Joan Valent, Poetic Logbook

From Mallorca, Spain, composer Joan Valent is a phenom. He refuses to be categorized. At least that is so on his very beautiful album Poetic Logbook (Deutsche Grammophon). There is a second volume out, a follow-up EP  but because of  COVID-19 ongoing I was unable to get a copy. Nonetheless I did get the first volume and I am happy I did.

It is music that is very lyrical, very consonant, very rhapsodic without being typically Romantic. There is a serenading element. The series of songs for soprano Maria Planas and the chamber ARS Ensemble are based upon poetry of note. They form the central focus of the album. Then there are instrumental works that go perfectly well with the songs--Ciaccona for Violin Solo, and Four Variations for chamber configurations.

The music is Post-Minimalist in that there may be an ostinato but the music ultimately feels more linear than cyclical. It is unabashed in its striving after beauty and that puts it in a place, on the surface in a kind of polar opposite to classic Modernism, which has had historically a more duplicitous relation to beauty--as Nielsen famously said, sometimes the music should be more "characteristic" than beautiful. But then again there is an energetically expressive, brio element to be heard in the music here as well, for example on "De Sentir" or with a sort of post-Bachian motor-impulsive cello on "Porto Amico."

This is music to savor, well performed, ravishing. Soprano Maria Planas and the ARS Ensemble sound wonderfully well  The music swims in summer whirlpools, settles into winter drifts, falling leaves and rises among spring budding. It's all nice and probably appealing to many ears, I would think. Bravo!

Noa Even & Stephen Klunk, Patchwork, New Music for Saxophone and Drum Set

Sometimes the daring of the how and the what of some music and music makers is unusual enough that the results are nearly automatically something important to pay attention to. For me, anyway. That is the case with Noa Even & Stephen Klunk's Patchwork (New Focus Recordings FCR255). Why? The duo of  saxophone and drum set is ordinarily one encountered in Avant Jazz/Free Improv channels. Here we get to experience such a duo for Avant New Music works in the equally edgy realm of ultra-Modern "Classical."

Stephen is on drums, Noa on sax. Patchwork is the name of the album and also of the duet itself. Five compositions comprise the whole of the program. Each has its own trajectory but all strive for a convergence of the two instruments/instrumentalists and put them through paces with a syntax more intensely dialogued with linear or cyclical content in an overt way than one might generally come across on a typical improvisation for such a duo. And the relative lack of composed drum-set sequences is also the case, so even just for that this is good music to encounter

There is a definite experimental daring to these works by Osnat Netzer, Hong-Da Chin, Eric Wubbels, Erin Rogers and Dan Tramte. As such the music most definitely feels its way through at times more than it supplies definitive pre-fab solutions. Eric Wubbels "Axamer Folio" struck me as being one of the most interesting compositions of the bunch for its complicated cyclical and non-cyclical event sequences.

The music clearly thrives in its challenging the duet to express things that sound lucid and progressively reasoned,  as a new sort of abstracted language of sound production that comes out of the last 70 years of avant improvisations for the two instruments. You might call this a kind of synthetic codification of that. But taken on its own it is completely self-sufficient as well. Even at tines exciting.

Patchwork goes boldly where no music has quite gone before--at least for sax and drums, anyway. That is quite a feat. One admires and congratulates all involved for having the chutzpah, perseverance and talent to come up with it all. Listen.

Mark Abel, The Cave of Wondrous Voice, World Premiere Recordings

I've covered the music of Mark Abel on these pages before (see articles from April 13, 2012, June 13, 2014, August 20, 2018). I never consciously sought to cover so many. It was one-at-a-time and I've found myself liking and posting on each. Now there is another one, a new one of chamber works, entitled The Cave of Wondrous Voice (Delos DE3570). It features a song cycle and three instrumental works for small chamber configurations.

Generally speaking this is not music that overtly seeks to call attention to itself by being extroverted-Modern or Avant Garde, nor is there a rock or pop influence in any obvious sense. Nonetheless it is inspired and very well put-together music that would not be mistaken for the music of the past nor perhaps as the music of some future utopia, either? It is straightforwardly intricate, expressive and inventive in good ways, in the best ways.

