Allan Pettersson, Symphony No. 14, Norrkoping Symphony Orchestra, Christian Lindberg

There is nothing comparable in the modern new music literature to the later music of composer Allan Pettersson (1911-1980).. Like his compatriot Ingmar Bergman, he had a rather somber, even gloomy vision of the expressive arts, being the symphonic counterpart to Bergman's films in spirit. Pettersson himself draws the analogy in "The Song of Life." More on that (the video) in a minute.

As I've argued for some time, we allow and even embrace the darkness of mood of filmmakers (horror, Bergman), playwrights (tragedies...what could be darker than Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex?") and visual artists ("Guernica") where we have less tolerance for such things in music.Why?  Pettersson's later symphonic music has come under some fire over the years because it expresses undoubtedly in musical terms his frame of mind during his protracted period of suffering from a very painful illness. Some say it is self-indulgent. What is indulgence if not self expression, an aesthetic aim he had in common with all the "greats"? And it is noble and greatly dramatic music!

The Symphony No. 14 was one of the very last works, completed in 1978 (along with his 15th and the Violin Concerto). As such it is a culmination of his later style, a sprawling, single-movement work that stands at times at the very edge of tonality with chromatic melody lines that stretch endlessly forward and have some relationship to his ongoing pain and frame of mind of his last years. Yet if we did not know that, the music would still give us pause and speak to us eloquently.

So we have a recent recording of the 14th (BIS 2230 SACD) in the remarkable series of Pettersson's Symphonies by the Norkkoping Symphony under Christian Lindberg. The SACD sound quality is excellent, as is the performance. And the 14th is quite the seminal work, encompassing everything that late Pettersson was all about. It is most definitely not chipper fare, yet there is transcendance. All the suffering undergoes transformation by the very nature of the symphonic medium. The orchestra is large, the music beautifully unrelenting.

Is this akin to Bruckner in hell? Not exactly. The expansive sound has something far beyond Bruckner, yet has a hugeness, an epic grandeur not dissimilar. Pettersson's scoring for flutes, French horn, and above all the strings has a heroic quality and often enough seems central to his expressionist project. Think of Bruckner's scoring of the horns over a thick carpet of strings and you might find it enlightening.

Pettersson is one of the 20th century's most enigmatic composers, which is saying a great deal since enigma is an important part of the modernist project at times. He is irreducible to the modernism of his era, yet decidedly a parallel to "mainstream avant garde" music as represented by others in the later part of the century.

The 14th and its performance here is definitive Pettersson, an ideal point of departure if you do not know his music, and an affirmation for those that do. A wonderful bonus is the DVD included in the release--the very informing and moving video "The Song of Life," a lengthy series of conversational interviews with the composer from 1973-80. It is essential watching.

So take a plunge with this one if you can. Excellent in very many ways!

Augusta Read Thomas, Ritual Incantations

The advent of women among New Music composers has obtained a steady-state condition. There was a time when Ruth Crawford Seeger, Amy Beach and perhaps a handful of others were all we were aware of. That has changed. There are many now. And there is much good to hear, thankfully.

We have another worthy one in Augusta Read Thomas. Other than an anthology that includes Thomas (by Alarm Will Sound in a May 19, 2016 review here) I have not discussed her music much and have not experienced it a great deal until the present new release Ritual Incantations (Nimbus Alliance 6355). I notice from the CD booklet that there are at least six other Thomas CDs on the Nimbus label.

The current release provides us with a varied program of compositions, from solo piano to choral to symphonic. Five of eight works are in world premier recordings. Throughout one gets the impression of a lively and inventive musical mind at work, a modern contemporary composer that seeks a sort of middle ground between traditional tonal and high modern possibilities.

That the music is unself-consciously lucid and unpretentiously expressive is perhaps the first thing I noticed on listening.

There are too many varied compositions to comment upon in detail in this space. Suffice to say there is a memorability and worthiness to them all. The title work for cello and orchestra is the most ambitious, but there is much to be appreciated in the entire program, especially in "Chi" for string quartet, "Klee Musings" for piano trio, "Dappled Things" for male glee club, and "Eurythmy Etudes" for solo piano. The 1999 through 2017 provence of the compositions allows you to follow Ms. Thomas' development over time. The performances are uniformly good.

All in all Ritual Incantations gives us a varied and rewarding glimpse of a composer of true merit. I do recommend you hear this one.

