Electronic Chamber Music From Finland

To show you how much New Music has evolved or simply changed, please suppose you bought an album entitled simply "Electronic Chamber Music" in 1963. What might you imagine you would get? I am thinking something along the lines of MEV or AMM, improvised, abstract, somewhat hermetic. On the other hand the 2018 Electronic Chamber Music  (SIBA Records Sibelius Academy), might be that but might be something else, or both. Perhaps the tip-off is that no composers are a part of the cover listings. That is deliberate. This is music no doubt pre-planned in many ways, yet at base improvisational. In that we have a situation in common with our hypothetical 1963 album by MEV or AMM.

What is meant by "Live Electronics" is one thing that may well differ today. In earlier days such as 1963 synthesizers were bulky and cumbersome, not really the sort of thing you'd expect in a live ensemble. Until the later sixties as the evolution of relatively compact synthesizers came about an ensemble like Mother Mallard (who amassed a number of synthesizers in live performance) would have been inconceivable. Now of course that is not so. But then individual pitch producing and pitch altering devices were likely to be there in the earlier days, individual components that later were part of the synthesizer anatomy. I mean tone generators, wave generators, frequency and amplitude, timbre and taxonomic sound alteration filter devices and such were a likely part of a live ensemble. You were perhaps less likely back then to encounter a gathering of unabashedly acoustic instruments like the acoustic guitar or the unprepared contrabass etc. Nowadays it is different.

And the music back then might have been improvised but it tended to sound something like the punktive Serial New Music one might hear coming off the composer's pencil directly then. The music might also bear some relation to the sound laboratory studio electronic musics then being made, especially in terms of a living impossibility sort of thing, music that was for whatever reason far more nearly impossible to produce on conventional instruments alone. This because of complexity, speed, timbre, etc. Virtually or literally unplayable music was often the case--doing something with electronics even if improsed and live that was unimaginable before electronic  generation and alteration.

In the case of the 2018 release Electronic Chamber Music we can get some enlightenment on at least one way such music can vary from what was common 50 or so years ago. The group in question is a quartet and Finland is their home base. This is a music of collective composition, improvisation surely. And group structuring. The participants are Otso Lahdeoja on guitar and electronics, Alejandro Montes de Oca is responsible for modular synthesizer sounds, Aino Eerola plays 4- and 5-string violins and electronics, and Nathan Riki Thomson plays prepared double bass and electronics. Musicianship is not lacking and all four make a significant impact as a quartet.

The music is tonal centered and often as not pulsating. It is mostly tonal music and  both extended techniques and electronic enhancement take the acoustic instruments and make of them something familiar yet novel. There is a soundscaperd ambience to this music that in 1963 would have sounded quite different of course. Gone are bleep-bloop hochet and to stay are extended outburst of cosmic differences as joined by somewhat unprecedented soundings of long notes and then loping sing-sing continuity.

It is music that few would find in any way jarring, a kind of peon to open space more than a sawing through to essential primality that perhaps might have prevailed in such things in 1963! And indeed one can scarce imagine this music without the psychedelic and ambient worlds that 1963 knew little to nothing of. Yet the intervening avant jazz and improv styles show little impact. That is not to say that anything should or should not prevail today; I only wish to identify more precisely what one would hear on listening.

I find it all fascinating and nicely open. This is not necessarily music to change the face of our art for many years to come. Face it, everything need not be that. It is music of depth and substance, good to commune with at length. I do recommend this one.

Trio Clavio Plays Modern Music

There ever comes a new generation of music makers. And inevitably they may see things slightly differently than others that came before. That is the nature of history, music history and it is the nature of creative freedom. So today we consider a trio of young Czech women who set out in 2013 to perform music in ways that reflected their own distinctive musical outlooks, yet in the process to create a real blend, to make a threesome that thrived as a unity in distinct parts as a whole.

Trio Clavio was born. And now with a self-titled 2-CD set (ArcoDiva UP 0204) we get to experience what they can do with a program of varied Modern Music.

