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Best of, BMOP, CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Harold Shapero on BMOP (Best of 2020)

Harold Shapero

Orchestral Works

Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Gil Rose, conductor

BMOP Sound

Composer Harold Shapero (1920-2013) was a central figure during the mid-twentieth century. A member of the Boston neoclassical group of composers, he was one of the first professors hired by Irving Fine for a new composition program at Brandeis University. Shapero had three principal influences that are evident in his work: the craftsmanship of Nadia Boulanger, transmitted both through his work with her in Cambridge and his principal teacher at Harvard, Walter Piston, the neoclassical works of Igor Stravinsky, and Aaron Copland’s midcareer music. In the 1950s and 60s, Stravinsky and Copland both explored serial procedures in their music, leaving Shapero bereft. As a stylistic holdout, his productivity slowed down and music became unduly neglected. But as a teacher at Brandeis of numerous prominent composers, he remained an influential presence on the Boston scene. 

There have been few recent recordings of Shapero’s music. As they have in championing so many underserved figures, Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP), conducted by Gil Rose,  has come to the rescue with a CD of his orchestral works. Sinfonia in C minor is given a muscular reading, its heraldic fanfares and vinegary wind outbursts punctuate neo-baroque dotted rhythms and taut solo writing. More mellifluous is Credo for Orchestra (1955), the closest Shapero came to writing an Americana piece. On Green Mountain for jazz ensemble is a Third Stream work. Played with impressive verve here, it demonstrates Shapero’s fluency in a traditional jazz idiom. As with so many releases by BMOP, this disc makes one hope that the programmed pieces achieve wider circulation. Best Orchestral Recording 2020.

by Christian Carey
Best of, CD Review, File Under?

Not Our First Goat Rodeo (Best of 2020)

Not Our First Goat Rodeo

Stuart Duncan, Yo-Yo Ma, Edgar Meyer, and Chris Thile

Sony Music Masterworks

Not Our First Goat Rodeo, a second album for the grouping of fiddler Stuart Duncan, cellist Yo-Yo Ma, bassist Edgar Meyer, and mandolinist Chris Thile, adopts a popular hybrid: bluegrass meets classical. The past three decades have seen a number of releases in this mold, many of them spearheaded by Meyer and Thile. But this particular recording captures a certain spark, an ebullience that can elicit a smile even in the midst of the dark days of 2020. 

The group plays together beautifully. Edgar Meyer’s long glissandos give an Eastern feel to “Your Coffee is a Disaster.” Stuart Duncan’s fiddle is deployed in a ‘high lonesome’ fashion on “Waltz Whitman.” Yo-Yo Ma, as the classical musician reading notation, would seem to be an outlier in this group, with charts by Meyer and Thile circumscribing his contribution. That said, he plays with brilliant tone and rhythmic verve, clearly enjoying being in this different context again. His playing is particularly poignant on “Waltz Whitman.” Thile’s supple playing and singing, in a duet with guest vocalist Aife O’Donovan, buoy the standout track “Every Note a Pearl.” All of the players and vocalists create a hypnotic interplay on “Not for Lack of Trying,” and album closer “757 ml.” is catchy as all get out.

The Beethoven Year has skewed toward profundity, but sometimes in the isolation of social distancing, abundant fun has been just the ticket. Best crossover release of 2020.

-Christian Carey

by Christian Carey
Best of, CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Piano Concertos on DG (Best of 2020)

John Adams

Why Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes?

Yuja Wang, piano; Los Angeles Philharmonic, Gustavo Dudamel, conductor

Deutsche Grammophon

Thomas Adés

Adés Conducts Adés

Kirill Gerstein, piano: Christianne Stotijn, mezzo-soprano, Mark Stone, baritone; 

Boston Symphony, Thomas Adés, conductor

Deutsche Grammophon

This year saw the release of two formidable new piano concertos on Deutsche Grammophon: John Adams’s third piano concerto, titled Why Must the Devil Have All the Good Tunes? (a quote from Martin Luther about using popular melodies as chorales), and a concerto by Thomas Adés. The recordings feature two of the most dynamic soloists active today, pianists Yuja Wang and Kirill Gerstein. The Adés release also includes Totentanz, an impressive vehicle for mezzo-soprano Christianne Stotijn and baritone Mark Stone.

Adés has crafted a piano concerto that pays homage to past pieces in the genre, with more than a passing nod at those by Ravel and Gershwin. Buoyancy typifies the outer movements, with jaunty swinging passages appearing in both, but the middle movement is a searing adagio in which dense harmonies are set against a poignant piano solo.  Gerstein is extraordinary in his virtuosity and versatility. His playing is particularly impressive during the latter portion of the third movement, where weighty terrain reminiscent of the second movement is once again encountered, at the last possible second veering back to the fast demeanor of the opening and a brilliant cadenza followed by a strongly articulated final cadence.

In Must the Devil…, Adams displays the polyglot language he has cultivated since the 1990s, in which the post-minimalism of his earlier works takes on the role of a background grid while rich harmonies, American pop references, and a demanding solo part take the fore. The first movement is marked “gritty, funky, and in strict tempo,” and the rockabilly riff that Wang and the orchestra lock into propels the action. It is succeeded by a double time riff from the orchestra over which Wang plays incisive chords and fleet runs. A cadenza deconstructs the riff into angular punctuations and arpeggiations. The second movement features delicate shadings of repeated pitch cells and frequent trills haloed by long descending scales in the strings. Gradually, counterpoint in the winds joins the proceedings and the piano part thickens to lush textures. Textures dissolve until we are left with pointillist versions of the original arpeggiations. Repeated chords lead attacca into the third movement, the repeating pulse undertaken by the orchestra while the piano takes up a wide-spanning perpetual motion figure. A vigorous march, punctuated by chimes and brass and thick chords in the piano supplants this, eventually offset by a triplet riff that gives us just a hint of the piece’s opener. Moving back and forth between double time iterations and solid beat-note blocks of sound, the stage is set for a flurry of activity from the piano. The soloist and orchestra interlock in a  brisk groove that periodically is interspersed by mini-cadenzas. The coda takes on a machine like ostinato that ends vigorously. Wang’s encore is China Gates, one of Adams’s prominent early works that has stood the test of time. Here and in the concerto, her playing is superlative, vivacious, and detailed.

by Christian Carey
Best of, CD Review, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, File Under?

Scelsi revisited (Best of 2020)

Scelsi Revisited

Klangforum Wien, Sylvain Cambreling, Johannes Kalitzke, conductors

Kairos 2XCD

A number of prominent European composers took part in Scelsi revisited, a festival, documented on this double-CD, celebrating Giacinto Scelsi’s music. Their tribute pieces were based on unrealized tapes of Scelsi playing the Ondiola, a three-octave tube synthesizer that was his preferred instrument for making drafts of his works. Some are incorporated directly into pieces, others remixed and morphed as part of larger electronic designs, and some merely outline materials subsequently reworked by the selected composers. The forces used are often that of Anahit, Scelsi’s piece for violin and ensemble, previously recorded by Klangforum Wien for Kairos.

Michael Petzel’s Sculture di Suono addresses the beating, tremolo, and fading in and out of material often present in Scelsi’s tapes. The piece contains beautifully distressed microtonal bends, particularly among the winds, ornaments by the oboe, and references to Scelsi’s “organ sound,” with its tonal implications and plethora of thirds and sixths. Michel Roth’s Moi (see the article referenced below) also demonstrates beating, including the rhythmical quality found on Scelsi’s tapes, difference tones, and a particularly varied and engaging orchestration.  

Tristan Murail had a long association with Scelsi, performing some of his works with the ensemble L’itineraire in the 1970s. In Murail’s Un Sogno, the composer reworks Scelsi’s tapes, augmenting them with his own electronics and spectral harmonies for the ensemble, creating an imaginative tribute piece. Introduktion und Transsonation, by Georg Friedrich Haas, allows tapes to roll and encourages Klangforum Wien to improvise along with them. 

Nicola Sani’s “Gimme Scelsi” deals with long sustained sounds that are then morphed by microtonal ornaments  and harmonics, made all the more powerful by space in between the utterances. Later in the piece, block harmonies once again recall Scelsi’s “organ sound.” Clocking in at more than 42 minutes, Ulli Fussenegger’s San Teodoro 8 is the most expansive work on the recording. Fussenegger made tapes from Scelsi’s archives for all of the participating composers and he uses a great deal of this material in his own piece, which is also arrayed with original electronic components and melodic material based on monad and dyad formulations. The Ondiola material is front-loaded in a way that is seldomly done in the other pieces.Like Anahit, it also features a violin soloist, but a number of members of the ensemble get a chance to take a solo turn. Á tue tet by Fabien Levy is for nine winds distributed throughout the performance space. It juxtaposes pointillist shards of ricocheting fragments into gradual pile-ups of texture. The second disc closes with Cardinald by Ragnhild Bergstad, who takes the more gentle aspects of Scelsi’s artistry, as well as nature sounds, notably the song of the robin, to create a more placid surface than the other works presented here. An appealing denouement and gentle coda to a fascinating collection of pieces. 

The booklet notes are excellent, including the Scelsi’ “symbol,” a rare photo of the composer, and Ragnhild Berstad’s thoughtful essay on reception history and the revisited project itself. Berstad doesn’t shy away from the controversies surrounding Scelsi’s legacy, notably the article “Scelsi c’est moi” by Vieri Tosattis, one of the musicians who helped Scelsi to transcribe his tapes to musical notation. Of the revisited project, Berstad instead suggests “Scelsi, c’est nous,” pointing out the myriad ways that the composer has made his presence felt here and elsewhere. Scelsi continues to inspire, as the composers and performers on this recording readily attest. One of the best releases of 2020.

-Christian Carey

by Christian Carey
Best of, CD Review, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Improv

Closing out the twenty-tens: Schell’s picks for 2019

Though our decade technically has another year to go, the marketing appeal of “Hits of the XXs” type formulations tends to overwhelm such semantic niceties. So as we leave the 2010s behind, there’s more than a little Web-based generalization to be found regarding their musical character and trajectory. I’ll try to keep things in perspective as I review some of the highlights of 2019 that embody the breadth and caliber of contemporary Western art music. All of the following selections are available via fixed media or on demand, and many have been featured on Radio Eclectus.

