Jakob Schoenberg, "Another Schoenberg"

The past is never really set in stone, except as the gravestones and monuments that remain with us from other eras. And even they can be toppled or fall into ruin. It applies to music as well as anything. Music history is in reality a fluid, plastic thing, subject to revisions and additions (and deletions) like any other form of knowledge over time.

Enter one Jakob Schoenberg (1900-1956), a composer with the same last name, of course, as the famous one. And then enter a two-CD set of his music, Another Schoenberg (Edition Hassler Profil PH 12023). Before hearing this new set I knew nothing of the composer, and I rightly suppose there are many others who didn't/don't as well. There are reasons we don't and this is not the place to go into that. But it is not for reason of the quality of his music, as this set makes quite clear.

The set covers some wonderful lieder and chamber music, impressively performed. If this set is representative, as I assume it is, much of his musical output reflects and pays tribute to his Jewish heritage, either directly or as a melodic-scalular backbone.

So we have a number of excellent song cycles in the set that rework traditional Hebraic song material. Soprano Tehila Nini Goldstein does full justice to the music, as do the chamber players involved as called upon.

In addition to the songs there is a "Hasidic Suite for Piano," a Sonata for Violin and Piano and a Piano Quartet. Throughout we hear music that is extraordinary in the various ways it combines an early modernism with Jewish tonality. This is no "also-ran" composer, but rather one to listen to closely and savor.

Jakob Schoenberg, in short, fully deserves our listening attention, at least in terms of the works included in this disk set. I hope we can hear in subsequent volumes, assuming there are scores available, his music for larger forces. In the meantime this one is a find! Hear it and you'll hear something very good indeed.

John Cage, Music for Piano Volume 4, Giancarlo Simonacci

I said something like this yesterday but it bears repeating and expanding. There are artists of such importance that it takes years to grasp fully what they are about. John Cage is one of them. If you listen to and begin to understand his music over time, you hear differently. And not just music. You hear the world in a more meaningful way.

I can remember my first encounter with his music. The early electronic mixes I grasped immediately, in part because it was a era where these sorts of collaged sounds had become already a part of musical counter-culture. But the instrumental music. I'd get to the long silences and automatically get up off my chair to flip the record. It exasperated me. Was the music over or what? And the sounds themselves. Were they just a random hodgepodge? No and even if they were (they weren't) you started to hear that differently. Performers too over the years have become much more fully cognizant, I think, of the meaning of it all, the sensuality of it, the cosmic quality if you will.

So here we are celebrating Cage's Centennial. He'd be 100 this year had he lived. There is a release that celebrates it quietly and profoundly, in ways John would have liked. I refer to Giancarlo Simonacci's Piano Music Volume 4 (Brilliant Classics 9263), a three-CD set.

There are works of importance to be had here, played with intelligence and sensitivity. The "Music for Piano", all 84 pieces from 1952-53, are included, as are some prime later works: ASLSP from 1985, and several versions of ONE (1987-90).

These are works of high abstraction, endlessly listenable because extraordinarily counterintuitive. There is no satiation point with this music because there is no point where you fully internalize it. That also means that a first hearing for the uninitiated may be confusing, incomprehensible. That's a given and it takes time to understand Cage, perhaps a lifetime. It doesn't take that long to enter John's musical world however. If you don't force your expectations on this music and let it go its way, it is very contemplative, rather rapidly so.

These are works that demand an extraordinary sensibility on the part of the performer. There's no one way to do the music. But then there are versions that may not come across well nevertheless. Giancarlo Simonacci does not give us such versions here. He does the opposite. These are versions as spirited and simultaneously as detached (in a Zen sort of way) as I've heard. They are beautiful, if Cage would accept that as a valid categorization. Beautiful Cage. Music to live with a lifetime. Music that changed music. Essential, in other words.

John Cage, Music for an Aquatic Ballet, Music for Carillon No. 6, Jonathan Faralli, Roberto Fabbriciani

The John Cage (1912-1992) Centennial reminds us of the incredibly productive output and conceptually game-changing outlook of the American composer while he lived. There were so many different aspects of his music and what it meant, each important and influential, and in many ways we are still catching up to how far he went. This is no less true of performance realizations as it is of listener appreciation and consciousness-raising.

Both aspects are affected on the eight-work disk recently released by Roberto Fabbriciani (flutes) and Jonathan Faralli (percussion), Music for an Aquatic Ballet, Music for Carillon No. 6 (Brilliant 9284).

It's a whirlwind journey through some of Cage's unrecorded and rarely recorded works. It also features works realized in unique versions by the duo.

"Music for an Aquatic Ballet" was performed in 1938 at the National Aquatic Show in LA. The score has been lost but descriptions survive of a piece centered around tam tams and gongs played in the water in part to allow the synchronized swimmers to follow the music even when submerged. Fabbriciani and Faralli realize very freely a version for flute, percussion and tape which is in effect a re-composition in tribute to the lost work and in its spirit.

What follows are quirky, creative and quite listenable versions of works that span much of his career.

There are concrete, natural and human sounds on tape as called for, and the flute and percussion work is exemplary.

The album ends with a first recording of Cage's "Music for Carillon No. 6" in a version for flute and percussion. It was never performed in Cage's lifetime and this is a first recording.

What is most important, ultimately, is that Fabbriciani and Faralli have created a memorable program of Cagean music that is fascinating and very musical. It's a fine disk and will most certainly appeal to the adventurous listeners out there, not only confirmed Cage fans.

