Month: August 2021

Contemporary Classical

BBC Proms: BBC Singers Feshareki, Burton, Hughes, Williams, Muhly/ Cheneki!

The Proms concert on August 19, presented by the BBC Singers conducted by Sofi Jeannin, was a continuous complex sequence lasting about an hour and a half. In it, a number of renaissance choral works were paired with reflections on or reactions to those pieces by more recent composers, in three cases BBC commissions written for this concert. At the center of this was one of Stravinsky’s completion, by adding lost parts, of one of the Three Sacred Songs by Gesualdo, Illunina nos. There was also a work by Hildegard of Bingen, O viridissima virga which stood by itself. An instrumental ensemble consisting of Liam Byrne, playing viola da gambe, Stuart King, playing bass clarinet, Tom Rogerson playing synthesizers, and the strikingly charismatic Delia Stevens, percussionist bridged the space between the works, and sometimes also played during certain of them. This whole enterprise was bookended by Qui habitat in adiutorio altissimi, a large for work 24 voices, by Josquin de Prez at the beginning, and a mammoth reaction/reflection of it, Aetherworld: Josquin Mirrored by the featured artist, turntablist Shiva Feshareki, at the end.

Of the inner pairings, Ken Burton reflected Tallis’s Loquebantur variis linguis, whose text is about the apostles at Pentecost speaking in many tongues with texts from the psalms set with elements of gospel music. Bernard Hughes, in Birdchant, stayed close to the surface qualities of Janequin’s Le chant des oiseaux, and, in fact, made his work a continuation of it, but pushed everything further along, including adding more bird songs, in more realistic transcriptions, as well as mechanical imitations, and adding the instruments, making everything more manic and funny. The title of Roderick Williams’s Ave verum corpus Re-imagined tells the whole story: he made a different piece from Byrd’s Ave verum corpus using exactly the same material that Byrd used. Sweelinck’s Je sens en moy une flamme nouvell is embedded as a sort of memory/reference point in a larger piece setting a poem by Thomas Traherne in the very beautiful A New Flame by Nico Muhly.

Shiva Feshareki’s program note for Aetherword: Josquin Mirrored explains that “Aether was the fifth element in alchemical chemistry and early physics. It was the name given to material that was believed to fill the universe beyond the terrestrial sphere….This concept was used in several theories to explain various natural phenomena, such as the traveling of light and gravity.” Her work, taking the Josquin piece that begin the program as material and using technology including vinyl, turntables and CDJs, all processed through “vintage analogue tape echo and a cutting-edge immersive software designed by creative technologist Andy Sheen” makes what she describes as “an intricate duet between immersive electronic and natural acoustic sound, based on the fractal geometry of sound.” The work filled the hall, moving from place to place, and also interacting with a certain amount of live playing, including that of Kit Downes on the Albert Hall organ, in a sort of climactic show down between the organ and the technological forces.

The playing and singing throughout the whole concert was fabulous and the presentation was flawless–even considering an unnecessary sort of light show accompanying it—and the effect of it all enthralling. The recording of this concert can be heard at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000ytpy for 43 days.

The Prom concert on August 24th was presented by Chineke!, the UK’s only black and ethnically diverse orchestra. The last Prom concert I heard them do, in 2017, focused on living black composers. This concert, conducted by the Panamanian-American Kalena Bovell, featured historical black composers, presenting music by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Fela Sowande, and Florence Price. Fela Sowande, a Nigerian-British composer and organist, who lived a long life and had a long a successful career in London, was represented by his African Suite (1944) for string orchestra and harp. Based on West African material, including quotations from Ghanaian composer Ephraim Amu, it was in the vein of British string orchestra pieces such as the Holst St. Paul’s Suite, and was extremely appealing music. Florence Price’s Piano Concerto In One Movement (1934) featured pianist Jeneba Kanneh-Mason. Although played without a break, the piece really had three fairly clear and distinct sections, if not movements. In the first two the very grateful and impressively virtuosic writing for the piano was matched by very strikingly delicate and skillful scoring for the orchestra. In the third section, a juba, an African-American plantation dance with origins in the Kongo, although the music is snappy and engaging, the piano part tends to fade more into the texture and loses its prominence, which, however attractive it is as music, becomes less successful as a virtuoso vehicle, and causes the piece to end, despite its upbeat quality, with something closer to a whimper than the sort of bang one would like for a big concerto.