A different kind of East Meets West

  1. Adam Rudolph, Go: Organic Orchestra and Brooklyn Raga Massive: Ragmala: A Garland of Ragas (Bandcamp)
    Earnest efforts to mesh the potentialities of Indian and Western musical instruments go back well over half a century. Ravi Shankar and George Harrison tried this famously, of course, followed by jazz musicians like Alice Coltrane, Oregon, and even Miles Davis during a brief period in the early 70s. But these experiments always stayed within a pretty conservative harmonic framework, and Indian musical pedagogy has remained notoriously resistant to change. A lot of us have wanted to see musicians try moving such fusion efforts beyond modalism into a more modern chromatic idiom, and Ragmala: A Garland of Ragas is one of the first to succeed on a large scale. Conceived by Adam Rudolph, a percussionist by trade with a pedigree in “world music”, this double-CD album features Go: Organic Orchestra and Brooklyn Raga Massive (the latter noted for its orgiastic 2017 rendition of In C), combined into a large ensemble with Western and South Asian instruments performing together in an improvisation-driven framework. It’s in tracks like Wandering Star or Ascent to Now that this pungent overtone-rich instrumentarium is most effectively deployed in service of dissonant drones and polytonal soloing
  2. Land of Kush: Sand Enigma (Bandcamp)
    Similar in concept is the Arab-influenced free improv music of Land of Kush, the band led by Egyptian-Canadian musician Sam Shalabi. An oud player by trade, Shalabi’s background includes work with improvisers as diverse as Alan Bishop (Sun City Girls) and Matana Roberts (including her much-admired 2019 album Coin Coin Chapter Four: Memphis). A track like Broken Maqams from Land of Kush’s new Sand Enigma album demonstrates the reintegration of Middle Eastern influences into a more expanded harmonic language than you usually get in this kind of fusion
  3. Lao Dan et al: Live at Willimantic Records (Bandcamp)
    This free improv quartet features Lao Dan and Paul Flaherty on saxophones, Damon Smith on bass and Randall Colbourne on drums. The obvious starting point is late Coltrane, albums like Meditations and Expression, where he used a pair of reed instruments, but things get extra interesting when Lao exchanges his sax for a Chinese flute or the strident double reed suona, as on the track Winter Dawn
  4. Nursalim Yadi Anugerah: Selected Pieces From HNNUNG (Bandcamp)
    I was late to discover this specimen from August 2018, an opera influenced by the folk music and mythology of the indigenous Kayaan people of Indonesia. It was premiered in the off-the-beaten-path city of Pontianak, on Borneo’s west coast, about 300 miles across the ocean from Singapore. Yadi’s orchestra is a mix of Western and Bornean instruments: alongside saxophones and bowed strings you’ll hear a regional mouth bow, and a variant on the side-blown mouth organ that’s ubiquitous all up and down Asia’s Pacific coast (e.g. the sheng in China and the shō in Japan). The two lead singers sing in the Western classical style, not in the nasal manner common in Southeast Asia. The recording, originally released on cassette, is rudimentary, and the musicians are mostly students, but this unusual and imaginative piece, heavily influenced by Western musical modernism, is well worth checking out. A video introduction and interview with the composer is available on YouTube
  5. Toshio Hosokawa: Gardens (Spotify)
    No country has outdone Japan in finding a compelling intersection of its traditional musics and the potentialities of the post-WW2 avant-garde. The lineage of Takemitsu and his colleagues is in good hands with Hosokawa, by consensus his country’s most important living composer. He’s best known for his orchestral and other large-scale works, but this album focuses on chamber and solo pieces, of which the most intriguing may be Nachtmusik for the Hungarian cimbalom, yet another new and unexpected species of East Meets West

In the vernacular tradition

  1. Roscoe Mitchell Orchestra: Littlefield Concert Hall Mills College March 19-20, 2018 (Spotify)
    The prosaic title of this offering from the longest tenured member of the Art Ensemble of Chicago reflects the origins of these pieces as transcriptions and orchestrations of improvisations. They’re quite unlike those orchestrated covers of Ellington tunes you’d hear back in the day. Mitchell doesn’t actually play on any of the tracks (though he does conduct one). My personal favorite is Rub with scratchy solos by Soo Yeon Lyuh (haegeum) and Thomas Buckner (baritone)
  2. Sun Ra: Live in Kalisz 1986 (Bandcamp)
    Another key source of the international free improv movement is represented by this new release from Lanquidity Records. A relatively modest 12-musician touring version of the Sun Ra Arkestra is heard in a recently unearthed performance at a Polish jazz festival
  3. Taylor Ho Bynum 9-tette: The Ambiguity Manifesto (Bandcamp)
    This free improv album features several younger leaders of the movement in New York (including Ingrid Laubrock, Mary Halvorson, Tomeka Reid and Tomas Fujiwara). A good representative of the current state of the art
  4. Tyshawn Sorey, Marilyn Crispell: The Adornment of Time (Bandcamp)
    A single, epic, hour-long duo jam recorded at The Kitchen
  5. Matt Mitchell: Phalanx Ambassadors (Bandcamp)
    Good representative of the classic atonal bebop tradition post-Dolphy
  6. Kukangendai: Palm (Bandcamp)
    Minimalist avant-rock from Japan
  7. The Flying Luttenbachers: Imminent Death (Bandcamp)
    Newly reformed after a ten year haitus, these denizens of atonal rock spent 2019 touring and releasing albums. In the tracks White Wind and White Lines and Serial Plagarism you can hear them channeling electric Miles and Prime Time Ornette
  8. exclusiveOr et al: MODULES (Bandcamp)
    This intriguing album is the brainchild of the electronic duo exclusiveOr, which consists of Jeff Snyder and Sam Pluta (a SuperCollider maven often heard performing with Kate Soper). Here they’re joined by violist Amy Cimini, bassoonist Katherine Young and several members of International Contemporary Ensemble for a wonderfully variegated excursion in composed improvisation using combined acoustic and electronic means
  9. Green Dome: Thinking in Stitches (Bandcamp)
    Zeena Parkins, harpist and bandleader, is a longstanding figure in the Downtown New York improv scene. She’s usually heard playing an electric harp, but here she uses the acoustic variety in a trio with Ryan Sawyer on drums and Ryan Ross Smith on prepared piano and electronics, lending the album its distinctive sound world

Voices of the elders: America

  1. John Zorn: Cat o’Nine Tails, The Dead Man, Memento Mori, Kol Nidre (Spotify)
    Speaking of the Downtown scene, its dominant figure—and one of the most eclectic musicians ever—is showcased in this album from Quebec’s formidable Quatuor Molinari. It’s Zorn as composer that’s on display here: four string quartets written between 1988 and 1996. Zorn is prolific and can also be uneven as evinced by his Kol Nidre, which sounds awfully derivative of Pärt’s Fratres. Momento Mori, though, is a worthy and epic modernist survey, ending with an apparent quote from the start of Berg’s Lyric Suite. And Cat o’Nine Tails, originally written for the Kronos Quartet, is one of his most famous “cartoon music” compositions
  2. John Adams: Roll Over Beethoven (Spotify)
    Our obligatory helping of minimalism begins with this keyboard arrangement of Adams’ Second String Quartet. It’s one of his most compelling shorter works, taking for its source material some snippets out of Beethoven’s Diabelli Variations and Piano Sonata No. 31. It’s not until about 7:30 into the first movement that the tableau starts to sound like typical Adams (steady repeating notes with octave displacements). As Beethoven deconstructions go it’s closer to Dieter Schnebel or Shaw’s Watermark (after the Piano Concerto No. 3) than to the angst-ridden nostalgia of Schnittke’s Third String Quartet (after the Grosse Fuge)
  3. Michael Gordon: Acquanetta (Bandcamp)
    I’ve always found Gordon the most interesting of the Bang on a Can triumvirate. The ease with which he incorporates vernacular elements into his style of beat-driven postminimalism makes his voice the most distinctive, and fun, of the bunch. The title character of this one-act opera is an American B-movie actress popular in the 1940s and 1950s

Voices of the elders: Europe

  1. Salvatore Sciarrino: Ombre nel mattino di Piero (Bandcamp)
    Sciarrino’s newest string quartet is exquisitely performed and recorded in this album, which features the Lassus Quartet
  2. Horizon 9 (Spotify)
    The recent performances by the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra gathered here include works by Roukens, Rijnvos and a piccolo concerto by Tüür, but the highlight is Peter Eötvös’s Multiversum, a concerto for pipe organ and Hammond organ. The intoxicating sonorities of the latter, dripping with their characteristic chorus effect, are a welcome novelty in a modernist orchestral context
  3. Peter Eötvös: Gliding: Four Works for Symphonic Orchestra (Spotify)
    It was certainly the banner year for Eötvös recordings. My favorite work here is Alle vittime senza nome (to the unnamed victims), composed in 2017 and dedicated to refugees recently killed crossing the Mediterranean Sea. It brings Henze to mind more than most Eötvös works. And then there’s Dialog mit Mozart which reminds me more of The Cunning Little Vixen than Mozart, but is still enjoyable for its rhythmically graceful colorful palette. Like Saariaho, Eötvös’ music seems to be taking a turn from dense, slowly-changing textures toward more open textures featuring more conventional (though still postmodern) rhythmically-articulated patterns
  4. Tristan Murail: Portulan (Spotify)
    Ensemble Cairn’s new album gathers several Murail chamber works under the moniker Portulan (an archaic word referring to nautical charts). Despite the small ensemble size, Garrigue and Paludes present the range of color, the strung-together sequences, and the rhythmic and formal unpredictability we associate with this most admired of living French composers. Then there’s the creaky, drum-driven labored breathing of La chamber des cartes (2011), the only work on the album to use all eight instruments in the Portulan ensemble
  5. Per Nørgård: Whirl’s World (Spotify)
    Ensemble MidtVest performs chamber works by the dean of Danish composers. The title track, a wind quintet from 1970, is like Nørgård’s answer to Stockhausen’s Adieu (1966), while Spell, a clarinet trio from 1973, anticipates more recent postminimalist trends

Dark drones and loops

  1. William Basinski: On Time Out of Time (Bandcamp)
    With the analog synth revival and inexpensive laptop tools that come with a steady VoIP Phone System driving a boom in slow, aurally complex drony, atonal music, this album stands out for its compelling timbres and rhythmic skill. The long title track is punctuated at first by widely and irregularly spaced “bass drums” that sound like an incredibly distended heartbeat that eventually becomes—well—disintegrated
  2. Koray Kantarcıoğlu: Loopworks (Bandcamp)
    More loop/dark ambient music from a less famous musician based in Istanbul. Built from looped samples of 1960s–70s Turkish LPs, it works in a way not far removed from Carl Stone’s music
  3. Ellen Arkbro: Chords (Bandcamp)
    The gripping microtonal guitar peals of Arkbro’s Chords for guitar are among the most haunting things I’ve heard all year
  4. Phill Niblock: Baobab (Bandcamp) and Music for Organ (Bandcamp)
    In a direct line from La Monte Young, Niblock is one of the sources of today’s dark ambient and Wandelweiser genres with his dense microtonal drone music for (usually) monochromatic instrumental groupings. Baobab again features Quatuor Bozzini, while Music for [pipe] Organ features Hampus Lindwall
  5. Éliane Radigue: Occam Ocean II (Spotify)
    In the same lineage as Niblock is Éliane Radigue, who for two decades set the bar for electroacoustic drone music in Europe, mapping out the landscape since homesteaded by thousands of dark ambient and Wandelweiser-style musicians. Now that her attentions have shifted to conventional instruments, her affinity with Niblock is clearer than ever, and the orchestral Occam Ocean II, written in 2015 and now released on the Shiiin label, displays a Niblockian affection for microtonal deviations across multiple instruments, as in the D♮-centered passage heard at the 30-minute mark
  6. Horațiu Rădulescu: Works for Organ and for Cello (Spotify) and Complete Cello Works (Spotify)
    Rădulescu, inventor of Romanian spectralism, is well served by these two new albums from Mode Records which feature his widow Catherine Marie Tunnell. Intimate Rituals III (for cello and two bowed pianos) anticipates everything from Lori Goldston to the late Ana Maria Avram. And Rădulescu’s low-tech variety of spectralism (as opposed to the highfalutin IRCAM variety) is another key source for the iridescent Wandelweiser-style heterostatis showcased in the next two albums
  7. Michael Pisaro: Achilles, Socrates, Diotima (Bandcamp)
    Pisaro got a lot of attention in 2019 for his 5-CD set Nature Denatured and Found Again, but I’m smitten by this comparatively modest 48-minute offering that showcases the Swiss ensemble Insub Meta Orchestra. Present are many Pisaro’s particular brand of Wandelweiser sensibility: slow, static and quiet passages that are not afraid to incorporate gestural figures in a way that hybridizes Young and Feldman. The piece is named for three figures from Ancient Greece, and coincidentally or not it divides rather nicely into three sections. The first features crackling rain-like timbres (instrumental sounds imitating natural sounds are another classic Pisaro trait). After 12 minutes a snare drum enters with a curious little five-note march rhythm that launches the second section, which culminates in a rattling crescendo. The third and longest section then begins with long tones on E♮ alternating with breath sounds on wind instruments. These two sounds are combined and expanded in a way that’s similar to Niblock, but very soft instead of very loud
  8. Jakob Ullmann: fremde zeit addendum 5 (Radio Eclectus)
    This album features a single hour-long work, solo V for piano (2013–14), created by this Wandelweiser-adjacent composer in collaboration with Lukas Rickli and Zora Marti. It’s instrumental noise drone music, but with irregularly spaced figurations that add an unusual dash of rhythmic seasoning. A great bedtime listen
  9. Winfried Mühlum-Pyrápheros: Musica Nova Contemplativa (Bandcamp) and Pauline Oliveros and Guy Klucevsek: Sounding/Way (Bandcamp)
    These two re-releases document older works whose drones and tremolos are of a more classically minimalist order. Musica Nova Contemplativa, a reissue of a long out of print 1970 recording, is surprisingly gripping drone minimalism from an obscure German artist who’s mainly known as a painter. Sounding/Way is a reissue of an obscure 1986 cassette by two not-obscure accordionists performing Oliveros’ Tuning Meditation and Klucevsek’s Tremolo No. 6 (which is reminiscent of Ligeti’s Continuum and Coulée)
  10. Various artists: On Corrosion (Bandcamp)
    A remarkable snapshot of the dark ambient genre as it stands today comes by way of this anthology from Helen Scarsdale Agency that injects the newfound anti-establishmentarian nostalgia for audiocassettes into the world of collectible objects. Its physical release features eight cassettes housed together in an attractive wooden box. Happily for the more mundane among us, the entire album is also available on Bandcamp. Particularly noteworthy are Francisco Meirino’s loops cut from an old reel-to-reel tape of gospel music and the “9 dreams in erotic mourning” from English musician Alice Kemp

