Leonie Klein, Gathering Thunders, Percussion Music by Stockhausen, Xenakis, Lachenmann, Huber, etc.

The High Modern period of Classical Music has seen the rise of percussion instruments as a widespread aspect of orchestral, chamber and eventually solo instrumental music. Varese's "Ionisation" for large percussion group made concert audiences take notice. John Cage and Lou Harrison wrote some widely discussed and performed works. Flash forward to today and we see the near ubiquitous development of virtuoso solo percussion works where the individual is called upon to play many instruments at the same time, becoming a sort of one-man band or an orchestra of one, taking advantage of the heightened sound color contrasts a battery of percussion instruments offers.

An excellent program of such virtuoso solo works can be had, played with world-class musicality and technical wizardry on a new album by Leonie Klein called Gathering Thunders (Wergo 7375 2). The repertoire addressed on the program covers some recent works in New Music echelons and classics going back to the years when solo percussion compositions were considered rather daring. In most cases here an array of pitched, semi-pitched and unpitched instruments form the nucleus around the complex klangfarben, sound-color melodic structures each piece demands in its own way.

It takes a real master not only to get all the notes right, with intricate instrument-to-instrument jumps a constant virtually always. To play this music properly the percussionist must think in terms of the overall phrasings, must in a way conduct herself or himself and seek a total balance of near-orchestral syntax.

Perhaps nowhere is that more the case in telling ways than on Stockhausen's classic 1959 "Zyklus." In choosing to perform the work as a solo piece the performer then has the freedom to choose the order of the 17 sections and the direction she or he chooses to move in completing a single cycle of moving across the complete array of spatially situated instruments. Ms. Klein shows us a singularly melodic interpretation of the work, one of the best I've heard. That advanced musicality shows itself too on the works that follow in the program, each individual and special, sonically and syntactically.

From there we hear the distinctive all-in-one color peaks of "Psappha" by Xenakis, of "Interieur I" by Helmut Lachenmann, of "Pothos" by Nicolaus A. Huber, and then Peter Eotvos's "Thunder" for a single bass timpani and Johannes Julius Fischer's "Gathering" for "prepared and extended xylophone."

It altogether gives us a bird's eye view of the state-of-the-art in current performance practice and in compositional best practices today and yesterday. It is a veritable whirlygig of percussion sublimity and so will heighten  the pulse rate of anyone who loves the Modern and the percussive arts. Leonie Klein is a wonder! Grab this one if you suspect you'd like such things.

Post-Haste Reed Duo, Donut Robot!

There are album concepts and cover illustrations that grab my attention and I will admit that the art on Donut Robot! (Aerocade Music 010) by the Post-Haste Reed Duo is a favorite.What's wrong with a bit of outlandish humor? Nothing at all as far as I am concerned. All the better of course if the music turns out to be very much worth our ear-time. That is the case here as limber-timbred saxophonist Sean Fredenburg and bassoon stalwart Javier Rodriguez take us on an imaginative journey through six compositions and compositional suites.

The music if we must label it might be Post-Modern Modern Neo-Classical? It has form and force, from the beautifully apt opening title work by Ruby Fulton to the closing four-episode adventure-sequence "Snapshots" by Takuma Itoh. One should not be blase about it all without paying close attention, for a saxophone-bassoon duo can be as full and lively as anything you can imagine, provided the works are as interesting as they are here and the execution is natural and artful, as the Post-Haste Duo show us consistently and happily.

If the composers are not so well-known, the works show us we have missed them at our own, well not "peril" so much as lack. So we are invited to sit and hear the nicely turned gems from Ruby Fulton and on to miniatures by Drew Baker, Michael Johanson, Edward J. Hines, Andrea Reinkemeyer and Takuma Itoh.

No notes are wasted and the base-grounding of the two reeds never seems lacking in fullness of content. The robot looms yet we the listeners triumph in the hearing. Post-Haste Reed Duo emerges from the underbrush to conquer the sweet would-be treat and its relentless advance! Go on Duo, keep going and we cheer you forward!

Happily recommended.

Ferruccio Busoni, The Late Works, Svetlana Belsky

It is difficult to pay attention to everything. All good music? There is too much, not too little! So I try and help by picking out the good things, the best things I am sent. One of those is an extraordinarily nice program of The Late Works (Ravello 8007) of Ferruccio Busoni (1866-1924), as played with dramatic vigor by pianist Svetlana Belsky, who holds forth over at my alma mater, the University of Chicago.

This disk gives you three compositional groupings, all exceptional in their own way. The "Sonatina Seconda" (1912) begins the program. How modern, how dissonant, how amazing for its time, rousing, and how well played. This is worth the price of admission alone. I never paid enough attention to later Busoni, so this woke me up and made me very aware and very pleased. Ms. Belsky plays it all like she owns it, and indeed she does. There is a sure-footed expressive chromaticism that leaves Romanticism in the dust and sounds a clarion call to the future Modernism that was coming every day.

