Nordic Affect, He(a)r

Nordic Affect is an Icelandic Modern Chamber quartet. They have a new one. I covered an earlier one happily on March 6, 2017. One year and a half later I am still here. Still writing these reviews. And I am again happy to write on this group of very adept and forward leaning women, about their new album He(a)r (Sono Luminus 92224 CD & 5:1 Blue Ray Disk).

Graphic design should have no other function than to introduce prospective listeners/customers to climb into the music, and initially to buy it. That said, knock-out type from a grey background would have gotten designers fired from every job I'd ever had in the pre-internet pre-DIY publishing and music days. If artists and persons involved ask me about a certain artist and release and I have no idea because I cannot even read the cover, there is something not right. And forgive me but I have real trouble reading the information on this release because the design is not geared for the reader but instead for some image thing. If you do not know what it is or what is on it, what are you getting from such graphics? I am grouchy today so I am saying it for this release but really it is true of maybe 70% of the music I receive.

That being said let me try and decipher what it is I have been listening to happily. Halla Steinunn Stefansdottir is on violin and voice, Guorun Hrund Hardardottir is on viola and voice, Hanna Loftsdottir plays cello and uses her voice and Gudron Oskarsdottir plays harpsichord and too uses her voice. Now if I have spelled anyone's name wrong (and I am sorry about the accents, my system is not clearly adapted to such things) blame this design!

Well there are seven compositions to be enjoyed on this program. There is ambiance, there are spoken word poeticisms and narratives, there is New Music interplay of a high order, post-counterpoint you might say. And the music is a very fine thing to me. Halla gives us the title composition and it goes by in a flash even though it is ten minutes long--that because it is a wondrous sculpting, a vibratoless post-modern chorale that fascinates and encourages to listen. He(a)r is a play on the English "hear" and the Icelandic "her" (with an accent), which means in the language "hear." Of course then I guess there is the play on "her" as a denotation of a woman. It is far from irrelevant since the feminine excellence of this music is an important trait, that it is a woman's musical force we hear and I say amen.

I am not going to try and figure out the names and titles of the works here. They appear all to be Icelandic women and I congratulate them because the music is exceedingly beautiful and engaging. Not everything is new-lyric and that is good, just like a meal is best if it is not about one taste in unrelenting sameness. The space for the extended technique sort of Modernity is used creatively and wisely and it frames and brackets the tonal washes properly and bracingly.

I could say a great deal more because this is not a music that easily fits into the usual labels. Yes everything about the Modern New Music scene has some relation to this set of musics. We hear on he(a)r a uniquely original stance that the compositions and performances embody. That is encouraging and also very rewarding to hear. So listen, do that and you will h(e)(a)r-(h)ea(r) and perhaps exclaim "here-here!" I did that to myself in response. Bravo!

Matthew Shlomowitz, Avant Muzak, Asamisimasa, Hakon Stene

The key to the music of Matthew Shlomowitz as contained in the recent CD is latent in the two pronged idea of the title, Avant Muzak (ATD2). There is that double-take duplicity in the music made by the group asamisimasa, Hakon Stene on percussion and the composer manipulating and sequencing the sounds in various ways. The composer seeks to take musical and audio material that is often initially on the banal side and repurpose it to an Avant-Modern series of works. Here style permutes and mutates in fluid and unbounded ways. That can be liberating.

So among the various musical strains are concrete sounds of appliances and tools, scratchy record surfaces, a baby crying, conversation snippets, sirens and alarms, electronic bleeps and bloops here and there, and what have you, including a small bit of music sampling outside of what the instrumentalists are doing here. There is what sounds like an Electronica rendition of Debussy's "Afternoon of a Faun" and it is both funny and oddly moving. This music does have a sense of humor and all the better for that.

Otherwise the asamisimasa group and Stene are central to what goes on. They most times form a sort of combo with Ellen Ugelvik on all manner of keyboards, Kristine Ugelvik on clarinet, Tanja Orning on cello, Anders Forisdal on sometimes quite electric guitar, and the aforementioned Hakon Stene on percussion, drums and electric drums I presume.

There is a tension between real-time performance and the sampling style of Cubistic rapid cuts and juxtipositions. This is key to the sound overall. There are three suite-like works, each with multiple movements, "Popular Contexts 7: Public Domain Music," "Popular Contexts 8: Five soundscapes for a contemporary percussionist" and the title work "Avant Muzak."

Most parts have vernacular elements, a Reggae motif, moments that sound like Progressive Avant Rock, etc. The best things have a deliberately scumbled chiaroscuro collaging going on. Real-time is on notice and the banality loses to the avant most of the time!