Trio Clavio are Lucie Soutorova Valcova on piano,  Lucia Fulka Kopsova on violin, and Jana Cernohouzova on clarinet. Together they excel and come to us in a dazzling light of sound.

The program is an engaging mix of the familiar and the less familiar.

Trio Clavio put their beautifully idiomatic character masks on from the start with the trio suite from Stravinsky's "L'Histoire du Soldat." The suite boils it all down to the music's very essence and Trio Clavio give us a sparkling, very characteristic reading that is in its own way perfect. The execution is not just a matter of the right notes, weighted rightly. It breathes in the whimsical essence and makes it all into a palpable magic. This performance is worth the price of admission alone! Here is a younger generation of musicians who feels so comfortable with this music, a sort of, pardon the phrase, Ethnic Modernism because they are beautifully talented and have breathed in the two strands to make the music seem as it should, ORGANIC and now very much a part of us. Hear this and you may well smile broadly. I did.

Yet there is much more. Bartok's "Contrasts" gets a sterling performance devoid of some of the mannerisms and pretensions one can hear from earlier recordings.

"Trio for Clarinet, Violin & Piano" by Paul Schoenfeld (b. 1947) ends the first CD with a Jewish tinged music that again seems completely idiosyncratic in the hands of the trio. Jana Cernohouzova on clarinet is something to behold. Her Klezmer inflected reading is a joy to hear! This is moving and substantial music in every way.

CD2 showcases four more living composers with engaging and vibrant fare. There is Lukas Hurnik (b. 1967) and his "Alphabet," Martin Brunner (b. 1983) and "Little Children," Juraj Filas (1955) and "'Chiaroscuro' Trio," and finally Sylvie Bodorova (1954) and "Dancing Mountain."

Current time restrictions this morning prevent me from engaging in a detailed breakdown of the second half of the program. Suffice to say that the momentum that builds on CD1 does not flag in the least. Instead there is a wealth of nicely turned, even brilliant compositional fare played with a musicality that never fails to delight.

Melodic Modernism is in great hands with Trio Clavio.

So bravo! Trio Clavio is a wonder! The music and its presentation on this set is as good as anything you might hear in such a trio. A beautiful milestone in chamber music this is to me. Do not fail to hear it. I look forward to whatever they might do in future. This is a must for Modern Music fans!

Johann Nepomuk David, Symphonies 2 & 4, ORF Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien, Johannes Wildner

Bruckner is not dead. He lives on. And if you wonder what kind of symphonies he might have written had he lived in the '30s and '40s of last century, you might listen to the music of Johann Nepomuk David (1899-1975), specifically in this case today, David's Symphonies 2 & 4 (RSO 777-577-2). Now it is probably unfair of me to state  glibly that David is Bruckner. He isn't. He is David. In the two symphonies so nicely performed by the Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien under Johannes Wildner, there is very much something "beyond" Bruckner there. The chromaticism is pretty well at the edge of the tonally centered and there is a dynamic tumult to the music that is more extreme than Bruckner might have felt comfortable with. David is no clone. Far from it. He is a Modernist as much as there is something Late Romantic or Neo-Romantic about the music.

So David was born in Austria. He was blessed with a fine singing voice and at ten was sent for musical training to become a choir member. He studied with choirmaster Muller, who venerated Bruckner. Fast forward to 1923, when David premiered his first symphony. By then Vienna had cast its spell upon the young composer. Schoenberg and other luminaries were duly influential. By 1922 he himself noted the strong influence in his style of Reger in the contrapuntal sphere, then also Scriabin and Debussy. The monothematic symphony idea began to consume him but also so did Schoenberg's 12-tone techniques. By the time of 1938 his second symphony took stock of his evolution. It was a large-scale, 40-minute orchestral work for a sizeable gathering of instrumentalists. There are three themes and the development is contrapuntal.

Listening is a matter of immersion,. There is a striking density and drama to the symphony and the more you hear the better it becomes.

