David Lang, "This Was Written By Hand" for Solo Piano

David Lang has increasingly struck me as one Bang On A Can composer who is especially bent upon forging a minimalist/post-minimalizt language all his own. The solo piano opus This Was Written By Hand (Canteloupe 21073) puts that forward somewhat emphatically. The album consists of the 13-minute title cut and eight shorter "Memory Pieces."

The title cut (2003) has a very pianistic left hand-right hand split, the right hand repeating and developing a central melody line, the left hand repeating and varying a figuration accompaniment for the most part. It is lyrical, reflective and appealing in its spare but musically impactful utterance.

The "Memory Pieces" (1992-1997) have a bit more in the way of motoristic movement, sometimes marimba-istic figuration that is more typically classic minimalist. Yet it is not linear, post-African trance groove that is coming out of the figurations for the most part. For the first piece it's a matter of rolling wide-interval trills (to stretch a term) that together form an overarching melodic movement that has a slower, more majestic trajectory. The second piece calls for rapidly articulated arpeggiations that again don't have groove as the intent, but rather verticalized harmonic sequences. Piece three is a kind of largo. Piece four slows the trill idea down and makes each pulse a more fortissimo chordal block. Number five is mercurial, a kind of drumming on the piano with Lang's own sort of rudiment-like execution. Six slows things down again for some delicate interlocking sequences of expressive meditation. Seven is a whirlwind of rapid cycles of piano drumming. The final piece returns in some ways to the feeling of the first, a kind of slower series of related melodic cycles, this time in the middle range of the piano, with punctuations in the upper and lower registers.

Pianist Andrew Zolinsky realizes the parts with a restrained poeticism that seems right for these two works.

This is music that keeps my interest while playing upon the more positive emotional affects that the solo piano has often evoked from the days of Mozart onwards. It should find a good number of adherents, I would think. And it is some of David Lang's most intimate and appealing music to date.

Ars Nova Copenhagen, Paul Hillier, "A Bridge of Dreams": Modern Choral Music from the Pacific Rim

Paul Hillier happens to be the world's premier choral conductor to my way of thinking. As principal conductor and musical director of the choral group Ars Nova Copenhagen he shows himself as champion of new music that has been heavily influenced by early and/or archaic musical forms, an important trend from the last half of the 20th century through to today. The new CD A Bridge of Dreams (Ars Nova 6.220597) puts Hillier and the marvelous choral group in a rather wondrous zone for a program of music that shows the influences of both the classical past and the East Pacific. Subtitled a cappella Music from the Pacific Rim, for this CD the idea is that all composers-works represented here have important multiple associations with the coastal Pacific. All the composers hail from Australia, New Zealand, California, or China, respectively, and all in some way or another address Eastern Pacific thematics.

Lou Harrison's Mass for Saint Cecilia's Day is a work from his later period (1983) utilizing transformations of Gregorian Chant, resituated in part within Chinese and Balinese tonality. Ann Boyd's enchanted A Bridge of Dreams is based on an anonymous Medieval Japanese Woman's text of the same name. Jack Body's Five Lullabies have a strong medieval polyphonic influence as well as traditional Chinese elements. Ross Edwards combines psalm texts with aboriginal bird names for Sacred Kingfisher Psalms. Finally Chinese composer Liu Sola gives us The Seafarer, a suite from his opera The Afterlife of Li Jiantong.

All of this music has an ambiant quality, thanks in part to the pieces themselves, to Paul Hillier's/Ars Nova's highly melifluous renditions, and to the very resonant recording space of St. Paul's Church, Copenhagen. There is a constancy that is both post- and pre- minimalist, interestingly. These are very beautiful works, beautifully done. There is timelessness conveyed in the music, a confluence of past, present, and, perhaps, future. Don't neglect this one. A Bridge of Dreams may find you spanning the length of one somnolescently. . . repeatedly.

John Carollo, Transcendence in the Age of War

John A. Carollo is an American composer that minds (and mines) modernist roots to forge an expressive personal style. I reviewed his Starry Nights on this blog last July 16, 2011. Now for a look at an earlier release, Transcendence in the Age of War (Navona 5817).

This one covers a wide spectrum of chamber and orchestral forms.

Carollo has a real knack for constructing melody/ensemble lines that have a modern ring to them and tend to soar expressively. This is quite true of the two short pieces for string orchestra, Desiderio and Let Thy Mind Be Still, which like Starry Night from the second album have a kind of Ivesian rootedness combined with a Carollian uniqueness. There is a denser, more active texture to String Quintet No. 1 for 10-String Guitar and String Quartet, but the inventive line knack is again at the forefront.

Fear of Angst for Flute, Cello and Piano has more chromatic expansiveness and a more expanded harmonic range for the first movement. It is also very well conceived. Movement two is quite beautiful, with striking pitch-timbre contrasts between flute and cello, the piano mediating somewhere at the center of the sound. The final movement has a more desolate quality, then some turbulent final bars.

The title piece, Transcendence in the Age of War for two pianos has a dense, restless, endlessly modulating quality appropriate to the subject matter.

So there we are. A very well played set of interesting compositions, some rather sublime, some rather edgy, all showing the inventive talents of John Carollo. If you can only get one of his two CDs, Starry Night would get my vote for its beautiful string pieces. Transcendence in the Age of War comes in a close second. Here is a composer of today that deserves your attention.

