Alfred Schnittke, Quartet & Quintet with Piano, String Trio, Quatuor Molinari

The music of Alfred Schnittke (1934-1988) is remarkably consistent. Virtually everything I have had the pleasure to hear of his output bears the stamp of originality, of a modern yet melodically thoroughgoing fineness, of a structural soundness and a human and humane expressivity.

This holds true for the works represented in the recent Musique de Chambre Vol. 2 (Atma ACD2 2669), featuring Quatuor Molinari and guests. Two late and one slightly earlier works are represented: the Piano Quartet (1988), a String Trio (1985), and the Piano Quintet (1972-76).

As is often the case with Schnittke, tradition and modernism combine in interesting ways, notably in the String Trio and Piano Quintet, where plaintive melodies, waltz figures, tender, melancholic minor largo-like themes share aural space with contemporary dissonances and abstract structures.

The performances are rather exceptional. Louise Bessette at the piano, Marcin Swoboda as the additional viola on the quintet and the Quatuor Molinari giving attention to the details and the big picture, combining tonal and extra-tonal passagework with sureness and an excellent feel for the composer's passion and structural genious.

If you only have some or all of his string quartets, this gives you a more complete picture of his chamber output. Much recommended.

McCormick Percussion Group, Concerti for Piano with Percussion Orchestra

I've found that the moment I unwrap a CD from its mailing packet I have some expectations as to what the music might be like. That was certainly the case with the McCormick Percussion Group's Concerti for Piano with Percussion Orchestra (Ravello 7862).

The piano and the percussion orchestra are natural allies as far as a percussion family goes. You might expect that the pitched nature of the piano might result in more scoring for the pitched mallet instruments, and if you've listened to plenty of percussion group music over the years you have a mental-aural picture of what is the orthodoxy there.

With this recording you have two formal concerti, one by David Gillingham and one by David Noon; and two shorter single movement works--by Igor Santos and Mel Mobley, respectively.

So what I didn't expect was anything romantic, almost Rachmoninovian, but that's the surprise in Gillingham's work. The David Noon concerto is more rhythmic, angular, more in the percussion music zone. The piano functions as a very rhythmic component and you get something that a percussion orchestra handles well.

The same expectation applies to the Santos and Mobley shorties. They are firmly in the more orthodox modern zone.

The McCormick players under Robert McCormick acquit themselves well, as does soloist Ji Hyun Kim.

It is engaging music. Percussion ensemble aficionados will find this a good addition. And who would have expected the romantic concerto?

Richard Barrett, Dark Matter

The state-of-the-art in avant-garde high modernist classical must be searched out. It is not as readily accessible as it might have been in the halcyon heydays of the late-'60s-early-'70s, when Cage, Stockhausen and myriad local composer groups were represented by major labels and mass distribution. But then part of it involves the decentralizing centrifugal nature of the internet and how that disperses information over a vast field for the would-be cultural squirrels to traverse in search of stylistically specific nutrients.

The internet is not like a record store or the Schwann catalog of old. And the hardest part is attempting to browse.

Thankfully there are distribution channels who continue to be a centralizing constant for the music. And smaller labels abound.

All this an introduction to Richard Barrett, improvising instrumentalist and avant garde composer of genuine distinction. He's been involved in the avant jazz-oriented realms of Evan Parker, notably the latter's electro-acoustic ensemble, and has created on his own a pretty formidable set of compositions that go on into new pathways of the high modernist camp.

His compositional suite Dark Matter (NMC D183) joins soprano Deborah Kayser with a fairly large chamber ensemble composed of the melding together of two groups, Elision & Cikada, and the composer on live electronics for music that takes the musically contrapuntal, sometimes anarchic, nearly always sonically innovative sounds of late Darmstadt and Cagean compositional ways and extends them further into an electronically-acoustically complex music that is personally distinct. Richard Barrett music, in other words.

