Alexander Berne and The Abandoned Orchestra, Flickers of Mime/Death of Memes

After years away from music, reedman/ composer Alexander Berne got the call in his being to go into the studio and put down music that had in whatever way gestated within him for more than a decade. The product of many hours of layering sound carefully and doubtless arriving at a combined "orchestration" meticulously as he painted tone colors on a digital canvas, the result is a remarkable 2-CD set, Flicker of Mime-Death of Memes (Innova 804). It's a battery of standard, altered or radically modified wind instruments along with prepared piano, wine glass, vacuum cleaner, lap steel guitar and so forth--that he uses to build up startling ambiances and resonant, ever-shifting space-drone transformations.

It has a primal quality, as he makes note of in the accompanying liners, but it also is extraordinarily sophisticated in its use of transformed sounds--not through electronic filtering but through careful layering and mixing over time. It's a sound-color tour de force, at once mystic and concrete, an orchestra of odd provenance creating otherworldly sounds.

It's rather remarkable, very listenable and pretty much like nothing else in its poetic, sound-sculpting consistency. One of the most original extended soundscapes I've heard.

Anna Thorvaldsdottir, "Rhizoma," High-Mode Musical Abstractions

Some music requires that you clear your head of distracting influences and open up. Clearly that is the case for Anna Thorvaldsdottir's Rhizoma (Innova 804). It is a series of works for various forces: percussionist on grand piano (Justin DeHart), chamber ensemble (KAPUT, conducted by Snorri Sigfus Birgisson), or full orchestra (Iceland Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Daniel Bjarnson). "Hidden" consists of five rather brief movements, scattered across the disk, as played by Mr, DeHart. "Hrim" and "Streaming Arhythmia" are for chamber ensemble, and "Dreaming" is for symphony orchestra.

Ms. Thornvaldsdottir's music is ethereal, often sparse, with a timeless, floating quality. They are so much of a piece that if one listens without reference to how the tracks are parsed, one piece flows into the other with sound colors changing, but a feeling of stylistic continuity dominates. The music sometimes reminds me of a set of wind chimes on a mildly breezy day, though nothing sounds like wind chimes really, and you do not hear the sound of wind. And it's not a random quality one hears either. Instead there is a very irregular and unpredictable contrast between musical utterence and quiescence, too directed to be the product of chance operations, but also too experiential-serendipital to be a product of logical-linear thinking.

Those factors make it essential that one listens in a state of relaxed concentration. My first several hearings of the disk were in hectic multitasking situations and I came away with no impression at all. It is not background music. When I went back and concentrated on the music I found my aural footing and was able gradually to come to appreciate what was happening.

This is, in it's own way, the music of Iceland (from which Ms. Thorvalsdottir hails). If that explains anything however I am not sure what, except that perhaps Anna spent some time in a less noisy world than ours, and has come to understand that relative silences and the silent actions of memory are implicit framing points and lead to a different mind-set than the continual periodicic, unreflecting action-sound we are used to hearing.

In the end, one leaves this music with a feeling that one is in the presence of an original voice, a poetics of desolation and isolation, an a-strophic language of free-verse, a series of sound color pieces that have more in common with natural forces than human-made machinery, that at first puzzle and then confirm.

Anna Thorvaldsdottir. She is whispering something in your ear. It will take many hearings to make out what she says to you. It is worthwhile that you listen, anyway.

Leos Janacek, Choral Works, Daniel Reuss and Capella Amsterdam

Leos Janacek was one of the most original of 20th century composers, in his own way a titan, yet at least in the States his music is not as regularly performed or recorded as one might wish. So it is especially welcome when there is a well-performed set of something one does not often find on disk, namely his Choral Works (Harmonia Mundi) as performed by Daniel Reuss leading the Capella Amsterdam. The recording just became available and it is a good one.

There are 72 delightful minutes of works not often heard on this side of the planet: they include "Six Moravian Choruses (Sechs Klange aus Mahren);" "Vlci stopa (The Wolf's Trail)," for soprano, female chorus & piano, JW 4/39; "Elegie na smrt dcery Olgy (Elegy on the Death of My Daughter Olga)," cantata for tenor, chorus & piano; "Rikadla (Nursery Rhymes)" (18) for 9 voices & 10 instruments, JW 5/17; "Otcenas," for tenor, chorus, harp & organ, JW 4/29, plus assorted miscellania.