The concert also included two pieces by Samuel Coleridge-Taylor. It’s hard to see any reason other than racism why Coleridge-Taylor should not have been a revered British musical icon before now. His music is as accomplished as anything that his countrymen of his age (and this includes Vaughan Williams and Holst) were writing during his lifetime. In fact Vaughan Williams and Holst had barely begun to produce any of the music of theirs which we know before Coleridge-Taylor died in 1912. The concert began with the Overture to The Song of Hiawatha (1899), one of the large choral works based on Longfellow’s poems that were the pieces their composer was best known for for many years, since they were for many years before the Second World War annually staged in the Albert Hall (although none of it has been performed in that hall for the last sixty years). As good as this piece was, it was somewhat overshadowed, at least for this listener, by Coleridge-Taylor’s Symphony No. 1 (1896-1901) which ended the program. It really is a very fine piece, but is an astonishingly accomplished and successful piece for a twenty-one year old composer, taking a place with pieces like the Mendelssohn, Octet, the Shostakovich First Symphony, and the Shapero Four Hand Sonata, as incredibly mature pieces–masterpieces, in fact– by very young composers. The last movement, which Stanford his teacher apparently kept telling him wasn’t quite right, is problematic and, despite, his reworking it several times, is still not quite right, but it was still immensely impressive and exciting and wonderful to hear. The performance, like those of the other pieces, couldn’t have been better. This concert can also be heard for a little over a month at https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000yzr8.






CD Review, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, File Under?

Two Wandelweiser Recordings (CD Review)

Sivan Silver-Swartz

Untitled 6

Wandelweiser CD EWR 1920

Nigel Dean, violin; Patrick Behnke, Tanner Pfeiffer, viola; Tal Katz, Julian Tedaldi, cello

 

Antoine Beuger

Jankélévich Sextets

Another Timbre CD at168

Apartment House – James Opstad, double bass; Mark Knoop, accordion; Heather Roche, bass clarinet; Mira Benjamin, violin; Joe Qiu, bassoon; Bridget Carey, viola

 

At twenty-eight years of age, Sivan Silver-Swartz is the youngest member of the Wandelweiser collective. A native of Ohio, he received his undergraduate degree at Oberlin College and then relocated to California to get his Master’s at CalArts. He has remained in Los Angeles since getting his degree in 2019.

 

Silver-Swartz’s work fits in well with the interest of Wandelweiser composers in the New York School, notably late pieces by John Cage and Morton Feldman. Six of his string player friends perform Untitled 6, an hourlong piece that takes its cue from the slow, soft music Feldman favored and that Cage adopted in his Number Pieces. Silver-Swartz pursues a quasi-aleatoric device in the score, with one chart of events that “change and do not return” and one of events that “change but do return.” The design of the events structure is the composer’s, but it gives the musicians considerable latitude in realization. There is a fair bit of overlap and harmonic presentation in Untitled 6 and the tuning reveals overtones from just intonation. The pace is steady and gradual, sumptuously so.

 

Antoine Beuger is one of founding members of Wandelweiser. From 2003-2005, he wrote a series of pieces, each for a different ensemble, that referenced cultural or intellectual figures in their titles, including Canto, Ockeghem, and Tschirtner; these three have all appeared on the label Another Timbre. The group Apartment House recorded the fourth in the series, Jankélévich Sextets, written for an interesting hybrid ensemble consisting of three strings (violin, viola, and double bass), bass clarinet, bassoon, and accordion. Vladimir Jankélévich (1903-1983) was a philosopher and musicologist. A French child of Russian-Jewish parents, he fought in the Resistance during the Second World War and later taught at the Sorbonne.

 

Jankélévich Sextets is also an hourlong piece that is primarily slow and soft. The performance instructions indicate that tones should be “very quiet; long to very long,” and that rests should give time to breathe or be much longer. Each pagelong section starts with a unison pitch in all voices (notes may be played in any octave) followed by an additional six pitches on each staff, with some repeated notes. Beuger indicates that the number of these sections used in a performance, as well as their ordering, is free.

 

Generally, the Sextets are, in this recording, presented in a thicker texture than that of Untitled 6. Given the freedom of ordering provided, the sense of trajectory alongside spontaneity is noteworthy. Octave displacements and freedom of pacing result in complex verticals, which are frequently fascinating. Arresting too are the places where simple intervals are given voice. For example, a multi-octave presentation just shy of twenty minutes in is a powerful point of arrival.

