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CD Review, Chamber Music, Electro-Acoustic, File Under?

Attacca Quartet – Real Life (CD Review)

Attacca Quartet

Real Life

Sony Music CD/DL

 

Kronos Quartet excepted, there have been a lot of really bad arrangements of pop music for string quartet. Part of the problem is that the arrangers of these covers attempt to translate a medium that involves amplification, electronics, and a flexible sense of rhythm into straight notation for acoustic ensemble. Attacca Quartet’s Real Life, on the other hand, sees the opportunity for collaboration in electronic music covers. 

 

Their recordings are subjected to production from some of the top electronic musicians in the industry: Tokimonsta, Squarepusher, and Daedelus among them. The songs are by the artists Flying Lotus (“Remind U” is a particular standout), Louis Cole, Anne Müller, and Mid-Air Thief. The title track, by Cole, features propulsive beats that are offset by chordal strings and the song’s melody doubled in octaves. After a fragmentary opening, Mid-air Thief’s “Why” is populated with reverberant crescendos. Pizzicatos, drumset, and quirky harmonies give Squarepusher’s “Xetaka 1” a fascinating, off-kilter feel, like Bartôk in a blender. 

 

At thirty-five minutes, the recording doesn’t overstay its welcome, with several of the selections truncated from their original versions. A welcome exception is “Drifting Circles” by Anne Müller, in which minimal ostinatos adorn the song’s sumptuous chord progression and evolving textures are explored. Cole’s “More Love Less Hate” provides an aphoristic, supple coda to the proceedings. 

 

  • Christian Carey

 

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

Martin Suckling on NMC (CD Review)

Martin Suckling

This Departing Landscape

NMC Recordings

CD/DL

Tamara Stefanovich (piano), Katherine Bryan (flute), BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, BBC Philharmonic, Ilan Volkov

 

Two concertos and two substantial orchestral works by Scottish composer Martin Suckling are programmed on This Departing Landscape, his debut portrait CD. The White Road (after Edmund de Waal) is inspired by De Waal’s ceramic artworks. It features flutist Katherine Bryan, a friend of Suckling’s since childhood – they played in youth orchestra together, and she managed to extract a promise of this commission some twenty years ago. Her virtuosic and energetic performance is remarkable. The violin part consists of frequent registral shifts, microtones, and angular melismas, often at high speed.  The White Road includes a series of cadenzas punctuated with brash interruptions from the orchestra. The orchestral writing also consists of “virtual flutes” that Suckling makes by selecting particular string harmonics with an uncanny resemblance to the flute’s sound quality. 

 

Release has a terrifying opening, with stentorian tutti followed by portentous silences. Gradually the spaces are filled in with echoes of microtones, then an English horn and viola duet, and a song-like theme in the upper register. Cascades of polyphony replace the tutti to create even more reverberant releases.

 

Although the piano is a fixed pitch instrument, microtonal harmony plays a significant role in the concerto too. Suckling, like Julian Anderson (a colleague who writes the liner notes for the CD) picks different instruments from the orchestra to supply quarter tones related to deviations from equal temperament in the overtone series. Anderson calls this technique “macrotonality,” and it is an effective way to exploit rich timbres. The rhythmic design is also intricate, with frequent use of polyrhythms.The concerto is cast in five movements, a fifteen movement first movement marked “Vigorously” followed by three intermezzi and a passacaglia as the finale. The first movement has a Carterian division of forces, with the piano interacting with different subsets of the orchestra: cor anglais and viola (the same combination found in Release), then strings, clarinets, oboes and horns (which contains some truly mind-blowing sounds), piccolo and violin, claves, and back to solo viola to finish the movement.

 

In Intermezzo 1 – Implacable,  a vigorous moto perpetuo inhabits the upper register with gradually introduced bass pedal points unfolding a chromatic ground against the dissonant counterpoint above. This leads attacca into the second Intermezzo, marked Luminous in which hushed repeated notes and chromatic melodies  on the piano are accompanied by high string harmonics, brief wind melodies, and brass swells. Intermezzo 3 has a more aggressive cast, with determined piano attacks, overblown flutes, and acerbic string lines. The final movement is a passacaglia that begins delicately, with ornamented lines in the piano and sustained strings. The piano builds corruscating lines over the ground bass, successively joined by members of the wind family who play sustained passages. Arcing strings and brass chords crescendo before cutting off to allow the solo piano to return to music reminiscent of the reflective opening, which here leads to a hushed close. Tamara Stefanovich is a powerful performer with a commanding presence, full sound, and facility in fleet passages. She also plays, in places such as the close of the final movement, with considerable delicacy. The Piano Concerto is an impressive, formally inventive, addition to the genre. 

