Heinz Holliger, Machaut-Transkriptionen, Guillaume de Machaut

The modern music arena, like the modern visual arts scene, may frustrate you if you have one rigidly defined set of features that you apply like a grid over everything new you experience. Half the time or more, the music may evade your definition and yet be worthwhile and even important. You get more out of the explorations when you approach new music on its own terms, one work at a time. Only then may the various patterns emerge alongside one another, though of course everything is changing, mutating, going forward month-to-month.

Much commentary on the scene tends to freeze that ever-evolving whole in order to describe the situation on the ground at x point in time, but of course the natural way is that it continues to move forward. That is hard to put into words so long as there continues to be an opening up of the future that is the opposite of a one-style dominance. And we are most definitely in a very creative, generative period in the times in which we live.

The new recording by Heinz Holliger is nicely symptomatic of a branch of the process of contemporization right now. Machaut-Transkriptionen (ECM New Series 2224) makes use of the famed Hilliard Ensemble vocalists and three violas to resituate a cycle of works by 14th century early music master Giullaume de Machaut.

Beginning with literal transcriptions of the Machaut works, Holliger gradually transforms them with ever-increasing interjections of modern elements, dissonance, extended playing techniques (harmonics, for example), and various displacements.

This is a further example of the old-in-the-new, the search for convergences of early and modern musics that Stravinsky did with Gesualdo, Lukas Foss and his "Baroque Variations" exemplified in the '60s for a later period of early music, then Penderecki reaffirmed in very different ways in his vocal works beginning with his early-mid period. More recently of course Arvo Part came on the scene with a distinct style that contained some definitive transformations. He has rightfully been made much of in the late-20th century through to today. But the process by no means ends at Part. It continues on and Holliger is among the prime movers as we hear on this album.

Holliger's refiguration of Machaut takes the four vocalists and three violists increasingly across time from early to late, at the same time interjecting his own musical vision yet situating it within a world first sourced out of Machaut's subtle part-writing and periodistic spatiality.

The music is impeccably performed, captured beautifully and has a dramatically transformative trajectory that gives us a sonic momentum as contentful as it is moving. It is first-rate early-to-modern music and a great example of why Holliger occupies a special niche as a present-day innovator.

Hear this and be a part of the contemporary developments going on out there. Very recommended.

Eleanor Cory, Things Are, String Quartet No. 3, etc.

Eleanor Cory (b 1943) is another one of those composers you may know something of or may have missed altogether. Her music has been performed widely but her recordings have not circulated quite as much. She has a way about her, as can be heard in her recent six-work anthology Things Are, String Quartet No. 3 [etc.] (Naxos 8.559784). All are world premiere recordings in a chamber context.

Her music is a varying mix of tonal, atonal and modal, a constellation of contemporary stances that vary with the requirement of a piece. The results are well put-together, individual, sometimes lyrically expressive and largely modern in the classic sense.

The anthology is a good sampling of works written between 1973 and 2012.

The "Violin Sonata No. 1" is the latest work and shows her expressively rhapsodic-modern side with memorably active passage work that projects forward in ways quite appealing.

The "String Quartet No. 3" (2009) is filled with motivic road signs that guide the listener through the musical terrain with articulate grace. "Sweetly melancholic" is how the work is described in the liners and well so. "Things Are" (2011) is for flute and piano, dedicated to Milton Babbitt. It has the rangy openness that Babbitt would have appreciated.

The "Celebration" (2008) for solo piano has contemporary virtuoso agitation/repose and a bit of a very modern jazz flavor to it. Stephen Gosling does the honors as soloist and shows the interpretative range so needed for this one to come across.

The performances are all first-rate. Eleanor Cory shows herself a composer of expressive smarts, dash and lyrical modernism, indeed a first-rank post-high modernist that has mastered a divergent harmonic-melodic way that covers much ground with a naturally assimilative yet individual approach that sounds effortless though of course a good deal of work has gone into these pieces.

