Charles Tournemire, Trinitas: Vincent Boucher on Organ

The French Organ School that began with Franck and ended more-or-less with Messiaen is a body of music that established the cathedral organ as an instrument of symphonic proportions and made the freely composed fantasia-like organ style a dynamic, breathing modern art form.

Somewhere in the center of it all is Charles Tournemire (1870-1939), who wrote sprawling masterpieces of freely mystical, cosmic breadth.

A new disk, Trinitas (Atma Classique 2472) of some of his solo organ gems just came out with Vincent Boucher offering a very pleasing program played on a marvelous instrument, with ravishing sound.

Boucher gives us near definitive performances of Tournemire's "Triple Choral," three movements from "Postludes libres pour des Antiennes de Magnificat," and five from "L'Orgue mystique."

Partially because of the nature of the function of the organ in the liturgical setting it has long been an instrument that cultivates great improvisers--from at least Bach's time onwards, and Tournemire's music has that freshly improvised feel. In the hands of Boucher and with the pristine dynamic range and audio depth in this excellent recording, we hear Tournemire in his many-layered complexities, almost as if for the first time.

For all those devotees of the French school, or those new to it, Trinitas is a (pardon the pun) Godsend!

Bang On A Can All Stars, "Big Beautiful Dark and Scary"

Whatever minimalism is in music today, or whatever word you would rather use to describe the contemporary classical music of recurring periodicity, the Bang On A Can All Stars are at the vanguard of it, at least here in and around Manhattan. So when they come up with a special 2-CD set commemorating their continued success, namely Big Beautiful Dark and Scary (Canteloupe 21074) it is rather an occasion.

There are 89 minutes of music, pieces by Wolfe, Lang, Gordon, Ziporyn, Longstreth, Nancarrow, Andriessen, Moore--the founders and others. As is the nature of the Bang On A Can folks, they take chances and seek to do new things within the forms of contemporiety, so that not every composition is going to appeal to everybody. And for me some seemed just a hair on the crude side, others were interesting, still others I found quite beautiful and moving. There are pieces that show a kind of hard rock insistency, others that go off into space in exploratory ways and yet others that have a more lyrically expressive side.

So this is an occasion where in marking it BOAC shows they do not intend to drift into a complacent stance. They aim to innovate and they succeed, most of the time.

So if you want to be in a conceptual space where things are moving along, morphing, generating the excitement of the new, this set is one place you want to dwell within.

So do not miss out on the future. Here is part of it.

Tomas Marco, Symphonies Nos. 2, 8 and 9, Jose Serebrier

There's nothing quite like a new discovery to reassure one that the intensive work of listening to new music and writing these blogs is worthwhile. Today I cover the symphonies of contemporary Spanish composer Tomas Marco, more specifically Jose Serebrier and the Malaga Philharmonic's recording of Marco's Symphonies Nos. 2, 8 and 9 (Naxos 8.572684). Nos. 8 & 9 are world premier recordings.

Marco writes dense scores that have national elements as well as multipart structures that sometimes remind one of Ives's poly-thematic complexities, only working with original and Spanish grassroots musical idioms as building blocks to a very personal symphonic vocabulary.

Marco's No. 2 is perhaps the densest and most dramatic. No. 9 combines medieval motifs, the liner notes tell us, with a kind of portrait of the sea spirit "Thalassa." There is a recurring theme that recalls Stravinsky's "Rites" and it weaves its way throughout the work. No. 8 Gaia's Dance has rhythmic and melodic motives that suggest folk dance forms but are treated by Marco as raw material to his larger end of creating multistranded polysemantic orchestral significances.

This is a composer going his own way. There are complex dissonances and simple folk melodies conjoined in labyrinthian matrices, all bearing the stamp of originality. With Jose Serebrier at the helm the complexities of Marco's music are articulated with expressive heft and drive. Tomas Marcos and these symphonies should be heard by anyone with an interest in the modern symphony and contemporary Spanish music. A provocative recording that is not to be missed.

Grieg, String Quartets Arranged for String Orchestra; Nordheim, Rendezvous

Edvard Grieg (1843-1907) had a lyrical streak in him that has made him a favorite with all kinds of people. If you are like me you grew up hearing and loving his "Peer Gynt Suite" and later perhaps some of his singingly immediate solo piano music (plus the Piano Concerto) and have sought to reproduce that feeling by sampling his other works.

Nevertheless not everything Grieg wrote was at the same lyrical level. But there is more to Grieg than melodies you can whistle, of course. His treatment of folk-like material, his fine compositional craftsmanship, his Northern sensibility, musically speaking, his sunlight and sundowns.

The String Quartets are not as well known as perhaps they should be. They are filled with a lyric light--not in some whistle-able sense, but in the sense of his treatment of themes in the somewhat more formalist context of a string quartet. There are two quartets that survive, the completed Quartet in G minor, Op. 27 and the unfinished two movement F Major Quartet (there also was one that has been lost to us). Alf Ardal has arranged both works for String Orchestra and they are available in a new recording by the Oslo Camerata (Naxos 8.572441) along with Nordheim's "Rendezvous," an attractive string orchestra work from 1986.

The good news is that Ardal's arrangements successfully give us what seems like new Grieg. He has transformed the works so fully into the orchestral context that they seem like wholly new works. So what are they? Folk-laced excursions into the special lyricism for which Grieg is known and revered. The Oslo Camerata sounds quite lively and spirited, and the sound is quite decent, if a little on the reverberant side.

