Month: December 2022

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

File Under Favorites 2022: Christopher Fox and Exaudi

 

Christopher Fox

Trostlieder

Exaudi, conducted by James Weeks

Kairos Music

 

British composer Christopher Fox’s latest portrait CD on Kairos focuses on music for vocal ensemble. Exaudi, conducted by James Weeks, is one of the finest groups for recent repertoire in the UK, and they present this program with characteristic care and detail. This is their third disc devoted to Fox’s music

 

The four Trostlieder Widerwertigkeit des Kriegs (“Poems of comfort in the awfulness of war”) (2015) were written as companion pieces to Heinrich Schütz’s 1648 collection Geistliche Chormusik. Published at the end of the Thirty Years War, it is powerful music imbued with the hard lessons dealt by the conflict. Fox’s own ancestry plays a role in the impetus for the piece. Some of the worst fighting late in the Thirty Years War was in Pomerania, where the composer’s relatives lived until 1945. Fox chose to respond to the commission with settings of poems by seventeenth century poet Martin Opitz. Each of the four volumes in Opitz’s Trostgedichte contains more than 600 lines written in Alexandrine verse. Fox chose to take 44 lines from each book, setting four songs that epitomize the aspects of each volume. 

 

The first song depicts depredations inflicted upon common folk, farmers. In addition to articulated polychords, conjunct melodic gestures are passed among the voices. The latter section features fortissimo keening set against homophonic passages in the low register. Interlocking tenor voices are introduced, bringing the piece to a close. The second song discusses the “Wheel of Fortune” that governs the vicissitudes and blessings of life. This equanimity is addressed by corruscating lines accumulated into verticals, systematically repositioned in register. Upper register clusters and a high soprano melody begin the third song, which extols the virtue of mothers and indicts those who are prideful. Then the material moves successively down each section of the voices, ending with the second basses, each providing another aspect of hope or despair that Opitz juxtaposes in the poem. The fourth and final song also brings together two ideas, those of hope and of a brave death in war. Ricocheting counterpoint and segmented sections create a slow build to intricate and clarion chords, which repeat a regular progression. This texture dissolves into an angular melody in octaves. The climax features a blossoming of the harmony and a chant-like melody in the soprano. 

 

A Spousal Verse (2004), written for the Clerks, is a harmonically rich setting of the sixth stanza of Prothalamion (1596), by the Elizabethan poet Edmund Spenser. Fragments of melody are interwoven into brief contrapuntal units. Birds, Venus herself, and Peace are implored to bless the wedding, with the last verse serving as a refrain: “Upon your Brydale day, which is not long: Sweete Themmes run softlie, till I end my Song.”

 

Canti di carcere collects three madrigals – fantasma, senso comune and suo tormento – that were contributed to Exaudi’s madrigal book project from 2013-2018. The texts are from interesting sources. fantasma takes its text from the Marxist writer Antonio Gramsci’s Quaderni del carcere (Prison Notebooks), in which he ponders the significance of Dante’s ideas about society, judging them to be utopian instead of true political theory. Despite the intellectual character of the madrigal, the music focuses on the emotions the poet feels while being in prison, his suppositions about Dante standing in for his own frustrations about the nature of society. senso comune is also a setting of Gramsci, perhaps the most famous segment of the notebooks: “Every social stratum has its own ‘common sense’ which is ultimately the most widespread conception of life and morals.” It ends with a brief quote from Dante, further cementing the connection between the two writers. Conjunct lines sit astride secundal verticals in a slow-moving reverie that also explores a stratified pitch vocabulary. Gentle yet tense intervallic relationships between closely following lines and verticals, sung pianissimo, provide an otherworldly ambience that befits the text. Towards the very end, the chords go sideways, only to reveal a melody in octaves that brings the madrigal to an enigmatic close. 

 

The third and final madrigal sets a passage from Canto X of The Inferno: “We see, like those who have imperfect sight, the things that are far from us; to that extent the supreme leader still shines on us,” and Gramsci’s commentary on the text. Accented hocketing and brief pauses interspersed with verticals converge into a passage of abrupt staggered entrances. Consonants begin to be accentuated, and a soprano duet and bass sonorities are juxtaposed. Once again, snippets of melody are interspersed with rests. The unpredictability of attacks unmoors the music from meter, creating instead fluid lines between the silences. The proceedings speed up, creating articulate phrases and diminishing the duration of rests. The ending is homorhythmic, abrupt.

 

In Preluding (2006), the poem Was it for this (1798) by William Wordsworth is set in unusual declamatory fashion. The singers are to vocalize using the poem, the words understood to them but not to the audience. In the score, Fox asks for the effect to be like the gale wind described in the poem. Mission accomplished. The piece is a tremendous challenge for its singers, but Exaudi performs with aplomb.

Every word is clear in the final work on the recording, Song, a setting of W.B. Yeats “Easter 1916,”  composed in 2016 to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the Easter Uprising against British rule in Ireland. Heterophonic deployments of an arcing melody, inflected with shakes, alternate with vertical pileups. Compound melody provides another layer of the piece’s architecture, but it is fleeting compared to the main sections, which soon are presented in different ensemble deployments. Melody in octaves, slightly staggered and rising in intensity, brings the piece to an emphatic close. 

 

One can readily hear why Fox and Exaudi have had such an extensive collaboration. The compositions suit the performers and vice versa in excellent fashion. Trostlieder is one of our favorite recordings of 2022. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

 

by Christian Carey
Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Los Angeles

Populist Records – Tuesdays @ Monk Space

On Tuesday, November 22, 2022, Brightwork newmusic’s Tuesday@Monk Space was host to the populist records recording label and several of their artists in a concert titled Ten Years of populist records. Andrew McIntosh, Rachel Beetz, Nicholas Deyoe and Aperture Duo all performed in a selection of music heard on CDs released over the ten year history of populist records. It was good to see a big crowd at Monk Space with everyone getting reacquainted after the scarcity of live performances during the pandemic.

