Robert Schumann, Dichterliebe, Liederkreis, Laure Colladant, Stephen Lancaster

 

Robert Schumann's lieder were some of the very best of his era. In many ways he took the torch from Schubert. I suppose you could say I am generally pre-selected to like a good recording of such things. And the album up today is very much that. It features baritone Stephen Lancaster and pianist Laure Colladant on a lovely sounding vintage Molitor pianoforte. They take on two cycles with great poise, clarity, deliberation, gravitas--namely the Dichterliebe opus 48 and the Leiderkreis opus 39 (BCR56

Perhaps needless to say there may be no genre more dependent upon the performers for the ultimate product than lieder. The vocalist is of course everything and the pianist a close second. It is so much the case that one is tempted to remember Ornette Coleman's dictum that there is no bad music, only bad musicians! But of course with Schumann lieder an awful lot has to do with the beauty of the music itself. it goes without saying.

Beyond those considerations one ideally surrenders to the lyrical beauty of it all. The vintage piano sounds very sweet and Lancaster responds to Colladant's exceptionally sensitive reading with a refreshing ponderousness that does not stray from the matter-of-factness of the music as they approach it. You who read along here no doubt know at least a few of the songs in these cycles and if you do it is interesting to compare the versions you know already. For me at least there is something substantial with these readings, when I compare with others I know. They soar, true, but they also have a pronounced earthiness that seems right to the world we live in today.

So in the end I must say these complete versions of the cycles have a kind of benchmark definitiveness that makes me happy to have them. And that in itself makes me recommend the album without hesitation. Lancaster and Colladant give us detailed and inspired readings that open our ears to the beauty of it all and contrast nicely with other readings so it is worthwhile no matter what listening level you are on for Schumann's lieder. overall. A big bravo for this one!

So and the feelings about feelings as we live through this rather peculiar period.

Chris Campbell, Orison

I've happily had the occasion to review some of Chris Campbell's music over the years (type his name in the search box for those articles).  Now there is a new one and I am very glad to hear it. Orison (Innova 008 CD or LP) is an ambitious, seven-part work for a 14-member chamber ensemble.

Like the other works I have heard of his there is a kind of natural flow to the music, with everything coming into sequences that sound unforced, evocatively flourishing and easily engaging.

The composer tells us in the liners that Orison comes out of the practice of sitting, meditation, prayer. The composer has worked on it for several years, responding to events locally and also globally, a processing of world and eventua-tive happenings rising up and falling away as expressed in a gorgeous spatio-temporal flow where all that comes after relates to the before yet supersedes it in the additive sense, be it "shifting sonic image" or "textural idea" as the composer expresses it.

It is music that very effectively gives off an ambient vibe yet has both a cosmic sound envelope AND a more directly engaging melodic thrust than some other such works out there. So as you relisten you get both components coming together in ways that work wonderfully well and give you the pleasure of recall one gets from a detailed and inspired game plan.

As I listen again I feel I am in the presence of a latter-day Berg--expressively feelingful yet decidedly forward moving into the present day. In the end I come away from this music wanting to hear it yet again. It is orchestrationally ravishing and beautifully absorbing. Big kudos!

Skylark Vocal Ensemble, It's A Long Way, Timeless Early, Modern, Folk Vocal Ensemble Music

 

Each day we wake and set our house in order, we restart our experiential engines and get ready for whatever comes. If you are like me music has much to do with how that day unfolds. Today I turn once again to vocal ensemble choral music, a chamber vocal gathering named the Skylark Ensemble. Their latest plays as I contemplate what it is about. It's A Long Way (HMR004), the title cut tells us. And perhaps after all it is. "Goodnight cow jumping over the moon" sings soprano Alissa Ruth Suver on Eric Whitacre's song about a bedtime story while the horror of the pandemic reigns. And doubtless we need such beautiful yet sad music to feel that we are indeed still here.

The main thing you take note of as the program winds out is how the 20 brief compositions straddle the old and the new, the formal institutional with the earthy and idiomatic, and how it all uniformly takes on a convincingly vibrant brilliance and ultra-musicality thanks to the talent and dedication of the artists in a sort of universal embrace of what they quite obviously are happy to sing. There are solo vocals sprinkled in with the ensemble works and happily everyone sounds fabulous.