Cover your ears: noise, electronic music and sound art

  1. Cecilia Lopez: Red/Machinic Fantasies (Bandcamp)
    See my review of Lopez’s brand of “precarious augmented reality” that takes after Lucier, Niblock and Gordon Monahan
  2. Steve Layton and Sound-In: The Mind Wanders (Bandcamp)
    Sound-In’s music originates in online jams among musicians networked from separate continents. The results are then edited and assembled by Seattleite Steve Layton. This 2019 compilation offers an eclectic range of electroacoustic mashups of improvisations that themselves often start out as Dadaesque “findings”
  3. Ben Kudler and Jayson Gerycz: Kapteyn B (Bandcamp)
    Gerycz is a rock-and-roll drummer from Cleveland. His playing was captured on a computer in realtime by the Brooklynite Kudler, then processed in SuperCollider and sent back to Gerycz’s headphones, whereupon the drummer improvised off the regurgitated mix
  4. Noisepoetnobody: Concrete Vitalist (Bandcamp)
    Noisepoetnobody is the stage name for the formidable Seattle-based noise musician Casey Chittenden Jones. This four-movement offering uses field recordings, contact microphones and an analog synthesizer
  5. Nurse with Wound/The James Worse Public Address Method: The Vursiflenze Mismantler and Emptyset: Blossoms (Bandcamp)
    Here we start to connect with the British industrial music tradition. Nurse with Wound requires no introduction. Emptyset is a Bristol-based duo who create sound installations and make music with programmed neural network systems
  6. Luciano Maggiore: Locu (Bandcamp) and Agostino Di Scipio: Concrezioni sonone (Spotify)
    From Italy come a pair of names previously unknown to me. Maggiore, a sound artist currently living in London, contributes this haunting and noisy album (it was originally a cassette) that features faint howling sounds. Di Scipio’s album focuses on music for piano and live electronics, starting from the New York School’s attitude of a piano as, first and foremost, a sound source. His Three silent pieces (3 Pezzi muti) borrows a concept from Larry Austin’s Accidents (1967) where the pianist is directed to perform rapidly on the keyboard without trying to sound any notes. The resulting mechanical noises, along with the occasional audible “accident”, are captured and transformed by computer processing. In Di Scipio’s chpn3.2, written for the Chopin bicentennial, recordings of Chopin’s piano music are “injected” into the strings through transducers custom built by Giorgio Klauer. As in the Maggiore album, it creates the sense of an overheard transmission from the au-delà

New composed music

  1. Ana Sokolović: Sirènes (Spotify)
    This Serbian-born Québécoise composer has gotten some international attention for her chamber opera Svadba (Wedding), which uses six female voices who alternate between standard “classical” and guttural Balkan singing styles. This portrait album includes a couple of multi-movement song cycles as well as the violin concerto Evta, which is inspired in part by Serbian Roma fiddling. Aside from the conceit of its title meaning seven (the concerto’s seven sections are based on the succeeding degrees of a C major scale), the work is in the contemporary European polystylist vein where different music types are unexpectedly juxtaposed
  2. Žibuoklė Martinaitytė: In Search of Lost Beauty (Bandcamp)
    Another transplant from Eastern Europe (Lithuania) to North America (New York), Martinaitytė’s music may remind you of John Luther Adams. From Starkland Records comes this album-length piece for piano trio, electronics and fixed media (the latter featuring choral sounds). In its own way I find it akin to Bryn Harrison’s hour-long Piano Quintet that Quatuor Bozzini recorded in 2018
  3. Speak, Be Silent (YouTube)
    This satisfying offering from Riot Ensemble features new chamber pieces by Chaya Czernowin, Liza Lim, Rebecca Saunders, Anna Thorvaldsdottir and the Croatian Mirela Ivičević. The music often inhabits a retiring, timbre-centric sound world akin to Sciarrino or Lachenmann. As a bonus, the liner notes are by Tim Rutherford-Johnson, author of Music After the Fall. See the review by Christian Carey
  4. Dominique Schafer: Vers une présence réelle… (Spotify)
    Ensemble Proton’s Martin Bliggenstorfer with his lupophone

     

    Ensemble Proton Bern performs music by this Swiss composer who sadly died of pancreatic cancer in August. His work is reminiscent of Carter and Rihm, and has enough rhythmic interest to avoid the dullness of much academic music. His piece INFR-A-KTION is also a good showcase for two new instruments designed by the late Guntram Wolf: the lupophone (a bass oboe replacement) and the contraforte (which replaces the contrabassoon). See the review by Christian Carey

  5. Andrew McIntosh: We See the Flying Bird, Five Songs (Bandcamp)
    I first encountered McIntosh’s music at the 2018 premiere of Shasta by the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s New Music Group with John Adams conducting. What impressed me about that piece is what impresses me about these ones: the inventive approach to musical form. Whereas most music nowadays is based on simple repetition-based forms or else uses gradual processes where ideas and transitions unfold slowly (or remain static), McIntosh’s structures are more of a throwback to composers like Messiaen who used block forms built from a succession of sections that are clearly set off from each another without relying on repetition
  6. Zosha Di Castri: Tachitipo (Bandcamp)
    A Canadian composer based in New York who, as befits her professed “restless” personality, is fond of sudden stylistic juxtapositions in the mold of Zappa and Zorn (and Europeans like Neuwirth and Goebbels). Like the best of them, Di Castri can pull this off without sounding disjointed
  7. In manus tuas (Bandcamp)
    Violist Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti performs works by herself, Caroline Shaw, Anna Thorvaldsdóttir and Andrew Norman. The latter high-profile young composer (who turned 40 just two months ago), is best known for his orchestral music, but as is so often the case with American composers, I think he does better with more modest, and less Eurocentric, means. His lovely solo viola piece Sabina is inspired by light refracting through stained glass windows
  8. Knockler (Bandcamp)
    Diego Castro Magas performs solo guitar compositions from Chile and the UK. Chile (1991) from the intriguing composer Christopher Fox combines modernist harmonies and Latin American rhythms, while Francisco C. Goldschmidt’s …Aún Caen Retazos de Esos Gritos… (2014) is reminiscent of Cage’s prepared piano music

New takes on departed voices

  1. Music of Harry Partch, Vol. 3: Sonata Dementia (Spotify)
    Previously reviewed by Paul Muller, this latest release in PARTCH’s survey of the 20th century’s most important microtonal composer includes the premiere recording of Sonata Dementia, the first version of what eventually became Ring Around the Moon. Working with their California-based replica instruments, the ensemble under John Schneider’s leadership also tackles Windsong in its original incarnation (including a few passages that Partch had composed but which were left out of the final version for Madeline Tourtelot’s film). Bridge Records also includes a vintage 1942 recording of Partch performing Barstow in early solo version for voice and adapted guitar
  2. Karlheinz Stockhausen: aus LICHT (IDAGIO)
    Pierre Audi’s farewell to Dutch National Opera involved staging roughly half of Stockhausen’s mammoth cycle of seven operas, one for each day of the week. It’s marvelous to hear this music in modern performances that often blow away the original Stockhausen Edition renditions. The excerpts are well chosen too, a powerful concentration of musical highlights from this often sprawling and uneven tome. Available exclusively through IDAGIO, the classical music-centric streaming service launched in 2015
  3. Morton Feldman Piano (Bandcamp)
    I still love John Tilbury’s classic traversal of Feldman’s solo piano works, but Philip Thomas’s new survey for Another Timbre is also very fine, and adds a few rediscovered and previously unrecorded short pieces
  4. Frank Zappa: Orchestral Favorites 40th Anniversary (Spotify) and The Hot Rats Sessions (Spotify)
    Two multi-CD “the making of” albums from the Zappa Family Trust commemorate the 40th anniversary of Orchestral Favorites and the 50th of Hot Rats. The Orchestral Favorites set includes a remaster of the original 1979 LP along with the complete 1975 concert at UCLA’s Royce Hall that was its source. This featured a pickup orchestra that combined some of Zappa’s regular musicians (such as Bruce Fowler, Ian Underwood and Terry Bozzio) with several LA area freelance musicians. Hot Rats, recorded in 1969, is from Zappa’s early period. It dropped the Mothers of Invention moniker, focusing more on rock improv vehicles for Zappa and some of his side musicians (in an original radio promo spot, included with the anniversary set, tracks like Peaches en Regalia and Son of Mr. Green Genes are referred to as “rock and roll concertos”). Also included are the original unedited takes from tracks like Willie the Pimp, which famously features Captain Beefheart on vocals with solos by Zappa on electric guitar and Don “Sugarcane” Harris on electric violin, jamming on what’s basically a one-chord tune
  5. Pehr Henrik Nordgren: As in a Dream (Spotify)
    The latest posthumous release dedicated to this remarkable composer of Finnish nationality and Japanese tutelage features concertos for cello, for string orchestra, and for viola and double bass. The latter, modeled after Brahms’s double concerto but shifted down to amplify the two “marginalized” members of the string family, exhibits that Nordgrenian talent for juxtaposing seemingly disparate musics. For example, at 22:00 there’s a funky riff of piano chords that one minute later leads into an orchestral passage based on pentatonic East Asian-style runs that in turn lead into an Ivesian quodlibet at 23:30. This is the kind of montage that we’ve tended to associate with improvising Americans like Zappa and Zorn, but Nordgren is one of the increasing number of Europeans to pull this off. At 31:00 there’s a tonal Bach-like chorale tune. It reveals a connection with the spiritual minimalists, but Nordgren is always his own strange mix
  6. Galina Ustvolskaya: Complete Music for Violin and Piano (Spotify)
    This album by Natalia Andreeva and Evgeny Sorkin is one of several commemorating the centenary year of the “lady with the hammer”. Few capture the terror of footsteps and knocks on the door better than these two in their interpretation of Ustvolskaya’s 1952 Sonata, written while Stalin was still alive
  7. Henze: Heliogabalus Imperator, Works for orchestra (Spotify) and Das Floß der Medusa (Spotify)
    Two important additions to the legacy of the second most famous German composer of his generation. In the first, the late Oliver Knussen conducts the BBC Symphony Orchestra in several classic Henze works, including the first proper recording of his symphonic poem Heliogabalus Imperator, written in 1972, revised in 1986, and named for the brief and garish reign of an obscure 3rd century Roman Emperor. The music is appropriately raucous and colorful, more reminiscent of Messiaen than most Henze compositions. Meanwhile the ever-industrious Peter Eötvös conducts the first digital recording of Henze’s most notorious dramatic piece, The Raft of the Frigate Medusa. It’s also the first to incorporate the revisions that Henze made to the score in 1990, and it sounds great
  8. Richard Rodney Bennett: Orchestral Works, Vol. 3 (Spotify)
    The latest in Chandos’ survey includes some of Bennett’s better-enduring works, such as the First Symphony and Zodiac (which is quite unlike Stockhausen’s namesake). The music is basically neoclassical, but in the modernist vein of middle Tippett
  9. Stockhausen, Xenakis, Ferneyhough, Donatino, Reynolds, Fundal, Henze: 20th Century Percussion Solos (Spotify)
    Fine new versions of evergreens Zyklus and Psappha from Danish  percussionist Mathias Reumert, and a first recording of Roger Reynolds’ epic Watershed

Stage to video

Among the year’s video releases with particular significance to new music, three major European opera productions stand out. Not so much the Alex Ross vaunted trio of Heart Chamber, Orlando and The Snow Queen—simply because the first two have not been recorded while the third, though visually attractive and a vehicle for the justifiably glorified Barbara Hannigan, seems an overly ambitious foray into operatic spectacle for a composer whose authentic voice is fundamentally introverted and non-verbal. Instead I was more struck by the following thought-provoking productions that show how the creative standards for new music theater remain quite high.