Symphony No. 4 is a product of struggle in a world torn and  ripped in twain by the Second World War. The original manuscript of the work was destroyed in an air raid and David had to reconstruct it all from memory. One might readily say that the final version shows the scars of its traumatic birth in that it has upheaval yet a determined grandeur and even a contrapuntal strain of thickly grim austerity at times yet a depth of feeling too that catapults it into our times as a reminder of how unsettled and ugly the world can be. There is a transfixing quality to the whole that gradually enters your listening mind and holds pride of place, at least for me.

I am heartened by the depth of this music. David seems very much a discovery for us that is as worthy as any revival discovery from this era. The music is rather profound. If the kind of angst of later Allan Pettersson appeals to you, then David may well strike a sympathetic reverberation. I myself am glad to have and hear this disk and will no doubt try and hear more of his music going forward. David is a real find.

David Diamond, Symphony No. 6, Indiana University Chamber and Philharmonic Orchestras, Arthur Fagen

There is a tendency to pay less attention recently to some of the US composers once quite popular in the '30s to '50s. Like Thomas Hart Benton in the painting world, their style was thought the epitome of Contemporary when they flourished, and then their reputations underwent a bit of an eclipse. Like Benton many are due for reappreciation.

Take David Diamond (1915-2005). He was overshadowed for a time as later styles came to the forefront on the American scene. Yet there is a master craftsman at work on the wealth of his compositions, an inspired originality that now sounds again fresh. So Naxos in its ongoing "American Classics" series gives us a volume that reminds us how much we miss if we ignore the Diamond orchestral legacy. Here we have the Indiana University Chamber and Philharmonic Orchestras under Arthur Fagen with enthusiastic and vibrant readings of three middle period gems, namely his Symphony No. 6, Rounds for String Orchestra, and Romeo and Juliet (Naxos 8.5598942).

One notes from the first the quality of the performances and the concentric intensity of the music. Arthur Fagen and the Indiana bring the scores to life with fine nuance and bold strokes. And each work is in its own way exemplary and a world unto itself.

The opening "Rounds for String Orchestra" (1944) has vivid plein air energy in the outer movements and an "Appalachian Springish" tenderness in the center. It seems vaguely Americana-like yet there are no obvious thematic homespun allusions exactly. It is a delight, really.

"Music from Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet" (1947) alternates drama and reverie and a lyrical then more robust sinew, a rustic charm not exactly typical of what the timeless story might evoke. The "Death of Romeo and Juliet" finale morns, regrets and shows a tender sadness.

And then we turn to the concluding "Symphony No. 6" (1951-54). This beginning of a '50s view of what is to be done has a bolder thrust than the previous works, really more thoroughly modernistic and expressive of an inner strength that takes us unawares then affirms Diamond's brilliance. Hard to believe but this is the World Premiere Recording. And a fine thing it is.

There you have it. The weather can be fine if you want to stretch your imagination with these three nicely done offering. Put them on and forget the thunderclouds.

Georgy Sviridov, Canticles and Prayers

Since to my knowledge none of us have sprung fully formed from the head of Zeus as apparently had Athena according to legend, we must in the beginning have more or less absolute ignorance when it comes to anything, and that includes music. Sure we may have an aptitude for it and even as a tabula rasa being take readily to its intricacies, and so too at some point we may like some things and perhaps others not as much. But all that entails a long gestation period of gradual and cumulative understanding, of slowly developing a musical understanding of the universe of various styles. That is, of course if one is so fortunate to have music available to experience in  life.

As as for the Modern, the New Music as it has unfolded from the beginnings in say 1900 and forward 118 years to today, the more of it one can hear the better one might understand the whole of it. For example there is the music of Georgy Sviridov (1915-1998), as one might hear in  the recent and fascinating Canticles and Prayers (Ondine 1322-2).

