Giovanna Pessi, Susanna Wallumrod, "If Grief Could Wait," Singular Arrangements of Purcell, Cohen, Drake, Wallumrod

If Grief Could Wait (ECM New Series) offers a remarkable nexus of historically diverse stylistic elements, subjected to the crucible of Giovanna Pessi's arrangements, her harp and the pure-tongued vocal songbird beauty of Susanna Wallumrod. To be more specific, the two have made a most interesting selection of the songs of Henry Purcell, plus the 20th century ballads of Leonard Cohen and Nick Drake, and several by Ms. Wallumrod herself, and gone on to create arrangements of sheer beauty that manage to transcend both early music performance practices and those of the folk songwriting of the modern era to bring us to a place somewhere without location in concrete time.

The ensemble of Pessi's harp, Jane Achtman's viola da gamba and Marco Ambrosini's nyckelharpa gives off a resonant, contemplative sweet-sorrow in keeping with Late Medieval-Renaissance song ethos. When conjoined with the deeply thoughtful lyrics & Ms. Wallumrod's vocal unpretentiousness and beauty, a spell of magic weaves its way through the performances that puts it in a world of its own.

One is vaguely reminded of the folk qualities of Joanna Newsom and early Joni Mitchell as one is simultaneously put into a sweet melancholic mood brought on by the nearly timeless quality of the songs, of the new world meeting the old without scullying the impact and essence of either sensibilities.

The ensemble arrangements, the gentle beauty of the harp ensemble, Ms. Wallumrod's movingly restrained, wistful voice and the lyric beauty of the songs make for an extraordinary listening experience.

This is one of those rare albums that transcends time and place to transport us into a never-never land of forgotten worlds, of the impossible longings of people both here and no longer here. In the process Henry Purcell's songs never sounded so appealing, nor has Leonard Cohen's for that matter.

It will be available in the States in about a week. By all means, if you are a musical dreamer, do not hesitate to get it and immerse yourself in its joyous sorrows. Pessi and Wallumrod bring us to a place both fragile-vulnerable and strongly transcendent. Do not miss it!

Isabelle Faust, Berg/Beethoven Violin Concertos, Claudio Abbado, Orchestra Mozart

Isabelle Faust brings something to the violin concerto repertoire that cannot really be taught--a restrained passion and dreamy quality to her playing, along with a ravishing tone. In a few days her recording of the Berg and Beethoven Concertos (Harmonia Mundi) will be released, accompanied by the Orchestra Mozart under the baton of the estimable Claudio Abbado.

The Berg Concerto has the quality of wistful sorrow and a poetic remembrance of loss, of things past (its subtitle is "On the Death of An Angel" and it was dedicated to the memory of a young lady Berg knew, stricken and taken from the world at an early age). Ms. Faust and Maestro Abbado bring out those qualities superbly with a kind of liquidity and flow to the performance I can't recall ever hearing so affectively handled. It is a most moving performance, one of the very best I have heard.

Beethoven's concerto of course has another series of moods which Faust and Abbado handle nicely. Isabelle comes through with a more bravura version of her sweetness of tone, and Abaddo and Orchestra Mozart give us all the nuances of this masterwork in all the right places.

All I can say is "Bravo!" An excellent recording in excellent sound. The Berg is stunning. The Beethoven uplifting and upbeat.

Reto Bieri, "Contrechant: Music for Clarinet Solo"

New music/modern classical music makes demands upon the performer in ways no style of music has previously known (though new jazz can do so as well, sometimes in quite different ways). The expansion or absence of pitch centers at times means that musicians and vocalists must develop an extraordinarily advanced sense of intervallic acumen and a more complex sense of the relationships between multiple tones in a piece (beyond conventional harmonic recognition). The often irregular and otherwise advanced precision rhythmic figuration places demands on the performers that can be considerable. And for many if not most instruments and vocalists as well a body of new sound producing techniques have arisen over the past 100 years, which need to be mastered along with those of conventional classical music. In contrast to an ultra-precise production of pitch, color, timing and dynamic, there are works that expect performers to develop a keen aural imagination and ability to improvise in the course of realizing a piece.