Then we segue into the playfully inventive brilliance of "Nine Variations on a Chopin Prelude," that one that Donna Summer made a disco tune out of if you are old enough to remember. Busoni takes it along with him on various rather exciting junkets, from the steeples to the mountains (as Ives declaimed), pouring down like happy spring rain.

Then we top it off with the 1908 "Elegies," all six of them, each of which says something expressively Busoni-ful.

I cannot but recommend this recording, for performances and for a window on Busoni in his final pianistic wonderment.

Karl Weigl, Violin Sonata No. 2, Two Pieces for Violin, Two Pieces for Cello, Piano Trio, Fruhwirth, Kloeckner & Krumpock

When I came back to the East Coast from Chicago in 1985 I duly paid a visit to the Classical Record section of Tower Records in Downtown Manhattan. There I happened to unearth a CRI recording of the music of Karl Weigl (1889-1949) and I took it home. I was impressed with it. Now some 44 years later I had the chance to hear and review some additional music of his, namely his Violin Sonata No. 2, Two Pieces for Violin, Two Pieces for Cello, Piano Trio (Capriccio C5318). I welcomed it. These chamber works are played with sparkle and dash by violinist David Fruhworth, cellist Benedict Kloeckner and pianist Florian Krumpock.

In the case of this CD and the record from years ago there is a feeling of being in the presence of a composer who is original and even brilliant, yet not overtly innovative like Schoenberg or Ives, not a leader in the teleology of where music goes so much as an entity who straddled the end of Romanticism and the beginning of what followed. And it is not so much a matter of where he could be positioned in the spectrum of styles, rather how he does what he does.

Weigl was in that same Vienna as Schoenberg and his followers. That he stayed with tonality and went his own way hardly matters now. For there were plenty of works that went into the more advanced territory and we can listen and perform them at will. The history of music sometimes reads as a description of Boy Scout hikes. We identify the Pack Leaders and pay homage to them but in some other "real" world there was no hike, just a lot of artists creating. We get to choose what we hear. Each work is a frozen moment in time and there is no Boy Scout Troop to be seen anywhere.

And that is a good argument to recommend that we stop ignoring someone like Karl Weigl, whose music most certainly was not a leading voice of its time yet there is some truly inspired music to be heard from his likes. The current volume shows us in marvelous performances why we should not ignore Weigl, even if he does not fit into the March of the Immortals! It is excellent music. That is reason enough. Highly recommended.

The Ovalle Project, Andree-Ann DeSchenes, The Piano Music of Jayme Ovalle (1894-1955)

Self-Taught Brazilian composer Jayme Ovalle (1894-1955) is best known in his home country for composing the song "Azulao." Outside of Brazil he is little known. However the new two-CD set The Ovalle Project (Self-Released 193428153240) gives us pianist Andree-Ann DeSchenes's fine readings of the complete 24 work opus of solo piano music.

Ovalle has some of the "outside art" daring of a self-taught composer with something to say and no set formula about how to say it.  There are at times a sort of Romantic declamatory pianism a la Rachmaninoff or Liszt, yet the way of going about it is Expressionist, like a German woodcut, in other words more robustly "primitivist" at times. At other times you might find an almost trance-inducing repetition of a chord alongside a melody line, nearly art-less yet artful for it paradoxically..

The Brazilian strain can be heard in this music--mostly through the melodiousness of the songfulness. And there is a folkishness to it, too,  that gives it all an individual flair. Not so much choro-like, not especially simple to pigeonhole or to even put into words. Brazilian fantasias? At certain moments. The way it comes together is so rather unexpected that it genuinely takes a few times through before it starts making its own sort of sense. Sometimes the chordal voicing has a definite modern tang to it and an almost jazzy contemporary quality, really.

If Charles Ives were Brazilian, would his piano music have sounded like this? Not exactly, but not exactly not at times, either. They both have a stubbornly independent manner and as you listen again and again it starts to make perfect sense. And as you get to the later opus numbers there is sometimes emergent a Brazilian rhythmic element as a block-chorded melodic thing with a left-hand figured accompaniment that is intriguing. But then there is a return to Expressionist rubato, again too.

It is music that refuses to stand pat, to stay put, to slot into the derivative, and all the better for it. Ovalle brings us a way of sounding that is his own and Ms. DeSchenes draws that out in an effective and sympathetic set of performances. This is something different, a Brazilian musical Grandma Moses so to say. An unconforming original, a strikingly wayward crafter of piano delicacies that are good to eat and good to think! Get this and go someplace different.