 

The title work concludes the CD. In his program note, Suckling expresses the desire  to “write twenty minutes of orchestral music that lives its life in a perpetual state of high energy.” He achieves this goal, creating an imaginatively scored and formally intricate work. It begins with attacks from percussion and disjunct pitch cells and glissandos from strings and winds. These gradually accrete into a short ostinato in which bass octaves are followed by gear shifting gestures that alternate between sections of the orchestra. This ends with an accelerating, thunderous climax of hammering bass octaves and fortissimo polytonal tutti chords. It is succeeded by a quieter, but no less vivid, section for altissimo flutes and sustained strings. A sudden breakthrough of loud brass chords, exuberant drumming, and oscillating strings propels the piece forward only to be cut off in favor of solo timpani repetitions. 

 

The second movement begins attacca, with flute filigrees returning, set against brass swells this time, with a horn melody that begins to reestablish a sense of tonality. The brass moves from chorale to coloristic overtone chords. Microtonal adjustments added by instruments joining create a bevy of shimmer. Suckling maintains this spectral aura, tweaking it with overtones added and subtracted. In the midst, a lyrical theme appears first in lower brass and then oboe. We move gradually from microtones to a blurring into the micropolyphonic spectrum, with glissandos, clusters, and sustained notes competing for the field. This builds into an intense cluster chord that is echoed by a just major triad and then a harmonic laden overtone passage. Polychords in a reverberant echo, stacked verticals, and slashing melody are succeeded by an echo of the beginning of the first movement’s percussion attacks, which closes the piece. 

 

Martin Suckling has an unerring sense of pacing and is an abundantly talented orchestrator. This Departing Landscape establishes him as a distinctive voice. One hopes his second portrait CD isn’t long in coming. 

 

  • Christian Carey  
by Christian Carey
Ambient, CD Review, File Under?

Matt Evans – touchless (CD Review)

Matt Evans

Touchless

Whatever’s Clever Records

 

“touchless questions the phenomenology of touch, reaching to transcend the boundaries of the physical to embody touch while remaining touchless.” – Matt Evans

 

In 2019, Matt Evans lost his partner, the sculptor and eco-feminist artist Devra Freelander. He commemorates both grief and the light that came into his life as a result of their relationship on the recording touchless. Synthesizers, field recordings, piano, and additional acoustic instruments provided by guest musicians come together to create beguiling textures. 

 

Two piano pieces bookend the recording, Arcto 2 and Arcto 1. Artco 2, which begins the recording, consists mostly of muted chords in reasonably predictable patterns, only to go sideways at the end and venture into significant chromaticism. Arcto 1 repeats a middle register drone against which a repeating chordal ostinato and water sounds contend. 

 

Two other pieces that form a pair are “Solar Silhouette” and “Fluorescent Sunrise,” made of drones with extensive harmonics. The former is girded by octaves in bass and treble; rising glissandos populate the latter, perhaps as a slight programmatic evocation of sunrise.  

 

The title track is the most elaborate, with a harmonic series reinforced by Tristan Kasten-Krause’s double bass and, in multiple registers, David Lackner’s tenor saxophone. Overlaid with dissonant sustained tones, the piece serves as an eloquent statement on loss, in which unresolved tensions coexist with spectral harmony. A coda of trills adds a sense of belated keening, which cuts off suddenly; the inference is clear.

 

A modal canon, played on the piano, alongside sustained tones from violin, played by Elori Saxi, are the main components of “Firn.” The canons begin to operate in phase as Saxi plays in successively higher registers. Partway through, Kasten-Krause adds low register octaves to the proceedings, which reach a significant level of syncopation. Gradually, the music returns to being in sync. The reference to early minimalism by Steve Reich is clear, but Evans is also concerned with creating a version of ambiance that pushes the genre’s envelope in terms of expressivity. touchless is touching. 

 

  • Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Percussion

Caroline Shaw and Sō Percussion (CD Review)

Caroline Shaw

Sō Percussion, Dawn Upshaw, and Gilbert Kalish

The Narrow Sea

Nonesuch CD/DL

 

Caroline Shaw and So Percussion

Let the Soil Play its Simple Part

Nonesuch CD/DL

 

 

The last live performance I saw before the pandemic hit New York was Caroline Shaw with Sō Percussion at Miller Theatre, which I wrote about for Musical America. It was Shaw’s debut as a solo vocalist (she has performed as an ensemble member in Roomful for Teeth for several years). Hearing these pieces again reminds me of the joy of concert life before the pandemic. I am glad to revisit them.