Terry Riley, The Palmian Chord Ryddle, At the Royal Majestic, Nashville Symphony, Giancarlo Guerrero

Of all the so-called minimalist giants of the music, Terry Riley by now perhaps has strayed the furthest from the trance-repetition he had so much to do with establishing on his celebrated "In C." With this new recording (Naxos 8.559739) of two works from 2011 and 2013, respectively, a "new" Riley emerges definitively, though one might argue (correctly, in my view) that it has been there for a long time.

None of that should deter us from the music on this new CD, which occupies its own space without looking backwards. Each of the two works centers around a soloist in interaction with the orchestra, Tracy Silverman on electric violin for "The Palmian Chord Ryddle," Todd Wilson on organ for "At the Royal Majestic." The works are not so much vehicles for some super-saturated solo virtuosity, though both players are called upon to engage in complexities. The space between soloist and orchestra is more in the nature of a close collaboration, with musical togetherness the aim.

Turning to the works themselves, we hear the essence of Riley in spite of change and evolutions in style. After all, Riley excels at fashioning beautiful lines which intermesh together brightly. That is as much true of the new works as it is of "In C."

Here the lines interrelate but not in some strictly processual sense, they may repeat but then they develop in more symphonic ways than orthodox minimalism posits. And then there can be a glorious sort of anarchy as well.

"The Palmian Chord Riddle" (2011) is in seven short movements, beginning with a classical Indian feel in the long lined beginning but then developing outwards into a fantasia of possibilities where violin and orchestra dialog together expressively and at times in mysterioso fashion. It is after all a riddle, so the work you do to follow the music makes possible your own "solution." It is music that has idyllic mystique and event-a-mental drama and unfolding. The main motif winds its way through the music, reappearing with shifting contexts and continual redevelopment and contrasting counter subjects. It all makes for fascinating and ever more absorbing listens as one gradually grows into the musical flow.

"The Royal Majestic" (2013) has initially an old jazz riffing feel, especially in the organ. It repeats and evolves like a boogie-woogie only in Riley's mischievous and cosmically open hands. It goes outwards like a boogie-Bach projectile launched into space. The three movements take note of, conflate and deconstruct-construct a bluesy sensibility and subject it to all manner of musical clearings, throat clearings, spacious energy custers and even a kind of tip of the hat to old standards jazz. All this has some sort of relation to Foss's final movement to his "Baroque Variations," or I can hear it as a rejoiner, anyway. It may just be the dynamically ubiquitous nature of the organ part amidst wonderful clangor and tumult that jogs my aural memory?

And then there is a further movement outward like a Sufi-esque spinning gyroscope encompassing related pulsars of pentatonicity! A rather wild repartee to the opening work. And a pandora's box of possibilities coming out of the one. It is like Riley has become impatient with the orderly unfolding of something like "In C" and instead allowed the paint box of inspiration to spill and splatter its way into new, unexpected forms coming out of forms. Trust me. Listen carefully, repeatedly.

When the program ends, I have the urge to hear it again. It is like Mona Lisa's enigmatic smile. It is clear what is there but not at all clear that there is some simple, grounded answer to the "riddle." Guerrero, the Nashville Symphony, and soloists Silverman and Wilson do a bang-up job presenting the complex mosaics of the two works, refusing to simplify but instead giving all due weight to what Riley has put before us.

It is like a Zen rock garden--only in time are you aware that each grain of sand within is both similar and yet very different on close inspection. Sameness and difference are thrusting themselves at one another in this new music, in some ways like a super particle collider in slow motion, so that nothing has a simple provenance to anything else. That is delightful to me and I listen again and again to find more that is new and emergent. I do love that feeling of casting adrift and putting yourself in the music's hands. Join with Riley in this journey, too. It holds a solution. It does not matter to what!

Very recommended!

Mahler, Symphony No. 8, Utah Symphony, Thierry Fischer, Mormon Tabernacle Choir

It was in our lifetime that Mahler went from being a rarified taste to the Late Romantic poster child. Richard Strauss used to be that, hands down. Now he is more in eclipse I suppose you can say than in 1950 or so, when he was at a peak in reputation and popularity among typical classical listeners. At least that is my impression. Mahler's symphonies are defining and constitute a personal journey through a world he was very much a part of as conductor yet very much an outsider as Jew and innovative force, an enigma as a composer to those at the time and up until recently. Increasingly we listeners value those works and find they speak with a voice we can understand and relate to, at long last. And Strauss has become more marginalized. It did take us a while to get there, myself among them.

As much as I've appreciated Mahler's Symphony No. 8 over time, I have connected only tangentially to it on a personal level. Until now. Thierry Fischer directs the Utah Symphony and the Mormon Tabernacle Choir in a brand new recording (Fresh! Reference Records FR-725CD).