All these things come to the fore in woodwind performance practice, including of course music for the clarinet. With this in mind we look at a recent CD of very modern music for solo clarinet, Contrechant (ECM New Series 2209), performed by Reto Bieri. There are seven demanding works by six composers, some of the latter well known and some not as well. Luciano Berio, Heinz Holliger, Elliott Carter, Peter Eotvos, Gergely Vajda and Salvatore Sciarrino are each represented, Heinz Holliger with two works.

Clarinetist Rero Bieri, Swiss National, Julliard trained, unleashes a formidable arsenal of modern techniques for the clarinet in a recital where brilliant musicianship and aural poetics conjoin nicely. He has mastered the modern idiom in ways that put him at the forefront of virtuoso wind exponents practicing today. The works make considerable demands. Bieri saturates the performance soundstage with a dazzling array of color, contrast and expressivity.

It is most certainly a tour de force performance. The works are varied and ever reshaping one's notion of the subtle nuances of the instrument and its expressive capabilities today. Of course a large part of that has to do with the exceptional abilities of Maestro Bieri.

Contrechant deserves landmark status as a marvelously invigorating melding of technique and aesthetic sensibility, composition and performance, musical abstraction and concrete sound color invention. Bravo!

Elliott Miles McKinley, String Quartets, The Martinu Quartet

The institution of the string quartet has remained a central if sometimes more "inner-sanctum" oriented part of classical music since Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert wrote their highly involved masterpieces for the configuration. It remains an idiomatic kind of musical retreat, often a special space for the most seriously new-form-seeking aspects of a composer's works through to today.

Elliott Miles McKinley embodies that "today" with at least six string quartets in hand. The Martinu Quartet commissioned Nos. 4-6 and perform them with great spirit and presence on the Navona (5855) release of same.

This is music of considerable depth and subtlety. High modernist for the most part, rhythmically sophisticated, the works in a way are the equivalent to some of the painterly abstractions of the New York School and beyond, in that they are intended as pure music, untrammeled by considerations of extra-musical references or vernacular expressions. Like Mozart referenced Haydn, McKinley most certainly has given some attention to the quartets of Bela Bartok and Elliott Carter. It's a lineage he fits in with and to me does not at all suffer by the comparison, but rather finds a way to extend the modernist tradition with his own inventive take.

I don't feel that a detailed analysis in this space is practical; nor do I think that it would make a great deal of difference to your appreciation of works you have not yet heard. Why? First of all because it would take me some weeks to do the music justice and secondly because my blogs tend to point the reader toward good and interesting music, more than they try to express the verbal equivalent of that music in any detailed way. Since the map cannot be the territory and overarching form becomes apparent in many sophisticated modern works through a study of the scores, etc., I shall remain mute on the details, except to say that there are many sublime moments to be heard here.

Suffice to say that Elliott McKinley has gone the distance in creating three original modern quartets and the Martinu Quartet do a fabulous job recreating them for our ears.

This one is definitely recommended!

Lisa Smirnova, Georg Friedrich Handel's "Die Acht Grossen Suiten": Handel's Eight Suites, Beautifully Performed on Piano

There was a time in my purist-thinking youth when I distained the performance of Baroque era harpsichord works on the piano. No, I thought, this is inauthentic. So I stuck with my Wanda Landowska LPs and sported a holier-than-thou attitude. Then I heard Glenn Gould play Bach, and Jorge Demus...and I quickly changed my mind.

Russian-Austrian pianist Lisa Smirnov brings up-to-date the tradition of using the expressive and sonoric possibilities of the modern pianoforte to bring out the glowing musical phraseology of a Baroque masterpiece--in this case Handel's Die Acht Grossen Suiten (ECM New Series 2-CD 2213/14), which is also known as "The Eight London Suites" or "Suites de Pieces pour le Clavecin."