 

Two Nonesuch releases document the material she presented at Miller, one featuring Shaw as vocalist and the other the soprano Dawn Upshaw. Upshaw is joined by her longtime collaborator the pianist Gilbert Kalish.

 

The title piece on The Narrow Sea finds Shaw reworking spirituals from the 19th century collection Music from the Sacred Harp. The centerpiece is “Poor Wayfarin’ Stranger,” with a different tune to the timeless words. The instrumentation that accompanies the five parts of the piece is imaginative, including synthesizers, poured water, flower pots and the piano played like a dulcimer. Kalish and Sō Percussion collaborate well, particularly on the ghostly introduction to Part Three, which depicts shades of Henry Cowell. Upshaw sings with fluid legato and declaims the Sacred Harp texts vividly and emotively.

 

“Taxidermy” is an additional piece for Sō Percussion, who once again add flower pots to a considerable arsenal of percussion instruments. Steel pan and a hailstorm of chiming attacks swell and recede and are succeeded by layers of pitched percussion. A simple chord progression played by mallet instruments is elaborated by steel pan and a canon of spoken word is followed by the chord progression returning to serve as coda.

 

Let the Soil Play its Simple Part is a more collaborative venture, in which Shaw and Sō Percussion spent three days in a recording studio together creating an eclectic work, both textually and musically. It begins with “To the Sky,” in which Shaw’s voice is synthetically manipulated and set against mallet filigrees and Jason Treuting’s syncopated drumming. “Other Song” was originally part of an orchestra piece that Shaw composed to celebrate Sarah Bareilles. Here it becomes a banquet of battery, with the Sō Percussion players bringing, as Shaw puts it,”all of their toys to the table.”

 

Four of the pieces on the recording are duets. The title track is a duet between Shaw and steel pan specialist Josh Quillen. It features Shaw’s characteristic free-floating chordal writing alongside stream-of-consciousness lyrics. “The Flood is Following Me” is a setting of James Joyce that is groove forward with Shaw’s voice blending with keyboard harmonies and synth bass. It may be the first musical depiction of James Joyce with a hook. Joyce makes a reappearance on “A Veil Upon the Waves.”

Perhaps the most enigmatic section of the piece is a radical revision of ABBA’s “Lay All Your Love on Me,” just a small section of the middle of the song for Shaw and a marimba playing a chorale-like progression, with a gradual accumulation of Sō Percussion members joining around the instrument to build out an ostinato. “Cast the Bells in Sand” features both an IDM ambience and elaborate drumming from Treuting. Treuting and Shaw duet on “Long Ago We Counted,” which features nonsense syllables instead of conventional text.

 

A poem by Anne Carson is the text for “A Gradual Dazzle,” with thrumming bass drum and a vibraphone outlining subtle harmony that underscores some of Shaw’s most chromatic singing. The final song, “Some Bright Morning,” is a duet with Eric Cha-Beach, who mostly plays a single note but finds numerous textures to animate it.  Shaw plays with the lyrics from another gospel standard, “I’ll Fly Away,” rendering the result in gentle melismas.

 

Both of these recordings display abundant imagination and felicitous collaborations. Recommended.

 

-Christian Carey

 

 

 

 

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

“Blue” Gene Tyranny Boxed Set (CD Review)

“Blue” Gene Tyranny

Degrees of Freedom Found

Unseen Worlds

6XCD boxed set/digital

 

Composer and pianist “Blue” Gene Tyranny passed away in December 2020 of complications due to diabetes. The boxed set Degrees of Freedom Found, a generous six-CD compilation of tracks from 1963-2019, was already in the works and contains liner notes by Tyranny. Thus, it is an endorsed release rather than a posthumous archival grab. 

 

He was associated with a number of prominent musicians, Robert Ashley, Carla Bley, Bill Dixon, and Iggy Pop, whom he joined on an early tour of the Stooges. Most viewed him as a generous collaborator. Ashley, in particular, afforded Tyranny a considerable amount of freedom in crafting the music he played in the opera “Perfect Lives (Private Parts),” in which he enacted the role of Buddy, the world’s greatest piano player.