Magdalena Kožená and Georg Nigl in Macbeth Underworld
  1. Pascal Dusapin and Frédéric Boyer: Macbeth Underworld (YouTube)
    I’ve had trouble warming to Dusapin’s coupling of a colorful but thick postmodernist idiom with conventional opera’s vocal and instrumental baggage, but Macbeth Underworld is one of his most successful efforts, depositing Shakespeare’s fallen couple into a hell-world informed by Dante and Elizabethan nostalgia. It was premiered at La Monnaie in September, and a fine video culled from two October performances has been published to YouTube for the rest of us to enjoy. An especially lovely touch is the bedroom duet in the second scene, where the increasingly insane couple is accompanied by a solo archlute (played by Christian Rivet). The comic Porter (played by British tenor Graham Clark) doubles as Hecate and serves as a recurring commenting fool, replete with red Bozo the Clown hair and frequently accompanied by an onstage fiddler
  2. Francesco Filidei and Joël Pommerat: L’Inondation (ARTE)
    A newer voice is the Italian composer Francesco Filidei (1973–). A pupil of Sciarrino and an organist by trade, his music is eclectic, with postminimalist passages culminating in hints of Vivier, and spectralist string harmonic glissandos accompanying discoordinated vocal melodies in a manner reminiscent of Saariaho. One might connect Filidei with the post-Henze variety of European neoclassicism that’s currently making a comeback. But regardless, the language is well-suited for the scenario, adapted by Joël Pommerat (who also directs this premiere production at the Opéra Comique) from the same Yevgeny Zamyatin short story that spawned the 1994 Franco-Russian film. The central character is an unnamed woman (played by the versatile young French singer Chloé Briot) in a childless and somewhat dysfunctional relationship. She strangles (or perhaps hallucinates that she strangles) the couple’s adopted teenage girl (represented onstage by two identically costumed and wigged women, one an actor, the other a singer). As in Wozzeck, the music represents the world as she perceives it, so although it’s clear that she is insane by the end of the opera, we can’t be sure how much of the action, perhaps including the titular flood itself, is real rather than imagined
  3. Karlheinz Stockhausen: aus LICHT (ARTE)
    Finally there’s the aforementioned Kathinka Pasveer/Pierre Audi condensed production of LICHT. ARTE has made available a high-quality 90-minute video sampler featuring 16 excerpts from the 15-hour performance. These are intercut with shots of schoolchildren creating art projects based on the cycle’s Urantia Book-inspired story lines (Stockhausen Sonntagsschule, I guess). Not surprisingly, the excerpts feature the most visually striking passages (such as the Central African video sequence from Michael’s Ride Around the World) and the broad-stroked lighting and set design from Urs Schönebaum, with its curved illuminated piping, multiple video projection screens, and monochromatic blocks of color (chiefly red, blue and yellow). The last three excerpts come from Mittwoch and Sonntag, and feature passages not included in the IDAGIO audio album: a 6½ minute look at Orchester-Finalisten, 13 minutes of the notorious Helikopter-Streichquartett (performed by the Pelargos Quartet in feathery costumes) and the cathartic choral piece Engel-Prozessionen
  4. From Elbphilharmonie, György Ligeti: Le Grand Macabre (YouTube) and HK Gruber: Frankenstein!! (YouTube)
    If you don’t live near Hamburg and haven’t yet seen the interior of the spectacular new Elbphilharmonie, the next best thing is to watch Doug Fitch’s concert staging of Le Grand Macabre performed there by new arrival Alan Gilbert, who debuted the production in 2010 during his stint with the New York Philharmonic. Also worth viewing from the Elbphilharmonie is HK Gruber singing and conducting his song cycle Frankenstein!!, long a hit on Germanic concert stages. Also on the program are his Manhattan Broadcasts and Weill’s Second Symphony, the latter reminding us all where Gruber’s roots lie. Regrettably no English subtitles though
  5. Robert Ashley: Improvement (Don Leaves Linda) (Vimeo)
    From New York comes this revival of Robert Ashley’s new music theater piece from 1985–1991. Ashley called it an opera, placing it in the tetralogy that also includes Now Eleanor’s Idea, but it’s more in the lineage of Einstein on the Beach in its avoidance of opera singers and traditional instruments. The production from Tom Hamilton and David Moodey is unlikely to sway opinions about Ashley’s stage works in either direction, but it puts the material in the best possible light, and is a welcome addition to the paltry collection of professionally documented landmarks of American experimental theater

Past and present

Special mention goes to Agamemnon the opera, one of the most remarkable of the year’s Web-driven “back from oblivion” discoveries. It was conceived in the late 1980s as an opera on disk by Nicole Gagné and the late David Avidor. Gagné, who adapted the libretto from Aeschylus, is best known as a music writer (among other things she compiled the Historical Dictionary of Modern and Contemporary Classical Music), while Avidor seems to be mainly remembered as a recording engineer. Both are present as musicians for most of the opera’s two hours and five acts, but they’re joined by an astonishing cast loaded with such Downtown superstars as Fred Frith, Pauline Oliveros, Julius Eastman (who voices Agamemnon), Sussan Deyhim, Blue Gene Tyranny, Shelley Hirsch (who voices Cassandra), Robert Ashley, David Shea, Arto Lindsay (who plays Aegisthus) and Ned Sublette (whose Texas accent reminds me of The Residents’ Homer Flynn). Most of these artists contribute improvisationally to the musical texture.

Though the opera was completed in 1992, it was never released on a commercial recording (the contributing musicians didn’t even know it had been finished). So it lay forgotten for over two decades until a buzz began to circulate in social media this past year that the piece had been published on Bandcamp, to the delight of contemporary music fans intrigued by its lineup of unique musical personalities.

That this project from 30 years ago can be included here with no loss of continuity (apart from the presence of a few long-deceased voices) speaks to the stability (or stagnation if you want to be less charitable) of the current musical environment. The 2010s were not so much distinct from their predecessors as they were a prolongation of themes that have been dominant for quite some time in Western art music and its neighboring regions. One can reasonably claim (and many have) that no fundamentally new musical ideas have arisen since the 1970s spawned spectralism and hip hop. Subsequent innovations have been of the strictly recombinant variety (i.e., postminimalism and the kinds of intercultural fusion described above) or the reclamatory one (neoromanticism, the modular synth revival, etc.).

It might seem ironic that the age of globalism and the Internet has produced so much displacement in how music is mediated and commodified, yet so little evolution in its style. But if the effect of the last ontological revolution in Western art music—that of the post-WW2 avant-garde—was to expand the range of allowable musical material to include literally any reproducible sound, then it stands to reason that the only further room for radical change is in the epistemological direction. It’s too soon to see what particulars that next revolution will involve. The more doomsday-oriented observers, such as Richard Taruskin, suggest that the end of Western art music is already in sight as the supremacy of written music gets overrun by modern technology. But the quantity of visionary artists dedicated to moving the music forward—artists who regard all facets of its modern praxis, whether composed, improvised or fixed-media, as belonging to an integral shared tradition—is amply displayed by the compelling work showcased in this article. It suggests that this most progressive and unpredictable of musical traditions may still have some life left in it.

Photo credits: Sam Shalabi via Constellation Records, Lao Dan via Family Vineyard Records, Taylor Ho Bynum 9-tette via Bynum, Zeena Parkins by Andy Newcombe, Ellen Arkbro via the artist, Michael Pisaro by Kathy Pisaro (design Matthew Revert), Cecilia Lopez by Ian Kornfeld, Žibuoklė Martinaitytė by Lina Aiduke, Martin Bliggenstorfer by Michael Schell, Frank Zappa by Jay L. Handler, Pehr Henrik Nordgren via Kai Nordgren/Wikimedia, Magdalena Kožená and Georg Nigl in Dusapin: Macbeth Underworld via La Monnaie, L’Inondation by Stefan Brion/Opéra Comique, Agamemnon: Fred Frith by Alexander Kurz, Pauline Oliveros by Linda Montano, Shelley Hirsch by Frank Schindelbeck, Julius Eastman via Wikipedia, Arto Lindsay by Carstor, Sussan Deyhim by Robert Hayman, Robert Ashley by Savio.

by Michael Schell
Best of, CD Review, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, Opera

Noteworthy in 2018: Schell’s picks

Unlike those big-media favorites lists that appear in mid-December to grease the skids of the Great Shopping Season, my year-end reckonings dawdle until the last moment and don’t claim to define the best of anything. But with audio streaming, social media and other factors pushing the contemporary music landscape into an increasingly variegated but fragmented state, some measure of thoughtful inventorying seems both prudent and practical. In that spirit, here’s a biased and opinionated survey of albums and other media released in 2018 that made an impact on me.

Stage to screen

New music theater was a recurring theme during the year. Tops in prominence was the premiere of Kurtág’s Fin de Partie at La Scala, but we’re still waiting for that to be recorded. Another notable 2018 event was the US premiere of Saariajo’s chamber opera Only the Sound Remains (its European video release was one of my picks in 2017). Over in the UK, a string of high-profile operatic premieres—including Muhly’s Marnie, Dean’s Hamlet and Adès’s The Exterminating Angel—reached an apex with the captivating Lessons in Love and Violence by George Benjamin. Its libretto, which Martin Crimp adapted from Marlowe’s play Edward II, divides the palace intrigue into seven scenes, and shoehorned into a tight 90 minute span, the result invites comparisons with Wozzeck (though Berg, when faced with the insane King’s insistence that “I can hear drumming”, would surely have used the orchestra to depict his deluded reality, whereas Benjamin depicts things as they really are). Lessons is similar in style to Hamlet and Angel, but Benjamin’s textures are thinner and clearer, and thus seem more varied and communicative by comparison.