There is so much to the 8th that it can fail to hang together unless you experience it as a whole. And it is true too that a conductor and performance may also lack the sort of dedicated unity it takes to put the parts into a whole. The nickname "Symphony of a Thousand" certainly underscores the challenge of harnessing the strength of the massive forces the work demands. I have heard versions that sound a little bloated or lacking a center of gravity. No matter. Fischer and the Utah contingent meet the challenges and bring us a single-hearted reading that perhaps is less Wagnerian (a problem with some readings) than Mahlerian, less strictly giganticistic and more focused than some. And the SACD audio most definitely helps pull it all off as brilliant listening.

When we realize that late Mahler is not precisely the same as earlier Mahler, that there is less of the folk-sarcastic idiomatic and more of a kind of Romantic centrism, we also should attend to the fact that there are many parts, if not most parts that give us an evolved expression wholly Mahlerian. So we can begin to forget the earlier style when listening and embrace what is there. It is no longer exactly local, Vienna and surrounds as filtered through Mahler's place in both center and periphery. It is looking outward to a larger world, perhaps. As so he would also end up in New York. That takes a careful reading, a balanced sounding of the whole of the score. We get that here.

There is an ecstatic sadness to Mahler at times that doesn't entirely conform to what you expect to hear from a symphony master, a level of regret that the 8th has at its core.  The beauty is tinged with a kind of transcendent melancholy, especially in the middle movements.

And this Fischer-Utah recording is all the things that the 8th has in such abundance, a remarkably balanced, detailed reading that is huge and ecstatic when called upon to be that, and then lingeringly introspective and regretful, yet beautifully evocative when that is in order. The 8th has never been a favorite with me. But I can say now that it no longer seems so anomalous to me, thanks to this fine rendition.

Mahler represents one of the glorious last gasps of another age, yet also the later music is mindful that his time is at an end of an era though he had progressed beyond the tradition and had flowered as very much a brilliant original as much as any composer of our times.

I must say that I heartily recommend this recording. There may be better versions out there. There are no versions I have heard that I like so much.

John Cage, Christian Wolff, Apartment House, Phillip Thomas, CC

On today's 2-CD set CC (NMC  HCR16CD) we get fine interpretations of two important American New Music High Modern works, one a mainstay classic, the other something brand new. Both are for chamber orchestra, performed with dynamic grace by the ensemble Apartment House and piano soloist Phillip Thomas. The works fill a CD each and consist of John Cage's iconic "Concert for Piano and Orchestra" (1957-58) plus Christian Wolff's "Resistance" (2017) in its world premiere recording.

The "Concert for Piano and Orchestra" performance presented here is one of the very finest, rivaling the 1972 recording by Ensemble Negativa released in Germany as part of the now quite obscure LP set Music Before Revolution.

The current version takes up a full 53 grand minutes. It has been built from 84 separate "notations," various sets of codes and instructions for specific aural soundings in the "Solo for Piano" part, intended to be performed alongside of the separate orchestral parts, each a kind of solo performance which then in amalgam becomes the work as a whole. It exemplifies and embodies indetermination in the choice of musical texts, the enjoinment of each player to chose texts or abandon them at will, and the "clock hands" of the conductor, which speed up or slow down the progression of the music at the conductor's aesthetically spontaneous whim. The texts chosen for this particular performance differ from previous versions in that there is a combination of previously used notations and new reconstructions as well.

So this performance is in effect one-of-a-kind, as every one is designed to be. The result in the right hands is a landscape of synchronies and dis-synchronies, sound punctuations out of silences for 14 instruments plus piano soloist. Apartment House comes through with a beautifully creative sound-sculpture-in-motion. It is a superb reading. I react like I did for the Ensemble Negativa version when I first heard it, with the idea now firmly held in my head that "John Cage doesn't have to sound like s--t!" Indeed it sounds like what happens when musically sensitive instrumentalists are let loose and allowed to commune with the structural demands of wisely aleatoric Cage.

The new Christian Wolff work that comprises CD2, "Resistance," sounds quite different as it was meant to. The work was commissioned by Apartment House for performance alongside Cage's "Concert." The instrumentation used here is the same as for the Cage, though the composer allows for a greater sized ensemble according to various specifications. Keeping to the same ensemble size helps us compare the two works directly and makes them each fully a part of the set. The piano part is a constant and like Cage, Wolff juxtaposes variously notated and aleatorically variable texts. The sound is denser, perhaps slightly less abstract, and filled with intersections and running contemporary phrasings that are less dryly monumental than the Cage. In any case the musical results cohere and sound well as an exciting New Music excursion.