 

Neophytes who think that Wandelweiser pieces must all ‘sound the same,’ because of the affinity of its members’ aesthetic aims, would do well to compare these two works. They may be contained in similarly constructed vessels, but each has an individual character all its own. Kudos to the performers of both pieces for their tremendous attention to detail and keen sense of collaboration.

 

-Christian Carey

Contemporary Classical

BBC Proms Manchester Collective: Gorecki, Finnis, Eastman, Tabakova, Horowitz/Rattle and LSO: Stravinsky

The Proms concert on August 17 was presented by The Manchester Collective. The group apparently has different manifestations, but in this case it was an almost twenty-member string orchestra, led by its music director, violinist Rakhi Singh, performing a more usual sort of new music concert, featuring harpsichord soloist Mahan Esfahani. Adam Szabo, the organization’s Chief Executive, also participated as a sort of MC for the evening, introducing and commenting on the program. Like the concert highlighting Abel Selaocoe two days earlier, it had a piece featuring, or at least referencing Jean-Phillipe Rameau, this one being Suite in Old Style ‘The Court Jester Amareu’  by Dobrinka Tabakova. The suite evokes Rameau’s music to “present a series of glimpses of the life of an imagined 18th-century aristocratic household,” including a return from a hunt, a (anachronistic) waltz “through the opulent corridors of the imagined stately home,” a conversation between the solo violist and members of the orchestra in the slow movement, and a fugato fast movement which presents a ‘riddle,’ embodying Rameau’s name in the main melody. The whole suite is symmetrically framed by a fanfare appearing at the beginning and at the end. The solo violist (in this performance Ruth Gibson, playing with enormous bravura), appears from offstage after the fanfare as the returned hunter, who then dominates the action of the rest of the work. The performance was marked by a beauty of sound and a rhythmic verve, as well as a great enthusiasm for the music.

Maahan Esfahani, harpsichordist, who has a prominent part in the Tabakova work, was the soloist in the works that began and ended the concert, the Harpsichord Concerto, Op. 40 (1980) by Henryk Górecki  and the Jazz Harpsichord Concerto (1965) by Joseph Horowitz. The Górecki begins with the orchestra playing a slow unison melody over an continuous and unrelentingly frantic stream of notes with very little recognizable pitch in the harpsichord for the entire first movement. By contrast the second movement’s writing for the soloist makes the pitches and the harmonies of the harpsichord clear in a sort of folky dance-like exchange with the orchestra. The recognition that pitches on the harpsichord in modern(ish) music can be not at all clear, and the use of that fact in the realization of the work is one of the chief elements making the nine-minute long piece so funny and enjoyable. By contrast the Horowitz, which is about twice as long, is almost completely lacking in profile and shape, and left this listener with the impression of a more or less endless stream of vague and vaguely jazzish stuff in three movements. In the Horowitz Esfahani was joined by bassist Misha Mullov-Abbado and drummer Alan Taylor. Esfanni’s playing in both pieces was magisterial.

Following the Górecki, and before intermission (a concert with an intermission seems to be something of a rarity in this season’s concerts) were The Centre is Everywhere by Edmund Finnis and The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc by Julius Eastman. The Eastman was first performed, and is usually done, as a piece for 10 ‘cellos. This performance was by the whole of the group. Most of Eastman’s scores are general enough in their notation that it’s possible to perform them with different instrumentations than that of their iconic recorded performances. This performance certainly lacked nothing in terms of its concentration, its rhythmic precision and energy, or its forcefulness of character. The brash energy of the Eastman was a striking foil to the Finnis, which preceded it. Starting almost inaudibly, it consisted of shimmering, ever changing, overlapping lines which gradually coalesced into a glowing motionless aggregate. It would be hard to imagine a more lovely or persuasive performance of it.

In fact, every work on the concert including the encore, Orawa by Wojciech Kilar, was given a performance whose obvious understanding of and enthusiasm for the music and generosity of music making was matched by the meticulous preparation and flawless performance. The whole concert was enjoyable and memorable.

The Prom on August 22, presented by The London Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Sir Simon Rattle, consisted of three works of Stravinsky, each of them with title ‘Symphony’, which gave some insight on the development of the composer’s thinking about the term. The concert, which was done without an intermission, began with Symphonies of Wind Instruments in its original 1920 version. The work was not published until 1947, when Stravinsky revised it, mainly its orchestration; the original version was not published until 1991. The piece is not only one of Stravinsky’s most striking and original works, it was also the work with which he crystalized his personal formal constructive methods, which E. T. Cone called stratification, interlock, and synthesis. The work is dedicated to the memory of Debussy, and an earlier small memorial piece which Stravinsky had contributed to the periodical La revue musicale, a sort of chorale which in that version was a little piano piece, appears early on and gradually, for lack of a better term, takes it over, becoming the summation of the work. I think Rattle was trying to play to the plaintive quality of the chorale, but without the crispness and incisiveness , and, frankly, speed, of the other music, that quality doesn’t exactly read, so this performance had a slightly soggy quality about it, despite the fact that in practically all ways, the playing was beyond reproach.

