Michael Hersch, I Hope We Get A Chance to Visit Soon

I write in spite of my inclination lately, for we live in somber times. I've heard news commentators in the last few weeks assert that we live within a mental health crisis, with long-term effects of pandemic and politics, and the accompanying stress of everyday life taking its toll. I myself am not joyously happy these days, though I maintain a balance anyway. Surely some folks in the headlines lately seem disturbed; their actions might best be explained by a chronic point of reference in ir-reality, not to mention a-sociality?

So is this a time to hear music on a decidedly down frame of reference? Not any less than it is always timely to take in a Shakespearian tragedy, for example. In such cases transcendence is the point. I've said such things here before. It is of course critical that the music be well done, or else why bother?

Today I offer you some thoughts about a great example of such a thing, I Hope We Get A Chance to Visit Soon (New Focus Recordings FCR 251)  by Michael Hersch. It is a 16 part dramatic narrative work for two sopranos (Ah Young Hong and Kiera Duffy) with a chamber orchestra (Musicians of the Mahler Chamber Orchestra conducted by Tito Munoz).

It is a live recording from the Aldeburgh Music Festival and most certainly is high quality sonically. Clocking in at a little over an hour the present performance of the work seems definitive.

The work reaffirms the importance these days of Michael Hersch as one of the leading living voices of US High Modernism. I've covered a fair amount of his music on these pages (type name in search box above for those).

This one looks at the gradually unfolding trauma of a woman who finds she has a tumor that turns out not to be benign. The two sopranos express the progression of the affliction both matter-of-factly and poetically. It follows on the heels of Hersch's "On the Threshold of Winter" (2012) based upon texts by poet Marin Sorescu, who died of cancer in 1996.  

The present work Hersch conceived of as a companion piece and comes to terms with the loss of a close friend, Mary Harris O'Reilly in 2009, also from cancer. The texts for "Hope" are based on letters O'Reilly wrote Hersch plus poetic fragments by Rebecca Elson.

The music and sung text follow the steady progress of the cancer in spite of medical interventions. In the liners Christopher Hailey notes the rather unprecedented aestheticizaton of cancer in both works and indeed it is not your usual dramatic focus. On the other hand the absolute sincerity of the treatment helps us in feeling this as an unforced memento mori of a dear friend, with the obvious care that went into setting these texts.

Perhaps only those who have lost friends or family in slow procession to the inexorable march of cancer can fully appreciate the nuances of this drama. The music is within Hersch's high expressionist syntax and we relate the musical structure understandably with the emotional turmoil of gradual loss. And yet we do it primarily in terms of the internal experience of the patient. We come to feel personally the endless struggle as she must have, and the music portrays it in elaborately stark terms, in a readily express manner you who know Hersch's ways are not surprised to hear.

This is sad music but as one might hope music that in its very artfulness adds both tribute and transcendence, and gives dignity to the long suffering progression it immerses itself within.

Is it the musical equivalent in a way to plunging in an ice-cold stream after spending time in a sweathouse? It may shock the sensibilities by its unstinting honesty, but it remains always the expression of a high art.

Just listen!

Jordan Dykstra, The Arrow of Time

To read all of Proust, to look into representations of time, to experience Bergman's Seventh Seal  is to alter the way you experience life, or at least that's so to me. Now it is time for me to add Jordan Dykstra's The Arrow of Time (New World 80823-2), a CD that's been out for a few months but has caught my attention definitively in the last week.

It consists of five varied but nearly cinematic works, culminating in the title work. Jordan Dykstra, the liners tell us, has been on the music scene for 15 years, classical, improv, avant garde, etc. The music we hear on this new program proceeds with both deliberation and openness, with conventional chamber ensembles and/or electroacoustics. And I am so glad I have this to hear again.

There is a timeless timefulness to this music, which oftimes involves successive layers of sustain with changing timbral colors, gradual unfoldings that have a wordless narrative quality, yet they "mean" without saying, brightly so.

Layering of sustains are paramount in the opening "Fathom Peaks Unseen" (2015/16) (for 2 violins, viola, cello, double bass and crotales), also the ensuing "Ghosting No. 3" (2017) (for two violas, vibes, synthesizer and reed organ), then also "Orbits" (2016/17) (for viola, sine tones and chen).  

