Patrick Castillo, The Quality of Mercy

Patrick Castillo, a New Yorker, a new compositional voice of note, gives us his debut recording in The Quality of Mercy (Innova 926). The album showcases two works for chamber group and mezzo-soprano (Abigail Fischer, a fine exponent here): "This is the hour of lead" and "The Quality of Mercy," with "Cirque," a short contrasting work for solo violin (Karen Kim) in between.

The moody works take advantage of the colors inherent in the ensemble--flute, string quartet or trio, percussion (including marimba), piano, plus clarinet and electronics on the title work.

"This is the hour of lead" comes to grips with death and loss and consequent feelings of anger, grief and acceptance. "The Quality of Mercy" deals with reconciliation.

Both are expressive, evocative and sometimes rather stoically restrained. The music is advanced tonal with stylistic variability in the musical events and their nature. There are occasional ostinatos at work but for the most part this music encompasses both high and post-modern tendencies in an original language that constitutes a very personal hybrid.

The five movement "lead" centers around an elaborate vocalise with surrounding interludes bringing out contrasting emotional states.

The title work makes use of elements of plainchant, "The Merchant of Venice," urban sound environments and birdsong for a full interaction of processed sounds with chamber ensemble colors. To make that connection more palpable the electronics principally arise in a live setting in response to the instruments.

"Cirque" is high-modernist abstract and breaks up the longer works well.

Castillo has a vibrant feel for complexes of sound that have a narrative quality, a poetic demeanor, a superior sense of dramatic color weaving that makes for some very moving chamber music.

It is a fine introduction to Patrick Castillo the composer. One only hopes we can be exposed to more of his work soon. In the meantime this is a ravishing performance of some very interesting and moody poetics. Bravo!

Mahler, Symphony No. 4, Debussy, Prelude to an Afternoon of a Faun, Martingale Ensemble, Ken Selden, Chamber Versions

Mahler's 4th Symphony is not exactly like any other, though there are movements in his other early symphonies that have an Austrian and or Jewish folk flavor. Mahler wrote most of his music in his summer period, in between the demanding and often enough bitter climate of opera directorship. The idyllic environs that he and Alma occupied and the break from factional music strife seem no more telling that with his nostalgic, extraordinarily tuneful and bitter-sweet 4th. Like the other early symphonies, the music relates to the folk poetry of "Das Knaben Wunderhorn," which was also set to music by Mahler as a marvelous song cycle. The Martingale Ensemble under Ken Selden gives us a wondrous chamber version of the work, along with a similarly paired-down Debussy "Prelude to the Afternoon of a Faun," all in a fetching 2011 release (MSR 1373) that I am just catching up with--and very appreciatively so.

As the liners remind us, the 4th is built around a single "Wunderhorn" poem about a child's vision of heaven. Mahler makes of it a magic carpet, weaving folk-like themes and other very Mahleresque passages into a totality that may well make for his most accessible large-scale work, but for reasons that have more to do with its singing melodic strains than any attempt to pander to regular folks. The orchestration of strings, wind, brass and such shows Mahler's total mastery of the modern orchestra and must be heard in a carefully impassioned reading to be fully appreciated. So then why a chamber version? If you remind yourself that such a version does not replace the original, but brings you a new appreciation on more intimate terms, something that can stand proudly alongside the full orchestra version, you are prepared for the Erwin Stein arrangement heard here.

The Martingale Ensemble flowers luxuriously under Ken Selden for the Mahler, the arrangement of which apparently was a part of Arnold Schoenberg's Viennese Society for Private Musical Performance. Began in 1917, the Society was a subscription only gathering of music lovers (critics excluded!) to expose to them the best of modern music. The music of the late romantics was performed by scaled-down chamber ensembles so that the audience could better grasp the structural affiliations such music had with the later modernists.

And so this lovely arrangement. The final movement puts a fitting capstone on it all, with the soprano part (here performed very nicely by Deanna Breiwick) telling us that "no music on earth can compare to ours (in heaven)". Well, you believe it after hearing Mahler's extra-earthly sounds. The single Wunderhorn poem on which the symphony is based, "Das himmlische Leben (The Heavenly Life)" inspired Mahler to some of his earthiest yet also naively otherworldly music.

There may be no experience quite as telling as the full symphonic score played by a requisite number of musicians Mahler envisioned. But the chamber version, played marvelously well, has its own charms. Paired down to the bone, often without doubling of parts (statistically or otherwise) except understandably at times in the strings, you hear the music with a new clarity. It is an uncanny experience. This is "ethnic" music! Folk music! Yet it most certainly has that great developmental brilliance and grand sweep that Mahler is always all about too, and so it never really loses that connectedness of the full orchestra version.

