Stewart Goodyear, Phoenix, Solo Piano Works Modern and Classic Alike

 

Compositions featured on this album:

Stewart Goodyear "Congotay"

Jennifer Higdon "Secret and Glass Gardens"

Anthony Davis "Middle Passage"

Steward Goodyear "Panorama"

Debussy "La Cathedrale Engoloutie"

Debussy "L'Isle Joyeuse"

Mussorgsky "Pictures at an Exhibition"

Trinidadian Caribbean rooted pianist Stewart Goodyear shows his enormous virtuoso musicality and adept contrast of style and mood on his latest, an album of piano solos called Phoenix (Bright Shiny Things BSTC 0154). His two compositions act as bookends for the program--"Congotay" and "Panorama" have irresistible rhythmic drive and syncopation that show vibrant connections with traditional Caribbean, Trinidadian, and primal Jazz roots. They are happy wonders and show a side of Goodyear that puts him in a league of his own. 

Beyond that are a series of works that embrace our current Modernity and twentieth century gems, some staple of the repertoire along with fresh new music. The solo piano version of Mussorgsky's "Pictures at an Exhibition" is one of the very best I have heard. It does not fall victim to the sometimes ultra-clangorous readings one tends to hear. The whole of it has brilliant phrasings and perfectly appropriate sound color pianisms.

The several Debussys have the poetic expressive qualities one hopes for in this music. And for the later Modernisms, the Jennifer Higdon and Anthony Davis works are given very sympathetic and flawlessly executed readings. Bravo! Listen to Mussorgsky's "Dance of the Un-hatched Chicks" for some almost incredible velocity and "swing"! Just great is what that is!

So there you have it. An outstanding pianist savoring a cornucopia of solo piano goodies. You really should check this one out if you are piano-oriented, or even if not! Brilliant!

Douglas J. Cuomo, Seven Limbs, with Nels Cline and the Aizuri Quartet

 

Of the new there is no end. Our Modern music turns and bends Pretzel like in a never ending panorama that parades before our ears if we are fortunate to get to hear it all. Such a thing continues happily for, today an album of chamber music by Douglas J. Cuomo featuring guitarist Nels Cline and the Aizuri String Quartet. Seven Limbs (Sunnyside SSC 1641) is both the title of the CD and the seven-sectioned, 18 part work that the recording contains.

There is a kind of magic in the blend of Nels Cline's electric guitar and the sonorous strings of the Aizuri Quartet. The liners draw our attention to something Miles Davis said that is worth reproducing here as well. Great art happens, he said, "If you put a musician in a place where they have to do something different from what they do all the time." Something like that happens when guitarist Nels Cline and the Aizuri Quartet are in some ways relied upon to accomplish the equivalent of a high wire act, inspired by the Buddhist "Seven Limbs" form of dwelling upon the turn of the wheel of dharma, a virtuoso series of situations for the group that require improvisatory and spontaneous togetherness that mark out a kind of spiritual pilgrimage in musical sound.

Like the quartet we covered the other day, Ruo's "A Dust in Time," there are long and  sometimes slow ostinatos that underpin a continual exploration of tonal reaching forward, chant-like, Expressionistic torrents and everything in between. Nels Cline comes through with a beautiful reading and extension of it all, with guitar work that suggests jazz and fusion but ultimately harnesses the energy to compliment the quartet's exciting effusion of dramatic sound. It is music that has moments of thoughtfulness, or kinetic drama, endurance, resistance, turmoil, euphoria, stillness.

Like Ruo's music of several days back, this post-post Modern approach is something that feels intimate as you live with it. We all have had a certain amount of suffering in the past few years. This music recognizes how hard it has been, maybe, and tries to speak beautifully consoling tones for you to live within. Bravo!

Apollo Chamber Players, With Malice Toward None, Globally Inspired Music

 

The last several review articles make for interesting comparisons, and now for a second offering in the string quartet Post and Post-Post Modern realm. (There is a third that is written and will be proofed and posted today as well.) Here we have the Apollo Chamber Players and their "Globally Inspired Music" in an album entitled With Malice Toward None (Azica  ACD71340).

One thing that can be said straight off the bat, and that is that the Apollo Chamber Players are to be warmly commended for the adventurous programming. All five works go to interesting places. We get a determined tonality and a kind of eclectic stance that appropriates music of the heritage of the vernacular, and thereby deliberately strays into places decidedly beyond the purity of purpose that bleep-bloop High Modernism has given us. They acknowledge the whole earth approach to the music in the subtitle "Globally Inspired Music." It is that, interestingly so.