Throughout, the music forms and unforms as drones, harmonies, and sheer sound space. All has the abstraction of meaning more so than the sheer materiality of things. As the music continually builds and shifts, we experience a kind of cognitive motion within self as a kind of analog to the aural experience. Or anyway I feel that listening.

By the time we get to "In the Snow" (2018) (for violin, viola and cello) the sustains are slow moving with brief silences that mark out a periodicity, and so bring us to a post-hypnotic way of experiencing it all. Then comes a mid-section where glisses are added starkly at the beginning of each sustain for contrast. They disappear after a time for the feeling of a making bare again, perhaps roughly standing for the white bareness of an increasingly gathering snow cover?

"The Arrow of Time" (2019) finale puts us down in a new place as it builds with piano, siren, drumbeats and "fixed media playback," into a very narrative-formed unfolding that seems almost Bergman-like in its evocative quality, complete with an unrelenting pulse that evolves into the tick of an ancient clock that in turn evolves and gets reinforcement via complementary contrast sounds. As you listen it feels like time is inexorably there and makes itself felt with real aural force, moment to moment. Bravo to this one! It is unforgettable in its own way.

After a few hearings I gradually came to find deep form and meaning in it all. Jordan Dykstra chimes in with real importance. And he manages to hit home whatever he does here. Is this the music of the future? Who knows, but it certainly captures a recent feeling, a place where we are as it so all happens. And part of the point is the "so all happens" feeling of this music. Hurrah!

Carolyn Surrick & Ronn McFarlane, Fermi's Paradox, Music for Lute and Viola da Gamba

 

Fermi's Paradox is all about how we do not have evidence of other intelligent life elsewhere even though the promising conditions in some sectors of the Universe would seem to indicate that we should have already found at least some traces of it. Why is that? 

The lute and viola da gamba album Fermi's Paradox (Sono Luminus DSL-92244) is a musical rumination on this conundrum, the entire album named after the magical opening piece lutenist Ronn McFarlane composed for the album. It's one of his three Folk-Early-Neo-Lyric song-like items he performs on the album with Carolyn Surrick on viola da gamba. They are excellent players both and well attendant upon one another's presences for these and some gem-like settings of old English Folk ditties, some Early Music pearls and some otherwise well-healed arrangements of other melodic excellences throughout.

The contrast and flow of the repertoire makes for a continually high listener interest level that's to the gallantry of the performances and beautify of the parts working together.

So we get gigs, jigs, reels and wonderful feels out of such fare as the traditional Irish "She Moved Through the Fair," the English classic "John Barleycorn," the traditional Swedish "Sjungar-Lars Visa" to name a representative few, then Early Music savories by the likes of Dowland, Marin Marais, Hassler, Bach, Telemann, and then present-day surprises like Duane Allman's "Little Martha," plus staples like "Ave Maria," "Amazing Grace," etc.

It is the refusal to stay put in one definite period or genre that makes this of a somewhat surprising appeal, and by that I mean it surprises because everything hangs together even though one would not expect to combine and sequence them all in quite this way.  McFarlane is a marvelous lutenist, as subtle as he is accomplished and Ms. Surrick makes a perfectly vivid contrast with her own supreme musicality. 

Get this one for the sheer pleasure of it.

Beauty Crying Forth, Flute Music By Women Across Time, Sarah Frisof, Daniel Pesca

 

An album generally starts in your experience with a cover image. So the image above peered back at me as I opened the package that contained it. The title told me what to expect, Beauty Crying Forth, Flute Music By Women Across Time (Furious Artisans FACD6826). It is performed, as the jacket explained, by Sarah Frisof on flute, Daniel Pesca at the piano, and for one work Hannah Collins joining in on cello.

Of course it is in the listening that everything takes form. So it is, very noticeably so, with this album. The deep impression one gets immediately is what a remarkable flautist is Sarah Frisof. She has a markedly sweet and musical tone, considerable agility and a sure and poetic sense of phrasing. Pianist Daniel Pesca has interpretive talent in his own way, plus too a personal commitment to sounding his part with care and imagination. In tandem the two together approach every work with a fresh start and a feel for the individuality of each piece. Hannah Collins fits right in too, quite impressively, on the Saariaho work she participates in.