Eggs and Baskets (1987), by Tom Johnson was the first piece on the concert program and was performed by Rachel Beetz, flute and Andrew McIntosh, violin. This is one of Johnson’s more distinctive forms, musical works driven by mathematics. The narration by Adrianne Pope explained that the notes of the flute and the violin illustrated how a number of eggs could be distributed among two baskets in all possible combinations. With two eggs – one in each basket – the flute, then the violin – each sounded a short note. Then the two eggs were placed, in turn, into each of the baskets and so the flute sounded two notes, followed by the violin. As the number of eggs increased, the placing of the eggs in the two baskets in all possible combinations grew more complex, with more pitches and notes coming from each instrument. In this way, a straightforward mathematical concept was spun into the structure of a whimsical musical piece reminiscent of Johnson’s earlier work, narayana’s cows.

As the number of eggs grew to five, 32 separate notes were required to account for all the possibilities of eggs in the two baskets. The notes now began to be perceived as a series of musical phrases and not simply as markers for the eggs; Beetz and McIntosh traded their notes with great precision and a fine sense of timing. At the finish, all of the combinations, from six eggs down to two, were played without pausing, and the stream of notes at various pitches now resembled music more than mathematics. All this all proved to be highly entertaining – Eggs and Baskets exemplifies how extraordinary music can be crafted from ordinary arithmetic.

Cat Lamb’s frame/frames (2009) followed, and this began with a sustained tone from an open violin string played by McIntosh. This pitch remained steady and constant throughout the piece while Rachel Beetz accompanied on a bass flute. The tone from the flute began at the same pitch as the violin, but was then bent slightly through a series of extended techniques. Ms. Beetz used alternate fingering as well as over-blowing and under-blowing to vary the pitch, sometimes only by a few cents and at other times by quarter or even half-tones. This produced a variety of intriguing blends and interactions as the flute note weaved in and around the steady pitch of the violin. All of the variations were sounded by the flute, and this was the more difficult instrument of the two to do so – but the playing was accomplished with great skill by Ms. Beetz. There is a haunting and introspective feel to this piece and it requires the listener to focus on the subtle changes. fame/frames provides a valuable illustration of the intimate relationships that are possible between similar pitches beyond those heard in conventional harmony.

My memories are never an accurate representation (2008), by Andrew Tholl was next, a solo piece performed by Andrew McIntosh on violin. Although very short, it was packed with every sort of advanced playing technique thought possible – and some that were not. There were squeaks, rapid runs of notes, fast phrases and great jumps in pitch. There was nothing like a melody or structure to this, just a series of highly expressive gestures and sounds. Andrew McIntosh played all this with accuracy and poise in a show of great virtuosity.

Stillness Is the Move (2022), by Rachel Beetz was next, performed by the composer. Ms. Beetz played the flute that was wired for computer audio processing, a foot pedal for looping and a position sensor worn on her head like a boom mike. As the position of her head moved up and down, the processed pitch of the flute notes also changed up or down. As the piece proceeded, bursts of flute notes were heard, like flowers sprayed into the sunshine. The sound was both airy and beautiful, producing a feeling of warm optimism. Ms. Beetz then lowered her head and the pitches of the flute were processed downward, creating an active rumbling which was looped and sustained. More higher pitches followed and these provided a vivid contrast. As the pitches changed and more sustain was activated, interesting harmonies often broke out, adding to a dreamlike quality overall. For all their complexity, the electronic elements performed flawlessly during the performance and the close acoustic of Monk Space revealed every detail in the resulting sound. The computer processing, sound amplification and flute tones worked well together and the result was very polished. Stillness Is the Move made a great first impression and this electronic configuration, combined with inspired flute playing, shows great promise.

Transgressions (2019), by Andrew McIntosh followed, performed by Aperture Duo with Adrianne Pope, violin and Linnea Powell, viola. This began with a sustained pitch in the viola, answered by the violin. Electronic sounds entered in a sort of counterpoint and this led into a nice interaction between the various tones. Some solitary pizzicato followed and the dry drawing of a bow across the strings, without intonation, added to a sense of mystery. Various extended techniques were heard with short bursts of tones, inviting the listener to appreciate the many subtle interactions and interesting harmonies. The playing by Aperture Duo was skillful and exact with Transgressions extending the vocabulary of their string duo in new and unusual directions.

The final piece of the concert was Nebula/Mattie (2022) by Nicholas Deyoe, who performed this on an electric guitar connected to a formidable array of processing modules, foot pedals and amplifiers. Each strum of the guitar brought forth a great wave of processed sound that was full of power and harmony. Even very light touches on the guitar strings translated into big sounds, and the reflections off the brick walls of Monk Space provided additional amplification. Deyoe went from strumming the guitar to bowing the strings and this seemed to increase the power by adding a stronger sense of continuity to the processed tones. At times it felt like standing in front of a thundering waterfall with the sound physically beating through your body.

Towards the finish, the bow was discarded and a guitar pick was employed. The notes were now heard singly and then processed into a shower of sounds like roman candles bursting in the air on the Fourth of July. This was not as relentless as the bowed sounds and made for a nice contrast in texture. Nebula/Mattie was an impressive solo performance demonstrating just how much sonic power can be deployed by a musician with no fear.

Ten Years of populist records was a reminder of how favored we are in Los Angeles to have several small record labels dedicated to the recording of local new music. The merchandise table offered a large number of populist CDs, a visible sign of their success and our good fortune.

by Paul Muller