Some chamber gems are here for you to appreciate. They hold together well with repeated listens and give us a stance that has a unified authenticity and a stylistic flourish that makes Cory a living modernist of high caliber. This is well worth your time!

Andre Gagnon, Baroque

My Monday dawns as I listen to the newly recorded Baroque (Atma Classique ACD2 2715), a compendium of modern-day works written in the baroque style by Andre Gagnon. It suits my need for something positive and bracing in a world I at the moment find somewhat loathsome. I am reminded of an old friend who stopped listening to the avant garde many years ago with the comment that he "already felt terrible and the music just reinforced it." Of course you do not go to the Museum of Modern Art and expect to find happy, chipper things, so why then must music always be that? If music is solely something to enhance your mood, then he may be right. But if you seek that sort of thing you may end up listening to musak or new age, ultimately, or what used to be called "easy listening."

It does not wash to me; ideally music is not made for you to wallow in like a pig in the mud. For that same reason the MOMA is not as yet filled with 1,000 happy faces on canvas. And yet I am glad to hear this music right now on this Monday because it is well made, inspired, even if out of season for what you expect a composer to be doing in these present day circumstances. One swallow does not make a summer, though, so we can have this music without fear that it will somehow negate everything else we call "modern" today.

The fact is that Andre Gagnon's new baroque music is very engaging. The music was written in 1969 and 1972 and originally recorded for release by Columbia records in two albums where, as the liners tell us, they did well.

The new recording uses all period instruments (that is of the baroque period) and gets a nicely brio reading by Daniel Constantineau conducting the Orchestra symphonique de la Vallee-du-Haut-Saint-Laurent, with Jean-Willy Kunz on harpsichord. (The original recordings had the keyboard part played on the piano, so this too is a more authentic period touch.)

The music consists of four sets of suites corresponding to the four seasons, "Mes quatre saisons." Then there are the "Les Turluteries Suite"(s) No. 1 and No. 2. It is remarkably baroque in form, in its contrapuntal part writing, its bright emotional range and its treatment of themes. The music has plenty of invention to it. It may not have quite the depth of a JS Bach, but that was as much true of most baroque composers in the day as well, of course.

The originality of the music, and what perhaps makes you think of the modern day if you listen carefully enough for it, is in the thematic material. It is generally lyrical, and not always characteristically baroque. That makes this music much more than a clone of another era. It is a product of today in the end. But even if you do not pay as strict attention to the thematic play it is music of real substance.

Should a composer do such a thing in our world today? Why not? I might be alarmed if all contemporary composers went baroque in this way, but that is not the case. And if the music satisfies without pandering to mood, listeners are all the better for it.

The performances are convincing, lively, and very musical. And the music itself rings true. So I do recommend this one strongly.

Chicago Gargoyle Brass and Organ Ensemble, Flourishes, Tales and Symphonies

This time of year puts me in mind of brass choir and organ. That of course has to do with the upcoming holiday season and the coming of winter. If you crave the enormous and sometimes enormously subtle massing of such forces, there is a new CD out that puts you in front of an excellent group, The Chicago Gargoyle Brass and Organ Ensemble, with founder and artistic director Rodney Holmes. They tackle a wide variety of music on their Flourishes, Tales and Symphonies (MSR 1598). The Gargoyles are in fine fettle, joined now and again by a timpanist.

Understandably most of this is music of the grand gesture. Much of it is music I am not familiar with, by contemporary composers who have a flare for the grouping at hand. So we have Carlyle Sharpe and his "Flourishes" (2005-2010), and also his "Prelude, Elegy and Scherzo" (2012); William White and his five-part suite "The Dwarf Planets" (2012); David Marlatt's "Earthscape" (2011); and Peter Meechan's "Velvet Blue" (2012) a bluesy pulsating adventure ultimately in a sort of jazz-rock mode that adds drum set and gives us an unexpected treat.