That incisiveness and precision of rhythm and attack was also lacking in the performance of the Symphony in C. By the time he wrote that symphony Stravinsky was very intent on assuming the mantle of the great “classical” composers, and the piece aspires to that kind of structural scope, but without the tonal workings that underlie what those masters were up to. It’s very interesting to experience the first movement’s approximation of what a classical first movement does without those qualities. There is a further consideration of the work in that the first two movements were written in Europe at a time of great stress in Stravinsky’s life due to the deaths of his wife, his daughter, and his mother more or less at the same time. The final two movements were written after he was in the United States, initially to deliver the Norton lectures at Harvard, but eventually, due to, among other things, the second World War, for the rest of his life. He certainly spoke of that creating a divide between the qualities of the first and second pairs of movements. The final movement, which initially seems to evoke Tschaikovsky, is in itself problematic, at least it’s always seemed to me. This performance’s lack of rhythmic drive and attack, pretty much throughout, didn’t help anything. The Symphony in Three Movements, which dates from the very end of the second World War, seems to be a more successful match of Stravinsky’s intention with its character and musical materials, and the qualities of attack and incisiveness and rhythmic dive which the piece needed were there in abundance in the playing, so the performance realized, at least it seemed to this listener, the scope and breadth and particular specialness of the work. It should be added that the audience seemed to have no reservations at all about any of the performances, all of which were enthusiastically, if not ecstatically, received.

 

CD Review, Chamber Music, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

City of Tomorrow on New Focus (CD Review)

City of Tomorrow

Blow

New Focus Records

 

The City of Tomorrow is a woodwind quintet dedicated to 20/21 music, particularly compositions that explore environmental themes. They first convened to play the title work on this recording. Blow, by Franco Donatoni, is a tour de force for woodwinds. In addition to the obvious association with embouchures, the piece also explores the qualities of wind, from a soothing breeze to gusts to gale force. The use of counterpoint in polyrhythms reminds one of the formidable craft Donatoni possessed – and expected of the musicians who play Blow. The confluence of “wind painting” and proportional imitation, as well as the piece’s relentless energy, are thrilling in City of Tomorrow’s authoritative performance. 

 

Hero and Leander, by Hannah Lash, also explores an environmental theme, if somewhat obliquely. The Greek myth involves Leander swimming the sea each night to reunite with Hero, only to be taken away by Poseidon in a vicious storm. In the wake of Tropical Storm Henri, and all the other hurricanes yet to come as climate change bears down on coastal communities, the piece has psychological resonances well beyond the archetypal tale of unrequited love. Hero and Leander is a nine-movement suite both varied in texture and harmony and unified by recurrent use of birdsong (played in piccolo and e-flat clarinet) and Poseidon’s heavy weather. Unlike Donatoni, Lash takes her time revealing the tale, with the calm before the storm just as emphasized as the lovers being kept apart. The last three movements bring Stravinskyian dissonances and clipped utterances (there are connections to his Oedipus)  and poignant stillness to the depiction of Hero’s grief at finding Leander’s body.  

 

In 2003, Esa-Pekka Salonen wrote a piece dedicated to the memory of Luciano Berio: Memoria. It was premiered alongside Laborintus 2, Berio’s own work dealing with memory. Beginning with heterophonic overlap and moving to a main section of vivacious rhythms, the short motifs and shifting meters suggest Stravinsky. Later there is another Stravinsky connection in Memoria. The finale consists of chorales that recall the Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Salonen manages to channel two great composers of the twentieth century while imposing his own kinetic spin on the proceedings. Once again, City of Tomorrow impresses with its dextrous delivery and the silvery tone of its soloists. Recommended. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

CD Review, Contemporary Classical, Piano

Peter Garland – Three Dawns and Bush Radio Calling

A new CD of solo piano music by Peter Garland has been released on the Cold Blue Music label. Two pieces comprise the album: Three Dawns, inspired by the poetry of Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo and Bush Radio Calling, written specifically for avant-garde theater with a total of nine movements. Peter Garland is a well-known composer with deep roots in contemporary music from long association with important influences such as Lou Harrison, Harold Budd, James Tenney and Conlon Nancarrow. The performer for this album is Ron Squibbs, pianist, academic and a leading authority on the music of Iannis Xenakis. This latest album takes us on an exotic journey of the Southern Hemisphere via Garland’s extraordinary musical inspirations.