Lessons in Love and Violence (photo: ROH/Stephen Cummiskey)

You can view streaming video of the Royal Opera’s premiere production at medici.tv (subscription required) or purchase it on Blu-ray. Highlights include the powerful second scene where three peasants describe their impoverished agony to the callous Queen Isabel (played by Barbara Hannigan). One peasant asks why both the poor and the rich sleep three-to-a-bed (the latter alluding to Edward’s same-sex consort Gaveston). Another fine moment is the brief threnody for Edward that features cimbalom and Iranian tombak drums (one of the opera’s few nods to beat-driven vernacular music). Benjamin’s use of cimbalom and two harps is effective throughout: they seldom play simultaneously, but working in tandem they create a soundscape rich in struck/plucked string sonorities.

Musgrave with another famous female British politician (photo: John Stillwell/PA Wire)

Speaking of British royalty, there’s Thea Musgrave’s Mary Queen of Scots, wherein Scotland’s most famous female composer weighs in on its most famous female politician. The long-unavailable 1978 recording of this most admired of Musgrave operas has finally reappeared in celebration of her 90th birthday (Amazon, Spotify, YouTube). While Lessons in Love and Violence belongs to the Tippett tradition of English-language opera, Mary is squarely within the more conservative Britten lineage, but its style is still contemporary and unsentimental. My favorite moment comes in the ballroom scene where one courtier starts up a bawdy reel to disrupt Mary’s dance with a rival, the musics clashing like the men’s ambitions. Won’t someone revive this work onstage in lieu of yet another production of Donizetti’s Maria Stuarda?

Shell Shock (photo: Filip Van Roe)

In November 2018, while various world leaders were in France commemorating the end of WW1 (or in Trump’s case, hiding indoors from the rain), Parisian audiences took in a concert staging of Nicholas Lens’s 2014 opera Shell Shock. The libretto, a collection of anguished reflections from war veterans and widows, ostensibly set during the Great War, was penned by Nick Cave, thus explaining how a traditional opera might open with a lyric like “Some asshole…some asshole…some asshole shouts at me in words I do not properly understand”. The eclecticism of Lens’s score is reminiscent of Henze, though specific passages conjure up other composers. The prelude, for instance, is practically a clone of the Kyrie from Ligeti’s Requiem, while the Canto of the Nurse resembles the serial music heard throughout Eisler’s German Symphony.

That Shell Shock has been successful enough to warrant revival is due largely to its weaving of cultivated and vernacular styles into a fabric that is postmodern but not hackneyed. ENO and the Met should take note of how much better this works for “accessible highbrow” than Marnie, whose application of bel canto opera accoutrements in service of fancified Broadway-style music comes off as pretentious and overproduced.

Video of Shell Shock can be streamed here for a limited time.

Electronic music today…

Fixed media music has often been marginalized within the broader classical music world because it doesn’t align with traditional performer-centric institutions and publicity machines. That its prominence is increasing today is testament to the shakeups engendered by inexpensive digital instruments and new distribution channels. One of the few regrets I have over this development is the amount of high-quality studio work that I’ve had to set aside to shrink this part of the list to a manageable size:

  1. Steve Layton: Virtual Composition (Bandcamp)
    Layton, whose work is almost entirely studio-based, seems to exemplify the fraught interface between new media and traditional music institutions. Despite being one of Seattle’s most important composers, he flies largely under the radar of the city’s classical music establishment. Virtual Composition is a 3½ hour compilation of fixed media pieces stretching back to 1998. By contrast with the more groove-oriented tracks of his 2017 No Answer album, this collection features music conceived in symphonic terms but realized with digital instruments. Ekphora is one of the standouts, reminding me both of Kurtág’s Stele and Zappa’s Civilization Phaze III (the title refers to Greek funeral processions). I enjoy the moment-to-moment unpredictability and eclecticism of this music, which overcomes the clichés of the “orchestral MIDI” sound that’s ubiquitous in demos and low-budget jingles nowadays
  2. Sarah Davachi: For harpsichord, For pipe organ and string trio (Bandcamp)
    This young Canadian exponent of dark ambient has gotten praise for her recent Gave In Rest album, but I think this slightly earlier, but notably grittier music is more interesting
  3. Ian William Craig: A Turn of Breath (Spotify)
    Another Canadian electroacoustician, albeit of a different stripe. This sampler album, originally from 2014 and recently rereleased in expanded form, offers a selection of short pieces built from looped samples, often of voices. A track like A Slight Grip, a Gentle Hold (Pt. I) demonstrates that even a very slight modification of a found object can cause us to listen to it very differently. Other tracks are reminiscent of William Basinski’s classic Disintegration Loops
  4. Okkyung Lee: Speckled Stones and Dissonant Green Dots (Bandcamp)
    Sine tone patterns with no dynamic or timbral changes. Serious minimalism in the stoic tradition of Karel Goeyvaerts
  5. Anthony Paul De Ritis: Electroacoustic Music (Spotify)
    De Ritis’s technique takes a single solo acoustic instrument, then through digital manipulation spins it into a dense and strident web. This album from Albany Records gathers works created between 1993 and 2011 in honor of De Ritis’s teacher, the late David Wessel (1942–2014)
  6. Stuart McLeod: Tetraktys, All Is Number (Bandcamp)
    A Pythagorean shape, a font of mathematical relationships, which in McLeod’s hands evoke musical structures that are varied but unified. See my review here
  7. Langham Research Centre: Tics and Ampersands (Bandcamp)
    My soft spot for these British advocates of live electronic music goes back to their 2014 album John Cage: Early Electronic and Tape Music, one of the most impressive latter-day surveys of critical repertory pieces like Cartridge Music and Imaginary Landscape No. 5. This half-length album available digitally and on cassette features their own noise pieces in the Cagean tradition

…and yesterday

  1. Éliane Radigue with her ARP 2500 (photo: Yves Fernandez)

    Éliane Radigue: Œuvres Électroniques (14 CDs, from GRM, available at Metamkine, excerpts on SoundCloud)
    The epic electroacoustic works of the mother of dark ambient, gathered into an attractive 14-CD box. My contribution to Second Inversion’s Top 10 Albums of 2018

  2. Jerry Hunt: from “Ground” (Bandcamp)
    Other Minds reclaims this 1980 studio performance by America’s most iconoclastic shaman-musician. See my review here
  3. Xenakis: Persepolis (Bandcamp)
    Martin Wurmnest and Rashad Becker’s new presentation of this 1971 tape piece is a true remix (not an arrangement) of Xenakis’s 8-track original. It’s simply awesome: strong bass, clear separation, by far the best this classic has ever sounded on record

More tribute to the elders

  1. Gloria Coates (photo: Simon Leigh)

    Gloria Coates: Piano Quintet, Symphony No. 10 (Drone of Druids on Celtic Ruins) (Spotify, YouTube)
    Coates is like a kinder, gentler Ustvolskaya with her single-minded emphasis on colliding sound masses and abstract forms. This new Naxos recording starts with her un-Brahms-like Piano Quintet (2013), in which half of the string instruments are tuned a quarter tone sharp (a technique borrowed from Ligeti’s Ramifications). Next comes her Symphony No. 10 (1992–3), which is like a Phill Niblock piece arranged for brass choir with a battery of snare drums added in. A new octogenarian and longtime Munich resident, Coates is finally receiving some well-deserved recognition in her native United States

  2. Dominick Argento: The Boor, Miss Havisham’s Wedding Night, A Water Bird Talk (Spotify, YouTube)
    The Boor competes unfavorably with Walton’s The Bear (both set the same Chekhov play), while Miss Havisham’s Wedding Night (adapted from Great Expectations) loses out to Maxwell Davies’ similarly-themed Miss Donnithorne’s Maggot. But it’s all worth it for A Water Bird Talk (1975–6), one of this nonagenarian’s most imaginative works. Featuring a baritone solo, some clever use of bird song, a little bit of coughing and a small chamber ensemble, it’s like Erwartung for people who prefer Britten to Schoenberg
  3. Berio: Sinfonia, Boulez: Notations I–IV, Ravel: La Valse (Amazon, Spotify, YouTube)
    Ludovic Morlot and the Seattle Symphony are joined by Roomful of Teeth to present one modern and one postmodern sacred cow. With Boulez’s orchestral miniatures thrown in. One of my colleague Christian Carey’s picks, along with…
  4. Harbison: Symphony No. 4, Ruggles: Sun Treader, Stucky: Second Concerto for Orchestra (Spotify, YouTube)
    Harbison further represents the octogenarian set, and his Fourth Symphony (2003) is one of his more humorous orchestral works. The Ruggles performance is second only to Michael Tilson Thomas’s classic 1970 recording, while the late Steven Stucky (1949–2016) is well represented by this colorful work from 2003 that might remind you of a composer like Stephen Albert. David Alan Miller conducts the National Orchestral Institute Philharmonic
  5. Kondo: Syzygia, Snow’s Falling, Pebbles: Pine Cones Fall (Bandcamp)
    Paul Zukofsky (1943–2017) is another recent departure, an accomplished violinist (he premiered the title role in Glass’s Einstein on the Beach), conductor, arts administrator, and the bane of many a graduate student whose interest in his father—the noted symbolist poet Louis Zukofsky—was thwarted by his zealous copyright guarding. In this, his final recording project, he showcases Kondo at his most Feldman-like. Syzygia is like hearing the Lutheran hymnal reimagined by old Morty, while the choral Snow’s Falling is like Rothko Chapel with a literary reference to Three Voices thrown in. In between the two Kondo tracks is Craig Pebbles’ similarly Feldmanian Pine Cones Fall
  6. Ichiyanagi: Sapporo (audio excerpt)
    Seattle’s Eye Music ensemble takes a fresh look at a quintessential graphic score from 1963 in this new CD from Edition Wandelweiser. See my review here
  7. Richter, Schnittke et al: Through the Lens of Time (Spotify)
    Looking back even farther is violinist Francisco Fullana’s concept album whose centerpiece is Max Richter’s The Four Seasons Recomposed, a droll update to Vivaldi’s famous concerto tetralogy (imagine Winter in a modern 7/8 time). Between each Season, Fullana inserts other neo-Baroque compositions: Schnittke’s Suite in the Old Style (modeled after Baroque dance suites), the Spaniard Salvador Brotons’ Variations on a Baroque Theme, and a fantasy on Bach’s Musical Offering by Isang Yun. Fullana and company present these works in the best possible light, leaving it to you to decide whether they’re transient nibblings at the feet of the old masters, or fresh prospects deserving of a foothold in the repertory

Justifiably admired

Next come three albums that seem to be on everyone’s list, and understandably so.

  1. Dennett and Johnson (photo: Alonso Nichols, Patricia Nolan)

    Scott Johnson: Mind Out of Matter (Amazon)
    Alarm Will Sound performs this new “atheist oratorio” from the master of speech melody, based on speeches by Daniel Dennett. I review it here

  2. Josh Modney: Engage (Spotify)
    Three CDs of (mostly) unaccompanied violin? Yes, it works! Modney takes us on a journey that includes Bach, free improvs in the Malcolm Goldstein mold, live electronic music (Sam Pluta’s Jem Altieri with a Ring Modulator Circuit), an attractive duo for amplified violin and prepared piano by Modney’s Wet Ink Ensemble co-director Eric Wubbels, and one of Anthony Braxton’s finest composed works (Composition No. 222)
  3. Tyshawn Sorey: Pillars (Bandcamp)
    Pillars inhabits the epic-length free improv space that includes such monuments as Is and People in Sorrow. But it also has a foot in the drone minimalism lineage of Young and Radigue. Sorey employs an octet instrumentation whose most striking component is three double basses. Their bowed rumbles can be heard anchoring the chorale section at the 1:11:08 mark of Pillars I that’s soon followed by trombone and cymbals music obviously borrowed from the Tibetan ritual orchestra.

