Piotr Szewczyk, Violin Futura, 21st Century Solo Violin Project

As if to bring home the idea that the unaccompanied solo violin is very much a part of the contemporary music situation, violinist-composer Piotr Szewczyk gives us the album Violin Futura: 21st Century Violin Project (Navona 6028 2-CDs). The set brings to our ears 33 short works, includng several by the artist along with Mason Bates, Patrick Castillo, Carson P. Cooman, Sydney Hodkinson, and many others. All were written between 2006 and 2010. The composers were born between 1934 and 1983, so a spectrum of generations and biological ages are covered. The composers hail from many lands, from the United States to China, from Mexico to Germany.

Piotr himself was born in Poland. He resides in the US, where he makes his home-base and often performs. He is a violinist of impeccable technique and expressive wealth.

The works nearly all have programmatic features and run the gamut of contemporary violin techniques and compositional approaches. None would be mistaken for a work by Bach or Paganini. So this is modern music in the wide sense of the term.

Given the large number of miniatures involved, Szewczyk sees the sequencing as a kind of meta-composing in itself. In concert he will play 16 through without interruption and varies the order each time. We as listeners perforce hear the music in wholes as well, which is not to slight the merits of any of the works individually, but rather to experience the unity-in-diversity that the entirety represents. There tends to be, as the composer notes in the liners, an aesthetic eclecticism at play, a commonality of pan-stylism that is oftimes a hallmark of our current century. But within the idiomatically violin-specific totality the project represents we nonetheless get much variety of conception and attack, ultimately very personal expressions within a general "post-" universe.

Maestro Szewczyk brings to us a finely virtuoso capability and his musical acuman makes of the great mass of music a singular totality of what the violin can be today. All of the works bring together a kind of state-of-the-art of where the solo violin situates itself in our times. It is music to engage, to nudge us forward into the present-future.

It is a beautiful listen, best heard no doubt in single CD sittings but also appreciated more and more as one listens repeatedly.

A wonderful recital of some very significant music! I strongly recommend it to you.

The Sixteen, Poetry in Music, Harry Christophers

Over the weekend, in the mornings I tend to haul out some old vinyl and give it a spin. Yesterday it included a Palestrina recording, a '50s early music disk typical of what one settled for back then. Hearing it I realized how radically groups like the Sixteen have changed our expectations. I could barely listen to this LP now, so uninspired and plain wrong it seemed to be after reveling in the Sixteen's considerably beautiful renditions of the contrapuntal master.

It seems fitting this morning to return to that angelic ensemble under Harry Christophers, this time for their anthology of English a capella choral, Poetry in Music (CORO 6134). As the title suggests, the works were chosen for their setting of worthy poetic texts by composers who knew how to do it, with six centuries represented from early to modern.

The theme is songs of departure and farewell, with texts by such luminaries as Edmund Spencer, Christopher Fry and W.H. Auden. The music contains gems by Britten, Howells, Rubbra, Tompkins, Weelkes and others, 14 short works in all, wondrously performed as one has come to expect from the Sixteen.

The great care Christophers and company give to every one of these and the beauty of the ensemble carry the day and bring us to a timeless realm of expression where 500 years pass and we feel we have been in the presence of great feeling, sublime poetic utterances transposed and transformed into sublime choral mastery, passages where word and song intertwine in the most fulfilling ways.

And so we have another triumph from the Sixteen! Long may they carry us along on their travels to vocal superlatives. Highly recommended.

Mason Bates, Mothership, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Gil Rose

Youngish composer Mason Bates (b. 1977) has a directly visceral approach to composing for orchestra that makes his music in-demand on concert stages throughout the world. The Boston Modern Orchestral Project under Gil Rose has recorded an anthology of Bates' works on the recent album Mothership (BMOP/sound 1045).

There are five works in all, written between 2006 and 2013, and all have something worthwhile to offer. They have not been previously recorded. The works have enjoyed a good number of performances and/or are breakthrough pieces for Bates. Either way they make for lively listening.

The title work was written (2010) as an opening kind of blockbuster that has a vibrantly fanfarish flourish, an electronica element in the sophisticated beats employed and solo parts for jazz luminary Jason Moran on electric piano and guzheng virtuoso Su Chang. There is a deft handling of orchestral forces in a kind of Quasi-Americana manner, a lyrical brightness that owes something to the lineage of Aaron Copland (at least as struck my ears) but made personal and present-day.

We get an electronica beat aspect and some reworked field recordings of katydids and locusts on the descriptively evocative "Rusty Air in Carolina" (2006) where the bright lyricism is even more pronounced.

