV to his compositions in the New Music mode, his sound installations and his work in Electro-Acoustics (notably the breakthrough Songs and Views from the Magnetic Garden) there have been a series of bright moments that gave us a happily unexpected and a very original forward momentum, a key part of the age we are in I think.

So a new one to me is auspicious. That we have in Endangered Species (New World 80804-2 2-CDs).  I must say that on first listen I was not quite sure what to make of the music. That of course is as it should be sometimes. Central to it all is Alvin Curran at the Yamaha Disklavier, which is a conventional grand piano equipped with a MIDI "brain" that, if I am not mistaken,  affords the operator-artist the ability to  record what is being played and also to alter the sounds electronically or put it in synch with electronically derived audio output. So it is a sort of "player piano" but in ways consistent with the advances in MIDI actualities and sound synthesis. Or that is how I understand it anyway.

With this as his canvas, paint and brushes, Curran creates the long expository Endangered Species. It is not what we might come to expect, as I have said above. It centers around a well put set of performances of "Great American Songbook" standards and some older Jazz classic pieces. So we get "Ain't Misbehaving" as well as "Bewitched, Bothered and Bewildered," "St. James Infirmary Blues" as well as "Tea for Two." He can take them out a bit and sometimes he does. He can worry around a chord or even just a note of the song at hand. Or as most of the time he gives it all a pretty straightforward reading, with a definite, distinctvely Jazz tinge but as a whole much the way a pianist might have gone about this music in a now remote, timeless past. He mentions in the liners the endless gigs where he was called upon to do such things and so clearly these are a part of his own roots. 

My mother used to play these songs, somewhat in the way he does here. It was for her an un-mannered sort of thing where the song was the center of it all, and for that matter for her the songs were just a part of the music of her time, not some effort to make a Neo-Trad statement out of them. She is long gone and in some ways Alvin Curran is enacting an elegy to someone like her, the living homo pianicus as it existed in my youth and my mother's day especially. He is much more of an artist as pianist but he nonetheless evokes the centrality of song and piano as they were situated years ago.

So certainly in some ways the Endangered Species is the human world where such songs were the way much music happened, what was "in the air" at the time. The performance of the songs on the piano was a way to commune with it all. But of course there is more to it than that. I say "of course" because Curran's music is never quite single in referentiality and certainly not here.

For the piano is thrown into a world shot through-and-through with electroacoustics, sometimes straight recorded signals, other times concrete-enhanced and sometimes seemingly electronically derived sounds that conjoin closely with the piano utterances and contextualize it. Curran has always been a story-teller when it comes to electroacoustics. The  Magnetic Garden work is a classic example. We live in a world, especially from the days of radio-show sound effects onward, where there are the sounds of our world, not unmediated, but sounded in a kind of performance to create a special meaning. So the blare of traffic on a radio play was meant to convey the backdrop of the story as it was being told; it is not just there for its in-itselfness, so to speak.

With the rise of electro-acoustic possibilities especially in the school of Musique Concrete the everyday potentials of natural or human-made sounds (as mediated already in "sound effects") was reworked to be further poeticized into new contexts, altered states and transformations into directly musical intents. Alvin Curran has been an especially lucid and original story teller in this possible mode.

Now in Endangered Species he unleashes a Pandora's Box of sounds that blend in various almost orchestral ways as commentary and contrast over and against the piano standards. So we get squealing tires and car crash as conjoined with pianistic phrases, or for that manner any number of sounds, a plethora of them, the steam escaping from a tea kettle, an exotic jungle bird's cry, conversations, just about anything but made to tell some complex story. Central perhaps in lineage was Cage's Variations IV, where Cage and David Tudor created complex collages of sound via playing a number of recordings spontaneously and transcendentally while the sound of the participant-observers in the art gallery where it was performed were mixed into it all. The complex meanings were ever expanding and nearly infinite. And such doings freed up musical and extra-musical meanings in ways that liberated our hearing and made possible an understanding of Alvin Curran today.

Now Alvin has taken it all yet further by juxtaposing abstracted sounds that contextualize in fascinating ways with the piano performances. There is much meaning to be deciphered and of course no literal one perhaps, although the Endangered Species idea comes readily to mind, the solitary music maker in a sea of digital, social and ecological chaos we encounter daily? There is no one view of it all, but what keeps you coming back to the music is that it is fascinatingly ineffable and perhaps passionately human.

It is a work to experience in multiple ways and ideally multiple times. Nobody can quite create a narrative like this today save Alvin Curran. And so he remains central. Here this, I recommend! It is no doubt an essential of the now of New Music.

Mozart, The String Quintets, Klenke Quartett, Harald Schoneweg

If you are reading this on the day I wrote it, yesterday was Mozart's birthday. Friday I covered a nice set of his Piano Trios. Today I have before me a new set covering his String Quintets (Accentus Music ACC 80467). It is chance that bundled these two sets before and after the anniversary of his birth. But of course it feels right. Mozart was one of the handful of spooky, almost unearthly musical geniuses that grace music history. And happy for that.