Perhaps  you will be surprised as I was to hear a nice solo version of "Wayfaring Stranger" along with some gems by Arvo Part and Josquin des Prez? As you listen you embrace stylistic duplicity and convergence. So the title piece "It's A Long Way" by Neil Shaw Cohen takes the poetry of Harlem Renaissance poet William Stanley Braithwaite and sets it to a Modern-Early Modern sequence that happy spans the great divide between our ever evolving present and the living brilliance of pasts both yesterday and far, far away in time.

And in the end we get a beautiful melding of later Minimal and post-Minimal hypnotics with revived contrapuntal gems of earlier polyphonic life. So too they allows us to embrace Folk roots and even Romantic high expression. Following the album's sequence is to experience connections and interconnections of Western vocal music over time in myriad places.

American composer Evelyn Simpson rubs stylistic shoulders with Max Reger, Schubert and Thomas Tallis--and a happy surprise in the fetching folk ditty "A Game of Cards" sung with excellent verve by Fiona Gillespie. In the process we get a  new sort of Modern stance that eschews rigid distinctions between high and low, present and past, so much as it draws enthusiastically from the great well of vocal artistry looking both backwards and forwards to the future, from plainchant to "Nature Boy" and beyond. And happily it all works remarkably well. One travels along the adventurous route gladly and expectantly.

It may not exactly be what you expect and all the better for that. Skylark is as much curators of the whole legacy of vocal music as they are excellent vocalists and dedicated artists. Bravo. Listen!

Herbert Howells, Requiem, Sacred and Secular Choral Music, Baylor University A Cappella Choir, Brian Schmidt

 

If you ever took things for granted, chances are in the last year or so that you no longer do? And so music remains central if you are like me, but there is no guarantee, you understand, that it will all be there for you as you are for it? The Pandemic has made it very difficult for live music, and if it is coming back all the more does it seem precious, Happily recorded music never exactly went away! And so I turn to an album I've gotten recently that is getting my ears focused. 

And so we have an absorbing disk of a cappella choral music, centered on Herbert Howells' Requiem (MSR Classics MS 1757). The Baylor University A Cappella Choir under Brain Schmidt do the honors and they sound  nicely angelic and/or robust, depending on the work at hand.

The most ambitious of the compositions and the most interesting is no doubt the "Requiem" of Herbert Howells (1892-1983). It combines a hovering, post-chant influence of early church musc with English folk roots and a modern sense of space perhaps. It will no doubt appeal to the modern-anglophile contingency, in the English neo-renaissance of choral unfolding from the time of Elgar to Vaughan Williams and so on.

The remaining nine works are in a miniaturist mode of brevity and concentration. Thee are older classics from the likes of Tomas Luis de Victoria and Felix Mendelsohn, then an interesting assortment of 20th century and beyond works by a variety of composers, all working in a rooted tradition that may include a tang of modernity but just as much or more a feeling of thoughtful continuity.

So we encounter interesting works by the likes of Enrico Miaroma, Alexander L'Estrange and Susan Labarr are some of the composers. It all makes for compelling fare, none of it exactly at the cutting edge of the new, but rather earnest choral moments worth savoring, very well sung.

If you love the a cappella choral sound and want something unfamiliar and worthwhile, this will no doubt appeal to you. I am glad to hear it. Kudos to the choir and director Brian Schmidt.

Inna Faliks, Reimagine: Beethoven and Ravel

 

The world of music has many facets of course and if you are like me the whole everloving Pop scene seems ever more vast and mysterious. I've pretty much given up on trying to assimilate the new flavors of the month there. I no longer feel compelled to hear all that as it comes out. There is too much great music coming out in Classical, New Music, Jazz, Avant, "World" and Avant Rock to appreciate. And the days when I made ends meet in a "Top 40" band are long gone, for better or worse.

So today another unexpected new one by the very talented pianist Inna Faliks. It is called Reimagine: Beethoven & Ravel (Navona NV6352). It is a great example of how a poetic musicianship and the freedom to rethink typical categories can make for very enjoyable and rewarding fare.

Essentially Ms. Faliks spans three centuries of piano music by paying homage to Beethoven and Ravel in interesting ways.  The program zeroes in on key compositions--Beethoven's "Bagatelles op. 126" and Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit. 

Ms. Faliks had an inspired idea--to commission living composers to write piano music dedicated to work out modern implications from the Bagatelles and Gaspard. The program features some nine world premieres in all. So to begin the opening sequence each Bagatelle gets Inna's lucid reading, followed in each case by a commissioned work that draws from that Bagatelle for a special New Music utterance. Stylistically the new works cover a good deal of ground, from harmonically stretched passages to rollickingly motor minimal to anything goes lyricisms. 