This includes Euroamerican Rock elements, Western Folk and Songwriter influences, Armenian Folksongs, and finally a kind of synthesis of Eastern European, Far Eastern and American Folk elements. The Apollo and their special guests prove themselves ideally suited to the repertoire they have carefully chosen, kind of a furtherance of Kronos and the changing music soundscape.

First up is J. Kimo Williams and a take on the furtherance of riffing and rocking with the quartet and the rather psychedelic electric violin of guest Tracy Silverman, all attractively put together on the title work.

Pamela Z contributes her voice, electronics and an immersion in Joni Mitchell's classic "All I Want" among other things. I sometimes have a little difficulty with Minimal vocal repetitions but once I get past that she plays with the song in an intriguing way, then moves on to a abstract dissection of a hoary old folksong ("500 Miles") and etc. Once one gets past the vocal insistence there is some very attractive string abstractions that recall the originals yet stray into the world at large today. There is a high level of invention that helps offset the momentarily rote-ish vocal cycles.

Christopher Theofanidis and Mark Wingate begin their "What is the Word 20x2020 No. 11" (2017) with a start and stop poetry recitation composition, then derive inspiration from the spoken word with six rather beautiful movements for the quartet and the voice electronically transformed.

Matthew J. Detrick and the Apollo players do a fine job arranging for quartet (plus guest viola) Komitas & Astamazyan's "Themes of Armenian Folksongs." Anyone (like me) who loves the Armenian melodic-harmonic universe will no doubt love these as I did.

Eve Beglarian's "We Will Sing One Song" combines eastern (Armenian) percussion with strings and the duduk, a double-reed instrument also from Armenia. The music is very exciting, interesting, folk based without being directly folk-phrased. Then again the ensemble breaks after a time into a very unusual version of the Stephen Foster song "My Old Kentucky Home" and it is beautifully, wildly unexpected.

In the end there is much to like on this album once you get past some of the more repetitive vocal moments. The Apollo players are absolutely winning in their dedicated and full-blushed readings. And the music gives us some unexpected twists and happy outcomes involving the very contemporaneous sounds. Bravo, bravo!

Huang Ruo, A Dust in Time (Passacaglia for Strings), Del Sol Quartet

 

In this sometimes grifting, drifting, blistering world we are in today, there perhaps is nothing quite so honest and direct than an album of New Music presented with care, with nothing but the music in general and, one ever hopes, something we will respond to, will like, something to want to hear again and again. New Music is a true element of our freedom from undue coercion, a thing to consider with never a hard sell.. In a world where people compose freely, listen freely, and ideally all are rewarded in kind, not in riches so much as to find a place in what the present-day may be self-remembered for, one hopes.

That hits me as I listen to the Del Sol Quartet performing A Dust in Time (Passacaglia for Strings)  by Huang Ruo (Bright Shiny Things BSTC-0158). This is a full-length work divided into 13 sections, each of which flows to the next with a supercharged lyrical set of quietly reminiscent and sad but transcendent slow suspensions and unfoldings .Altogether the work makes for a beautiful, never ending mood that avoids the sort of rote repetition of orthodox Minimalism, but lingers on something that builds on a crawlingly slow ostinato, puts us onto very widely spanning  in ways perhaps more vaguely familiar more as chant structured than overtly hypnotic recalls. In time the music moves in melodic motion beyond the already stated and follows a wide arc in a kind of hour-long quasi a-b-a axis..

In this way Ruo creates a never-ending largo that the composer builds forward with, never exactly moving ahead in time nor exactly static. And as we listen we feel the opening up of a musical space.

Ruo explains what led to this haunting work: "Most of us have experienced moments during this global crisis where time and space seemed to be slowed or frozen. This special piece is created for the people affected by the pandemic, giving them a piece of music to reflect, to express, to mourn, to bury, to heal, to find internal peace, strength and hope," The hour long work Ruo suggests might be expereinces as a Tibetan Sand Mandala, created slowly from a center, expanding outward to a "colored fullness, and then to be subtracted from it inwards back to the central essence point"  in a life cycle-like movement from nothing to a fullness and then back to an emptiness. The journey from a kind of dust to a life affirming expression and then back to the nothingness again has the aim of creating an "internal peace laying in the heart."

All that makes sense as the Del Sol Quartet give us this contemporary passacaglia of labyrinthian growth and returning stasis. The CD comes with a cosmic coloring book meant to help the listener obtain a sort of aural and visual completeness. As the unfolding process takes place.