    Tyshawn Sorey (photo: John Rogers)

    Another neo-Tibetan passage starts in the 30th minute of Pillars II with trombonist Ben Gerstein doing his best dungchen impression. Sorey soon enters on a real dungchen, though the result is more evocative of a didgeridoo. Several minutes ensue with drone plus bells/cymbals and later a bass drum. In the 37th minute, bowed double basses again launch a deep industrial growl which builds for four minutes until it completely usurps the drone from the dungchen. This slow and deep music continues until the 45th minute. Hopefully you’ve gotten an idea of the album’s sound world and slow pacing, but remarkably, the music never seems to drag

Back to the Old World

  1. Malin Bång: Structures of Light and Spruce (Spotify, YouTube)
    This Swedish composer has emerged onto the international radar this past year thanks to this portrait CD and the Donaueschinger premiere of her orchestral piece Splinters of ebullient rebellion. Reviewers have been apt to compare her to Lindberg and other Scandinavians. But her practice of deriving instrumental material from analysis of field recordings (as in this CD’s title track) suggests the influence of spectralism, while her mix of conventional instruments and mundane sound sources like woodworking tools reminds me of Kagel’s “strict composition with elements which are not themselves pure”. Arching, for example, “consists of a dialogue between the cello and the tools that constructed the instrument”, definitely a Kagel-worthy exercise in musical deconstruction
  2. Pehr Henrik Nordgren: Evocation (Spotify)
    I’ve gushed before about this composer, who died in 2008, and whose music remains practically unknown in North America. A typical Nordgren piece might start out sounding like European expressionism before veering suddenly into a tonal passage with a syncopated accompaniment (Equivocations for string trio and Finnish kantele does this at about 3:30). It’s the genius of Nordgren that you never know what direction the music will take next, but regardless he holds the flow together with motivic connections that keep each composition coherent. This latest CD of his music features the Kokkola Quartet and friends performing chamber pieces for strings
  3. Saariaho x Koh (Spotify)
    Graal Théâtre (Grail Theater), Saariaho’s violin concerto from 1994, is the centerpiece of this album from American violinist Jennifer Koh. With its relatively modest forces, the piece lacks the congestion that sometimes plagues her larger works for electronic and orchestral sounds. You can hear the connections both with her fellow Finn Nordgren and with the IRCAM-based spectralists of her adopted France. Though less often cited, there are also connections with North American composers like Robert Erickson and Morton Subotnick who experimented with live acoustic-electronic mixes
  4. Daniele Roccato plays music by Stefano Scodanibbio (Spotify)
    I’m not always blown away by “new music for [pick your instrument]” albums, but this one is a stunner, a tribute to double bass virtuoso and composer Stefano Scodanibbio (1956–2012), whose own works are in the lineage of Scelsi and Sciarrino. Alisei astounded me by having a single bass as its source (sustained harmonics on one string with fingered tremolos on the adjacent one make it sound like a duet), while the more linear Two Brilliant Pieces displays Roccato’s utter virtuosity and impeccable intonation. Da una certa nebbia (From a certain fog) is for “double bass and another double bass”, the second instrument adding a nebulous haze to the first one’s more straightforward declamations. Then there’s a crazy Octet that’s a half-hour tour de force of novel sound combinations for eight basses

Miscellanea and esoterica

  1. David Schiff: Carter (Oxford University Press) (Amazon)
    Schiff’s third book about America’s most irrepressible musical modernist takes a more personal approach to its subject matter while extending coverage to Carter’s very late works. The book is almost too untechnical (there are hardly any musical examples), but it’s still informative and insightful, an undemanding read about a demanding composer
  2. The Residents: I Am a Resident! (Amazon, Spotify)
    Fortuitously coinciding with the beginning of The Residents’ post-Hardy Fox era, this new release sees the surviving band members looking both rearwards and forwards as they remix covers of their own songs submitted by fans
  3. En Seumeillant: Dreams and visions in the Middle Ages (Spotify)
    Of all the historical periods in Western art music, it’s the Ars Subtilior, the mannerist era at the end of the 14th century, that scholars most frequently cite as a precursor to the post-WW2 frenzy of musical experimentation. This album by the Basel-based Sollazzo Ensemble casts a spotlight on that repertory, with ancillary beams extending a half century in either direction. Included is one of the most lugubrious ever renditions of the most famous of all Ars Subtilior compositions, the hyperchromatic rondeau Fumeux Fume
  4. Oskar Fischinger: Visual Music (DVD available from Center for Visual Music)
    This second disc in a retrospective series devoted to this pioneer of experimental animation features several shorts from the 1920s through the 1940s. There’s even bonus footage of Fischinger outside his California home, though it’s apparently not the location where Cage briefly worked as an assistant in 1937, accidentally drenching Fischinger’s camera to extinguish a fire started when the drowsy filmmaker dropped his lit cigar on a pile of rags and papers

The quantity of thought-provoking work that came along in 2018 makes this list quite a bit longer than last year’s, and testifies to the ongoing resilience and sophistication of Western art music even as some voices prophesize its imminent demise or assimilation. But perhaps a bit of perspective should be offered by two final albums whose scope lies well outside that usually associated with Western-influenced cultivated arts:

Music of Northern Laos and Music of Southern Laos
Cherishingly recorded between 2006 and 2013, and released this year on Bandcamp by the irrepressible Laurent Jeanneau (AKA Kink Gong), these two albums showcase the remarkable heterophony and sound world of traditional Laotian folk music. On display are the spicy timbres of bamboo tube instruments, the vertical mouth organ called a khene (basically the same instrument as the Japanese shō and the Chinese sheng) and singing in a variety of throaty and nasal styles. Per Jeanneau, “most recordings available in the Western world focus on the dominant culture in Laos. I focus on marginalized ethnic minorities”. It’s a monument to the tenacity of threatened cultures clinging to life amid the pressures of global artistic commodification.

by Michael Schell
Best of, CD Review, CDs, Chamber Music, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Best of 2018: Instrumental and Recital CDs

Best of 2018: Instrumental and Recital CDs

 

Best Recital

 

Hanging Gardens

Works by Claude Debussy, Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Anton Webern

Jacob Greenberg, piano with Tony Arnold, soprano

 

Rather than the customary bifurcation, Impressionism and Expressionism are related to one another on Hanging Gardens, pianist Jacob Greenberg’s loving curated, beautifully performed double CD. He is joined by soprano Tony Arnold for Arnold Schoenberg’s song cycle The Book of the Hanging Gardens, a work that epitomizes the overlap that occurs between the aforementioned styles. Their performance rivals the other best one on record, by Jan DeGaetani and Gilbert Kalish.

 

The notes from Greenberg’s piano filled the room, a masterful tapestry that wove together the intricate harmonies of Debussy with the structured passion of the Second Viennese School composers. His fingers danced across the keys with precision and sentiment, as if each note were a thread in a larger narrative. It was during these serene moments of musical brilliance that my thoughts drifted to a conversation I had with an uncle who had recently indulged in the world of meilleur casino en ligne français. He shared with me the rich textures of online play, the vibrant community, and how each game, like the pieces played tonight, was a unique composition of chance and skill. The experience, as he described it, was akin to the ebb and flow of a classical concerto, full of suspense and moments of unexpected joy, much like the crescendos and decrescendos that Greenberg so skillfully elicited from the grand piano.

 

Best Solo CDs

Christopher Fox

Headlong

Heather Roche, clarinets

Métier

 

Composer Christopher Fox has crafted an imaginative output, employing diverse approaches and many different technical resources. His latest Métier CD, Headlong, is devoted to clarinet music, for instruments of varying sizes. Heather Roche is the stalwart interpreter of these pieces. Her own versatility and facility with myriad extended techniques make Roche an ideal performer of Fox’s music. Indeed, the clarinetist’s website serves as a compendious catalog of techniques used to play contemporary works. This recording serves as an ideal accompaniment to her web-based pedagogical forays.

 

Several works here are ten-minute essays that have time to build and, in places, to breathe (as, one hopes, Roche is afforded as well). Even slightly shorter works like the gentle, fragmentary seven minutes of …Or Just After are given time enough to display significant exploration of the materials used in their construction. Here, there is a contrast between plummy low register melodies and higher single, sustained notes. Gradually and after many iterations, the upper line gains a note or two. This subtle shift in texture feels seismic and changes the registral give and take of the work. Likewise, small shifts are meaningful moments in the six-minute long Escalation. Originally written for Bb clarinet and here played on contrabass clarinet, the piece explores a mid-tempo stream of short phrases of chromatically ascending notes. In this incarnation, the sepulchral register in which these occur accentuates a kind of “walking bass” character that imparts a hint of jazzy swagger.

 

Some of the pieces include overdubs, either of electronics or other clarinets, and a couple are transcriptions of works originally written for other instruments or else for unspecified woodwinds. Originally composed for oboist Christopher Redgate, Headlong includes an ostinato electronic accompaniment that the composer suggests could sound like video games from the 1980s. The real fun here is the morphing of tempos through three different ratios:  5:4, 9:8 and 5:3. It makes for intriguing interrelationships between the instrumental part and the accompanying motoric bleeptronica. Headlong is an engaging mix of tempo modulation and minimal pulsation that shows a different and appealing side of Fox’s creativity.

 

On stone.wind.rain.sun, Heather Roche overdubs a duet with herself. The two clarinets converge and diverge throughout, with sustained and repeating notes in one instrument serving as a sort of ground for the chromaticism of the other voice. Registral changes, such as a leap downward to the chalumeau register to add single bass notes to the proceedings, divide the counterpoint further still, at any given moment affording one the impression of three or four distinct voices in operation.

 

One of my favorite compositions on the CD is Straight Lines for Broken Times, another piece employing overdubs. One track samples bass clarinet playing polyrhythms while the other two explore the “harmonic riches of the instrument,” as Fox describes a plethora of upper partials. Extended techniques are abundantly on offer. Altissimo notes, multiphonics, microtones, and harmonics create a swath of textures. However, the polyrhythmic underpinning assures that the piece feels guided in its course, beautifully shaping what could be a melange of overtone clouds. Straight Lines for Broken Times encapsulates Fox’s proclivity for experimentation in multiple domains: that of the recording medium, a wide palette of pitches that encompasses microtonal harmonics, and fluidly morphing tempos with intricate layers of local rhythms. The result never ceases to be of interest.

 

Solo Bass Clarinet – Contrabass Clarinet

Ingólfur Vilhjálmsson

Works by Jesper Pedersen, Franco Donatoni, Alistair Zaldua, Jacob Deal, and Thrainn Hjalmarsson

Lúr

 

Ensemble Adapter’s bass clarinetist Ingólfur Vilhjálmsson strikes out on his own on his first solo CD. The disc contains two outstanding pieces by Franco Donatoni, Soft I and II  and Ombra I and II. Another standout is Tinted/Milieu for contrabass clarinet and electronics by Thrainn Hjalmarsson; it revels in some of the deepest tones one can elicit from the instrument. For the same forces, Jesper Pedersen’s Kesselschleicher allows the electronics to take on a more active role. Jacob Deal’s Suada exercises Vilhjálmsson’s flexible upper register on the bass clarinet, while Alistair Zaldua’s Something other than it is explores the many extended techniques available to the instrument. With a diverse selection of composers, Vilhjálmsson’s CD is an excellent complement to Roche’s Headlong.

 

Still

James Romig

Ashlee Mack, piano

New World Records

 

Composer James Romig has spent the past twenty years cultivating a body of work that embodies both rigorous structuring and a wide-ranging gestural palette. As is explained in Bruce Quaglia’s excellent liner notes for Romig’s first New World CD, Still, there is good reason for these two aspects to be so important to Romig. His training as a composer was with American modernists Charles Wuorinen and Milton Babbitt, while his background as a performer – a percussionist – included a number of works by minimalists such as Steve Reich.

Extra-musical touchstones also play a significant role as inspirations for the composer. A series of National Park residencies has provided him with natural beauty to contemplate while composing. Abstract Expressionist painters such as Clyfford Still, who is the titular reference point for Romig’s piece on this CD, also enliven his imagination.