Three Dawns (1981-82) is a three-movement piece built around material contained in The Negritude Poets: An Anthology of Translations from the French. This was edited by Ellen Conroy Kennedy and contains the work of Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo. The beginning of “Movement 1” is a series of halting passages that propel it along in a comfortable, ambling gait. A nice groove develops and a strong bass line provides a solid foundation. At just 2:49, this short opening movement with sunny harmonies and a relaxed feel is like taking a quiet stroll on a summer’s day in Madagascar.

“Movement 2” is more than twice as long as both outer movements combined and begins with a solitary string of notes in the lower registers. There is a solemn, contemplative feel to this as a warm melody enters from above. The harmony lightens and the sense of optimism builds, like the sun rising on an empty beach. The repeating theme in the bass line provides a sure foundation, anchoring the agreeable phrases heard in the upper registers. This is lovely music – thoughtful but not too precious – and yet beautifully quiet and serene. A da capo towards the finish reprises the opening, completing the circle. “Movement 3” is the bookend to the first movement, with a strong bass line and choppy rhythms in the upper register. The same optimistic feelings are evident as this rocks gently to a close. Three Dawns is the perfect musical escape to tropical solace and tranquility.

The second piece on the CD is the nine movement Bush Radio Calling, a 1992 composition written in Island Bay, New Zealand. This music was composed for a play titled Just Them Walking produced by the Red Mole experimental theater company. The play describes the fanciful journey of a citizen militia called by Bush Radio to escape civil unrest by fleeing to the Remote Experience Zone on the far side of the Bridge to Nowhere. The play is a series of unlikely adventures populated by colorful characters who are confronted with a series of bizarre situations. After completing the score, Garland went on tour as the pianist with the Red Mole company.

The first movement is “Ringatu (Variations on a Chord by Dane Rudhyar) for Alan Brunton”. This evokes an exotic and dramatic setting with a series of strong, chiming chords. The phrases are simple, repeating with slight variations in the harmony. The pattern also includes asymmetrical rhythms and changing dynamics. There is no melody to distract from the variations in the chord with each phrase, and this succeeds in packing a lot of expression into a minimum of musical materials. Movements 2 and 3, “ Visions of El Niño Doctor” and “ Visions of El Niño Cieguito”, respectively, are short and direct, consisting of a series of strong chords with brief silences in between. There is a vaguely Latin feel to this that adds to the overall exotic character. “ Visions of El Niño Cieguito” is alternately robust and subdued in the dynamics and a bit more introspective.

The fourth movement “La Princesa (Wanganui Waltz) for Sally Rodwell” proceeds in halting, broken rhythms consisting of moderate chords that recall the “El Niño” movements. Wanganui is the name of a river in New Zealand that is invoked in the plot as the characters continue their journey by riverboat and the music here has a sense of subdued grandeur. Movement 5, “The Bellbird’s Song”, adds more color to the drama of the river passage and opens with a string of single notes in a high register with two pitches in a chattering, birdlike rhythm. The phrases repeat like a bird call but with slightly halting rhythms. New chords fill in around the bird call that are very simple at first but then a deep bass line is heard that adds a sense of majesty. A regal sound with deep, full chords ends this short movement.

The title of the fifth movement, “Hiruharama,” is the name of a New Zealand town (and the Maori name for Jerusalem). The riverboat travelers on the Wanganui hope to find Mother Aubert’s secret herbal remedies in what is only one of the many intriguing plot twists. Four chords open this, followed by a brief silence. The chords, with slight variations in the harmony, repeat in groups of two, three or four. Elegant and mysterious, there is again an exotic and regal feel. As the movement proceeds, the sequence of strong chords is followed by a single pianissimo chord in a high register, as if in a metaphorical dialogue of truth to power. At the finish, a series of soft, two-note chords is heard alone – truth has prevailed.