The six String Quintets are nicely recorded and played with distinct elan by the Klenke Quartett augmented to a quintet by Harald Schoneweg on additional viola. The performances are both peppy and sweet as called for without being sticky-sentimental or frenetic. And that is key since the music is marked by some ravishing slow movements and some dashing allegros. And as I listen to the almost incredible level of invention it strikes me how such a gifted musical mind is nearly unimaginable to me. I have a hard time imagining waking up in the morning and, I am Wolfgang Amadeus! Of course I am not but even the thought of writing music like this and so much of it in a short lifespan, it seems so far beyond my experience as to be the stuff of legend, of fable. Yet it was so. Listening to all six Quintets very well played as they are in this fine set, one finds oneself transported if one concentrates, or I do anyway.

A chamber configuration such as the quintet as Mozart wrote for it is not especially common in the annals of configuring over the Classical-to-Modern period. So it is possible to overlook this music just because you might not think to look for it. Perform it well and gather it all into one ready-to-hand set though and you are doing something very worthwhile! We should be grateful that this exists.

I can scarce imagine a better situated ensemble for this music. The Klenke Quartett, four women with considerable talent, sympathy and togetherness, plus Harald Schowenweg (who fits in like he was born to it) make it all seem so necessary, so right. The Klenke outfit comes to these Quintets after recording the complete Mozart Quartets, as the inclination, disposition and experience of and for living inside Mozart string music pays wonderful dividends.

I can not think of a better way to celebrate Mozart's birthday, or your own, or that of anybody you know for that matter. It is extremely beautiful music and the performances are among the very best. Heartily recommended.

Mozart, The Complete Piano Trios, Marta Gulyas, Vilmos Szabadi, Csaba Onczay, Mate Szucs

At a fairly young age I discovered Beethoven's Piano Trios and found that the piano-centered fullness and the violin-cello-piano interplay as Beethoven conceived it was very much to my liking. It seemed a highly flexible vehicle well suited to both the brio and the lyrical side of Beethoven's genius. I later acquired recordings of Haydn's Piano Trios and found them quite interesting, though of course often less concerned with an equal three-way voicing but rather more at times as solo and accompaniment. For no good reason I have not prior to now been exposed to the Mozart corpus of works in this mode, Happily I have been sent the very recent release Complete Piano Trios (Hungaroton 32825-27) and have been quite absorbed in the three CDs that form the whole of this set.

The trios are played with a great deal of poise, balance, precision and well tempered passion by Marta Gulyas on piano, Vilmos Szabadi on violin, Csaba Onczay on cello--and Mate Szucs on viola for the violin-viola version of the "Piano Trio in E-Flat Major, K. 498."

The eight Piano Trios that comprise the complete opus are included. That includes the D minor which was left incomplete and nicely topped off by Maximilian Stadler. All the reasons we love Mozart are present in these trios, the structural brilliance, the inventive infinity, the poignant lyricism and the soul-stirring vigor, it is all meted out in a myriad of ways within a sort of  Jello mold of Classical containment.

I will admit I have not heard any other versions of the complete trios but I am very happy with the sound quality of the recording and the artistic integrity of the players on this particular incarnation. One thing I especially like is that none of the music becomes a leapfrogging for an ambitiously showy presentation. Instead, the music exists as the music Mozart wanted us to hear, with all due attention to the pacing and note gathering he intended.

Perhaps I am a little off the norm, but honestly being in possession of such a well performed set is to me a kind of guarantee of happy listening ahead, more of it when there should never be too little! The wealth of wonderful music played with insight and zeal, what could be better than this?

Needless to say I very much recommend this for anyone who thinks they would like to have it! It does not disappoint. Mozart will warm you in winter and cool you in summer. So do not hesitate.

George Crumb Makrokosmos, Volumes 1 & 2, Music for a Summer Evening (Makrokosmos III), Yoshiko Shimizu, Rupert Struber

I would not think I am going out on a limb if I said straight off that George Crumb's Makrokosmos for Amplified Piano (and Percussion) is a landmark in the New Music of the later stages of the last century, a singular breakthrough in a post-Cagean ambiant sound-color field, a fresh start, a wildly imaginative extending of the kinds of things Henry Cowell and John Cage did to the piano sound--playing inside the piano, altering the strings by "preparing" them, placing objects upon and between the strings to alter the timbre and tone, and etc.

There is a new recording of the whole of it by pianist Yoshiko Shimizu and as needed Rupert Struber on percussion (Kairos 0015029KAi 2-CDs). Having all of it in one place is absolutely a happy thing! I in the first years of this music's life found right away the first recordings of each of the three parts and was taken with it all as much as with any discovery of importance in my life. The versions, those first versions were very fine. I still have the LPs I believe but in any event they are indelibly etched into my being. Those first recordings are hard to top. What does it take to do a successful performance of these pieces?

A first and somewhat obvious need is for a technically and stylistically seasoned player who knows New Music ways and can execute difficult passages in the thick of something at times ritually primal. Also a pianist must be comfortable or learn to be comfortable with the idea of extended techniques, primarily strumming, plucking, striking, sliding over the strings in very specific ways and using just the right amount of sostenuto to make of the piano a universe unto itself, not to mention a harp, a percussion instrument, a non-Western stringed instrument, a guitar, all manner of things.