Those two especially stay in my memory but there are treasures too in the other works to be heard in the collection: "Sea-Blue Circuity" (2010), "Attack Decay Sustain Release" (2013), and "Desert Transport" (2010), the latter of which combines a wonderful pastoral grandeur and depictiveness with a bit of Pima Indian song.

You can see how contemporary audiences respond readily to his music. It is tonal and very well put-together, it adds some ultra-contemporary popular elements in the beats to be heard, but most importantly the music breathes with a rather extraordinary earthiness and elan.

It is music to be experienced TODAY. It pleasures without pandering. It is accessible but filled with plenty of musical content. It is wonderfully orchestrated and it speaks a universal modern mainstream language. Like Copland perhaps, he has his ear to the popular world and can allude to it without directly taking it on, mostly. The anthology gives us another excellent example of what is going on out there. You could play it for your kids and they might take to it right away. But then grandma might find it interesting, too.

Recommended!

Rain Worthington, Dream Vapors, Selected Works for Orchestra

The blog has covered the music of composer Rain Worthington in a number of anthologies, but for the first time we encounter a full CD of her orchestral works, her inaugural offering, in Dream Vapors (Navona 6025), featuring variously the Czech Philharmonic under Robert Ian Winstin, the Moravian Philharmonic under Petr Vronsky, and the Russian Philharmonic under Ovidiu Marinescu. The orchestras all come to the music well prepared and give us fine readings.

Rain Worthington's music here makes characteristic use of chromaticism in a tonally rooted, expressively heightened modern mode. There are seven fairly short works represented, written between 2001 and 2013. There is a remarkable, inimitable stylistic unity to be heard throughout, filled with expressive feeling but not typically romantic, sprawling tonal landscapes that have a mysterious, searching quality.

For the record the works are as follows: "Shredding Glass" (2004), "Reversing Mirrors in the Quiet" (2012), "Tracing A Dream" (2009), "Fast Through Dark Winds" (2013), "Within A Dance" (2012), "Yet Still Night" (2001), and "Of Time Remembered" (2011). Each somehow captures an inner journey through a twilight world of moody sound colors, lingering on chromatic tonal sequences that expand linearly into dramatic fields of tonal encounters.

They are slightly akin to Swedish composer Alan Pettersson in their chromatic expressivity, yet not quite so dark, less bleak, and ultimately distinct. Both are prime examples of an expressively tonal edgy modernism, with Ms. Worthington working here in more compact structures that have their say and leave us, to make room for yet another tone poem.

She has the ability to state her compositional case to us directly, as it were, in absolutely concrete if mystical terms. She somehow makes clear to us how we experience the transitional, impermanent and ever shifting quality of a later modernist world. Perhaps I am reading into the music, but a sort of chromatic instability within a rooted quality most certainly comes at us as listeners and we respond.

The size of the orchestra ranges between smaller to more full, yet it is the impact of the composing in every case that stands out as full of dark, burnished color. She is a master of her own orchestral palette. Each work seems just right for the forces at hand.

To honor both her grandmother and her mother, Rain has directed that all her artist’s proceeds from the purchase of the Dream Vapors album be donated through PARMA Recordings to the Cure Alzheimer’s Fund (a research 501(c)(3) public charity registered under the name, Alzheimer’s Disease Research Foundation).

Rain Worthington is a contemporary voice that demands to be heard. The present first collection establishes her as a unique orchestral exponent, an inspired artist saying something definite and compelling today.

Chinary Ung, Singing Inside Aura, Boston Modern Orchestral Project, Gil Rose

Cambodian-born composer Chinary Ung shows us in his latest collection of orchestral works, Singing Inside Aura (BMOP/sound 1044), that he is a major figure on the modern music scene. His childhood was spent absorbing the traditional music of his homeland, including the extensive vocalizations found in a small village setting of his original home. By the time he came to the United States to study under Chou Wen-chung, he had also thoroughly immersed himself in the study of western music.

The title composition "Singing Inside Aura" was composed in 2013. It features Susan Ung on viola and vocals, in a vocalization style Chinary Ung developed for her to in this case express the dual aspects of traditional Buddhism, the enlightenment that is heard and the enlightenment that is felt inside. It is a beautifully conceived and executed work that brilliantly combines the traditional and the modern orchestral in thoroughly integrated and personal ways.

It is one of five works presented by the acclaimed Boston Modern Orchestra Project under Gil Rose for this album. The works cover a vast space in time from Ung's 1970 "Anicca," the 1991 "Grand Spiral: Desert Flowers Bloom," the 1993 "Water Rings Overture," and finally the 1995 "Antiphonal Spirals." There are Cambodian scalular aspects that intertwine with modern classical expanded tonality in ways that work brilliantly well. Throughout Maestro Ung demonstrates vividly his strong sense of orchestral color.