Movement 7 features a reappearance of disjointed rhythms and bold, dynamic chords. The piano playing by Ron Squibbs here, and in all the movements, is technically exceptional and infused with human emotion that makes this music very listenable. Movement 8, “The Wedding (The Bride Shoots the Bachelor, Even.)”, is a complex rhythmic structure that never quite gets started or developed into a groove, but the phrases are engaging and keep the piece moving forward. The final movement, “Bridge to Nowhere”, features bright chords heard in the higher registers and has a sunny, optimistic feeling. The phrases seem to repeat with slight variations, adding a bit of an alien feel that is both mysterious and open-ended. The “Bridge to Nowhere” is full of luminous promise, but ultimately lives up to its name. Bush Radio Calling is an inventive and curiously singular piece, packing a lot of energy and emotion into just a piano score. Peter Garland has masterfully created a strange and romantic musical world that compliments the action of the play and brings the listener along for the journey.

Three Dawns and Bush Radio Calling is available directly from Cold Blue Records (CB0059) as well as by digital download from Amazon. Cold Blue Music is also available from many retailers throughout the world.



Contemporary Classical

BBC Proms August 15, featuring Abel Selaocoe

Although completely recognizable, there are differences in this year’s Proms concerts, most of them what one would expect. One has to show proof of vaccination to get into the Albert Hall, and then most of the audience is masked. There are still Promenaders, but fewer of them, and the audiences are in general less populated. This decline in numbers doesn’t seem to have in any way reduced the general enthusiasm for the concerts, though.

The Prom on August 15 was centered around the South African ‘cellist Abel Selaocoe and included along with him his trio Chesaba (in which he is joined by Sidiki Dembélé. who plays several instruments, and bass player Alan Keary), Moroccan Gnawa master Simo Lagnawi and his group Gnawa London, in which he was joined by Djina Jones, Amine el Manony, and Driss Yarndah (at least that’s what the program said; there were in fact only three people in that group on stage), the choral group Bantu Voices, and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, conducted by Clark Rundell. It was an evening of what Michael Denning, in his book Noise Uprising, would have described as vernacular (as opposed to folk) music since it was professional (very very professional) rather than amateur musical making. The program consisted of pieces by Selaocoe (Qhawe, Zawose, As You Are, Lerato, and Ka bohaleng), Dembélé (Shaka), and Lagnawi (Bambara and Counia lafou), arranged for the whole of the gathered musicians by Ian Gardiner and/or Peter Riley, depending on the piece,  along with the ‘cello concerto, L. B. Files by Italian composer Giovanni Sollima, and two short pieces by Jean-Philippe Rameau, whose presence there seemed to have something to do with the similarity of Baroque ground bass and a “culture of repetition” in African music.

The centering work on this program was the concerto by Sollima, L. B. Files. L. B. in this case is Luigi Boccherini, the composer and ‘cellist who in his day bridged divergent musical cultures. The four movements of the work provide a “micro-dramatization” of Boccherini’s life story, starting with his childhood in Italy through his service for Infante Luis Antonio of Spain. The third movement is based on a bass line of Boccherini’s, and incorporates a text from Casanova’s (yes, that Casanova) diary about the nature of the Spanish fandango. The fourth imagines Boccherini’s “returning from some hundred years in Senegal” and quotes a melody by the late Senegalese musician Gilbert Abdourahmane Diop. (The part about his being in Senegal at all, seems to be a fantasy of Sollima’s, rather than a fact.) The concerto, which was played with high style and brilliance, was greeted with enormous enthusiasm by the audience, as was everything on the concert. It was immediately preceded by a lovely and loving performance of Rameau’s Entrée d’Abaris from his opera Les Boréédes by Rundell and the orchestra. Rameau’s music also appeared later in the program in a very brief excerpt from Les Indes galantes, which lasted a minute and was almost missable, separating music by Selaocoe and Lagnawi.

Selaocoe is a fabulous player and singer and a completely charming and compelling personality, and it was wonderful to hear him. He joyfully and powerfully moves in the two musical worlds–western classical and African–he is a citizen and practitioner of, and he unites them for his audience in a meaningful way. His playing and singing was the focus and purpose of the concert, but it was also the most satisfying aspect of it. For this listener it was too often lost in the profusion of other elements. I was at a loss to understand exactly why Lagnawi and his cohorts were there at all, or what they added or were supposed to have added to the proceedings. This is not in anyway a judgement of their work or abilities; They just got lost in the crowd. I was reminded in reverse of Stravinsky’s comment about his first reaction to hearing Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire: he wished the singer would shut up so he could hear the music. The absolutely most beautiful moments in the whole concert were the encore, which began with only Selaocoe and Keary by playing by themselves, and the beginning of the concert, with Selaocoe, very lightly accompanied, playing and singing alone, presenting the African side of his musical personality. Often his beautiful performance was simply swamped by the profusion of other things going on. After a while all the elements came together in a way that negated the individuality and specialness of each one of them, producing a wash which seemed over-scored and over-amplified. This listener’s sense of that was clearly a minority opinion; the audience was continually wildly enthusiastic and loving every second of it. All in all, though, it was a very satisfying and meaningful experience. It leaves me, though, wanting to hear a whole evening of only Selaocoe and Chesaba, without anybody else.