The Debussy "Faun" does not quite provide you with the shock of recognition that Mahler's 4th does, but it is nicely revelatory nonetheless.

Ken Selden and the Martingale Ensemble outdo themselves with a very warm and vivid reading of the scores. It is a fabulous album! Those who know the originals like the back of their hands will be delighted and surprised with how well the music sounds, and how different, advanced, modern yet timeless those lines seem when expressed more as a series of nudes, as it were. Anyone who for whatever reason does not know the music will also respond to it I am sure. Beautiful!

Catherine Lee, Social Sounds

If the tides change constantly, fashions nearly as much, and political-historical events ebb and flow continually, there are some things with which we perforce ground our lives within us. One of those for many is music and the happy fact is that there is no shortage of it. New music and old music revisited abound, in a continual flow. It keeps me going through all seasons, a bitter cold dawn and its wonderfully colorful sunrise this morning being no exception.

A superior instrumentalist greets the sunrise for me, one Catherine Lee, an oboist of stature in an evocative program of new music for oboe solo, Social Sounds (Teal Creek Music 2035). There are five works by contemporary modern composers, one for oboe d'amore and tape, one for English horn, the rest for oboe proper.

Dr. Lee has a ravishing, declamatory tone and absolute control over her instrument, whether the work calls for extended techniques or less so. The modern extensions of tone production integrate themselves into conventional soundings on these works and Catherine negotiates them with ease, incorporating them into the fanfare-like extroversions and the more introspective passages with absolute musicality. Harmonics, alternate fingerings that lead to subtle shifts in timbre and microtonal differences, pitch bends, all are made an integral part of each compositional whole.

The works are given dramatic, rhapsodically lyrical realizations without fail. We are treated to "Still" (2006) by Dorothy Chang, "Rafales" (2007) by Jerome Blais, "Plainsong" (2004) for English Horn by Tawnie Olson, "Social sounds from whales at night" (2007) by Emily Doolittle (whose music we have encountered here before--type her name in the search box above) for oboe d'amore and tape (providing us with some extraordinary whale soundings--sequenced and somewhat transformed if I am not mistaken--to accompany fittingly the instrumental part), and "A Tiny Dance" (2008) by Catherine Lee.

The scores allow varying degrees of improvisation on the part of the performer. Catherine's experience in classical-modern and free-improvisatory settings serves her well. She is a founding member of the Blue Box Ensemble and forms half of the Catherine Lee + Matt Hannafin Duo. Her doctoral dissertation centered around 18th century virtuoso performers and their interactions with audiences and heightened her interest in the role of improvisation. McGill University (Montreal) awarded her a Doctorate for her work there.

The compositions have thematic underpinnings. Dorothy Chang's work was inspired by "Red-Black," a painting by Lawrence Calcagno that hangs in the Empire State Plaza, Albany. Jerome Blais was inspired by the many variations of wind he experienced when he moved to Halifax, Nova Scotia. Tawnie Olson's piece treats structural aspects of plainchant types performed in the Night Office. Emily Doolittle crafts an evocative soundscape around night sounds whales communicate with. It was originally for soprano and tape but Ms. Doolittle adapted the vocal part for oboe d'amore at Catherine's request. It bears the transition quite well! Dr. Lee wrote "A Tiny Dance" for two dancers who designed their dance patterns around performing in a restricted space with a number of natural and man-made obstacles. It was performed as part of the dance piece "Wet?" at Ten Tiny Dances Waterfront Project in Portland, Oregon.

The beautiful artistry of Catherine Lee ultimately breathes vital life into the music. It is music to beguile and uplift the spirits. It is modern yet lyrical. It is a stunning feather in Ms. Lee's very musical hat. Recommended strongly for double-reed enthusiasts and modernists of all stripes.

If, Bwana, Thirty, Al Margolis

If, Bwana is the music of avant composer Al Margolis. The 3-CD set Thirty (Pogus 21080-2) gives us a kind of contemporary retrospective on his music, more than three hours worth. The compositions are varied, firmly in the musique concrete camp as far as procedures, in that conventional instruments make up the sound sources, in various degrees of recognisability, and then are subjected to various electroacoustic manipulations. The set marks 30 years of If, Bwana releases with recent compositions, and was first released as a set of CD-Rs in the beginning of 2014. It has seen the light in cassette format and now comes at you as a collection of three manufactured CDs.

Thickly textured drone complexes unwind in ever differing ways throughout the set. Other pieces treat instrumental or vocal sources as collaged wholes that have a linear feel. Still others lie somewhere between the two poles. There is a center core of cohesiveness for each of the 13 works here on the set. You might say that Margolis is closer to the visual arts "minimalist" ethos than composers who have been so dubbed in our lifetime. That is to say that his music has seriality but at the same time restricts the elements utilized more radically than the trance-and-after minimalists out there today.