Donnacha Dennehy, Lisa Moore, Stainless Staining

The pulsation, the beat if you will, of some of the early minimalists was one of the things that attracted me to their music. Riley and Reich did landmark works in a gradualist realm, but they also "rocked out" in their own way. Some composers got away from the pulse in years following, for better or lesser results, but I still find In C and Reich's instrumental/vocal pieces of his early-mid post-electronic period to be works I continue to turn to with pleasure. And they all pulsate like the Dickens.

The EP Stainless Staining (Cantaloupe) brings back the pulsation in ways that appeal to me. Lisa Moore is the pianist here, playing the music of Donnacha Dennehy. There are two pieces on the 24 minute disk. "RESERVOIR for Piano" forms a rather attractive postlude to the main event, which is the title track.

"Stainless Staining" uses a "soundtrack" of samples of low G# retuned to accentuate 100 overtones derived from that fundamental. The samples involve playing inside and outside the piano. The result is a pulsating mass of piano sound, atop which Lisa Moore plays her "live" part.

In the end it is 15 minutes of very rhythmic, patterned, richly overtoned music. Lisa Moore plays her role perfectly and the music buzzes and swings its way through your head with irresistible drive and elan.

It's a disk that will be finding its way onto my player many times in the future I am sure. In its own way it has a perfection. It is a kind of heaven! Would you require more than that?

Charles Koechlin Oeuvres pour Ensembles

The only constant about the music of Charles Koechlin (1867-1950) is Charles Koechlin himself. Charles Koechlin, the original. He is not a romantic. He is not a modernist. He does not really sound like Debussy or Ravel, not precisely. Perhaps one can only say that he is a composer that has his own version of being French, like Satie. He does not sound Teutonic at any rate.

So when listening to the four-work Oeuvres pour Ensembles (Timpani 1C1193), one must prepare to hear Koechlin. Koechlin the chamber work composer of excellence. Koechlin the lyricist. The weaver of colored tapestries.

Ensemble Initium and Ensemble Contraste share the performance assignments, and both ensembles sparkle with brilliance in realizing the works at hand. The compositions span most of Koechlin's career, dating from 1916 to 1949. The instrumentation varies with each work; the size of the ensembles keeps to 6-8 players throughout. Winds and strings are the primary carriers of his music on these works. One work adds a piano.

I have to my knowledge not had the pleasure of hearing any of the works previously. I will be certainly hearing them many times more via this marvelous disk. This would make a great introduction to the composer for those who are not familiar. It is most certainly a welcome addition to any Koechlin enthusiast's library, or anyone wishing to explore some excellent examples of 20th century French chamber music.

Giorgio Mirto, Chamber Works with Guitar

Living, breathing, right-here-and-now composer Giorgio Mirto writes music of a certain passion. His album Chamber Works with Guitar (Briliant Classics 9259) makes that clear from the first listen. There is a (seemingly) Gypsy-inspired rhapsody for violin and guitar that soars, some wonderful miniatures for three guitars, and Triest, Solitario y Final for guitar and string quartet, which I find especially attractive.

Much of the music on this disc could have been written 100 years ago or more and would have seemed in keeping with the times. The classical guitar tradition anchors the music in a place that respects the idiomatic aspects of writing for the instrument. Mirto excels in devising fresh and lively music that works its way from the tradition towards the light of the present day.

Giorgio Mirto has a lyric strain, a neo-Spanish feel for dance form allusions and well thought-out multi-guitar writing. But the pieces that combine guitars and bowed strings show a sure mastery of both families of instruments, as well as a definite flair for music that is dramatic and memorable.

Maestro Mirto writes music that delights. For those who revel in the classical guitar especially, he is a great pleasure to hear.

Per Norgard, Sceneries for Percussion and Ensemble

I haven't gotten to the point in my listening where somebody can play me an unidentified disk and I can snap my fingers and say, "that's Per Norgard!" The later modernist doesn't sound like anybody else, yet there is much to his style, a highly developed sense of melodic abstraction juxtaposed with his own rather unique vernacular and sense of the subtly offbeat that takes time to appreciate fully. I am still in the process of getting there myself.

His new disk Sceneries for Percussion and Ensemble (DaCapo 8.226092) gives the listener four substantial works in the chamber mode. The first two, "Prelude to Breaking" for eight instruments (1986) and "Four Meditations" for seven instruments (2010) get a full and detailed sound in a mini-chamber orchestra zone. These are very charactered works, tonal and extra-tonal, narrative in flow and yet filled with abstractions at times, different enough that after five listens I find an appreciation growing in me and the need to hear them more.

"Arabesques" for solo percussion (2011) is in part based on a motif from the concluding work. It was written for percussion virtuoso Christian Martinez, who tackles a large array of pitched and unpitched instruments in an impressive manner. It has texture and ornament, moments of great rhythmic drama, and also more quiescent interludes. The composer states in the liners that one should try not to hear the music in terms of pulsation. "The rhythms are scewed" with fast and slow versions of the central motif sometimes played simultaneously, and with "small meander like windings and melodic fluctuations." So be it. A part for musical saw emerges. It works around some melodic material and adds a texture-color. The saw part did not entirely stimulate me but it most certainly has an otherworldly quality.

Christian, his saw, and his arsenal reappear in the related final piece "Three Scenes" (2009). The mini chamber orchestra sonance has a kind of dialog with the solo percussion. A saw part is there again (briefly) for us. I much liked the composer's handling of the other instruments, and found the entire matrix of varied, ornate, sometimes powerful percussion versus contrapuntally charged chamber instruments quite original and earworthy.

And that is my general reaction to the disk. Martinez and the Esbjerg Ensemble under Petter Sundkvist does justice to the sophisticated, unusual music. Norgard puts a conceptual twist, it seems, in all he does, so that several listens do not begin to give you a firm image of the composition at hand. What that means is that his originality takes time to get with. This compilation is a fine place to start.