Some are earlier works that are nonetheless of interest, some many are of the mature period and have the characteristic Janacekian contrasts, all are well performed and deserve a thorough hearing.

Recommended.

Light and Shadow: Modern Orchestral Works, 2011

Starting off the new year of music is not a simple thing. The accumulated baggage of the preceding year of releases reviewed weighs on me and a kind of symbolic casting away and a new beginning seems requisite. On a 7AM after the official end of the holiday season here it seems doubly important to retrace steps and make a fresh start down the path to the year ahead.

As a kind of palate cleanser, today's CD, Light and Shadow: Modern Orchestral Works (Navona 5847) seems right. It's a series of shorter works by lesser-known composers of today: Rain Worthington, Rebecca Oswald, Adrienne Albert, Tadd Russo, Russ Lombardi and Daniel Perttu, played quite decently by various symphony orchestras.

These are what I might call character pieces--sketches of orchestral character, of the character-characteristics of each composer at a particular point in time addressing a musical subject. The pieces tend toward the tonal-descriptive side of modern orchestral writing.

And if there are roots to be uncovered in these works, it would tend more toward Aaron Copland than Gustav Mahler. There are off-stage allusions to rooted, earth-folk elements, vernacular elements radically transformed to the orchestral-modern idiom.

Not to sound patronizing, but you might liken these pieces to performances of character actors in golden-era Hollywood films. They have a role to play in the overall matrix; they come into the frame and do their bit and do it well. They constitute an art form in themselves and they are appreciated by contemporary audiences and remembered later for their contributions by film buffs. They aren't the leading actor-artists of their time but without them the films would drag along with too much weight and not enough light.

Each musical work is vivid, colorful, and evocative. None of them are designed to be the heavy "masterwork" opuses of our era. They are the finely executed miniatures that stand alongside the gargantuan klangs of the epoch.

And so to me this CD is a fitting start for the new year. After the revelry and frantic gestures of good cheer in bad times, a simple set of premises, the well-turned phrase, the orchestral color sketch.

These may not be works that will change the nature of music making for the future, They aren't. They are exceedingly evocative day trips into imaginative musical realms. And so they please.

Howard Hanson, Symphony No. 4, Symphony No. 5, Schwarz, Seattle Symphony

Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony continue their Hanson (1896-1981) Symphony Cycle with the release of Symphony No. 4 and Symphony No. 5 (Naxos 8.559703). There was a time when Hanson's stature as an American composer was perhaps a little more assured than it may be today. His affiliation with Eastman School of Music and his many recordings for Mercury in the '50s had something to do with it. The "Requiem" Symphony No. 4 and the "Sinfonia Sacra" No. 5 were written in 1943 and 1954, respectively, more or less as he approached the height of his reknown. They are essentially Romantic in nature. He and Samuel Barber are the principal such composers of the American 20th century as far as I am concerned, and both sooner or later came into a version of it that was pretty wholly theirs.

The middle period Hanson sometimes strikes me as being a sort of rich Nordic dessert. It is lush, sated, majestic, filled with glorious peaks and pithy quietude in alternation. The Requiem is understandably somber and elegaic; the "Sinfonia Sacre" has a slightly broader range of expression. Both occupy a kind of middle ground between some of the eclecticism of the earlier works and the breakthough of new elements and the evolving sonic palette of the last symphonies.

Gerard Schwarz and the Seattle Symphony give us detailed and broadly passionate readings that sound well in the contemporary digital recording mode. The inclusion of two more middle-length works, "Elegy in Memory of Serge Koussevitzsky" (1956) and "Dies Natalis" (1967), is a nice bonus.

At the Naxos price and with the detailed, enthusiastic readings of Maestro Schwarz, one could hardly go wrong with this disk. These recordings were originally released on Delos International in the '90s if I am not mistaken. I look forward to his versions of No. 6 and No. 7.