As the liners tell us, Ruo draws upon a wide variety of influences, from Chinese ancient folk music to avant experimental noise, processual sound, rock and various classical genre traditions, then too installation art, all meant to combine into a cross-referenced and special whole.

As one listens one gradually realizes that everything Ruo intended comes off well, thanks to his an overarching conceptual constancy and the well healed reading by the Del Sol Quartet.

It no doubt must find each listener in a receptive earnestness of openness for it to have its way. It is a most welcome peace one can gain by intended focus. It refuses to copy so much as it re-creates the aural world need to transcend the pandemic. And it does.`

This is as insistent to be itself as anything around these days. And you end up appreciating it a lot of you are like me. Bravo Del Sol. Bravo Huang Ruo!

Tod Machover, Death and the Powers, Soloists and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Gil Rose

 

No doubt many readers will be familiar with the pathbreaking Electronic Music compositions of Tod Machover. Perhaps you might be less familiar with his music that combines live instruments and voices with electronics. Regardless there is reason to take notice in the face of the recorded world premier of Machover's legendary one-act opera Death and the Powers (BMOP Sound 1082), featuring a talented cast of vocalists (including baritone James Maddalena) along with electronics realized in the MIT Media Lab, plus the always focused Boston Modern Orchestra Project, all under conductor and music director Gil Rose.

The poetic and dramatic libretto is the handiwork of US Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky. I will not attempt to summarize it, as the libretto is included in the CD package. Suffice to say that its quasi-bildungsroman apocalyptic robot cosmos is richly detailed and gives Machover an evocative potential that helps him create a highly dramatic expressionism, a beautiful transcendence of outstanding musicality.

The entire one act opera fills our ears remarkably at some 80-some-odd minutes. It is through composed in a highly Modern chromatic and/or newly  inventive tonal manner, with some beautiful electronics mixing wonderfully well with the fully fleshed out vocal parts and the colorful and powerful expression of the orchestration. Everything comes to us with a highly effective deliberate phrasing that works  with true elegance and impresses dramatically. The more you listen to this one, the more you hear--and that in the best sense since the intricate expression comes alive with repeated earfuls. All components stand out in themselves and as part of the totality.

I very strongly recommend this album. It shows just how complete a conceptualist is Machover, how finely developed his orchestrational sensitivities are. Kudos! Bravo! A wonderful work and the performance is equally definitive. Do listen to this one, get it!

Julia Den Boer, Kermes, New Music for Solo Piano by Four Woman Composers Who Deserve to Be Better Known

 

The ever opening panorama of New Music shows no sign of fading away. And there are some strides being made out there for novel and encouraging works appearing before us in a pretty steady stream of new releases. One to take seriously and listen to with absorption is pianist  Julia Den Boer's Kermes (New Focus Recordings FCR311). It introduces to us four women composers and four new works deserving our attention--"Deserts" by Giulia Lorusso, "The Underfolding" by Linda Catlin Smith, "Reminiscence" by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, and "Crimson" by Rebecca Saunders.

These are composers not yet household names. I've covered quite a few by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, and a piece here and there by Linda Catlin Smith and Rebecca Saunders (type their names in the search box above for reviews).

The music has an adventuresome streak, It avoids the atonal bleep-bloop pointillism of High Modernism, though its harmonic-melodic sense embraces everything from ritualistic radical tonality to an edgy expansionist ambiguity. In a way it is beyond Modernism per se but also does not fall directly into the post-Modern Minimalist possibility. It does not ignore all of that which went before but nonetheless carves out a series of personal niches that are eminently pianistic and nicely suited to Julia Den Boer's virtuosity in latent potency and her genuine dedication to the piano as a kind of art form necessary and sufficient unto itself.

"The Underfolding" has a hypnotic continually recurring chord cluster that plays off a Satian-Cagean-Feldmanesque melody line that evokes without imitating, that converges in its paradoxically moving stasis. It is a wonderfully suspended temporary anomaly so to speak Ms. Den Boer handles beautifully the dream-like suspension that underpins the stricture of the work. It is an enchanted world we find our way into and it ravishes.

"Reminiscence" has a matching cosmic outlook of suspensions and repetitions interspersed with unique note responses that vary and open up the aural field.

"Crimson" sets up a more jagged sounding of clusters that interrelate at the same time as they unfold in ways that surprise and stray far beyond simple repetition.