Harley Gaber, In Memoriam 2010

The mature Harley Gaber as composer favors long continuous sound matrixes of electro-acoustic poeticism. His The Winds Rise in the North from the seventies was an extraordinarily dissonant and intense piece that involved continuously modifying tone blocks of strings. I saw My Mother Ascending Mount Fuji (Innova) was a long-term project that used more consonant soundblocks and electro-acoustics combined with conventional instruments to create a mystical sort of rarified equivalent of high altitude in sound (see my review in the July 13th, 2010 posting of Gapplegate Music Review-- http://gapplegatemusicreview.blogspot.com).

The new release In Memorium 2010 (Innova 243) was commissioned by Dan Epstein in memory of Nancy Epstein. It is an elegaic six-movement electro-acoustic tone poem of eerie beauty. There are the continuous sound blocks again, but the sonics are more drenched (to my ears) in the sounds one might hear in an underwater world (to Mt. Fuiji's air). It is a strangely intriguing, ever shifting world he creates, the musical equivalent of a set of memories recalled as if in a dream.

It is in its own way an electro-acoustic near-masterpiece of our times. Happy Thanksgiving.

Maki Ishii Live; Ryan Scott with Esprit Orchestra; Alex Pauk, Conductor

The Japanese composers of the 20th century who did the most, to my mind, to bring together modern classical orchestral music and traditional Japanese music: Takemitsu, Mayuzumi and Maki Ishii. It is to the latter that we turn today, in a live performance of three of his gems by Ryan Scott, percussion, with Esprit Orchestra under Alex Pauk. Maki Ishii Live (Innova 809) is a well-captured performance first aired on Canada's CBC Radio. Three Ishii percussion concerti are represented. They have some very intricate solo percussion parts which Scott plays from memory.

So it's not just that Ryan Scott has memorized the parts, of course; he plays them with musicality and fire. The orchestra sounds well too. These are works that belong to the later period of Ishii's output when he was especially concerned with incorporating traditional Japanese elements. "Saidoko (Demon)" was completed in 1989, "Concertante for Marimba," 1988, and "South-Fire-Summer" in 1992. All three have an intensive dynamic between percussion virtuosity & fire, and orchestral luminosity. They are excellent examples of Ishii's mature style and are played here with brightness, hard-edged thrust and a mastery of tone-color blending.

This is one of those recordings that SOUNDS great. There is presence and a sound staging that translate well to the speakers-in-a-room world of home listening. First-rate music, first-rate performance, first-rate audio quality.

Duo Gazzana, "Five Pieces" by Silvestrov plus Music by Takemitsu, Hindemith, and Janacek

The Italian sisters Natascia (violin) and Raffaella (piano) Gazzana turn in a rather stunning debut on Five Pieces (ECM New Series B0014656-02). They tackle Takemitsu's "Distance de fee", Hindemith's 1935 "Sonata in E", Janacek's "Sonata", and Valentin Silvestrov's "Five Pieces" (2004).

Takemitsu's work was written when he was under a marked Messiaen influence but it has a strongly poetic quality that Duo Gazzana brings out nicely. The Hindemith has the harmonic movement, sometimes quiet grandeur and motor drive typical of the composer at his best. The Janacek is a work of some passion, rolling dramatics and east-meets-modern sensibility. The duo does not overemphasize the dramatic-romantic element and instead gives a well-balanced reading. Silvestrov's "Five Pieces" compares favorably with the rest of the program, in turns tender, gently propulsive, and largo-istically expressive.

The combination of Manfred Eichner's full-depth production and the sensitive, lyrically ravishing phrasings of Duo Gazzana make for a rather heady, subtly absorbing program. These are some wonderful works and they get an especially moving performance at the hands of the sister duo.

Paavo Jarvi and the Cincinnati Orchestra, Baltic Portraits

The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra visit five greater- or lesser-known contemporary composers from the Baltic region and five corresponding orchestral works on Baltic Portraits (Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra Media 946). Paavo Jarvi conducts his way through the works with a good feel for orchestral detail and a full-fledged sense of the whole of each work.

Arvo Part's "Cantus in Memory of Benjamin Britten" is the one work many will have probably heard in one or more versions. CSO gives us a full, heart-felt reading that veers more to the side of warmth rather than elevator-shaft spookiness.

Two major symphonies act as bookends to the program. Aulis Sallinen's Symphony No. 8 has a sort of contemporary saga quality, with a wealth of melodically inventive passages that engage with a narrative quality. There is a boldness of rhythmic dynamics and a neo-post-romantic discursive unfolding. Lepo Sumera's Symphony No. 6 has contrasting blocks of mysterioso pianissimo orchestral murmurs bumping against more agitated, complex sound bursts.

The shorter works help provide variety and set off the longer pieces well. Erkki-Sven Tuur's "Fireflower" has post-impressionist shimmer and very evocative sound-sculpturing. Esa-Pekka Salonen (more known of course at this point for his conducting) provides in "Gambit" a sure-footed orchestral conception with soundscaped tone-painting that make for one of the more intriguing pieces on the program.

All-in-all Jarvi and the CSO do well in presenting us with quite respectable performances of works that deserve the hearing they get. I suspect that none of these versions are definitive at this point, but they do reveal a most interesting set of sonic experiences I feel I am the better for hearing. Worth a listen!