Nowhere in Romig’s output to date is this confluence of influences more apparent than in Still, a nearly hour-long piece for solo piano. One can see the pitch material’s progression in a chart in the liner notes and note the comprehensiveness of its organization. Unlike Romig’s portrait disc Leaves from Modern Trees, where the pieces tend towards tautly incisive utterance, here the progression of pitch material evolves slowly in a prevailingly soft dynamic spectrum. Ashlee Mack, a frequent performer of Romig’s music, provides a sterling interpretation. Slow tempi are maintained no matter what local rhythms (some complex) ripple the surface texture. In addition, Mack voices the harmony skilfully, allowing the piece-long progression to be presented with abundant clarity.

One more composerly ghost lurks in the room: that of Morton Feldman. Also an appreciator of Abstract Expressionism, who created long single movement pieces that transformed slowly and remained primarily soft, Feldman could seem to be Still’s natural progenitor. While surface details and scale of composition are similar, there is a significant musical difference between Feldman’s paean to a painter like Philip Guston and Romig’s reference to Clyfford Still. As pointed out by theorists such as Thomas DeLio, the undergirding of a Feldman piece is indeed subject to an organizational structure. That said, his work seems more intuitive than Romig’s, which is methodical in the unfurling of its linear components and their constituent harmonies. Whether Feldman’s surface in any way inspires the depths of Still, I am not sure; it would be an interesting question to pose to Romig. Either way, Still is his most engaging and beguiling piece to date. One looks forward to hearing more works that accumulate Romig’s proclivity for parks, painters, maximalists, and minimalists; these many ingredients make for intriguing results.

 

Garlands for Steven Stucky

Various Composers

Gloria Cheng, piano

Bridge

 

Steven Stucky passed away from cancer in 2016. For Garlands for Steven Stucky, Pianist Gloria Cheng commissioned thirty-two pieces in the composer’s memory from Stucky’s friends and colleagues. There are many stirring tributes here, ranging from those who use their offerings as expressions of grief, such as Fratello by Magnus Lindberg, Donald Crockett’s stirring Nella Luce, and Elegy by Joseph Phibbs, to fond remembrances: And Maura Brought Me Cookies by Andrew Waggoner and A Few Things (In Memory of Steve) by Steven Mackey. Other composers, such as Brett Dean in Hommage à Lutoslawski and Michael Small in Debussy Window, commemorate Stucky’s engagement with other composers’ music. Finally, there are pieces that celebrate craft in memory of a master craftsman: Waltz by John Harbison, Capriccio by Julian Anderson, and Esa-Pekka Salonen’s Iscrizione. Soprano Peabody Southwell and oboist Carolyn Hove join Cheng in Stucky’s Two Holy Sonnets of Donne (1982), a moving valediction.

 

Dreams Grow Like Slow Ice

Works by Michael Kallstrom, Alan Theisen, Andrew M. Rodriguez, Jay Batzner, and David Mitchell

Tammy Evans Yonce, flutes

971317

 

In addition to working with a conventional instrument, flutist Tammy Evans Yonce has made a specialty out of playing with a glissando headjoint. For her debut CD, Dreams Grow Like Slow Ice, she commissioned several pieces from active composers, some for glissando flute, and some with electronics to boot. While she is careful to delineate the various bends, microtones, and portamento phrasings afforded to her by this setup, the change of timbre that the headjoint affords is also an appealing element at play. Fire Walk by Jay Batzner could be a masterclass for the various techniques one can employ. On the title piece, Batzner adds drone-based electronics to the microtonally festooned proceedings. Highways by Andrew M. Rodriguez marries flutter-tonguing to glissando effects. Angularities by David Mitchell uses small pitch cells to construct an elaborate multi-tiered work that delivers as advertised. Solo pieces on the CD without the glissando headjoint are equally diverting. Michael Kallstrom’s Behind the Day supplies lyrical lines with Shakuhachi-liked inflections while his The Falling Cinders of Time is filled with soaring melodies. Commendo Spiritum Meum, by Alan Theisen, is an exquisitely constructed post-tonal miniature.  

 

Engage

J.S. Bach, Anthony Braxton, Taylor Brook, Josh Modney, Sam Pluta, Kate Soper, Eric Wubbels

Josh Modney

New Focus

 

Highly regarded for his work with Wet Ink, violinist Josh Modney’s recital recording Engage is a stirring two-hours of music. There are a number of Modney’s own improvisations/compositions, pieces by colleagues in Wet Ink, a searing version of Anthony Braxton’s Composition No. 222, and the famous Chaconne from Bach’s D minor Partita played in just intonation. Jem Altieri, by Sam Pluta, features distressed playing alongside avant electronics. A duo with composer/vocalist Kate Soper pits the soprano playing with the timbre of vowel dislocations alongside similar sounds via bowings on repeated notes by Modney. Vocalise by Taylor Brook features a detuned G string and an “offstage” drone to hypnotic effect. The Children of Fire Come Looking for Fire by Eric Wubbels is an unflinching behemoth for violin and prepared piano. Modney’s solos are at turns meditative and fiery creations, blazing with intensity.

 

Inconnaissance

Séverine Ballon, cello

All That Dust

 

Many composers have been fortunate beneficiaries of the advocacy of cellist Séverine Ballon. In a CD for new contemporary music imprint All That Dust, Ballon, for the first time, records her own compositions and improvisations. Informed by the works she has championed, such as those of Liza Lim, Rebecca Saunders, and James Dillon, the cellist displays an acute awareness of the various techniques – many extended – and stylistic approaches of composers at the European vanguard. She deploys them with skill, taste, virtuosity where it counts, and an impressive patience in shaping formal structures.

 

Best Chamber CDs (Part Two)

 

Bozzini+

Bozzini Quartet; Sarah Jane Summers, fiddle; Philip Thomas, piano

Works by Bryn Harrison, Mary Bellamy, and Monty Adkins

Huddersfield Contemporary

 

A project begun in 2016, under the auspices of the Centre for Research in New Music at Huddersfield University, brought together the Montreal-based Bozzini Quartet, the Scottish hardanger fiddler Sarah-Jane Summers, and Huddersfield artists pianist Philip Thomas, and composers Bryn Harrison, Mary Bellamy, and Monty Adkins. Some of the resulting music is heard on Bozzini+, a double-CD featuring an extended work by each of the participating composers. Bryn Harrison’s Piano Quintet revels in juxtaposing irregularly repeating piano filigrees with with whorls of glissandos from the quartet. Bellamy’s beneath an ocean of air crafts high-lying, tenuous sounds interrupted by occasional submersive thrusts. Still Juniper Snow, by Adkins, emphasizes sustain, with long drones held against folk-inspired melodies, creating a slow paced, sumptuous surface.

 

Blueprinting

Aizuri Quartet

Works by Gabriella Smith, Caroline Shaw, Yevgeniy Sharlat, Lembit Beecher, and Paul Wiancko

New Amsterdam

 

Bluprinting is a thrilling debut recording from the Aizuri Quartet, consisting entirely of new works by active American composers. The pieces vary in impetus but are all compelling. Gabriella Smith’s Carrot Revolution deconstructs everything from chant to fiddle tunes, Caroline Shaw’s Blueprint harvests harmonic material from an early Beethoven quartet, Lembit Beecher uses sonic sculptures made out of bicycle wheels and wine glasses, Yevgeniy Sharlat incorporates mournful melodica into a piece written in remembrance of a composition student, and Paul Wiancko’s Lift traverses extended techniques, “maniacal” swing, and post-minimal exuberance. The Aizuri Quartet negotiates each successive challenge with brilliance. Their advocacy for new music is exemplary.

 

by Christian Carey
Best of, CD Review, Composers, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Orchestral, Orchestras

Best of 2018: Orchestral CDs

Best of 2018 – Orchestral CDs

 

In ictu oculi

Kenneth Hesketh

BBC Orchestra of Wales, conducted by Christoph Mathias Mueller

Paladino

 

Three large orchestra works by British composer Kenneth Hesketh are attractively scored in multifaceted, often muscular, fashion. Hesketh’s unabashed exploration of emotionality, imbued with strongly etched motives and intricate formal designs, provides a cathartic journey for listeners.

 

Sur Incises

Pierre Boulez

The Boulez Ensemble, conducted by Daniel Barenboim

Deutsche-Grammophon

 

There is a previous, much vaunted, studio recording of Pierre Boulez’s composition  Sur Incises (1998), one of the composer’s most highly regarded late works (in the year of its premiere, Sur Incises won the Grawemeyer Prize). This 2018 rendition of the work was performed live at a new space dedicated to Boulez, the Pierre Boulez Saal in Berlin. Acoustically marvelous, it is perhaps the ideal location in which to hear the composer’s music. Barenboim is one of Boulez’s great champions, and the ensemble gathered here play it with supple rhythms (slightly less ‘incisive’ than the studio version, but warmer in affect). They also deftly shape Sur Incises’ labyrinthine form to provide musical “bread crumbs” along its myriad pathways.

 

Berio: Sinfonia – Boulez: Notations I-IV – Ravel: La Valse

Roomful of Teeth, Seattle Symphony, Ludovic Morlot, conductor

Seattle Symphony Media

 

Composed in 1968-’69 for the New York Philharmonic and the Swingle Singers, Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia helped to herald postmodernism in music. Roomful of Teeth has now done the piece with the Philharmonic, providing a new generation of performance history for Berio. It is excellent to have Roomful of Teeth’s performance of Sinfonia documented in a superlative outing with the Seattle Symphony and Ludovic Morlot. The orchestra is equally scintillating in Pierre Boulez’s long gestated modernist masterpieces Notations I-IV. The disc is capped off with a rollicking rendition of Ravel’s La Valse.

 

Shostakovich: Symphonies 4 and 11 (“The Year 1905”) Live

Boston Symphony Orchestra, Andris Nelsons, conductor

Deutsche-Grammophon

 

Even with an ensemble as fine as the Boston Symphony, it is hard to believe that this is a live recording. Seamless transitions, admirable dynamic shading,  gorgeous sounding strings, and exceptional playing by the brass section. Nelsons has a great feel for Shostakovich’s music.

 

Harbison, Ruggles, Stucky: Orchestral Works

National Orchestra Institute Philharmonic, David Alan Miller, conductor

Naxos

 

David Alan Miller has long been a staunch advocate of contemporary music, recording a number of discs of new works with the Albany Symphony. The National Orchestra Institute Philharmonic’s young players, aged 15-21, are a fantastic ensemble in their own right. Their rendition of Carl Ruggles’ Sun Treader is up there with the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and Michael Tilson Thomas on the complete works recording; and that’s saying something.

 

Recently departed composer Steven Stucky created a fluently retrospective piece when composing Concerto for Orchestra No. 2 (2003); the piece won the Pulitzer Prize in 2005. It includes quotations from a host of great composers as well as ample amounts of music in Stucky’s masterful contemporary voice.

 

Composed for the Seattle Symphony and Gerard Schwarz in 2003, John Harbison’s Symphony No. 4 is one of his most compelling pieces in the genre. In the debut recording, the Boston Symphony’s rendition of the symphony took a fairly edgy approach. Miller elicits something more lissome from the NOI players. Both versions make an eloquent case for Harbison’s piece.

 

Topophony

Christopher Fox

John Butcher, Thomas Lehn, Alex Dörner, Paul Lovens, soloists

WDR Sinfonie-Orchester, Ivan Volkov, conductor

HatHut

 

Christopher Fox’s orchestral work Tophophony accommodates both renditions for orchestra alone and with improvising soloists. The WDR Sinfonie-Orchester, led by Ivan Volkov, record three different versions of the piece. By itself, Topophony has a Feldman-like, slow-moving, and dynamically restrained surface. It provides fertile terrain for both the duos of trumpeter Alex Dörner and drummer Paul Lovens and saxophonist John Butcher with synthesizer performer Thomas Lehn. All three versions are absorbing: it’s fortunate one doesn’t have to choose between them.