For somewhat earlier sounds we get a 2013 arrangement of Jaromir Weinberger's "Polka and Fugue" from "Schwanda, the Bagpiper" (1926) and a nice arrangement of the "Adagio and Maestoso" from Saint-Saens' "Organ Symphony" ("Symphony No. 3") that first saw the light of day in 1886.

The modern works are tonal and very idiomatic for the instrumentation. Everything fits together well. The fabulous musicality of the Gargoyle Ensemble is matched by a bright, exciting recorded sound that does justice to the dynamics and grandeur of the performances.

It is some repertoire you will not always know and so it is a real addition for those who need to clear out the cobwebs in one's listening space with something very new! This is an excellent disk and great fun as well. Grab it and get prepared for some fireworks of sound.

Karl Weigl, Piano Concerto for the Left Hand, Violin Concerto, Norddeutsche Philharmonie Rostock

Karl Weigl (1881-1949) was one of the leading lights of Vienna before WWII and his Jewish status put him in danger. He fled to the United States like a good number of other composers fortunate enough to get out, where he taught and composed until his death in 1949. Unlike some others his reputation was shrounded in relative obscurity. It is only in recent times that his music has begun to be performed again.

But in the Vienna of his younger days he flourished. He studied with Alexander Zemlinsky and Robert Fuchs, became a vocal coach during Mahler's directorship of the Vienna Opera, and his works were performed and acclaimed in the years that followed.

Other than a CRI LP recording of his songs that came out in I believe the early 1980s, I have heard nothing of his music until now.

That all changes with a fine recording of his Piano Concerto for the Left Hand and his Violin Concerto (Capriccio 5232), performed by the Norddeutsche Philharmonie Rostock under Manfred Hermann Lehner. Florian Krumpock and David Fruhwirth happily take on the solo piano and violin roles, respectively.

The music is in every way deserving of our ears. It is post-Brahmsian, tonal with few modernist traces. But it is music of high craftsmanship and beauty. The works were written in 1924 and 1928, respectively, when Weigl was at the height of his career. And they seem exemplary and significant to me.

The "Piano Concerto for the Left Hand" was one of those commissioned by Paul Wittgenstein after an injury in WWI left him without his right arm. Thus Weigl joined the illustrious company of Prokofiev, Ravel, Britten, Hindemith, Korngold, Schmidt and Richard Strauss to receive a commission. Wittgenstein never performed the Prokofiev or the Hindemith works, which were too modern and incomprehensible to him, but for some reason he did not perform the Weigl concerto either. Incredibly it went unperformed until 2002, when Florian Krumpock gave its world premiere. So it is fitting that he is the soloist for this recording.

It is a work of glowing lyricism and depth, notably missing the sturm und drang of his late romantic counterparts but in no way lightweight in substance. Weigl might well have triumphed if the work had been performed at the time. Nonetheless we are well served by the modern-day recording with soloist and orchestra giving the work a very spirited and sonorous reading.

The Violin Concerto fared somewhat better in the day, getting one performance in 1930, whether well-received or not I do not know. It received several performances after Weigl's death but did not get any significant attention again until 2009. David Fruhwirth gives it a marvelous reading on the present recording, as does the orchestra. Like the Piano Concerto it is on the neo-classic side of romanticism, in that there is a contained expressive content that plays out as part of the work's tripartite form. So we get more Brahmsian symmetry than Straussian maelstroms of expression. Yet for all that Weigl does not sound at all derivative.

What matters is the quality of the music, which is a revelation to those of us that know little of Weigl. He may not have been the leader of a new music movement in his lifetime, but the two concertos have very much a life of their own and sound fresh and appealing to present-day ears, mine anyway.

There is nothing lacking in the performances and the sound quality is of the highest order. Here is a modern composer of definite weight, not certainly a part of the progressive modernist movements going on around him, but that matters little at this point.

This is Weigl in very persuasive terms. The music brings much to us. He did not deserve such neglect. Listen and I think you will agree.

