CDs

Bang on a Can, CDs, Composers, Concerts, Festivals, Music Events, New York

Riding the Next Wave: Michael Gordon

Composer Michael GordonThis week the Next Wave Festival 2008 is raging at BAM, and there are several chances next week to hear Lightning at our feet, the latest from Ridge Theater and Michael Gordon at the Harvey Theater. (Dec 9, 11-13)

Gordon and I spoke on the phone about the new work that premiered in Houston. Listen to our conversation here – Lightning Interview with Gordon and Clare.
Here’s an added bonus, Gordon has a new EP coming out Tuesday, a fascinating “Purgatorio: Popera” on Canteloupe. We talked about it, as well as being married to a composer (Julia Wolfe) and everyone’s favorite 100 year old on Thursday, Elliott Carter! mp3 file

by John Clare
CDs, Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Recordings

Sampling your way through Sunday brunch

Sunday Music: CD Samplers in the Era of Pandora
Sunday Music Volume 4

Big Helium Records BHRSM004 / www.bighelium.com

Unlike the album driven days of yore, today it’s all about the mix. From purchasing single tracks digitally at online stores such as Itunes and Amazon to the internet radio sensation Pandora, which tailors ‘stations’ to a listener’s preferences, music is presented as eminently accessible; instant gratification, inevitable. While all aforementioned methods of mix are exciting in their potential for discovery, surfing the impossibly commercial Itunes or using Pandora’s efficient but sometimes ham-fisted engine is unlikely to provide the enlightening swerves and hidden treasures found on the best mixtapes and compilation CDs.
Sunday Music, promoted by Barnes and Noble and released by Big Helium, has to cast a wide net; but despite this, the fourth volume of the series is an intriguing mix of classical and crossover-classical fare. There are chestnuts such as Magdelena Rozena’s fluid rendition of Lascia chi’io Piange from Handel’s Rinaldo and Bernstein’s Somewhere from West Side Story: Symphonic Dances. Also included are current favorites: Hilary Hahn playing Bach beautifully and Sting singing a lute song: Robert Johnson’s Have you Seen the Bright Lilly Grow. While no one will mistake the latter for Rogers Covey-Crump or Andreas Scholl anytime soon, his crooning take on the Elizabethan repertory has introduced a number of listeners to its charms.
True, some of the pop-oriented moments – Lisa Gerrard’s evocative but somewhat out-of-place instrumental The Unfolding and Craig Armstrong’s regrettably New Age take on Be Still My Soul – dilute the classical bent of the CD and may raise the eyebrows of purists. Rather, what makes Sunday Music 4 better than your average comp disc are its adventurous classical choices. The inclusion of up and comer Eric Whitacre’s Lux Autumque, with its lush cluster chords and ambient atmosphere, is a master stroke, as is Anna Netrebko’s glorious rendition of O Silver Moon from Dvorak’s Rusalka. Pepe Romero playing Rodrigo and a Schubert Impromptu performed by Wilhelm Kempf round out the disc in handsome fashion. While designed for the Sunday brunch set, this CD promises to keep things interesting and may well spur on many a conversation about classical music discoveries; something that keeps the spirit of the mixtape/comp CD very much alive.
by Christian Carey
CDs, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Music Instruments, Violin

Mutter Modern (An Interview with Anne-Sophie)

Anne-Sophie Mutter latest cdViolinist Anne-Sophie Mutter is continually creating something new – from concerti by Krzysztof Penderecki and Andre Previn to works by Sebastian Currier and Henri Dutilleux.

Mutter’s latest project is a recording of Sofia Gubaidulina’s In Tempus Praesens, written in 2006-07 and premiered with the Berlin Philharmonic in August 2007. Selke Harten-Strehk has more background here on Mutter’s website.

I spoke with Mutter about the new concerto recording and about working with composers, and even if she composed herself. Listen to our conversation here.

That morning it was very difficult to get an international connection, and then about 10 minutes into our talk, the line went dead, and to my horror, it was another 3 minutes until I could connect again. (She now has my number as well, hahaha) Despite that, we had a great talk – this version (without our disconnect) also leaves out our talk about period bows (which she uses for the Bach concerti on the disc) as well as some talk about technology. You can hear the longer version over at ClassicallyHip.

I did leave out our talk about politics, which she was very interested in, and said Europe is watching the election closely.