The first and last works are notable for their evocative and effective usage of the clarinet (David Shifrin)--"Intuition's Dance" for clarinet and piano (with Carol Rosenberger) and the "Clarinet Trio" adding Fred Sherry on cello.

"Four Poems of Marina Tsvetaeva" features Hila Plitmann's elastically expressive soprano with a plastically definitive Sarah Beck on English horn and Ms. Rosenberger once again well situated at the piano.

Finally a two-part "The Elastic Hours" pulls together violinist Sabrina-Vivian Hopcker with pianist Dominic Cheli for some of the most appealingly dynamic and alternately energetic music on the album.

What impresses consistently on this program is the beautiful melodic-harmonic poise of it all. One is reminded somewhat of a present-day Bartok in that the music creates an unforced and refreshing stream of inventive form-in-motion like the great Bela's music did so consistently. There is a continual series of musical acrobatics that neither relies upon the expected nor flavor-of-the-month bandwagoneering. That may mean that Mark Abel does not get a lot of attention for being on some cutting edge. The positive side of that is that the music always sounds lucid and relevant and by so doing should attract a wide variety of listeners.

This is rather brilliant written music that is well played. It will appeal to anyone who loves the intimate, "serious" sort of chamber music that speaks directly to the connoisseur of such things. An excellent program. Bravo!

James Primosch, Carthage, The Crossing, Donald Nally

The vocal ensemble known as the Crossing sound so beautiful that any composer no doubt is delighted to be performed by them. There is another album of theirs out recently featuring the music of James Primosch, Carthage (Navona 6287), There are six a capella works presented, including the title work and the "Mass for the Day of St. Thomas Didymus." Much of it was composed  recently, 1998-2019 in all.

Everything has that made-for-voices-hanging-together sound, with the subtle spice of modern harmonic movement and a widely hovering declamation of those gorgeous voices.

Each of the compositions has presence and memorability. The Mass and its five movements is the more lengthy but all show a remarkable natural part writing brilliance that the Crossing bring to life with great beauty, now lyrical and evocative, now expressive and dramatically surging forth. Not surprisingly the Mass is the most informed by a old-in-new contrapuntal melisma but nonetheless a pronounced contemporary edge.

It is all worth hearing, worth having, a thorough immersion in choral acuity. Kudos Donald Nally and the Crossing. Kudos James Primosch. Most heartily recommended.

Johann Sebastian Bach, Keyboard Partita No. 4, etc., Marija Ilic, Piano

As I grow older I find that the music of Johann Sebastian Bach seems ever more deep. And when a pianist makes a new selection of keyboard works that are worth re-hearing and then brings a fully pianistic expression to them, I am a happy listener. That's how I feel listening to a new volume of such things by Marija Ilic (MSR Classics 1724).

It's an almost whimsical reading of some classics, sounding almost like she is recalling the music in memory with some feeling of past-in-present, some fond associations the music brings to her. Perhaps I am projecting into the music how I myself feel about it? Not exactly, though, because this is a series of delicately dreamful readings, not a romping horserace like some of Glen Gould's classic interpretations, but then the choices reflect a reflection, a reflectivity more than a flurry.

So the two Adagios (BWV 1016 and 968) are calm and introspective, the "Six Little Preludes" have a brittle delicacy. But then the "Partita No. 4" has the deep waters of the "heavier," somewhat more profound Bach and Ms. Ilic gives it all the weight it demands.

In the liners they mention that the Times praise her for her "quiet intensity." Yes, I hear that, too. And with this particular setting and these interesting repertoire choices you have a real keeper. I am glad to have it and I suspect you'd be too, if you love Bach on piano. Bravo.

Nick Storring, My Magic Dreams Have Lost Their Spell

Nick Storring's My Magic Dreams Have Lost Their Spell (Orange Milk Records) resonates at once through a number of genres simultaneously. The music is Electroacoustic, New Music, Ambient, Neo-Psychedelic Rock and Soundscape all at once. The music is painstakingly built up out of many tracks laid down one-at-a-time by Storring on a great variety of acoustic and electroacoustic instruments--guitars, synths. violin, his primary instrument the cello, etc. The potent final conjugation is a heady orchestral melange that has roots in Sgt. Pepper's as much as Stockhausen, Pink Floyd, Fripp and Eno as much as Morton Feldman and John Luther Adams, or even Funkadelic for a minute or two! And out of that comes a certain brilliance, real brilliance.