And that strength of individual performance character ideally suits the wide-ranging program, spanning from Clara Schumann's expressively intimate "Three Romances" of 1853 through to Shulamit Ran's now-ish 2014 "Birds of Paradise."

The opening "Alma" (2007) by Tania Leon brilliantly manages to bring an opening and closing New Music representation of wind chimes to a virtuoso array of kaleidoscopic middle sections of great spirit, one passage sounding especially, pronouncedly Cuban-Latin-New Music fused. It is all a delight.

Clara's "Romances" follows, giving us a ravishingly contrasting lyrical tenderness and some soaring flute-piano interplay. Sarah's flute literally glows with warmth here and we feel the inventive period talent of Ms. Schumann fully and happily. 

Amy Williams contrasts the above with the eleven movement, very boldly New Music work "First Lines." It gives us fascinatingly vivid and ornately varying sound-color miniatures with a great deal of panache. 

The gone-much-too-soon Lili Boulanger (1893-1918) appears before us with the brightly beautiful brief and Impressionistic gems "Nocturne" and "D'un matin de printemps," played with lovely care. Just these alone make all worthwhile.

Next we get the spacefully sonic trio for flute, cello and piano, the 1998 "Cendres" by Kaija Saariaho. It bursts forward with a marvelously evocative quality, suggesting and making present landscapes that burst forward for miles and must be taken in with their many imaginative musical motions. Marvelous.

The finale in "Birds of Paradise" brings to us the immediacy of the last decade (2014) and Shulamit Ran's energetically dynamic, deeply contemplative, probing music.

So we end where we began, roughly in the present, having traversed the now and the then with some excellent music by women composers of real stature, played with exceptional poise by Sarah Frisof, Daniel Pesca and Hannah Collins. Strongly recommended for anyone who loves the flute and is open to great chamber music by women past and present. Bravo!   

Gene Pritsker, EroicAnization

 

With the music of Gene Pritsker a reliable constant is his brilliant unexpectedness, it seems to me. Last month (December) marked the 250th birthday of Beethoven. Part of the festivities honoring the occasion surely is Gene's album EroicAnization (Composer's Condordance), which selects musical passages from the 3rd Symphony and in one instance "Fur Elise" to rework them extensively into various stylistic exceptionalities. 

So for example the opening "Ludwig's Night Out" combines Gene's noteful electric guitar work with electric piano, bass and drums for a Fusion wonderment that makes a very different sense out of Beethoven while retaining Ludwig's melodic edge.

"Eroica Erupted" takes an old recording of the Eroica and electronically manipulates it, while adding a sort of demonically lively Hip Hop for strings, drums, etc. As is the case throughout the album, it is not just what Gene does to the Beethoven lines, it is the how of the transformation, how it works as something unleashed anew. 

"Eroica Extracted" makes lyrical ensemble sense out of another passage extracted from a recording and pulled apart as the ensemble puts it back together again differently, happily, contrapuntally engaging it and creating something wholly new amidst hypnotic counterlines that help put it all together.

"Erotic Eroica" makes up a slinky progressive heaviness that feels right, somehow. 

"Eulogy Eroica" gives us a plaintive and thoughtful chamber ensemble movement, then a nicely engaged song with an expressive vocal in a Modern Contemporary Pop sort of way with an edginess that one might expect from Pritsker. 

"Erroneous Eroica" works very productively with the scherzo--an orchestral excerpt as electronic source along with ensemble. It is wonderfully playful, wild and funny, too. Everything works together to conjure surprising variations and hairpin turns away from an expected destination.

"Eka Tala Eroica" gives us a sort of Indianization in ways that intrigue and delight. 

Finally "Fur Elise Charleston"--is just what the title suggests. It has that old band 1920s sound and yet it is indeed "Fur Elise" in a lively disguise. Then just as one thinks one knows what is next, up comes rap from the MC! It is funny but brilliant, too.

So we have a homage to the great Ludwig that marks his milestone birthday in ways that are really quite fun and substantive, typically Pritzkerian in that it takes nothing for granted and traces a contemporary Modern set of ties back to dear old Beethoven without a conscious throwback sort of nostalgia. It is someth9ng  stylistically possible only right now, today, and for that matter something nobody else but Gene Pritsker could quite pull off so convincingly. Bravo!