 

 

 

 

 

CD Review, Choral Music, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Cantus Records Manifesto

Cantus

Manifesto

Signum Classics

 

The all-male vocal ensemble Cantus’s first full length recording in seven years, Manifesto, features pieces, all in world premiere recordings, that explore relationships and identity. The title work is a piece by David Lang, the text taken from answers to a Google Search auto-complete list of the query “I want to be with someone who…” It was originally commissioned by Cantus for a program titled “The Four Loves.” Lang’s piece signifies romantic love and is written in a minimal style, the textual repetitions being a hallmark of his approach. “If I Profane,” by Libby Larsen, which features a tenor solo and swelling crescendos in its accompanying voices, is a setting of the love sonnet from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.  

 

Roger Treece’s Philia signifies friendly love, as does Timothy C Takach’s Luceat Eis, written in commemoration of service personnel who died on 9/11. Both artfully use polychords, the Luceat Eis bifurcated into low clusters and a chant-like upper melodic line. Ysaÿe M. Barnwell explores divine love in Tango with God. Here, the ensemble’s performance emphasizes exuberance rather than the suavity of the dance. To My Brother, by Joseph Gregorio, is about familial love. It begins with angular melody, gradually adding suspensions, homophonic declamation, and a few arpeggiations lending colorful cadences. 

 

It is not just love that resonates in this attractive program. Gagót, by Sidney Guillaume, is about dealing with life’s vicissitudes. Sarah Kirkland Snider’s luminous Psalm of the Soil connects nature and the divine. The longest setting on the recording, it is also the most intricate and interesting formally. 

 

Two song cycles complete the program. Poems by Hafiz, Rumi and Kabir are set in Paul John Rudoi’s Song of Sky and Sea. “At Every Instant” features elaborate syncopations, “The Infinite Dwelling” layers a webbing of contrapuntal passages. “Two Falling Stars” uses glissandos and descending lines in elaborate word painting, and spoken word and equally declamatory singing are featured in “As One Sky.” In addition to being a composer, Rudoi is a tenor vocalist, and one can hear him revel in writing the solo passages of “As One Sky.” 

 

Dale Warland incorporates piano, played here by Andrew Fleser, in his Evening Star triptych. Warland is well known for his direction of vocal groups, including his own Singers. Evening Star demonstrates his skillful composing in a neo-romantic idiom. Sara Teasdale’s poetry is about the stages of grieving that ultimately lead to acceptance of loss. Octave leaps supply “The Falling Star” with powerful resonance,“On a Winter Night,” the middle movement, is particularly haunting, and Cantus impresses in its a cappella tuning between piano interludes in “Stars Over Snow.” Cantus combines beautifully blended passages with strong individual voices. They are welcome to return to the recording studio ASAP. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

CD Review, File Under?

My Tree (CD Review)

My Tree

Where the Grace Is

Self-released, 2021

 

The duo My Tree consists of vocalist Caroline Davis and multi-instrumentalist Ben ‘Jamal’ Hoffmann. Davis is best known as a jazz saxophonist and flutist, but on My Tree’s latest recording, Where the Grace Is, she demonstrates an attractive voice comfortable in a hybrid blend of musical styles. These encompass funk and fusion from the seventies and more recent electronic pop. Hoffmann favors vintage gear, including analog synths and a Linn drum machine. He crafts intricate and memorable arrangements and demonstrates keen versatility.

 

Davis’s supple singing serves well the uplifting songs “One More Time,” “What a Joy,” and “Afterglow.” My Tree also addresses social issues in more challenging pieces. “Where the Grace Is” documents the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. Rico Sisney is a guest MC on “Run and Rag On,” an energetic and socially conscious anthem repudiating the New Jim Crow. “Our Land Oh” is another track about a recent and regrettable event, the Pulse Nightclub shooting. One can sense the grief contained in Davis’s overdubbed delivery and Hoffmann  plays a tense ostinato riff on Rhodes beside a weighty countermelody in the bass. “Liteshine” juxtaposes the power of the sun with the climate crisis. 