She worked on the entire opus for five years. What she does with it is in part what you expect from a world-class pianist, to use the dynamic swell of the modern piano and its variable articulation responsiveness to build up a very expressive music ediface. The music sings, the inner and outer parts are laid out before us with clarity, logic and poetic charm. The full suite is rarely presented in its entirety and with Ms. Smirnova's interpretive acumen, it gives the listener a new way into the brilliance of Handel the keyboard virtuoso.

The music is extraordinarily and perhaps I realized that as if for the first time on extended listenings to this release. Handel is surely one of the brilliant melodists of his or any time. Ms. Smirnova helps us come to terms with that brilliance in performances that let the principal melodies sing forth, the contrapuntal support and figuration assuming more of a supporting role. And her deft use (but not over-use) of rubato heightens the experience.

Here we have more than two-hours of musical bliss! Sterlingly beautiful performances of a great work of the Handelian mastermind, recording with sparkling audio presence. I come away from it a happy man.

Heavy Pedal: Works for Organ

Long before there was heavy metal...there was heavy organ sounds. There's a CD that reminds you of how the concert organ can hold forth in ways that Led Zeppelin, say, cannot. And we take a look at it today. With a title like Heavy Pedal (Navona 5853) you know you are in for some dynamically BIG sounds. And that is what you get on this all-organ release. Thanks to in part nearly 100 years of Gothic horror films, many of us (myself included) associate the grand cathedral organ at full pedal with an eerieness that of course was sometimes there to begin with. After all the function of classic cathedral organ music at times was to represent the mystery of the faith, the awesome power of the godhead, the ineffable presence of the sacred unknowable in aural terms. Before the large symphony orchestra held sway it was the loudest music, more or less, that one could hear in one's everyday life. That is, if one lived in at least a moderate-sized town with a suitably large cathedral housing a grand organ.

This album has some of that. But of course none of it was composed to strike fear in our hearts. Rather it is the grandeur of the full organ sonority that is on display.

There are eight compositions composed by five 20th-21st Century composers. You probably are not overly familiar with them unless you are an organ repertoire specialist. We get works by Tadd Russo, Curt Cacioppo, Ron Nagorcka, Wilhelm Middleschulte and Michael Summers. There are big modern Gothic roars (Tadd Russo), a piece evocative of Australian Native Residents, complete with didjeredu (Nagorcka), a virtuoso piece for pedals alone, based on a theme of Bach (Middelschulte), English folksong variations (Summers) and more besides. It's not really music to invoke images of horror, nor is any of it intended to be. It is modern, but not avant garde music that takes as a starting point a certain reverence for the classic cathedral organ and the works that went before. You don't hear a great deal of Messiaen as influence, but there is the presence of the French composers that preceeded him and their winding chromatics. Then too there is a channeling of the contrapuntal classical masters Bach and Buxtehude in direct and indirect ways. All serve in part as reference points.

It is a sure-fire winner for those who cherish the organ tradition and crave the spice of modernity. And some of it sounds downright spooky. It will get a prominent spot on my CD racks somewhere between Alain and Messiaen.

Craig Madden Morris, "Dreams:" Modern Chamber Music

There are times when music may not be ultra-advanced catagorically yet be so captivating that one doesn't care. The composer Craig Madden Morris and his chamber music on the album Dreams (Ravello 7813) gives us such a time.

There is lyricism, formal heft, the beautifully played parts (for example Christine Kwak's violin performances are quite lovely) and an idiomatic craftsmanship/inspiration that makes it all a joy to hear.

The piano reduction version of Morris' "Violin Concerto" is a perfect example of this. A ravishing violin presence, an intimate, harmonically early modern-later romantic context played sensitively by Eduard Laurel on piano, all facets come together for a work that brings beauty into your world, one note at a time.

The same is true of the other works presented here: solo piano on "Dream Songs" and "Tropical Dances," cello and piano on "Cello Rhapsody." All serve to map out Morris's most definite stylistic parameters, and all bring a timelessness into play that does not always apply to those working along more-or-less traditional lines. I would love to hear the orchestral versions of the several piano reductions but for now this is something to appreciate repeatedly and happily.