Leslie Tung, Beethoven, Piano Sonatas Nos. 14, 8 & 13

 

Ludwig van Beethoven was born in December of 1770 and if I did not mark the 250th anniversary of it last month in truth I celebrate it often enough by experiencing his music in my life continually ever since at around 13 years of age I came upon his Eroica. Here today and tomorrow however I will mark the anniversary anyway. Today there is pianist Leslie Tung doing the Piano Sonatas Nos. 14, 8 and 13 (MSR Classics MS 1733), 14 of course known as the "Moonlight Sonata" and 8 as the "Pathetique." 

The first thing that sets this apart from others is the fact that Maestro Tung makes use of a pianoforte built by Janine Johnson and Paul Poletti in 1983. It is based on a c.1795 instrument by Johan Lodewijk Dulcken, Munich. The date and province of the instrument means that it is one hopes characteristic of the sound of the pianos Beethoven played and composed upon in his prime. Of course the pianos from that period have a quieter and sweeter sound to them in general, making the pianissimo passages more delicate and fragile, the fortissimo passages less clangorous. I am no expert as to the hows and whys of such things but the less tempered tunings of period instruments is not a large factor in this particular reconstruction. Yet there is still a sort of shimmering sound to the notes, especially mid-register. And so much the better for it.

Leslie Tung gives us poetic readings of all three sonatas, readings that make creative and very musical use of the characteristics of the period-style piano. Listen to the adagio cantabile movement from Sonata 8 and you will be treated to a beautiful synergy of artist and instrument. 

The misted mooniness of the opening movement of the "Moonlight Sonata" is also a rather remarkable melding of artist and piano. I cannot help but imagine that Ludwig would have approved. Maestro Tung has plenty of technique on display throughout, but the emphasis is on the actually sounding, the bringing to bear of the notes as Beethoven himself might have imagined them played when he wrote each sonata. What an extraordinary artist was this Beethoven, we inevitably think as we hear Maestro Tung put all three sonatas through their paces with care, imagination, reflectiveness and dash. Listen to the last movement of the Moonlight Sonata for the uncanny synchronicity of artist and instrument, the slight rubato to emphasize the inner connectedness and the heroics of the brilliant passagework. It all makes sense.

In Nietzsche terms these readings are more Apollonian than Dionysian. And nicely the better for that. You may not come away from this program thinking "what an amazing pianist." It is more "what an interestingly faithful representation of Beethoven." 

I am glad to hear and have this one. I reminds me of course of the very happy part of birthday 250! Give this one a hearing. Recommended.

Alexina Louie, Take The Dog Sled, Evie Mark, Akinisie Sivuarapik, Esprit Orchestra, Alex Pauk

 

Some music fits a season so well that it seems right to hear it at that point. It is true of  deep winter and the Alexina Louie work for Inuit Throat Singers and Ensemble, Take The Dog Sled (Centrediscs CMCCD 28320).  The performance features seven musicians from the Esprit Orchestra and throat singers Evie Mark and Akinisie Sivuarapik, all under the direction of conductor Alex Pauk.

The work was commissioned by Kent Nagano and the Montreal Symphony Orchestra, completed in 2008 and first performed by the MSO during their tour of Nunavek in far Northern Quebec. After a good number of performances we happily have this worthy recording.

The work centers around an adaptation of traditional Inuit Game Songs, a unique musical pastime for two singers with greatly varying, aurally fascinating duet articulations of pitched throat singing and percussively breathed vocal twists and turns. There is nothing quite like this music in sound quality, the interlocking vocal bursts proceeding with unprecedented timbral depth through close repetitions of short call-and-response phrases.

Take The Dog Sled utilizes Game Song phrasing sung by the two throat singers, countered with a chamber orchestra that takes its musical form in part from Game Song phrasings and adds depictive open tonal passages that in the eight-part whole give a vivid impression of the plasticity of Inuit social and everyday life. It at times seems almost a concerto for throat singers and ensemble, yet it travels beyond that to instrumental tutti that take it all some distance from the short phrased vocals yet are shot through with their influence.

This is music both evocative and fun, seriously expressive yet filled with a joy of gaming in its own way. It is not your expected Modern Chamber fare and so refreshing in its somewhat independant cast. Very recommended.