Each of the six op. 126 "Bagatelles" gets a worthy performance, followed in each case by a newly commissioned work that extends Beethoven to our present day world in interesting ways. And then we have three more works based on Ravel's Gaspar.  The names of the New Music composers are some quite familiar, some less so but all of the music leads to an essential impression of the place of the revered masters in the realm of the Modern. 

So we gladly explore the adventurous adoption of each classical work in the inaginative hands of, respectively, Richard Golub, Tamir Hendelman, Richard Danielpour, Ian Krouse, Mark Carlson, David Lefkowitz, Paola Prestini, Timo Andres and Billy Childs.

It is an album that wears very well as you listen repeatedly. It is a beautiful showcase for Inna Faliks' deeply rich musicality and a wonderful program that gets you to appreciate Beethoven and Ravel anew and what they contribute to our contemporary music world. Strongly recommended.

Nomi Epstein, Sounds

 

US composer Nomi Epstein appears before us on a CD album with six compositions for solo piano and a few for small chamber configurations. The album is aptly titled Sounds (New Focus Recordings FCR260). Sounds is a meaningful title as Ms. Epstein's music gives us a heightened attention to the timbral qualities of tone production. It is also music that to some extent has the element of process, a semi-ritualized doing in patterns neither redolent of classical or song modes of unfolding (e.g., abacaba), rather coming to us with relation, at times repetition as abstraction, at times long tones and deliberate, open ended soundings that hang together like fantastic canvases in sound--in timbre-tone--where modern abstract visual art would use pigment.

The overall presence of the music including the repetitions are ambient in the manner of later Morton Feldman rather than, say, Steve Reich.

The trio of Frauke Aubert on voice, Shanna Gutierrez on bass flute and Francisco Castillo Trigueros on live electronics have special sonance on the 2016/19 "for Collect/Project." is simply gorgeous,a living breathing sound being that quietly maps out a path to a deep space inside us. It unfolds without a lot of repetition, through-composed cosmic tones it has in abundance. 

The solo piano works alone are worth the entrance fee! Each has its magic. "Layers for Piano" (2015/18) is a memorable gem. Similarly there is mysterious beauty in "Till for Solo Piano" (2003) as well as "Solo Piano Part I: Waves" (2007/11) and "Part II: Dyads" (2007/11/19).

The 2018 "Sounds for Jeff and Eliza" makes a beautiful sonance for Eliza Bangert, flute, Jeff Kimmel, bass clarinet and the composer at the piano. Long tones alternate in ways that iterate same and altered, change and stasis in ways that are exceedingly beautiful if you allow them to open to you.

This music has the kind of depth that perhaps is the antithesis of the "popular." That is not to say that it does not open the listening self to sheer aural expressivity, with a widely spatial lyricism that is not literal in the way it "means," but nonetheless  has much to understand in the way it straddles the inner aural self and a potentially infinite outward spatiality.

If you give this one enough listening frequency it should pay you back with a profoundly meditative inner space when you return to each new listening session. In this way it affirms that there are indeed places to go beyond the American School of Cage and Feldman. Highly recommended.

Jan Lisiecki, Frederic Chopin, Complete Nocturnes

 

A good case could be made that Chopin's "Nocturnes" and Satie's "Gymnopedies" make for some of the most strikingly lyrical piano works ever. 

A couple of years back Jeroen Van Veen gave us the complete Satie piano works with extraordinarily, almost painfully beautiful renditions of Satie's best, very slow, very thoughtful, solitary and moody effusions that cover you with some extraordinary outreaching lyricality. Type into the search box above for my review of that. 

And right now we have a new 2-CD set of the Complete Nocturnes (Deutsche Grammophone 408-0761) played by Jan Lisiecki. Like that Satie set it slows things down to contemplate the beautiful atmospheric brilliance of the music. No doubt we can thank the advent of the CD and its expanded playing time to allow artists like Lisiecki to stretch out, to take all the time he needs to catch the most subtle nuances of expression, etc.

As much as there have of course been earlier milestone recordings of the "Nocturnes" I cannot recall anyone who focuses with such clarity on the nearly infinite musicality in the scrolling out of each work, the very familiar published ones and too the posthumous pieces. In Lisiecki's versions we get a savored, lucid exuberance.

You can of course tell from the cover photo that Lisiecki is still quite young. But when you listen to the performances you feel the maturity of his expression. Here is a pianist to cherish, and some of the finest readings of Chopin I have ever heard. Do not miss this one!