Sofia Gubaidulina, Canticle of the Sun, Kremerata Baltica, Riga Chamber Choir

Sofia Gubaidulina is one of the originals of our era. A new release comes to us from ECM this week, confirming and extending that idea. Canticle of the Sun (ECM New Series B0016445-02) presents the title work as performed by the Riga Chamber Choir, Maris Sirmais conducting, with Nicolas Altstaedt as cello soloist plus two percussion and celesta. The disk also features the world premiere recording of "The Lyre of Orpheus" with Gidon Kremer as violin soloist, Marta Sudraba, cello soloist and the Kremerata Baltica.

Both works are substantial, well performed and sound terrific.

Gubaidulina makes a music with much space, ethereal headzone quietude and her own kind of tutti confluence. All the hallmarks of her mature style coexist in both works/performances: "Orpheus," a kind of meditative orchestral piece with prominent violin and cello solo parts; "Canticle," a choral essay combining echoes of Orthodox chant and post-serial expressivity, the old and the new. Ms. Gubaidulina so deftly interweaves such things in her best work. This is part of what makes her one of those great new Eastern European composers to my mind, contemporary in the most current sense.

It is an enthralling set of performances of music that helps define the world we are in.

Axiom: Society of Composers, Inc., An Anthology of New Music

Axiom (Navona 5856) is the 26th volume of the Society of Composers, Inc. CD anthology series. It consists of six diverse compositions by six composers from around the world. You may not be familiar with the composers (I certainly wasn't with most of them) and in part that is the point, to introduce music by composers who deserve a hearing. So there are works by Michael Boyd, Joo Won Park, Israel Neuman, Liviu Marinescu, Jay C. Batzner, and Peter Van Zandt Lane.

There are electro-acoustic soundscapes, pieces for conventional instruments and electronics, pure electronic music and a chamber work. All are worth hearing. If this is a gauge of where new music is today, it shows that there is a multi-stylistic eclecticism prevailing. This of course doesn't contradict my experience of surveying the music being recorded and listened to over the last decade, and in many ways that has been true of the overall situation in the last 100 years. New styles coexist with older ones, composers work in any number of directions in any given synchronous "now".

Perhaps though we have today a world where no one style dominates as the main innovative force, such as serialism did in the '50s of last century, or late romanticism did in, say, the '10s. We live in the present, necessarily. Someday music historians may look back and identify a style trend happening right now as what was important for the era. It is not clear on the ground if that will be so and, if so, what that will be. Certainly not in terms of this anthology. The works represented here do not show a marked tendency to incorporate non-formalist vernacular into the modernism the works espouse, for example. We've seen that can be a factor in the music heard lately in other circles. This hardly matters in terms of the music presented in this anthology. It is well-wrought and advanced music in the best sense. Whether it represents the most viable trends in composition world-wide is probably moot. It's interesting music, after all, and what more should we expect?

Recommended.

Javier Perianes, Noches en los Jardines de Espana (Nights in the Gardens of Spain) and Solo Piano Works

Pianist Javier Perianes, the BBC Symphony Orchestra, and conductor Josep Pons collaborate for a beautiful version of Noches en los Jardines de Espana (Nights in the Gardens of Spain) (Harmonia Mundi) for piano and orchestra. Maestro Perianes gives us a rather delightful selection of de Falla's solo piano works as well. The end result is top-notch de Falla, played with luminous transparency, with the Spanish element and the interpretive impressionist element balanced well.

The Jardin orchestral work in this performance is filled with the perfume of the flowers, the fresh but sultry feel of a tranquil space in time in the season of full blooming, with the magic of the night and its reveries. It is a very sensuous and not-too-romantic version, which to me most closely approximates de Falla's intentions and reveals the work in all its originality.

The piano solo pieces are marvelous companions to the main work. They too have shimmer and a very Spanish melodic and rhythmic element. The works cover a broad spectrum of de Falla's career, from the rather early but highly evocative 1906-09 "Cuatro piezas espanolas" to the 1935 "Pour le tombeau de Paul Dukas".

Javier Perianes seems an ideal de Falla interpreter. And this is some of de Falla's most spellbinding music. Highly recommended.

Dream Zoo, the Avant Cabaret Music of Valerie Kuehne

Life in the United States, in my generational view anyway, is a life of continual loss. You lose things. A piano, friends, a house, a job, parents, your car keys, that important note you wrote to yourself, your youth. And then you (one hopes) gain things too. There's always new music, for example. Here today is something to gain. It's the music of Valerie Kuehne, in the guise of the group Dream Zoo. She writes the music, plays cello, and sings what is variously dubbed classical, experimental, melodramatic popular song, avant cabaret.