Now I'll admit I am, or rather was in total ignorance some years ago about Sviridov and his music. I have had the chance happily to hear some of it and if you want to know about that type his name into the search box at the upper left. The present volume up today gives me and (perhaps you) a good idea of and a rewarding leg up on his sacrally oriented choral music.

Sviridov grew up in the Orthodox fold in Russia and was profoundly influenced by the music of the Orthodox Church. The cycle "Canticles and Prayers" for unaccompanied choir is it seems Sviridov's definitive and final work  in the choral mode. It also was his last completed composition, as it involved a long development from 1980 to 1997, the year before his death.

The plan was to cull all the sacred choral sketches he had begun but not completed by 1990 or so, to amass and develop them into one rather huge oratorio. By 1997 Sviridov had completed five parts, but did not live to finish the whole of what he had envisioned. The current performance takes on four of the five sections, omitting the second part and several movements from part five. The program concludes with a related  "Red Easter," which was completed in 1978.

In all this Sviridov utilizes Russian Orthodox liturgical texts but does not set them in an order that could constitute a set of chants the could be utilized as a whole in an Orthodox service.. He builds up the haunting whole as a sort of lament for the impending demise of the Russia of the Soviet Union, which was indeed undergoing a terminal dissolution in the last decade of Sviridov's time on earth.

This is introspective, mostly very somber music. It is music somewhat difficult for a typical choir to perform, as it makes demands, calls for in the words of the liner notes a group of "exceptional mastery and vocal abilities." I must say that the Latvia Radio Choir as heard on this disk is in every way up for the challenge of the music. The results are most ravishing, sublimely beautiful.

This is music that expressively expands outward from Russian Orthodox Chant. It is Chant as much as Afterchant, if you will pardon the phrase. It has a modern foundation with harmonies a bit more tangy at times than what would be typical in the church music. It is meditative and feelingful.

It is robust and yet there is a fragility as well, a kind of presence of the feeling of loss, as might naturally be expected given the composer's intention.

For all that it constitutes a kind of Modern milestone in the Russian choral world. Not at all avant garde in obvious ways, it is nonetheless substantial and original in outlook. It is so profoundly of its time that we can already look back upon it and feel the distance the world has gone since the end of last century. Of course we understand that not all change is wholly good, and what that entails we can only review the events that have transpired in the period once thought of as an age "beyond history," those years from the advent of the Millennium to the right now is a period of true upheaval in the world, an upheaval that compounds other upheavals and sediments a depth of change, a stratigraphy it may take future historians to make sense of, since the world does not especially make sense in all ways at present. Sviridov captures a kind of awareness of inevitable change and a less than happy feeling of what it might portend. That is complex and I try to experience it all as expression at this point. Well that perhaps defines this postmodern age? It is music of Postmodernity-Modernity surely. And sublimely so. Like Arvo Part, Sviridov has his own take on the old-in-the-new. The music haunts.

Friedrich Gulda, Piano Works, Martin David Jones

For those who have over the years been interested in the nexus between Modern Jazz and Modern Classical, the mere existence of a Friedrich Gulda (1930-2000) volume of Piano Works (Grand Piano GP759) is reason enough to sit up and take notice. That is if you know of the place Gulda has occupied throughout his life as a classical pianist of international stature as well as a jazz artist of definite talent and great merit. Most importantly I at least have been aware of his might we still say "Third Stream" compositional ventures and have followed as best I could what I managed to find in the ever-ongoing search for syntheses and pathways forward.

It may or may not be a coincidence that the compositional period represented by these works spans a time between 1965 and 1974, which was a very creative whileCfor a certain ongoing adventurism on the musical scene. Cool Jazz was pretty much a dead issue by then, whereas there were significant forays into Third Stream ventures prior to this by Jimmy Giufre, John Lewis, William O. Smith and others more or less one way or another lumped into the cool bin at some point. From 1965 to 1974 these was room for others to step in and indeed Heinrich Stadler and Friedrich Gulda and a few other Europeans along with some notable American voices did interesting compositional work. And I must stop a moment and say something about the AACM during this period. They may well be the more important of all the "serious" jazz composer-performers with some claims to "Classical" "crossover" status during that period. This is not the place to discuss that however.