Lei Liang, A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Gil Rose

Chinese-born composer Lei Liang brings to us a completely lucid sensibility and a most articulate and evocative syntax. The Boston Modern Orchestra Project album of three recent works shows us glowingly the vitality of his invention. A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams (BMOP Sound 1061) gives us the title work recently (2017) commissioned by BMOP, plus his "Xiaoxiang, Concerto for Alto Saxophone and Orchestra" (2009, rev. 2014), and "Five Seasons" (2010, rev. 2014).

Liang came to the US in 1990 as a young man, in time moving from a concentration on piano to composition, and finding his voice through studies at New England Conservatory and eventually a PhD from Harvard University.

While involving himself in his compositional studies he found himself reconnecting with Chinese culture, lifeways and traditions which then in turn informed his music. Columbia's Chou Wen Chung he acknowledges as an inspiration.

The music to be heard in this program before us shows us a vivid Modernism, a lively pictorial imagination and a landscape artist's sense of panorama and open skies. And the influence of traditional Chinese music too can be heard, in the most tangible ways on "Five Seasons" which features a concerted solo part for the pipa, played dramatically and effectively by Gao Hong. Then too Chien-Kwan Lin's alto sax on "Xiaoxiang" has a spatial-temporal feel that feels at times rather Chinese.

It is on the title work "A Thousand Mountains, A Million Streams" that we hear the current culmination of Liang's musical vision. It is sound-color-centric (and so too is traditional Chinese music you might say), carving a vibrant language from the various ways of sounding the instruments of the orchestra and soloists, as applicable. A concern with the natural landscape reminds us of the legacy of Chinese poetry and painting. The music recalls in its very own Chinese-informed way the innovations in sound clustering that later High Modernism perfected, which for those attending to it still stays with us as a part of conceptional and orchestrational color practice today.  Lei Liang has the acute ability to build sound structures and expressions that revisit the orchestra in those terms and then give it all a personal and culturally rooted stamp of identity.

One can learn a great deal from reading the liners to this album. I leave that to you.

The music itself gives us a true contribution to the "new" in New Music. Lei Liang speaks with his own voice, his own orchestral poetics, very much Modern, very much Chinese in its essence, and masterful in utterance. Highly recommended. BMOP comes through with another gem.

Ziboukle Martinaityte, In Search of Lost Beauty...

Is programmatic music back? Yes and no. It may not be so literal anymore. Not like Richard Strauss where the violin might mean so-and-so and the horns such-and-such. But there is a literary patina that envelops some of New Music today. And it serves to poeticize our listening mind when it works well. I have zero complaints on that front with Ziboukle Martinaityte's In Search of Beauty... (Starkland ST-231).

Martinaityte's programmatic intent is loosely poetic. One rainy day she went past the Notre Dame Cathedral and had a kind of epiphany when the puddles reflected aspects of the cathedral in multiple bits, showing a different reality, a different beauty not otherwise available to her. This is interesting especially to me because I noted something similar here the other day in the rain puddles reflecting the vertically upstanding trunks of trees as I went on a walk in the morning. It is a coincidence but then a mindfulness I was also experiencing.

What counts ultimately is the ravishingly evocative nature of the music. It has ten parts and lasts 70 minutes. There is a singularly refracted soundscape to be heard that does not remain the same ever. It sustains with near-drone continuity yet has punctuations that break through the blanketing sounds. An arpeggiated violin line starts midstream and develops intermittently over time. And the sustains evolve into a rolling dialog between the three instrumentalists responsible. There is a poignant sonic artistry to be enjoyed in FortVio via piano, violin and cello. There are electronics too at times and they serve to sustain us further. They give us more sustenance, if you will.

The liners map out the composer's world better than I can so I quote from them here. "An hour-long sequence of audiovisual novellas on the elusive subject of beauty - an attempt to recreate the experience in which time is slowed down in order to transport us into an alternate dimension where the commonly apprehended reality is inverted into the otherworldly mystique of reflection and shadows."

So the whole concept behind it all has a richness of meaning. And the music fully lives up to the promise of the poetry behind it. That is saying something. It is one of the best ambient forays I have heard lately. It passes by Minimalism to become "free" from the need to stick to sameness. Instead sameness and difference intermingle without a sense of rulebreaking or transgression. There is Radical Tonality that comes closer to Non-Western World Drone than typical of New Music today, yet does not adhere rigidly to itself either. It is a betwixt-and-between thing that as it remains hovering above possibility refuses to become everyday-ordinary, which is the composer's point, her vision.

So there is a modeling of the idea of the extra-normal reality represented by the puddle images as felt in the unraveling of the music itself. Not a sense of coming apart, though. Rather there is a sense of refraction, of reflective sound shapes unveiling. It is a music of Color Fields, not quite Frankenthaler-esque but really there is a sort of affinity there if you look for it.

It is some remarkable music that stands out as difference, as difference in sameness.

I do recommend this quite definitely. It is neither here nor there and that makes it a special sort of "where." Listen!