Like Friday's music it has a bit of a sprechstimme (speech-song) aspect, which of course cabaret always has had, presumably well predating Schoenberg's "Pierrot".

So there's a six-song self titled album Dream Zoo (self-released) which you can listen to on Facebook and My Space, and can buy as a download on Bandcamp (Facebook links you to them). Now I must caution you that this music may be an acquired taste (it was for me) so that hearing some of it while staring at a computer screen may not be the best way to experience the music.

It's music that has a cerebral-emotional intensity, modern expressionist chamber music if you like, and the first hearing, especially in less than ideal circumstances, may put you off. The lyrics are about a dissociative surreal metaphysical angst in an everyday dream world. I am not sure Ms. Kuehne would put it that way, but it hit me that way.

It is music that grew on me to the point where I now appreciate it...like it, even. First time through I almost hated it. But that's something I lost as I listened time and again.

If you download the album and do as I did, you may find that you feel the same way.

William Vollinger, Raspberry Man

Schoenberg's "Pierrot Lunaire" brought the art of sprechstimme into the vocabulary of new music. Speech-song stays with us in various ways. One highly idiomatic and funny way is with William Vollinger's Raspberry Man (Navona 5857), a short ten minute, two work single CD.

The title work is a chamber piece for small group and singer-recitator. The composer does the vocal part; the Juventas Ensemble takes on the instrumental parts. "Raspberry Man" is a wryly funny sung-spoken story that skillfully combines modern chamber music compositional style with an amusing story about a fellow who stood outside Jack Dempsey's Restaurant in Manhattan and gave passers-by the raspberrys.

The second short piece, "Emmanuel Changed" has a similar trajectory.

It's interesting, funny, well performed and well written music with a definite twist.

Hubert Howe, "Clusters," New Music for Electronics

Electronic music? It still continues on out there. The great composers who worked in the medium helped change the texture and periodicity of music last century and helped accustom audiences to sounds that now form a routine part of rock, pop and hip-hop records listened to by mass audiences. Of course the structural-timbral advances that such composers made possible live on in the original works. Now that we all are familiar with the sounds, we can return to the originals and evaluate them as music rather than as a shocking new aurality.

At the same time there are composers still working fruitfully in the field. One of them is Hubert Howe. His album Clusters (Ravello 7817) gives us seven relatively brief works realized in the six years between 2006-2011. All relate to one another as soundscapes of sustained electronic clusters (hence the title of the album), the electronic music equivalent of orchestral harmony, albeit in exotic timbres with as much or more noise-aggregate simultaneity than conventional harmony per se. Howe composes and realizes these aggregates in ways that show an inventive sonoric ear and a feel for variety in continuity.

You who know little of electronic music and you who have sampled and studied a great deal of it--you both will benefit from this very interesting set of pieces. Give it an earful.

Neil Thornock, "No Stopping, Standing, or Parking:" Music for Saxophones

There is no stopping new music. Leaving aside the question of who would want to do that, if we look for it, it is everywhere. It may not get much media coverage. It may not be listened to by millions of teaming throngs of admirers, but it continues on day-after-day, year-after-year, its creators making a living at it in some way if they are to continue, hoping for a time when their music is recognized, or perhaps basking in the limited sort of recognition available to them in the contemporary world.

Today we take a look at another such composer and another such group of performers--all going at it with conviction and perhaps some courage. I speak of Utah composer Neil Thornock and a group of performers that includes the United States Coast Guard Saxophone Quartet (didn't know they had one!). The album is called No Stopping, Standing or Parking (Navona 5861). It's six of Thornock's works, all involving at least one saxophone. There is a piece for solo soprano sax, one for flute and alto, one for alto and harpsichord, one for alto, tenor and piano and two for sax quartet.

Thornock has a tendency to write music that moves along (so the title of the album is quite appropriate) in ways that have to do with the interlocking motion of Balanese Gamelan, certain forms of avant jazz and rock, and minimalism (though here the repetition factor does not play a prominent role in the music and mostly is only present for a moment as a soon-to-be varied or developed motif). Now that movement does not apply especially to the slower movements and passages that are peppered here and there throughout the program. But it does serve to encapsulate the Thornock musical personality on display.

What his music does often do is develop developmental music dialogs that get punctuated by short tutti phrases of a rather emphatic nature. Sometimes there are longer emphatic interactions as well, especially in the pieces for sax quartet.

It is music that is in its own way "in the air." There's a hectic pace of life in much of the post-industrial/industrial world we are in, and art in this case imitates life. That is not to say that Thornock's music is not original. It is. It's driving. It's exhilarating. It charges forth. And it's very well played on this disk.

Recommended.