Taken as a whole or considered separately, both of these performances and the musical instructions and specifications that make them possible become very much high modernism at its finest and most intriguingly open. The Cage is a masterpiece of its time and Apartment House do it benchmark justice. The Wolff most certainly seems like a masterpiece-in-the making.

Anyone who already embraces high modernism encounters an essential, indispensable release here. Anyone who wishes to take the plunge into the new sounds maelstrom might well start with this! Do not hold back. Get it!

Dalia Raudonikyte With, Solitarius (Redux)

I am glad via this blog I can experience the music of numerous worthy contemporary composers. Yet sometimes life becomes hectic to the point where I find I know something and have reviewed it previously. My memory can suffer a slip when I have been grappling with distractions as I have so much lately. So it happens with the CD at hand. I already reviewed it last July and find out after I have written yet another article. OK, I might as well post it anyway! You can compare it with the earlier one and notice a consistency, yet also another slightly different take on things. So here it is:

Dalia Raudonikyte With comes center stage for us in a recent recording  of solo and string orchestra music, Solitarius (New Focus Recordings FCR186).

In each of the compositions on the program a literary, artistic-aesthetic or philosophical quote forms the reference point for the music at hand. So we have launching point pithiness from Seneca, Francis Picabia, Virginia Woolf, Frederic Chopin, Stefan Zweig and Thomas Wolfe, in each case underscoring a work of a distinctly modern, sometimes extended-technique-colored and an expanded tonal sort.

Receiving her MA in composition and piano education at the Lithuanian Music and Theatre Academy, With went on to study composition and electroacoustic music at the Norwegian Academy of music.

The program includes concentric works for solo clarinet,  for alto saxophone and electronics, for piano solo and for solo guitar. Centerpiecing the sequence is the searching "Grues et nix" for string orchestra, which contrasts with the solo fare and shows a fullness against the solo open sound dimensions of the surrounding works.

A constant is a poetic musical demeanor, a search for extended sonarities that express meaning and mood without being tied strictly to the text that inspires each.

It all is well played and a somewhat different take on what is possible today. Well worth your time.

Orlando Gibbons, Complete Concert Anthems, In Chains of Gold, The English Pre-Restoration Verse Anthem Vol. 1, Fretwork, Her Majestys Sagbuts and Cornetts, Magdalena Consort

In Early Music, you can freeze a moment in time, and if you lovingly reconstruct the moment and the moment is a good one there can be magic. Fretwork, His Majestys Sagbuts and Cornetts, and the Magdalena Consort take a passing but valuable moment in the English Pre-Reformation, freeze it and reconstruct it with stunning sonance. And so we have Orlando Gibbons' Complete Consort Anthems as Volume 1 of The English Pre-Reformation Verse Anthem, In Chains of Gold (Signum 511).

The music is performed with period accuracy and vital enthusiasm. The title comes from a 1597 text by Thomas Morley, where he expresses the desire for a choral ensemble that "draw[s] the hearer...in chains of gold by the ears to the consideration of holy things." Gibbons' Anthems provide ample means, an eloquent contrapuntal, mellifluous vehicle to allow the choral Magdalena Consort a way clear to some profound, earthy heaven of music. They and their instrumental cohorts give us every reason to appreciate this music in all its specific period glory.

The vocalist are beautifully central to this fine program. They articulate each part with a kind of period purity that brings out the ravishing starkness without artifice, a sweetness born of immersion and singular focus.

The brass ensemble has great color. It punctuates and gives breath and breadth to the soundings when it is present. Harp and organ plus five viols add sonorous depth and a special glow this period music attains when allowed to return to its proper instrumentation and method of delivery.

Gibbons has in the past suffered from lackluster and inauthentic performance practices. You might say that of much of the vocal music of similar time and place, certainly in the period of recordings from say 1950-1970. But Gibbons enchants when he is allowed to sound as he wished to sound. The Magdalena Consort and accompaniment give us every reason to grasp and embrace the unfrozen moment of music we may have been in too great a hurry to stop and truly appreciate until now. We have a rare opportunity here to stop the rush toward ever changing teleology that music history can often be. It matters not for the moment what came before, what came after.

We are invited to savor the beauty of what once was for a time only, yet speaks to us now without a need to put together before and after. That is what the Early Music movement does at its best. The Consort and assembled musicians give us ideal readings. It allows us to experience what once was in ways that embody yet transcend a time long gone. Kudos! Any adventuresome listener, archaist, or wide-eared adept will find this program enlightening and enrapturing. Highly recommended.