Matt Haimovitz, Orbit, Music for Solo Cello (1945-2014)

After celebrating Matt Haimovitz's recent recording of Bach's unaccompanied Cello Suites (see October 13th posting) I was reminded that I had planned to cover his earlier unaccompanied cello anthology, Orbit, Music for Solo Cello (1945-2014) (Pentatone Oxingale Series 5186 542). So I fished it out from the pending stack and gave it a number of close listens.

What Haimovitz did for Bach (and also Beethoven, see earlier posting), so he does for a wide spectrum of the modern repertoire, not of course so much make them period specific, since this IS the period we are in, but to make the music an extension of himself.

We get three full CDs of a wide assortment of modern works by the likes of Philip Glass, Luciano Berio, Gyorgy Ligeti, Elliott Carter, Luigi Dallapiccola, Steven Mackey, Tod Machover, Ned Rorem, Lewis Spratlan, and a host of others, some lesser-known, but all somehow expressing the modern classical idiom in all its variant guises. We even get a Haimovitz arrangement of Jimi Hendrix's famed solo guitar version of the "Star Spangled Banner" and a solo cello version of the Beatles' "Helter Skelter."

This is a treasure trove of solo cello as it has flowered in the modern present, which started in part from a respect for Bach's "Suites" by artists like Max Reger and Paul Hindemith in the first half of last century and continued on into high modernism and the contemporary music of recent years. The cutoff beginning point of 1945 means that we do not hear the earliest examples of the solo renaissance, but that I hope can be the subject of another anthology down the road.

No matter. There is more than enough to appreciate in this set. These are works that are sometimes fiendishly difficult, always advancing the cello into our world. Matt Haimovitz has fabulous technique and a very intelligent and impassioned interpretive bent. This is an opportunity to express what the zeitgeist is all about today in cello terms. Whether it be the abstract heights of Ligeti and Carter or the post-modern lyricism of Philip Glass, Matt gives us tour de force mastery and a flow that belies the sometimes rapidly shifting manners of articulation.

The sheer variety of the modern repertoire when taken in its widest sense as it is here and the beautiful outpourings of Matt Haimovitz's cello in mastering and making cogent the many stylistic variants give us a remarkable extended program. This is manna for cello lovers, infinite stimulation for any serious modern chamber enthusiast, and just plain wonderful for anyone with a sense of vastness and exploration that the modern musical world affords. Very recommended!

Dino Saluzzi, Imagenes: Music for Piano, Horacio Lavandera

Celebrated Argentinian bandoneonist Dino Saluzzi (1935-) has written occasional music over the years that exists alongside his primary bandoneon ensemble music. For example between 1960 and 2002 he was written a goodly assortment of music for solo piano. We get a fine selection of this on his Imagenes: Music for Piano (ECM New Series B0023792-02), as played with care by Horacio Lavandera. These works have never been recorded before. The disk comes out in celebration of the composer's 80th birthday.

The works are sometimes reflective, rather impressionistic essays with touches of neo-romanticism and at times a Satie-like lyrical simplicity. There are also elements of Argentine traditions that come to the forefront on occasion. But in the end, as Saluzzi says, "music is one." And so the total effect is of a music not easy classified. Modern, yes, classical, certainly, but occupying a space of its own, reflective and with a feeling of solitude often enough, but then there are pieces of bright activity, too. And in the end there is an originality.

Pianist Horacio Lavandera brings to the music a poetic flare, an interpretive acumen and beauty of touch that is totally right for the music. The ECM production gives us a glowing piano presence that creates an immersive staging, setting this music off nicely.

The album has much to recommend it. Saluzzi gives us an original voice that neither follows well trodden ground nor does it live in the contemporary moment. There is something of a timelessness to this music, beyond a present and a past, a pure and lyrical Saluzzi that expresses his musical self elegantly and pristinely.

I recommend you hear this music.