The album in fact gives us a kind of mini-retrospective on the composer's development over time, with works that show on occasion traces of a Varese influence but most importantly a keen sense of how the dramatics of the spatial-tonal Cambodian sound worlds can fit together with a personal modernism in contemporary orchestral composing practice.

He manages via his gifted poetic talent to so thoroughly incorporate both strains into his own special musical inner sense as to be an absolute original. The meticulous sound staging of the Boston Modern Orchestra Project under Gil Rose's conductorship and Susan Ung's very effective dual soundings of voice and viola make of this album something very special. It is a remarkable introduction to the music of a contemporary master, a one-of-a-kind creative force at his very best.

Anyone with an interest in modern orchestral music will find this album endlessly intriguing, I would think, as I most certainly have. Get a copy of this without fail if you can.

Jennifer Koh, Bach & Beyond, Part 2

The art of unaccompanied solo violin is very much one of the pinnacles of chamber achievements in the classical realm. Virtuoso Jennifer Koh gives us four such masterworks for the violinist on her own Bach and Beyond, Part 2 (Cedille 90000 154 2-CDs). It is listed at two-CDs for the price of one, so it's a good value as well as a fine listen. I have not heard Volume 1 as yet, but if it is like this one, it is very good, I would think.

We get for this volume J. S. Bach's Sonata No. 1 and Partita No. 1, done with expressive zest and detailed care. The "and Beyond" is Bela Bartok's "Sonata for Solo Violin" Sz. 117 and Kaija Saariaho's "Frises" for solo violin and violin-based electronics that are produced in the live playing.

All four works are first efforts for the solo violin from the composers involved. Koh intends the program to affirm the past-in-the-present and the present-in-the-past, how Bach's compositions are assumed and incorporated into the thinking of the 20th and 21st century composers working with the form, and in turn how timeless, even modern the Bach works sound to us, in their own way. And it is no mistake--Saariaho for example starts her work with the final D from the Chaconne of Bach's "Partita No. 2" and the music follows logically out of it, originally but intentionally so.

Jennifer helps all this along with readings and interpretations that are totally fresh and current, as much periodless Bach as not, readings that stress the universality of the music beyond the time he wrote in.

The Bartok and Saariaho are themselves "beyond," too. They are much more than simply "modern" in their inherent idiomatic writing for the violin, in their commonality of language in key ways to the Bach works. I would not want to put too fine a point on that, though, because of course there are distinguishing elements for each work, period, composer. You never really completely feel free of time and place, and that is all for the best.

Jennifer Koh has a stirring way about her. There is perfect technical prowess, but there is also an intimate understanding of the music and a personal approach that marks this Volume 2 as a significant statement, an artistic triumph.

J. S. Bach, Organ Works Vol. III, Robert Quinney

Not to be tasteless, but J. S. Bach and the expression "over my dead body" go well together, if not in the strict sense of the phrase. Bach is played and listened to in the age of mechanical reproduction, today, far more than he was in his lifetime. And of course that is not just because of modern media. His reputation has grown steadily from the time of his death until now, when we see him as a composer of incredible genius--not only the Baroque Era's leading light, but a composer for all times, all seasons.

We all know that, presumably. All who read here also no doubt know that some of his greatest works were for the solo organ, an instrument for which he was a renowned exponent even in his lifetime.

Robert Quinney, organist with the Sixteen, an early music group I have covered extensively on these pages, and also the Director of the choir of New College, Oxford, is a marvelous organist who happily for us all, is recording much of Bach's output. I have been listening to his Organ Works Vol. III (CORO Connections 16132).

Quinney gives us these works on the Metzler Organ at Trinity College, Cambridge, a superior instrument that sounds every bit as one might wish in the hands of Maestro Quinney. The sound is ravishing as is the recording quality.

Volume Three presents a beautiful mix of music associated with the Advent and Christmas seasons and some that are not. They flow together well no matter what time of year.

The works are as follows: the "Fantasia and Fugue in G minor" BWV 542, "Three preludes on Nun komm, der Heiden Heiland" BWV 659-661, the "Pastorella" BWV 590, the "Prelude and Fugue in C" BWV 547, the "Canonic Variations on Von Himmel hoch, da komm ich her" BWV 769a, and the "Prelude and Fugue in G" BWV 541.

Some of these are masterpieces, none are in any sense minor, and Robert Quinney gives them all a crisply clear, detailed, spirited and supremely triumphant reading. I would say he is without doubt one of the great Bach organ exponents of our time, on the basis of this very worthy volume. The music speaks volumes to us in this modern era, if we only stop our infernal everyday fidgeting and listen.

And so I recommend this one to you very highly.