Dark Matter, conducted skilfully by Christian Eggen for the premiere recording, consists of eleven interrelated, sometimes contrasting movements. Each has a particular instrumentation and a resultant sound that relates to the whole while remaining separable from it, according to the attentive listener's point of view, anyway.

This is music that represents, for the composer, that which is "unknown and possibly unknowable." Via a sonic poetics that bounds between the improvisational and the more formally structured, Barrett's work has very successfully created a music which is neither "purely classical," whatever that might ultimately mean today, and the new avant improv camp. Then there is the post Hendrixian Star-Spangled out electric guitar work of Daryl Buckley that shines in segments where Barrett has build invigorating settings for a skronk-maelstrom that I certainly appreciate.

What matters for the listener approaching this recording is that the music is filled with avant excitement. The soprano-centered movements rub elbows elegantly yet emphatically with the instrumental episodes, electronically and acoustical-electronically generated sounds share the stage with traditional instruments in a coherent convergence that shows us the progress that live electronics has made, thanks in part to technical developments, but also thanks to the continued presence of electronics in music over the past 50 years. Just as in seemingly every period of musical history, the introduction of distinctive new instruments changes the way the music sounds and eventually the composer and the individual instrumentalists move closer to the new sounds, with ever more integration.

Richard Barrett's Dark Matter has that sort of wholeness of intent that perhaps earlier Cage or Stockhausen were precursors of but never quite fully realized (and in Cage's case, never wanted to realize). And after 200 years of the sound of industry and mechanical objects, greatly intensified in the past 75 years, both our envisioning of sound and our hearing of music has changed. Dark Matter is a work that befits this new sensibility. Barrett represents what we may never understand by incorporating and transforming what we hear daily, at least in more urban zones, that is, complex noise and complex inter-relations of sound and music.

That might not be sufficient in other hands. Dark Matter wholly satisfies the need for a new music for today because Richard Barrett is genuinely hearing a new combination of sound and music, and giving us a superlative example of the known in the unknown, the unknown in the known. It is an avant highlight of this decade so far and Barrett could well be one of the most important composers we have living and creating today.

James Whitbourn, Annelies, A Choral Work Based on Anne Frank's Diaries

Yesterday was Remembrance Day, the day we recall and honor in sorrow the victims of the Holocaust, the anniversary of the liberation of the Auschwitz death camp in 1945. Surely there is hardly a more moving and poetic depiction of innocence in the hands of that evil than the Diaries of Anne Frank.

It is fitting then that composer James Whitbourn has used the diaries as the basis for a major choral work, Annelies (Naxos 8.573070), a recording of which is just now being issued in the States.

Before I heard it I was, to be honest, slightly wary of this kind of project. It's so easy to get it wrong, to go off-center on the impact of bravery and youthful steadfastness in the face of darkness and brutality.

James Whitbourn gets it right. There's no one way with this narrative, of course. Still nothing superficial will do. He takes a ponderously sorrowful approach here and, in the end, a bleakly comforting, musically moving transcendance. A remembrance that avows, "this will not stand!" And that seems fitting.

The performance is exceptional. James Jordan directs, Arianna Zukerman does her part justice as the soprano soloist, the Westminster Williamson Voices and the Lincoln Trio with Bharat Chandra on clarinet all come through with expressive eloquence.

The music is straightforward post/neo-romantic modern in a tonal mode. And it does not attempt to create a largeness as much as a literal intimacy in keeping with the solitary, cloaked-hidden advent of the events Anne Frank underwent. And that works very well.

It is marvelously done, a choral masterwork of our times I would suggest. The ending represents such tragedy in such a beautiful way I found the tears coming to my eyes.

We emerge from one of the darkest centuries the contemporary world has known. We face fresh darknesses. Annelies reminds us touchingly and very musically how our difficulties pale in comparison to Anne and her fellow victims. If you can get only one choral work this month or even this year, think seriously about this one.