Symphony No. 6, Rounds for String Orchestra, and Music for Romeo and Juliet

David Diamond

Indiana University Chamber Orchestra, Indiana University Philharmonic Orchestra, Arthur Fagen, conductor

Naxos

 

This is the best recording of David Diamond’s music since the iconic CDs by the Seattle Symphony under the baton of Gerard Schwarz. Indiana University has long had one of the best music departments in the country, but they outdo themselves here, with a brilliant version of Diamond’s Rounds for String Orchestra and nimble phrasing in his Music for Romeo and Juliet. But it is Symphony No. 6 (1951) that is the star of this CD.

Those who relegate all of Diamond’s music to American romanticism (which, admittedly, is a fair assessment of some of his work) are in for a surprise from this bold, Copland-esque work. Indeed, when I was a student at Juilliard, Diamond proudly told me that his ballet Tom predated Copland’s adoption of an Americana style. With Symphony No. 6, Diamond made a strong case to have his work set alongside the “usual suspects” in the genre.

 

by Christian Carey
Best of, CDs, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Best of 2018: Holiday CD, Opera Recording

Best of 2018: Holiday CD, Opera Recording

Best Holiday CD

Nine Lessons and Carols: 100 Years

King’s College Choir, Stephen Cleobury, Director

Choir of King’s College label

 

2018 is the hundredth anniversary of Lessons and Carols at King’s College (and ninetieth year of radio broadcasts of the event). In order to celebrate, the Choir of King’s College has released a two-CD set of some of their most famous offerings from broadcasts over the years, as well as new music commissioned for the occasion. The release also celebrates Director Stephen Cleobury, who will be stepping down after an illustrious tenure with the group. Through the years, King’s consistent, extraordinarily high level of singing is truly dazzling.

Best Opera

Dr. Atomic

John Adams

Gerald Finley, Julia Bullock; BBC Orchestra, BBC Singers, John Adams, conductor

Nonesuch

 

The Nonesuch recording of Dr. Atomic, an opera about the atomic bomb test at Los Alamos, is the first audio release of this 2005 collaboration between composer John Adams and director/librettist Peter Sellars. The text is assembled from letters, declassified documents, and poetry (the first test’s site was named Trinity by Robert Oppenheimer, after a John Donne poem). An integral component of the love scene between the Oppenheimers (played by Gerald Finley and Julia Bullock)  is a poem by Muriel Rukeyser. An island of respite in the midst of the intensity of the test countdown, it is some of the most affecting music written by Adams. Elsewhere, the orchestra and singers are given plenty of opportunities for fiery declamation. The large ensembles work on many levels, expounding the famously divergent historical viewpoints surrounding the test, ratcheting up the intensity until the inevitable big boom. Adams conducts a powerful performance of his most visceral work.

 

by Christian Carey
Best of, CD Review, Chamber Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Best of 2018: Composer Portrait CDs

Best of 2018: Composer Portrait CDs

 

2018 saw the release of a bevy of excellent recordings of music by contemporary composers. These were the portrait CDs that most frequently captivated my ear and captured my CD player.

Ipsa Dixit

Kate Soper

Wet Ink Ensemble (Erin Lesser, flute; Ian Antonio, percussion; Josh Modney, violin)

New World Records

 

Composer and vocalist Kate Soper spent from 2010-’16 creating the multi-movement theatre piece Ipsa Dixit. Working in close collaboration with Wet Ink Ensemble, she has crafted a composition in which theatricality encompasses multiple texts – ranging from Aristotle to Lydia Davis – and the ensemble plays “roles” as well as formidable musical parts.

 

Recently presented in an acclaimed staging at Miller Theatre, Ipsa Dixit is perhaps best experienced live. However, the audio recording captures Soper and Wet Ink in a dynamic, versatile  performance. Whether speaking, singing, or, even in places, screaming, Soper is an expressive, indeed captivating, vocalist.

 

Emblema

Osvaldo Coluccino

Ex Novo Ensemble

Kairos

 

Italian composer Osvaldo Coluccino created a series of Emblema pieces for a commission by the Gran Teatro Fenice in Venice. Slowly unfurling, sustained pitches, deft employment of overtones and harmonics, and varied textures populate the works. On Coluccino’s Kairos portrait CD, the Ex Novo Ensemble performs them with attentive delicacy. One can hear echos of great composers such as Feldman, Scelsi, and Nono in these elliptical emblems, but it is the ghost of Webern that looms largest.

 

Quartets

Laura Schwendinger

JACK Quartet

Albany Records

 

JACK Quartet released a number of fine recordings in 2018, but the one to which I keep returning is their Albany CD of Laura Schwendinger’s string quartets. These feature richly hued harmonies, seasoned with dissonance, and are superbly paced throughout. Schwendinger’s music is some of the most eloquent work in a post-Schoenbergian aesthetic currently being composed. JACK’s  performances of them are a detailed and engaging listen. Jamie van Eyck joins them for Sudden Light, a stirring vocal work.

 

distant song

Reiko Füting

AuditiVokal Dresden, Art D’Echo, loadbang, Byrne:Kozar Duo, Oerknal, and Damask

New Focus

 

A faculty member at Manhattan School of Music, Reiko Füting’s distance song features performers who are MSM alumni as well as European ensembles. An amalgam of various styles and materials notwithstanding, Füting displays a strong hand and clear-eyed perspective throughout.

 

After an introduction of thunderous drum thwacks, AuditiVokal Dresden and Art D’Echo perform “als ein licht”/extensio and “in allem Fremden” – wie der Tag – wie das Licht with marvelous close-tuned harmonies and suspense-filled pacing. Gradually the percussion is reintroduced at varying intervals to provide a foil for the singers.

 

loadbang and the Byrne:Kozar Duo, the aforementioned MSM contingent, perform Mo(nu)ment and Eternal Return (Passacaglia), two pieces featuring microtones and extended techniques alongside Füting’s penchant for off-kilter repetition. The Dutch ensemble Oerknal performs Weg, Lied der Schwänd, in which both spectralism and quotation (of a madrigal by Arcadelt) are explored: yet two more facets of the composer’s palette.  Versinkend, versingnend, verklingend adds the vocal group Damask to Oerknal for a piece that combines still more quotations, ranging from Debussy’s piano music to a Fifteenth century German folksong.

 

Stadium

Eli Keszler

Shelter Press

 

Composer/percussionist Eli Keszler’s Stadium is 2018’s best CD on the sound art, rather than notated, spectrum of composed music.  It deftly weaves percussion and electronics together in an atmospheric collection of pieces that lilt and swing in equal measure. While there is plenty of electronica out there using percussion in innovative ways, Stadium incorporates its various sound sources with a composerly sense of organization, where timbre, beat, and, in some places, pitch, are mapped with a rigorous formal sensibility.

 

Aequa

Anna Thorvaldsdottir

International Contemporary Ensemble, Steven Schick, conductor

Sono Luminus

 

This CD is ICE’s second portrait recording of Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir’s music, and her third portrait CD overall. Yet Aequa truly stands apart from the others. Each piece has a sense of flow, sometimes akin to churning water or rippling wind, and in others to oozing lava. Amid these fluid forms are also found visceral pools of unrest. In his performance of Thorvaldsdottir’s Scape, pianist Cory Smythe affords the listener a generous taste of reverberation and overtones, marked by trebly plucking inside the piano. The interplay of high and low creates ear-catching wide intervals in Illumine. This texture is later followed by corruscating strings. Another standout is the ensemble work Aequilibria, where undulating lines are pitted against static, sustained harmonic series and harp arpeggiations. It has extraordinarily beautiful low woodwind solos. Both of these pieces are conducted, with characteristic verve and accuracy, by Steven Schick.

 

Alisei

Stefano Scodanibbio

Daniele Roccato, Giacomo Piermatti, double bass; Ludus Gravis bass ensemble, Tonino Battista, conductor

ECM Records

 

The too-soon-departed Stefano Scodanibbio (1956-2012) was an extraordinary bass player and improviser. He was also a formidable composer, as the works for solo bass, duet, and bass ensemble documented here abundantly attest. Two virtuosic solo pieces, featuring an abundant number of harmonics and other special techniques, are impressively and energetically performed by Daniele Roccato. Roccato is joined by Giacomo Piermatti on Da una certa nebbia, a duo that is both an homage to and invocation of Morton Feldman.

 

The centerpiece of the CD is Ottetto (2012) for bass ensemble, one of the last works Scodanibbio completed before succumbing to motor neuron disease. It is sobering that, due to this debilitating illness, he could no longer play the bass at the time of the work’s gestation. Fortunately, Roccato enlisted a veritable who’s who of European bassists to populate the ensemble Ludus Gravis and, after Scodanibbio’s death,  carry the work forward. Ottetto’s recording is a stunning display of the many ways in which this low-end ensemble can be a versatile one, from sepulchral passages to high-lying harmonics, with seemingly every mode of playing in between. The piece showcases the intimate familiarity with his instrument that Scodanibbio developed over a lifetime of practice and playing: an incredible musical valediction.

 

Rube Goldberg Variations

Dmitri Tymoczko

Flexible Music, Atlantic Brass Quintet, and Amernet String Quartet

Bridge

 

Fools and Angels

Dmitri Tymoczko

New Focus

 

In 2018, Princeton professor Dmitri Tymoczko released not one, but two portrait CDs. The first, Rube Goldberg Variations, features three postmodern chamber pieces performed by estimable ensembles: Flexible Music, Atlantic Brass Quintet with pianist John Blacklow, and the Amernet String Quartet with pianist Matthew Bengston. On I Cannot Follow, broken consort Flexible Music performs the plethora of provided off-kilter postminimal ostinatos with elan. The group lives up to their name when inhabiting the piece’s supple dynamic swells. The title composition is also informed by postminimalism, but is more jazzy in terms of its chord voicings. Tymoczko cleverly tropes Igor in “Stravinsky’s Fountain,” and supplies Nancarrow-esque piano canons in “Homage,” over which sustained detuned brass asserts a grounded rebuttal. S Sensation Something ends the album in a triadic landscape distressed with pitch bends and persistent, biting seconds.

 

Fools and Angels is a different musical statement altogether, featuring vocals, electronics, and, often, an art rock aesthetic. Indeed, there is a Zappa-esque zaniness afoot, in which the composer juxtaposes repurposed madrigals, faux bebop slinkiness, and even risque monologues, amid persistent changes of meter, bellicose soloing, and sci-fi synthetic soundscapes. A who’s who of youthful contemporary classical performers — Mellissa Hughes, Caroline Shaw, Martha Cluver, Gabriel Crouch, Jason Treuting, and Pascal LeBoeuf, to name some — supply earnest and accurate performances of Tymoczko’s kaleidoscopic construction.

Waterlines

Christopher Trapani

Lucy Dhegrae, soprano; Marilyn Nonken, piano; Christopher Trapani, hexaphonic guitar; Didem Başar, qanûn, Longleash; JACK Quartet; Talea Ensemble, conducted by James Baker

New Focus

 

Rising flood waters in New Orleans as the theme. Alternate tunings, guitar vs. zither. The incomparable Longleash and JACK being given plenty of extended techniques to dig their teeth (and fingers) into. Lucy Dhegrae singing spectralism-inflected blues songs as only she can. Trapani has a thousand and one good ideas and has enlisted a fantastic slate of performers to realize them. This CD may be one of the few positives to come out of meditating on the catastrophe that was Hurricane Katrina.

 

by Christian Carey