 

My Tree reminds us that we needn’t forget hope and even joy in the midst of the adversity of recent days. Where the Grace Is — a balm for late summer blues. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

CD Review, early music, File Under?

Kate Lindsey and Arcangelo Record Nero

Tiranno

Kate Lindsey, mezzo-soprano

Arcangelo, Jonathan Cohen, director

Alpha Records – Alpha 736

 

Nero, Emperor of Rome from AD 54-68, is the subject of a set of baroque arias and cantatas on mezzo-soprano Kate Lindsey’s latest recording with Arcangelo. Over the course of the program, Lindsey portrays several of the main characters associated with Nero’s biography: the Emperor himself, his mother Agrippina, his first wife Ottavia, and consort Poppea.

 

Alessandro Scarlatti’s cantata Il Nerone presents its titular character at his most tyrannical, singing “In my realm only cruelty reigns.” Lindsey conquers both the fast flying melismas and jaunty swagger of the cantata’s first aria, in which the gods are told to bow down to Nero’s grandeur. Yes, this Nero plays the lyre while Rome burns, which is presented in a chilling, understated manner by Lindsey and Arcangelo. Like the other Scarlatti cantata on the recording, La Morte di Nerone (a premiere recording), Il Nerone ends with a recitative instead of aria, each declaring the tyrant’s intentions. In La Morte di Nerone, these are to commit suicide before the Senate’s agents can capture and execute him like a common outlaw in the arena. Scarlatti at least gives Nero a belated moment of regret, in part making his decision to take his own life based on remorse over murdering Agrippina, Ottavia, and Poppea. It is a compelling interior monologue and Lindsey portrays Nero’s defiance with steely tone and remorse with affecting long lines in straight tone.

 

Many of the composers here were likely inspired to take up the Nero story by Claudio Monteverdi’s last opera, L’Incoronazione di Poppea. Accordingly, Tiranno includes four excerpts from the work. The Act five duet, Or che Seneca é morto, in which Lindsey is joined by tenor Andrew Staples, finds Nero gleeful at the death of his former advisor, the famed philosopher Seneca. The two singers are well-matched and sing runs impressively, playing off one another in contrapuntal passages and declamatory recitatives alike. The most famous piece from the opera, its closing duet Pur ti miro, has in recent decades had its authorship by Monteverdi cast in doubt in favor of Francesco Sacrati, little of whose own music has come down to us. Soprano Nardus Williams and Lindsey sing it sumptuously, making the most of its aching closely written dissonances.

 

Bartolomeo Monari’s La Poppea, another premiere recording, details Poppea’s unfortunate end, kicked to death to Nero while pregnant; the child is lost too. Wrenching dissonance is used daringly by Monari to describe both the death throes and grief of Poppea. Lindsey allows this chromaticism to spur her expressivity, making the cantata an emotive threnody. The intimate interaction between Lindsey and the Arcangelo throughout, but particularly in Monari’s unfamiliar cantata, makes me want to seek out their 2018 recording together, Arianna, forthwith.

 

George Friedrich Handel was fascinated with the character of Agripina, so much so that he wrote an opera with her as the title character and a (now lost) Nero opera. Lindsey impresses in the aria Orrida, oscura, with cleanly delivered coloratura and imaginative ornaments. Her declamation in the recitatives is expressive and varied as well. One can clearly see in the short documentary on the recording how seriously both Lindsey and her instrumental collaborators take expressing the text. Nor are they averse to making a connection between their program about an authoritarian and the strife that has occurred in recent days. The character Nero serves as a warning to those propping up tyrants today: the consequences can be deadly.

 

 

Documentary on the recording:

 

Contemporary Classical, Percussion

Future of New Jersey Percussion Ensemble in Jeopardy with departure of Peter Jarvis

It was saddening to learn that Peter Jarvis has been dismissed from his position at William Paterson University. Jarvis has worked with the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble, WPU’s elite cadre of music majors, for decades, directing the group in countless premieres and all the major repertory works. 

 

The New Music Series at WPU, also directed by Jarvis, incorporated other musicians alongside the percussion ensemble, making it possible for the students to be coached on music from Cage to Carter. 

 

With Jarvis’s departure, it appears that the important work of NJPE will cease. This is a significant loss for the contemporary classical music community. If you would like to send a testimonial on Peter’s behalf, urging his reinstatement, they may be sent to:

 

Joshua Powers

provost@wpunj.edu