Leevi Madetoja, Symphony No. 2, John Storgards, Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra

I am never one to content myself with only the composers and works I already know. If that were the case I'd still be listening to around ten works! So when a teaser in a catalog noted that Finnish composer Leevi Madetoja (1887-1947) was known for the quality and daring of his modulations, I took the bait and requested a review copy of John Storgards conducting the Helsinki Orchestra in a program of Madetoja that includes his Symphony No. 2 (Ondine 1212-2).

I am glad that I did. Storgards gives us performances carefully hewned and majestic. Madetoja, not surprising, fits in with Sibelius as a romantic much more Scandinavian than Wagnerian or Mahlerian. There is a lyrical freshness, and yes, some very nice modulations, and a kind of sprawling thematic approach. These are very long-lined themes that take repeated hearings to digest. He does not have the sort of immediacy of a Sibelius, but that I suppose is what distinguishes him from the 20th century master.

The program includes the Second Symphony, plus his "Kullervo" and "Elegy". It all fits together as a good introduction to his music. After the usual five listens (for my reviews) I do not feel that I have fully digested the music. That either means it is not as memorable as a Sibelius, or that his music must be savored slowly and over a longer period of time.

Come to think of it, Sibelius took me a good time to get used to. Then around 30 years ago, on a flight from Chicago to New York, I listened many times to Sibelius's Fifth on the classical selection earphones (while gazing at the beautifully sunny sky outside my cabin window) and I had an epiphany.

So I await a similar epiphany. Meanwhile these are excellent performances. The repertoire adventurists out there will find something good here.

Nils Anders Mortensen, Im Freien, Debussy, Grieg and Bartok for Solo Piano

Norwegian pianist Nils Anders Mortensen's Im Freien (LAW Classics 1032) is all about music "out of doors," in nature, among the people, as thematically expressed in the solo piano music of Debussy, Grieg and Bartok.

This is music in a poetic vein, filled with moonlight, stars, the village, the night. Nils plays the representational, mood-capturing works with a very good feel for the overarching arc of each. This is music that works its charm through a propulsive, all-important long form. And that comes across quite readily and expressively in Mortensen's interpretations.

The selection sets the mood with a long string of impressionistic, lyrically masterful tone poems from Grieg and Debussy, then adds a bit of modern spice in Bartok's five movement suite "Im Freien," for which of course the album is named.

This is an important pianist who shines brilliantly with this repertoire. There is sheer pleasure to be had with his out-of-door program. When spring comes, you'll be ready for it with "Im Freien"!

Richard Teitelbaum, Solo Live

The area of "new music" is a lively zone that takes on the "seriousness" of Western modern classical and some of its sounds and trajectories, but it may also incorporate elements of rock (as we saw in yesterday's post), jazz and improvisation.

On the improv-jazz side there has been especially fruitful combinations, starting principally with the influence of Cage and his works, then also Stockhausen. Groups like MEV and Il Gruppo set the stage for improvisatory avant music, and many others followed. And of course the "New Thing" in jazz saw much important, related music being made starting in the '60s with Coltrane, Coleman, Taylor, Cherry, Shepp and others.

Into all this came Richard Teitelbaum, an electronics-synthesizer improviser and composer who by the early '70s and his work with Anthony Braxton and others had established himself as an important figure in the music.

That he has not rested on his proverbial laurels can be heard on a new download-only release of his music, Solo Live (Mutable Music). For this outing Richard uses a laptop, a sampling synthesizer, piano and various other instruments to create a series of soundscapes that incorporates the natural environment with spacious electronic panoramas that invite the listener to travel fantastically-virtually to other places. He also holds forth on piano towards the end in dramatic ways.

The extent to which his music is improvised versus pre-planned isn't always clear, but the immediacy and personal quality of it certainly is.

You can find out more and download the album at http://mutablemusic.com/mm/teitelbauminfo (please copy this URL into your browser and hit "enter").