Some of the musical participants who bring their sounds into the Margolis transformative sweep here include the vocals of Chloe Roe, Thomas Buckner and Lisa Barnard Kelly. On the instrumental front there is Jason Kao Hwang on violins and violas, Robert Dick and Jerome Bourdellon on flutes, Leslie Ross on bassoon, plus Steve Roe and Kevin Geraghty on guitars.

A blow-by-blow description of each work would only give you a more detailed idea of the musical universes Margolis inhabits, but would not get you any closer to how the music feels as you hear it. There is a heightened avant attention to the possibilities of natural sound in microcosm and macrocosm and their various possible degrees of transformation.

Suffice to say that Margolis is a new music electro-acoustic original and has been doing seminal music now as If, Bwana for 32 years. This three CD set for the price of two gives you a full listen to what makes him original and at the same time fascinates you with a wide spectrum of soundscapes that play upon your aural imagination like strong gusts of air play upon a wind harp. The music is ever fertile, conceptually alive and each with its special abstract aural tale to tell.

If, Bwana acolytes will jump at this, but so should anyone who wants to explore a different outlook on electroacoustic music in the avant firmament of possibilities.

Happy listening!

Frederic Rzewski, The People United Will Never Be Defeated, Ursula Oppens, 40th Anniversary Recording

The People United Will Never Be Defeated, Frederic Rzewski's landmark set of 36 variations on Sergio Ortega's Chilean protest song, enjoyed its 40th anniversary last year with a new recording by its first exponent and greatest champion, Ursula Oppens (Cedille 900000 158). Included on the album is also the premiere recording of Rzewski's "Four Hands," featuring Oppens and Jerome Lowenthal.

Rzewski's "People" was one of the 1970's most striking piano masterpieces. If nothing else, it was one of the bellwether works in the new multi-stylistic worlds that eventually would come to be thought of as "post-modernism." But it surely is much more than that. It put Frederic on the map in a big way and rightfully so, for it is incredible in its whirlwind kaleidoscope of variational inventions, an explosion of brilliant virtuoso pianism that takes us through endless modulations, permutations, changes in mood and direction that enthrall the listener from first to last. The variations run the gamut from a clangorous ultra-romanticism to the edge of modernity and back.

Ursula Oppens' original recorded version in 1979 was an occasion. It was Grammy nominated for good reason, as it was an ideal expression in Oppens' hands. Other versions have followed, most all worthwhile on any number of levels, but Ms. Oppens' version has remained the benchmark by which the others were measured.

The 40th anniversary performance-recording scales the heights triumphantly. If anything Ursula outdoes herself in a deeply expressive, tumultuous and tender reading that stands before us as the highest sort of achievement. Her performance is nothing short of breathtaking.

The addition of the new, briefly succinct "Four Hands" is an added bonus portrait of the composer today, with four compact movements that show wit and expressive complexity. When heard in sequence they form a nicely flowing coda to the variations.

Couple all this with state-of-the-art modern recorded sublimity and you have an irresistible offering. Whether you have the Rzewski variations or not this album literally glows with pianistic brilliance. If you want to get a handle on Rzewski and '70s new modernism this is an album to have, surely. Kudos!

Fifth House Ensemble, Excelsior

A world-class chamber ensemble dedicated to new music is undoubtedly key to the artistic life of a city and to the general dissemination of new works across the planet. The Chicago-centered Fifth House Ensemble is just such an outfit, and an exceptional one at that.

They show what they can do with four ultra-contemporary modern/postmodern works on the recent album Excelsior (Cedille 90000 148). All are tonal and exhibit marked tendencies toward the musical zone that occupies a position beyond minimalism or at a new phase of it, depending. All of the composers are younger than I am, so in my own relative sense I think of them as "young." The music in each case has something that sticks in the memory with originality. And Fifth House gives them each a beautiful reading.

Alex Shapiro's "Perpetual Spark" (2011) brings us some fascinating rapid ostinato figurations in the piano that are taken up by the winds and strings as through-composed counterlines are consequently taken up and developed by the rest of the chamber group. A rhapsodic but unusual waltz-like interlude intervenes in the middle section. The piece returns to the ostinato lines for a satisfying conclusion. Shapiro's work was originally written for solo piano. The chamber version for piano, string and flute/piccolo was prepared especially for Fifth House. It suits them well.

"Air" (2012) by Jesse Limbacher has rapidity, periodicity and repose as perhaps a mildly windy day might. Multi-velocity segments run up against each other as the wind players whisper, click the keys of their instruments and employ playing-singing modes to create a whirl of colors and textures.