You would do well to listen closely to the music as it tells you what you need to know far better than my words are doing here. With the Pop world taking a key from classic Electronic Music for so many decades now, we get a kind of reverse feedback with Shlomowitz's adventurous musical program. And it is a fitting payback.

This you should hear. We spend most of us nowadays a good bit of our daily lives in virtual time. Shlomowitz gives us a vision of the absurdity and drama of that world, a sonic representation of the constant recombinatory nature of it all. It is a Post-Modern statement for sure and it epitomizes a kind of cultural mish-mosh in ways that are serious and funny at the same time. Recommended.

La Patrie, Our Canada, Canadian Orchestral Music 1874-1943

This is an album that if it were never made, one might have to imagine it. Why? Because, for those that need to know, and sometimes that includes me, Canada is a real place with real people, a real country where everyone lives and dies like we all do and in between they make real art and real music, and we should not forget that and try to listen to it--the music I mean. Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, Oscar Peterson, OK, this should give you an indication that Canada is NOT some backwater. So what about Classical music?

There are all kinds of things to hear and I try to cover as much as I can. One that came out recently promises much even just in its title, La Patrie, Our Canada, Canadian Orchestral Music 1874-1943 (Centredisks 25618). Well as soon as I heard about it I made sure I got a copy. And I played it a bunch of times and loved the music, but there was something about the sound that puzzled me. In the acoustics of my current living space it was not clear. But then I listen with earphones today and I recognize what was strange. The instrumental performers are all very good, but then sometimes the masses of orchestral strings are sampled and that was what seemed so strange sounding. Shelley Katz is the person behind all of this. He calls himself the "symphonist," Truth to tell he creates an orchestral backdrop with only 12 musicians but it gives you an excellent of idea what a full blown orchestral reading would sound like. So that I must say right off the bat. He performs a miracle in a way.

No problem so long as you realize this. No problem because this is music that needs to be heard. We get eight works by eight composers spanning the time indicated in the title. Some of the names I know and have heard the music by, but all too few and as I listen I know it has been my loss, because this is very worthwhile music in styles one might expect of each period, but not written by slouches or hacks, certainly. Far from that.

So you get a work each by the likes of Calixa Lavallee (1842-1891), Clarence Lucas (1866-1947), Rudolphe Mathieu (1890-1962), Ernest MacMillan (1893-1973), Georges Emile Tanguay (1893-1964), Murray Adaskin (1906-2002), Violet Archer (1913-2000), and John Weinzweig (1913-2006). Most of these people were alive when we were (except maybe for some millennials) and so they are/were our contemporaries.

And I must say it is good to hear this music. Is all of it breakthrough masterpieces that should have stopped the movement of time? Probably not. Still we need to hear this music and more of it I think. So bravo for it. After reading this if you feel you are interested, well do not hesitate. It gives you some of the Canadian music you might have missed. And good for that. Not missing it I mean.

Eriks Esenvalds, The Doors of Heaven, Portland State Chamber Choir, Ethan Sperry

The Latvian composer Eriks Esenvalds (b. 1977) writes choral music that has a pronounced ambiance, replete with drones and spicy harmonics that flourish with such things as a major second simultaneity cluster or other exotic Modernism added to a sort of ritualistic old world palette. One might note the composer's general affinity with Arvo Part, except then you realize too that he goes his own way, with something one might call ceremonial choral diatonics with Post-Modern harmonic seasoning?

At least that is what I hear on the nicely ruminating series of choral works that form the program on The Doors of Heaven (Naxos 8.579008),  a CD that I have inadvertently overlooked for a little while but now unearth happily and I find myself gravitating towards. Estonia, Latvia, Georgia, places with old choral traditions that we hear in a batch of New Music composers, at least two anyway. Or maybe a few more too but there is the Orthodox Byzantine and beyond to a Russian Orthodox music spanning many centuries so there is a kind of glorious mystery music that we can see as precursors today among a few, even I would mention the late John Tavener. Yet all that is not at all obvious with Eriks Esenvalds. Just a kind of something in the "world air" so to say?

The Portland Chamber Choir under Ethan Sperry give us ravishing readings of four Esenvalds works written over the recent present of 2006 to 2015. They flow together into a movingly ambient whole, each slightly different but all in the way of a piece.