Lawrence Moss, "New Paths," Recent Chamber Music from the Octogenarian Composer

The 83-year-old US composer Lawrence Moss shows no signs of slowing down, based on the 2-CD compilation of his recent chamber works, New Paths (Innova 777). In fact quite the contrary. Nor is he converting to a more conservative style of writing, as tends to be current these days. In the composer's words "New paths in old forests. These are not the paths to Neo-Romanticism or any other 'old growth' but rather walks along the trails that lead from Stravinsky and Schoenberg to Varese and Ligeti."

The music certainly reflects those sentiments. One CD is devoted to instrumental chamber music; the second features the solo voice in a variety of contexts. I was most impressed with the music on the first volume; the second took me a bit more to get used to.

Disk One brings to our ears a number of gems. "The Woods" features the Capitol Woodwind Quintet in four lively movements that make use of bird song and a little humor in Moss's brief bowdlerization of the nursery song "Four and Twenty Blackbirds." There is an understandable influence of Messiaen, and yet the music does not sound imitative, instead rather Mossian. The program goes on to present Moss's somewhat quirky modernism in relatively short pieces for solo piano, oboe-viola-piano, trumpet duo, solo flute with electronics and his "String Quartet No. 4," a work that has sonorous brilliance.

The second disk has several more short, interesting instrumental works, two for string duets and one for violin and piano. The bulk of the disc is devoted to songs and song cycles for soprano and percussion, one for two sopranos and piano, and the five-movement "Another Dawn" for soprano and chamber ensemble.

It always has seemed to me that the solo vocal performance of highly involved modernist works constitutes one of the musically most challenging tasks in the Western world. The sopranos in the works represented here certainly are up to the challenge. There were occasions, however, where I thought the voice qualities occasionally seemed over- or under-matched to the music at hand, though perhaps those vocal qualities were what Maestro Moss had in mind. In any case I would like to hear some of these pieces in the hands of other vocalists for comparison. Nevertheless the works themselves hold interest throughout. The three movement "Emily's World" has very interesting two-soprano writing, where close harmonies sounding within the advanced, expanded musical universe as set up by the piano part give the music an almost otherworldly quality.

The set concludes with the sonoric and phraseological gem "Another Dawn," which takes on the serialist counterpoint of classic mid-twentieth century ultra-modernism and converts it to a Mossian poetry of means. The (chamber) orchestration has brilliance and the contrast of the resonantly chambered soprano voice and the texturally diverse chamber group is convincing and dramatically engaging.

So here we are. Lawrence Moss at 83. The music comprises to me a rather essential set for those looking for high modernism and what it has become in our era. Definitely recommended.

Ernesto Cordero, Caribbean Concertos for Guitar and Violin. Romero, Figueroa, I Solisti di Zagreb

I imagine that guitarist Pepe Romero and violinist Guillermo Figueroa were pleased to receive the respective dedications from Puerto Rican composer Ernesto Cordero (b. 1946) for the latter's two Caribbean Concertos. They went on to record the works with I Solisti di Zagreb, which is now available in a new release entitled Caribbean Concertos for Guitar and for Violin (Naxos 8.572707).

The two works, "Concierto Festivo" (2003) for guitar, and "Concertino Tropical" (1998) for violin, sandwich a third concerto, here given its world premier, "Insula: Suite Concertante" (1998), again for violin.

In all cases there is a very fluid interaction between the string orchestra and soloist. This is music that tries (successfully) to capture something of the landscape of island Puerto Rico and its natural and cultural comings and goings. It has some of the strong tonal flavors of Spanish speaking-Latin America and a very sunny disposition that relates to the impressionist composers from across the pond. The lightly textured quality of the string orchestra writing helps the music breathe; both Romero's guitar parts and those for Figueroa's violin heighten the impression of dazzling sunlight and movement over the land.

This is some extraordinarily refreshing music, played with care and joy by the soloists and I Solisti. Ernesto Cordero has created three delightful works that explore and transform his musical heritage into rather brilliant musical energy.

Recommended. A Winter Vacation in a jewel box!