The Toronto based Storring put this together as a tribute to Roberta Flack. That might not suggest itself to you if you did not already know it but the point is that the ambitious soundscape transcends any possible reference point gloriously to exist in itself. The music has Progressive thrust and a wonderful sense of "orchestration" that comes out of Storring's remarkable sound-color vision.

And in the end it defies genre to exist on its own plane, a singular thing of beauty, a remarkable set of short pieces that flow together in one long, convincing stream of musical being. It is a conglomeration of influences that all together come together as the future of the past. And perhaps all music of note exists in that way?

I recommend this one heartily. It could have been listed in any number of my other blogs because it is everywhere at once. It is a ravishingly fine album. Do not miss it if you can help it.

Jeremy Beck, By Moonlight

If one is to be fair in evaluating the various New Music albums that might come your way these days, it is best not to have a pre-conceived set of stylistic expectations that push the discussion into a pre-judgement. This may be a recent development. If you were listening to the assortment of New Music releases in the '70s or '80s it was fair to expect that the music would likely be either High Modern, pre- or post-Serialist, or Minimalist. Nowadays all those categories still exist, yet there are other possibilities as we continually see. When describing music, I find myself often enough making a turn to labels I have long thought are useful in that they give you a shorthand clue as to the music you could hear, what it generally might sound like, and now those possibilities include anything or everything. I have not abandoned the typologies-labels here because I still think it helps potential listeners, but they are no longer the end-all of considerations, surely, if they ever were.

For example we have the music of contemporary living US composer Jeremy Beck in an album entitled By Moonlight (Innova 051). It covers some nine works in a wide variety of ensemble possibilities--solo guitar, choir, tenor and piano, several stringed instruments, full orchestra, etc. The music is unabashedly tonal, perhaps a bit on the painter-of-tones side of things, lyric and expansive, not exactly a Modern-day Copland, but not exactly Neo-Classical either. Perhaps something in between, in original ways.

The last composition in the program, the relatively short "Three Pieces for Orchestra" takes flight most happily in the painterly zone--in general, not that the music engages in referential specifics to the extent of something like, say, Copland's "Appalachian Spring." The mood is soundfully sunny and pastoral, but not so literal. The first movement depicts moonlight, the second a prelude to Beck's opera The Biddle Boys and Mrs. Soffel, and the third a "Serenade" based on a movement from his fifth string quartet. It holds up on repeated hearings, as does the rest of the music in general.

The opening work, "Concertino" for two cellos and string orchestra also gives us some very heartening lyricism, this slightly more folksy than not but very fresh in its phrasing out of long melodic streams, and all that is most appealing.

The beginning and the end of this program give us vibrant music that, even if taken alone gives us sufficient reason to like this music. Yet there are a great deal of contrasting things in between as well. Given the terse but appealing brevity of much of it a detailed blow-by-blow delineation of what you would hear would be perhaps a little too much detail for this review article?

Yet a few touchstones might be in order. "Dream and Echoes" is a two movement satb choir sequence beautifully lyrical. "Of Summers Past, or Passing" gives us nicely ruminative and inventive movements for clarinet and piano.

"Two Pieces for Guitar" sounds timeless yet at the same time sounds like a past-in-the-present kind of Modernity that does nicely defy expectations yet channels the guitar-lute literature as a whole into something personal and in the present moment.

The solo cello "Prelude and Toccata" has a kind of proudly bold set of double-stop punctuated declamations both dramatic and toneful, then jumps into a dancingly jaunty second movement that is quite appealing.

The music disarms me as a listener by not calling attention to itself as an example of some new trend, some flavor-of-the-month fodder for some genre cannon. Instead it beguiles purely on its own terms as a series of  miniatures and one-offs most notable in themselves more so than examples of some larger movement. That is all fine if one listens without expectations. It is regenerative music nice to accompany the need for a more hopeful mood? As nature becomes awakened in full spring as I write this I feel the music helps do justice to the glorious seasonal opening of buds. Most pleasurable a listen it is. Bravo Jeremy Beck.