So it is a delight to hear "The First Tears" (2015), "Rivers of Light" (2014), "A Drop in the Ocean" (2006) and "Passion and Resurrection" (2006). Esenvalds clearly has an excellent grasp of what might sound well with the SATB configuration and gives us ethereal sounds that transport us to an almost mythical, enchanted canopy of human voices. Why is it that such harmonic spiciness should sound so well with the right gathering of voices?  One answer is that Esenvalds knows what will work and does it. Perhaps also because there is on a daily basis little enough Modernity for chorus that generally enters the ears in what one finds out there, or at least I am not overwhelmed with a vast amount of excellent Modern choral music. So this is all the more valuable for all that.

This is music that transfixes, perfect perhaps for those eerie silent early winter evenings? Or fall sunny days where memories crowd the experiencing self and need to be coral-ed and sent packing after a while. This music supplies you with a magical present to counter all that with an effervescently obsidian sharpness and shine of memory flow!

So heartily do I recommend this.

Alfred Bruneau, L'Attaque du moulin - Suite, Barcelona Symphony Orchestra, Darrell Ang

Are we being exposed to too many obscure Late Romantics lately? It is possible that I am. But then I want to know all things musical, so I do ask for it.  And how about some more Ernest Krenek somebody? All this is not so relevant today with Alfred Bruneau (1857-1934) because though he is pretty obscure and sometimes indeed rather Late Romantic he is in a French way also Pre-Impressionist with orchestral luster and twinkle and not all emotive gigantism. Not so much, just a bit. Or so that is at least the case on the new CD L'Attaque du moulin - Suite (Naxos 8.573888).

Darrell Ang and the Barcelona Symphony Orchestra give is a boldly engaged reading of
L'Attaque (1893) plus the Prelude from ACT IV of "Messidor" (1897), the Prelude from ACT I of "Nais Micoulin" (1907) and Tableau I "La Legende du Or" from ACT III of "Messidore" (1897). There is a mood-setting, pictorially evocative strain to all this music, which is fitting as the works we hear function in several of his operas to set scenes. or in the case of the Suite there are three movements joined together as a "drame lyrique" that conjures a rustic world quite livingly pictorial.

The liners call his efforts a kind of "natural theatre," a realism he shared with his friend Zola. Of course such things are more clearly contained in the overall sweep, in the libretto and dramatic arch of the full operas. And that for the sake of this program is not entirely here nor there. It does serve to frame the music that we do hear and is not at all irrelevant since the pictorialism is (one can suggest) an aspect of naturalism I suppose. So it is important to it keep in mind regardless.

The influence of Wagner is to be felt throughout, but then there is something else that the liner/blurb calls appropriately "Gallic." Yes! He was a pupil of Massenet and one can find a bit of that if one looks for it.

In all however there is something quite engaging in this orchestral music that gives us an original streak. He is to turn-of-the-century France as much perhaps as Ries was to early 1800s Austria (see my 11-23 review article of several days ago for that). That is, both were a solid and singular voice of their era who we have in large part forgotten today.

Ang and the Barcelona Symphony handle these brilliant orchestrations with the attention to detail and faithfulness of execution appropriate to Bruneau's way.

I would not hesitate to recommend this to anyone interested in the French scene as it was at the first sunrays of the dawn of the Modern Era. I am glad myself to have it and to hear it.

David Rosenmann-Taub, Primavera Sin Fin

This is the 3rd in my new Mini-Review Series, short reviews of things that are worth exploring but I have right now no time to cover in depth.

Pianist David Rosenmann-Taub is an avant garde player with a very dynamic and energetic style that falls in its own space somewhere between Cecil Taylor's Improv-Jazz and New Music keyboard explorations. There is sometimes multi-tracking, a very little bongo and a few add synthesizer, which is not quite as engaging to me as his piano. All are presented on the 2-CD Primavera Sin Fin  (Endless Spring) (MSR Classics MS1353 2-CDs). He is someone to contemplate, and when he is totally on top of things, he shines with some brilliance. So I do recommend you listen!

Schubert, The Complete Original Piano Duets, Goldstone & Clemmow

A second in the Mini-Review Series; things I simply must say nice things about but have run low on time.

OK, anyone with even a passing fancy for the music of Schubert, you are on notice. With the beautiful 3-LPs that came out in the Stone Age, by Badura-Skoda and Demus, as perhaps at least some of it is on CD now, where do I get off talking about Goldstone & Clemmow's 7-CD The Complete Original Piano Duets (Divine Art dda 21701)? Note that it is the COMPETE duets. Plus it ends each disk with a Schumann "Polonaise."  The Duo does a nice job with the music, and the music itself is really worth having if you are Schubert-centric like I am. Perfect for the holiday stocking, but for yourself!