Oh, and the Arne Nordheim (1931-2010) composition gives you another 20 minutes of interesting Northern string orchestra music, in a more modern a vein of course.

Any lover of Grieg will find this disk a wonderful experience. Those who enjoy and appreciate the Scandanavian, Norwegian musical corpus in general will go for this as well. It's good music, too. Anybody should find it appealing.

Philip Blackburn, Ghostly Psalms

Philip Blackburn composes music that hangs together with a kind of natural ambient discursiveness. His new CD Ghostly Psalms (Innova 246) is a triumvirate of works with the long 10 part title work sandwiched between the relatively brief "Duluth Harbor Serenade" and the concluding "Gospel Jihad".

The opening work collages the sounds of the harbor in Duluth, Minnesota: church bells, boats, horns, sirens, etc. with additional musical instruments. It's a soundscape that evokes as it unveils a panorama of the everyday pitched and unpitched sounds inherent in the world of the harbor. Blackburn has a keen ear for the musical nature of the environment and realizes its combinatory qualities in very appealing sonant ways.

"Ghostly Psalms" uses various vocal ensembles, musical instruments and their ambient transformations onto the soundstage for a kind of narrative musical prose that increasingly foregrounds long tones and sound envelopes produced by bowed cymbals, organ, voices, recorders and their acoustic-digital enhancements along with a more exotic component of unusual instruments (from what I hear) and unconventional articulations.

It gives me the uncanny feeling of hearing medieval through baroque sacred music in a kind of haunted dreamscape, where there are floating worlds of sonic residues, once a part of a musical whole but now destined to float through space, still ethereal yet disjointed, separated in their demise from their original home, wandering the aural spaceways in search a resting place. This of course is a personal interpretation. But regardless of what the music may associate to you and resonate with you personally, it is eloquent and linear in a very original way and it lays out in your listening present with dramatic impact.

"Gospel Jihad" winds up the program with a short work for the Choir of Clare College, Cambridge, acting as a crowd of voices, blocking out otherwordly clusters of chordal tones, popping, whistling and clicking, mumbling, shouting and rustling in reverberant space. It is a religious Tower of Babel that seems to be depicted, something we may well be experiencing in today's world. It is movingly done.

The cumulative effect is coherent, discursive, and complex in ways that allow repeated listenings to reveal the whole little-by-little, with connections becoming more apparent and complexes of sounds unveiling new and richer musical meanings the more one listens. These are some of the most compelling soundscapes I've heard in a long time. It is new music that has learned from the past 100 years of aural experimentation and creates finished works that use the vocabulary of sound color in masterfully expressive ways. Very recommended.

Evan Shinners, "@Bach," Bach by Young Pianist

Glenn Gould of course had his own way of playing Bach on the piano--fast, sometimes, interpretively modern, nearly always. Evan Shinners, an upcoming pianist on the scene, follows in that lineage with a recent disk devoted to Johann Sebastian's music for keys entitled @Bach (New Cull). It was recorded live in performance and subsequently has a few minor clams here and there, but that is made up for with an expressive exuberance.

He takes on the B-Flat Partita and the French Suite bwv 816 with zest, performs two Toccatas with improvisations added in an imaginative way, and then joins the SUITES chamber ensemble in a madly dashing version of the Concerto in d minor (bwv 1052) that, again, may not be a perfect performance, but makes up for it in spirit. Tempos are generally pretty rapid and Shinners is in an appropriate fettle. All tends toward the happily tempestuous.

Mr. Shinners has promise and the program keeps your ears in motion throughout.

Denes Varjon, Precipitando, Three Late-Romantic Early-Modern Solo Piano Works

Pianist Denes Varjon's Precipitando (ECM NEW Series B0016486-02) covers three solo piano works from the period beginning in 1852-53 (Franz Liszt's Piano Sonata in B minor), ahead to the early work by Alban Berg, Sonata, Op. 1 from 1907-8, and through to 1912 and Leos Janacek's In the Mists.

Varjon throws into relief the influence Liszt casts over these two early modernists at the outset of the 20th century--by programming the three together, and by bringing out the advanced and the romantic qualities of the Liszt sonata and doing ths same with the Berg and Janacek works.

All three are handled with spirit and passion. The Janacek certainly sounds more Lisztian than in some of the performances I've heard, and the Berg seems so as well (perhaps as much by being in the context of the others as in its treatment by Varjon).

In the process of listening to this disk you begin to rethink the lineages of the works though the magnetic pull of Varjon's commanding performance of Liszt's sonata. It is masterful. At the same time his heightening of the passionate late romanticism latent or overtly present in the Berg and Janacek gives you a new way to think about the music.

So in that way alone this is an important recording. Commanding Liszt, superlatively empassioned early Berg, and the half-way to modernist Janacek work. There should be no one standard of performance. Varjon's special way with all three works certainly deserves to stand alongside the very best. The recording would have had a slightly different effect if Varjon had ended with a few of the last Liszt piano works, which in other ways point forward. But that is another aspect of the overall trajectory of all three composers. This program not only makes you appreciate, it makes you think. The end was a beginning. The new emerges from the ashes of the old, the old has inherent within it the seeds of the new, the new partakes directly of the old to nourish itself and become the new that is inherent within it. That's something.