Mutter performs very soon in New York City on October 13th, and you can find the rest of her schedule here. She’ll be back at Carnegie Hall in April 2009 to premiere a Piano Trio by Previn with Lynn Harrell, and a celebration of Previn’s 80th birthday with the orchestra of St, Luke’s including his Violin Concerto and a Concerto for Violin and Viola.

by John Clare
CDs, Composers, New York, Opera

An Adams’ Baritone

Eric OwensBaritone Eric Owens is busy this fall – his Met debut as General Leslie Groves in John Adams’ Dr. Atomic is just a start to his performances this season in New York, Atlanta, London and Los Angeles.
Today is the release of A Flowering Tree on Nonesuch Records with Owens as the storyteller, another role he created. I spoke with Eric Owens about this new recording, his Met debut and about working with composers.
MP3 file

by John Clare
CDs, Classical Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Orchestral, Piano, Violin

Anders Koppel: Festivity back in the concert hall

How does it sound – a double concerto written by a musician weaned on Beethoven, salsa, Stravinsky and Bulgarian folk music? In short – like nothing else!

The Danish composer Anders Koppel (b. 1947) is himself. “My music consists of the life I have lived,” is as close as he gets to a definition of his style.

Anders Koppel grew up with music all day long. His father, Herman D. Koppel, was one of Denmark’s leading composers and pianists, and worked in the living room at home. Anders and his siblings were eye-witnesses to all aspects of the musical creative process and got to know about the smallest components of music. As adults all four became some of the most prominent Danish musicians.

The key words for Anders’ music are energy, collectivity and festivity. After one of the most versatile careers in Danish music, which still includes intense improvisations on Hammond organ, Anders Koppel is now concentrating on writing classical solo concertos. He has written over 20 since the mid-1990s, most recently also a couple of double concertos.

On two CDs from Dacapo you can hear Anders’ mixture of vital energy and classical forms. On one CD his son Benjamin is the soloist in his Saxophone Concertos 1 and 2, and on the other you can hear Anders Koppel’s double concertos: one is for violin and accordion with a definite touch of tango. The other is for saxophone and piano and drags Beethoven along to a nightclub. There are inserted improvisations that give the music freedom and personality – a good indication of the attitude of this congenial composer, who was one of Denmark’s best known hippies in the 1960s and is still a passionate representative of breadth of taste and a zest for life.

by Jens Cornelius
CDs, Chamber Music, Composers, Contemporary Classical, Recordings

Surprise!!

Toub: darfur pogrommenJust when you thought we’ve been musically laying low… There’s a brand-new online-only CD release by fellow S21 regular and composer David Toub, realized by yours truly (Steve Layton, for those of you who don’t read the bottom post tag). It just became available on iTunes (US, also now or very soon in UK/Europe, Australia and Japan) on my little NiwoSound label; expect its appearance on eMusic as well very soon. The CD is in the “electronic” genre at both places, but purely as a matter of expediting the release; if it’s not classical I don’t know what is!

David’s darfur pogrommen, composed only a few months ago, is another expansive minimalist essay; its single continuous movement clocks in at 47 minutes. There’s no real attempt at programmatic writing; rather — like many of David’s other pieces — the title is a marker of a moment, that can call up whatever associations the listener might have in relation to it.

The piece is for open instrumentation. David’s own first recorded version used synthy string sounds, but I decided to give it a kind of “old school” treatment: a Reich-Glass hybrid with a vibraphone and electric organ taking the two primary parts, and electric piano and two more organs adding secondary voices. It trades a little lushness, but finds a bright, hard and uncompromising edge.

The biggest influence is still “classic” 60s-70s Glass, but David has his own way with how figures intuitively expand and contract, the harmonies involved, and his preference for alternating and pulsing notes. But later in the piece there’s a spot that to my ears definitely pays tribute to Morton Feldman as well. Surprising and beautiful!

Though there are many clearly defined sections in the piece, like so much of David’s work there’s just no way to get the whole flow with separate tracks. So if you want it, it’s all or nothing. (You can preview 30 seconds of the beginning on iTunes, but it’s a laughably hopeless indicator of what unfolds…)

Anyone wishing to burn the download to disc can also download and print this PDF file, which gives you the entire cover art and inner notes. More musically, you can freely download the PDF of the entire score from David himself.