The five part "Red River" (2007) by Mason Bates gives us a contrasting depictive series of tonal vignettes combining instruments and electronics. It follows the Red or Colorado River through its winding trajectory from its source in the Continental Divide, through to Las Vegas, the Grand Canyon, and the California Desert. The music in lively and affective ways captures the movements of the water past its multi-faceted landscapes, and its enchainment and perhaps overuse at the Hoover Dam and in California. The music enchants.

At 30 minutes, the title work "Excelsior" (2012) by Caleb Burhans is the most involved and most ambitious of the four pieces performed here. It uses multimedia and vivid musical pictorialism to dwell on the US Air Force's testing of high altitude parachute jumping in the 1960 project Excelsior, when Joseph Kittinger successfully dropped some 102,800 feet to land safely on the earth's surface. The music is radically minimalist and fluidly lyrical in the magic of its inexorable motion and the continual sounding of a complex modern chorale-like melody with ornamental and dramatic interjections, both mysteriously contemplative and affirmatively visceral. The music switches gears with a slightly more rapid figure first articulated by the violin and developed dreamily with counterlines in the ethereal vocal and finely crafted chamber parts.

The third section brings in the violin again to articulate a steady-state quasi-fiddle multiple stop figure that the ensemble builds around gracefully and contentfully. And onward it goes in its ever descending trajectory. Vocal and horn ride atop the ever eddying swirl with a sort of triumphant flourish. Burhans has that knack of using simple diatonic means to create inventive, non-banal results and enchanting panoramas.

As with the other works this is tonal music of the newest sort, informed by the best of the minimalist works but treating ostinatos as backdrops for varational counterlines and lyrical expressions that may also be long-form cyclical or not, but always with a linear unfolding in mind.

And so ends a most rewarding program of new and interesting works played with ultra-musical subtlety and rejuvenating clarity. This is I think rather essential listening for the newest in the new tonal music being spawned today. It rewards your concentration with sounds that refresh and renew the possibilities in a most artful way. Lend this album your ears, definitely.

Karen Gottlieb, Music for Harp, By Bay Area Composers

We owe the prominence of the harp in chamber music these days to various factors. The romantic era featured it often enough as an integral part of orchestral works and modern composers have turned to it more frequently for its special color and capabilities.

World-class virtuoso harpist Karen Gottlieb treats us to a program of modern-era music for harp and various chamber combinations. She has spent a good deal of time in the San Francisco Bay Area playing the local modern's music, and consequently she falls naturally into this recital of mid-to-late 20th century Frisco-associated composers. Her father was a prominent ethnomusicologist and her mother an architect. As she grew up there was a continual flow through her home of visiting artists and musicians--from Hindemith to Ravi Shankar. The adventurous music of modern and world scope was something she learned about and embraced early-on, apparently. The repertoire she so aptly addresses on Music for Harp (Innova 927) reflects her roots and makes the music she plays a part of her personal heritage. Hence there is a conviction to what she does, a depth.

There are to be heard five tonal-domain compositions by four modern composers associated with the Bay Area. The album is bookended by two Lou Harrison works, the most iconoclastic, world-oriented composer of his time and place. The first, the 1940 Suite for Cello and Harp finds us in a sound world not yet fully matured but nonetheless filled with the lyrical, folk-inflected genius in a five-part suite idiomatically suited for the two instruments. Dan Reiter aptly seconds Ms. Gottlieb on cello for a performance of sensitive warmth.

Harrison's later (1967-77) period masterpiece "Music for Harp and Percussion" gives us the fully bloomed composer in one of his most productive periods. The combination of Karen's harp and the twin percussion voices of William Winant and Daniel Kennedy triumph with a fully alive version of the seven-part suite. It shows off Ms. Gottlieb as an expressive and fully resonant proponent of harp finesse and dynamics. And the quasi-ethnic, quasi-archaic uniqueness of mature Harrison never sounded better.

Dan Reiter's Sonata for Flute and Harp (1982) has a kind of neo-impressionist lyricism that is brought out beautifully by Tod Brody and Ms. Gottlieb. And Wayne Peterson's "Colloquy for Flute and Harp" (1999) has that resonance as well, with a slightly more expanded melodic modernism. Both works are quite engaging.

Karen's harp version of John Cage's mysterious "In A Landscape" (1949) brings out its wonderful vibrancy at the hands of a master.

So all told we have a rather wonderful set of music on this album. Karen Gottlieb has a sure and deft sense of her instrument and brings out its many timbral and spatial wonders with these heartening set of works. Anyone who loves the harp and/or lyrical modernism will not fail to appreciate this one!

Very recommended for its angelic presence!