Last but not least there is the opening Guilia Lorusso "Deserts" which adopts the pointillistic High Modernist rangy leaps and silence, and then makes something more hypnotic out of it. From, there the work rolls into a continual two-handed rhythmic density that has just the continuity needed thanks to Julia Den Boer's acrobatic virtuosity. This is a work to savor!

But then it all has plenty of substance to sink oneself into. Julia Den Boer triumphs and each work stands out as a worthy new gesture in high art. Do not miss this! New piano music thrives here! Listen!

Voces 8, Infinity

 

Each day we go forward and with any luck learn good things. Musically that is ever the case in my life. Today we have something not entirely expected, but then once the music plays a number of times it starts to sound like some part of home, the home of the contemporary world, the Modern as it twists and turns in ways we never thought around, say, 1974.

It is voces8 and their enchanting voices giving us a 15-work program entitled Infinity (Decca 4851626). Their website tells us that the album "embraces renowned composers alternative, film and contemporary classical music" for voices, and at times accompanying instrumental parts. Eight works were specially commissioned for the album, while the remaining are "choral versions of calming instrumental pieces."  Now that "calming" aspect might be telegraphic for some kind of "New Age" mélange, but serious listening to this program affirms that the musical content is by no means facile and purely functional.. Plenty of effort and musical inspiration has gone into this music as a whole.

In other words the program plants its stylistic flag squarely into a kind of Postmodern ambiance, a rather meditative spatial emission. Now I like most everybody these days recognizes a planetary malaise that can heighten all kinds of anxious thoughts, fears, worries, and if some music promises to counter that, are we to reject such a thing in the interest of High Modernist insistence? Probably not. It is our call. And I do not mind the idea of something sprawling spatio-temporally outward to a calm place.

An old friend years ago announced to me that he had basically had it with the Avant Garde in music because he already felt a kind of misery of life and, he went on. "Who needs to hear that all over again in the music?" What I said then in response is not relevant to today, really. Of course with the advent of the Postmodern per se, Brian Eno's ambiance, even some of the later works of Cage, well one might find plenty of music made since 1975 give or take, music that pulls the shade down on dissonance and fire in favor of something potentially soporific but then has the challenge of being contentful, structurally sound, syntactically perhaps looking far back into the Early Music worlds as it also carves out a vision of the futuristic present.

What could be wrong with that in those simple terms? And do we need to assert then, like my friend unfortunately did, that we should abandon music that challenges our sense of confluence and rips asumder the staid musical worlds it had tried to replace on some level? Certainly not. I've said this before but think about it differently--if we get away from musical considerations for a minute, we would be perhaps too extreme if we, for example  decided that all movies from this point forward were to avoid tension, dramatic horror, contrary plot suspense? Probably a bad idea.

So my response to the music on this program is not supposed to be an advocation that this music replaces other styles. Iti s rather than it can stand along other altogether different things and not be the everything in music that we perhaps increasingly find an outmoded idea? 

If along the way this album might prove popular to listeners who would perhaps avoid the Modern music worlds of the higher octane dissonant  realms like they might avoid watching "Psycho?" Well probably but that does not force us to follow in those footsteps.ourselves. I  might venture to say that even Elevator Music of the '50s at its best might be heard with some pleasure, without assuming the genre has some right of hegemony over our musical tastes.

So the music comes to us not as some obligation, but more as a gift, free to receive and enjoy. So we hear some 15 miniatures by people you may or may not know of, Sophie Hutchings, Slow Meadow, Jon Hopkins, Porkell Sigurbjornsson, Johann  Johannsson,  Kelly Lee Owens &Sebastian Plano, Olafur Arnalds, Anne Lovett, Benjamin Rimmer, Ola Gjeilo, Stephen Barton, Nainita Desai, Hildur Gudnadottir, A Winged Victory for the Sullen and finally Luke Howard. All in common is the kind of placid Ritual Tonality and sometimes a tinge of early music spatiality, some reaching out after a few listens and staying with you, others take a bit more focus but altogether we get a distinct mode locality, a planar expanding outwards for a beautifully lucid chamber vocal group of extraordinarily consistent lyricality.

After a good number of listens the music retains its consonance but began to stand out as content worthy, a goodly ways beyond what New Age requires of its composers. If this was the music we were somehow required to like to the exclusion of all else, I would probably balk. Given our ear freedom that is not the case, and so this becomes a pleasant change of mood and a substantial batch of chamber choral music that should appeal to a good number of folks out there. I recommend this one without hesitation. Voces8 is a beautiful ensemble and the music has a lurking sweetness that does not cloy.