It is not my intention to give some comprehensive overview of the rise and fall of the Third Stream  by say 1975, for that another time. A light sketch here is all I might want to do to set up this recording. So the CD is upon us.

I will say right off the bat that none of this music on this album has been or will be destined to move mountains in a stylistic or cutting-edge sense. The works have much room for improvisation and reflected the sort of Post-Bop musical world in which Gulda dwelled with his Jazz persona. The music has something of an eclectic quality to it. We have takes on a Boogie-Woogie/Classical nexis, then variations on the Doors' iconic "Light My Fire" (that very much strikes me as worthwhile), the multiple Jazz stylings of the ten-part "Play Piano Play," And more besides.

Anyone familiar with the Gulda presence in earlier days will find this volume captivating and reaffirming. Those coming to his music for the first time will be no doubt pleased with what they hear so long as they do not expect from it some world changing paradigmaticism!

Martin David Jones handles performance duties with sympathy, charm and a musicality that is heartening. If perhaps he is not especially by way of the evidence here a world-class improvisor it nonetheless shows you perhaps the sort of pianist who might well be attracted to the music. The improvisations set off the music well and perhaps not as much the other way around. Yet after a thorough immersing in this program I must say my appreciation of Gulda the rather brave straddler of Jazz and Classical camps comes to life once again to my pleasure. I am glad to have it!

If Gulda never wound up being a Duke or a Monk, how many do? For that we have Duke and Monk. That takes nothing away from the enjoyment of hearing this music.

Roberto Sierra, Kandinsky, Continuum, Cheryl Seltzer and Joel Sachs

There are albums that to me are exactly as one might hope, though maybe exactly not what you already know of course. And so with the offering today. Roberto Sierra has ever been to me a composer that being very much himself epitomizes something very good about the music of today. So we get that on the recent CD Kandinsky (Naxos 8.559849). The contemporary chamber gathering Continuum is in charge of the performances, with Directors Cheryl Seltzer and Joel Sach sharing the piano duties, ever amazingly and fittingly I might add. Everyone involved has concentrated and applied their considerable interpretive skills to make these performances a remarkable thing, to set off Sierra's music in as nearly ideal a manner as we might ever hear.

And as to the works themselves, all come from the first decade of this century. Two of three are in World Premier Recordings and all are vital and moving High Modernist beauties that in many ways are less a total abstraction so much as abstracted-yet-concrete embodiments of Sierra's fertile imagination.

Sierra, many will know, hails from Puerto Rico. There are Carribean strains in his work and you will hear them on this program. It is an important aspect much of the time but I will at times leave it to you to pick up on them. He integrates those elements fully and nicely, as well as anybody ever has and that is saying a great deal.

The title work, "Kandinsky" for violin, viola, cello and piano (2003) pays homage to the breakthrough abstract artist Wassily Kandinsky and his work. The music as one might expect has a High Modernist abstracted quality. It is music of a demanding sort for the players, who must shift into various expressionist modes continually yet always in a sort of multi-linear, unified presentive way.

The Latin strain is excitingly present in the "Sonata for Clarinet and Piano" (2005--06) via a gloriously dance like Salsa opening movement that is followed by a sort of explosive expansion of the rhythmic cells and melodic-harmonic implications of the beginning. This is spectacular music for sure.

Then we hear Seltzer and Sachs explode forward on their own in their performance of the piano four-hands "Thirty-Three Ways to Look at the Same Object" (2005-08). It is a glorious tilt at the windmills of our minds and the windmills lose!

There you have it. I cannot recommend this more strongly to those who cherish a Modernist flourish that is on the edge of tomorrow yet lets us know where some of the roots lie! Finely crafted brilliance played remarkably well. So get it. It is Naxos inexpensive and worth every single penny by far.  Sierra is a treasure.