Oh yeah: play it LOUD.

by Steve Layton
CDs, Composers, Contemporary Classical

You Ought to Be in Movies

I am not, generally speaking, a big fan of movie music although the ability to produce useful art on demand appeals to my lifetime hack sensibilities.  I don’t think Bernard Hermann and Miklos Rozsa are overlooked concert hall geniuses who might have been among the greats had they not traded their souls for big houses in Beverly Hills.  They are what they are.

Writing for films is a craft, not an art, but it is a demanding craft that not every composer–even a great one–can do.  In Andre Previn’s memoirs of his Hollywood years (which is called No Minor Chords because Irving Thalberg once degreed that no MGM picture should ever contain music with a minor chord), Previn writes of having taken one of the big moguls, Louis B. Mayer, I believe, to the Hollywood Bowl to hear the Sibelius Violin Concerto.  Afterwards, he asked him how he liked it.  “Well,” Mayer said.  “It was good but he couldn’t write for pictures.”

I suspect Mr. Mayer was right.  Many “serious’ composers (and writers, too, think of Faulkner) are not good at writing for pictures.

The latest example of underachievement in the category of film music is Osvaldo Golijov, whom Francis Ford Coppola specifically commissioned to write the music for Youth Without Youth, Coppola’s recent comeback film which was seen by absolutely nobody.  On the surface, Golijov’s enormous multicultural sound palette would seem perfect for film.  Alas, the result is more insipid than limpid, if you know what I mean.

On the other hand, Jonny Greenwood of Radiohead fame nails his film debut with the score for There Will Be Blood.   The music has to be pretty dramatic to match Daniel Day-Lewis’ over-the-top, spit-slinging, snot-dripping performance as a rabid early oil man but Greenwood pulls it off.  So he’s channelling Penderecki, Gorecki, and Messiaen, originality is less important than conveying mood in film music.  Like Ry Cooder, another unexpected star of film music, Greenwood shows himself to be a master of atmosphere and shifting physical and mental landscapes.  If he wants to give up his day job, he’s probably got a future in Hollywood.

by Jerry Bowles
CDs, Classical Music, Contemporary Classical

How Strange is the Change From Major to Minor

Big news on the time-marches-on front.  Deutsche Grammophon (DG) yesterday became the first major classical record label to make the majority of its huge catalogue available online for download with the launch of its new DG Web Shop.

The DG Web Shop allows consumers in 42 countries to download music, including–the press folks claim–markets where the major e-business retailers, such as iTunes, are not yet available: Southeast Asia including China, India, Latin America, South Africa, and Central and Eastern Europe including Russia.

Almost 2,400 DG albums will be available for download in maximum MP3 quality at a transfer bit-rate of 320 kilobits per second (kbps) –  an audio-level that is indistinguishable to most of us from CD quality audio; and which exceeds the usual industry download-standard of 128-192 kbps (as well as EMI’s 256 kbps on iTunes, the press folks helpfully observe).  Most prices are in the $12 range, which is not too bad I suppose although they’d be making a nice profit at half that.

The best feature, from my perspective, is that 600 out-of-print CDs are now available again as downloads. 

by Jerry Bowles
CDs, Classical Music, Contemporary Classical

BMOP a Lula

The Boston Modern Orchestra Project (BMOP) has just become the latest classical music organization to launch its own CD label. BMOP Sound will debut in January 2008 and will be devoted exclusively to new music recordings, many of them pieces commissioned by BMOP.

BMOP Sound is scheduled to release five world premiere CDs at the start of 2008: John Harbison’s Ulysses; Michael Gandolfi’s Y2K Compliant; Gunther Schuller’s Journey Into Jazz featuring Gunther Schuller (narrator); Lee Hyla’s Lives of the Saints, featuring Mary Nessinger (mezzo-soprano); and Charles Fussell’s Wilde, featuring Sanford Sylvan (baritone). With 28 more recording projects in the works, the company plans to issue four to six CDs each year. Albany Music Distributors will handle the real world distribution and BMOP is planning an interactive website with digital download capabilities for later in 2008. BMOP has an existing catalog of 13 commercially released CDs (from Albany, Arsis, Cantaloupe, Chandos, Naxos, New World, and Oxingale labels).

I’m one of those people who believe that the DIY model is the salvation of new music recording and distribution, a boon to both the people who composer and perform music and those of us who listen, and the ultimate final nail in the coffee of traditional record labels that fail to adapt. Good riddance.

by Jerry Bowles