Then one must place objects upon the strings at times to alter the sound, and there are quite specific ways the composer specifies. Further one is called on to whisper sotto voce specific phrases, some from the Latin Mass, and yet others with moodful impact, all in dramatic ways at strategic points. The pianist is also called upon to chant or sing along with or against a piano part at times, to exclaim, etc. There are quotations from Chopin, from the Medieval  Dies irae hymn for the dead, and so forth, all of which make of the music a consummate whole like no other before. The percussion parts in the third part primarily must enter into the music with the same commitment to the ambiance of the work. Above all the pianist and the percussionist must frame each part in relation to the very dramatic and rather cosmic whole. Space is key, color is key, and so also an almost ritual dedication to giving meaning to the on-the-surface abstract demands of the whole.

Ms. Shimizu is fully up to the challenge and Rupert Struber seconds her wonderfully well. The performances are in every way extraordinary and very much in keeping with Crumb's dramatic vision and philosophy of sound-generation theater.

To give the proper credit I should note that Akiko Shibata takes on the whistling role in "Makrokosmos I & II" and Natsumi Shimizu (Yoshiko's daughter) realizes the parts for slide whistle, alto recorder and whistle in "Music for a Summer Evening." And all is as it should be. Every detail of these works is decisive to the whole, and here they each get careful attention, happily.

It is some of the most beautiful and evocative Modern Music you can hear, and I believe I am not alone when I unabashedy confess that I love this music dearly. On the first few listens to this new version I had the original recordings firmly in my head and at times I thought, "well, possibly I like the original version of this passage a little better," but then by listen three or four I was sure there were things I liked better about this version, the overall pacing, the unified first-to-last feeling of the whole-as-whole. And so I am glad to have the originals but very glad too to have this new version. I think it essential. There is in this performance an overarching understanding that comes across the whole of the music, a confidence, a sureness and deliberateness that one can perhaps only get after a work has been out there in the air this long (47 years now for the first part!) and the artist has internalized fully the unique syntax that the work represents

So I not only do not hesitate to recommend the music and the performances here. I would say that this is vital, even mandatory listening for anyone serious about the Modern, and even those who are not sure of what that is. Crumb extended some vital tendencies of the "Local Schools" of New Music and helped bring on an ever-increasing emphasis upon what one might call "Ambiant Theater" in the post-Modern Modernity we live in today.

Close listening is what is needed, for words can only take you so far. So by all means hear this! Molto bravo!

Bronislav Martinu, What Men Live By, Symphony No. 1, Czech Philharmonic, Jiri Belohlavek

Is Bohuslav Martinu (1890-1959) less widely played now than he was at his death? I am not sure, but it is possible that his music is in a steady-state suspension since then, neither gaining more of a following nor less. His was a rather enormous output. The liners to the present release tell us he wrote no less than 10 operas before WWII, and another six after that. Add to that a large body of orchestral works and so on. There is a great deal. Perhaps not everything he did is in the classification of landmark classics for all time? I cannot say for sure on that front. What counts is the works we can appreciate now and how we should evaluate them.

Today's new release gives us two very worthy works in live performances, namely the World Premiere Recording of the "opera-pastoral" What Men Live By based on the writings of Tolstoy, and Martinu's very appealing Symphony No. 1 (Supraphon 4233-2). The late Jiri Belohlavec does a fine job directing the vocal soloists and the Czech Philharmonic in this 2014 recording. He was one of the foremost Martinu exponents and one gets a happy glimpse of such matters on this program.

What Men Live By is in English. It was written in 1952 while the composer resided in the US, hence the English libretto which the composer himself wrote based on the Tolstoy short story Where God Is, Love Is. The music itself has a level of Neo-Classical invention that we come to expect from the composer. It is a welcome addition to what we can now appreciate in recorded form and all Martinu lovers will certainly welcome it. Its extreme brevity (here 37 minutes) makes it an opera not likely for widespread performance even today, but the quality of its musical settings is quite high and one revels in it in the recorded format here. That is, if one is more or less pre-disposed toward the composer as I am. His brilliant use of the orchestra, choral forces and soloists make it a central offering among undiscovered 20th century works. The rustic tale of a village cobbler and his epiphany was obviously congenial to the composer, for the music sparkles throughout in folkish ways that the performance captures fully.

The coupling of the opera with Martinu's First Symphony of 1942 is a great idea as it marks two moments in the composer's US residence, the end of the first period and then also the beginning. The symphony also fits in with a somewhat folksy Neo-Classicism. It is a work of great charm and weighty ideas and Belohlavek gives us an evergreen of a reading, detailed and bursting forward with animation. There are other versions by the conductor, most notably in his complete symphonies release, but this version and the way it plays off against What Men Live By makes for a singular and more inclusive vision of the master composer in a very fertile period.

For those predisposed, this is a real addition to the Martinu collection, but too even one not familiar with the composer would gain a nice introduction to his music.

I recommend it strongly and happily.