 

Like Tyranny’s talents, the boxed set is eclectic in makeup and it is curated roughly by category rather than chronology. The set begins with selections that highlight the extraordinary pianist he was, with a warm touch yet fluid dexterity. The stylistic incorporations of the music, even within a single work, is wide-ranging throughout. Thus, one can be in the midst of listening to a minimalist-inspired piece and suddenly swerve through blues or honky tonk pianism. His detractors took this to be undisciplined and digressive, but appreciators knew better that the amalgamations the pieces underwent were intrinsic to their design.

 

If one dipped into a later disc first, they might get the impression that Tyranny was more interested in synthesizers, chamber orchestra, jazz, or theatrical vocal works than solo piano: all are here. The performance dates range from 1963, when the composer was still in Ann Arbor, to later presentations in Montana, Massachusetts at Jacob’s Pillow, Philadelphia, and a number in New York, which became his longtime base of operations, culminating with a valedictory piece featuring winds from 2019, titled “The Forecaster Hopes.”

 

Some of the included works are aphoristic, the length of pop songs. Often the most evocative all too quickly vanish. One piece, “Meditation” for trio and chamber orchestra, is spliced together (seamlessly) between two performances thirty years apart. There are also large-scale pieces, such as Tyranny’s epic monodrama “The Driver’s Son,” the half-hour long piano work “We All Watch the Sun and the Moon (for a Moment of Insight), and “Barn Fever,” a substantial synthesizer piece with a rollicking groove and fiendishly fleet soloing. 

 

Degrees of Freedom Found is a substantial amount of music, but a deep dive into Tyranny’s work is amply rewarding.

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical, Festivals, File Under?

Princeton Festival’s Dreaming/Undreaming (Video)

This past weekend, Kosmologia Interdisciplinary Ensemble premiered a multimedia work, Dreaming/Undreaming, at the Princeton Festival. The piece combines dance, video art, and piano music by J.S. Bach and the ensemble’s artistic director Carmen-Helena Téllez. Here is the trailer.

When I learned that it was inspired by two short stories of Jorge Luis Borges, “The Library of Babel” and “The Aleph,” the project piqued my interest. The juxtaposition of Bach with Téllez’s more atmospheric compositions is an intriguing way to underscore the work’s two sources. The two strands of identity allow dancer Alexa Capareda to create two “characters” with distinct movement identities. Pianist Natasha Stojanovska plays assuredly. Her Bach is “old school” in terms of tempo and rubato, but convincing when set alongside the video. Performance footage and images of libraries, architecture, and labyrinthine series of staircases also make the Borges connection clear.

After enduring so many performance videos in the pandemic of dubious quality, it is refreshing to see what Kosmologia’s team has put together, a visually appealing multidisciplinary work that entertains across its several domains.

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, File Under?

Sergio Merce, “En lugar de pensar” (CD Review)

Sergio Merce

En lugar de pensar (Instead of thinking)

Wandelweiser CD

 

“The name of the album is about this feeling that I have. I believe that playing music is a non-cerebral thought form; thought in the sense of being a channel to see, to reveal, a channel that opens through intuition, observation and attention but not through thinking.”

 

Argentinian composer Sergio Merce frequently records at home, but the results aren’t rough hewn as a result. Employing a microtonal saxophone of his own design, synthesizer, and an electronic wind instrument, Merce creates music that encompasses drones, layered sine waves, complex overtones, and periods of silence. The first piece, “Forma Circular” is an enclosed shape. It repeats twice on the recording. Often, a single interval is isolated for a period of time, to be followed by silence and then a more complex, microtonal sonority. An additive process of building from a simple interval to a stack of harmony is another common approach in the piece. Partway through, pitched pulsations animate the soundscape, moving the proceedings from a prevailing feeling of stillness to a mid-tempo presentation. Even when it is absent at the beginning of the second pass through the form, a subliminal urgency is still felt. 

 

In “Forma Continua,” straight tone intervals are morphed with microtonal beating. Single sine tones act as interludes between each wave of distressed dissonances. Merce prioritizes seconds among the intervals, but nearly each one gets to take a turn at being central to the music. Silence plays less of a role than sustain in this piece, with one attack beginning while another sustained chord is held. At times the instruments are recognizable as distinct entities. At other points in the piece their textures overlap, creating beautiful blurred sounds. Merce’s hand-fashioned instruments and home recording practices are in service of sophisticated music-making. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Opera

Chaya Czernowin – Heart Chamber (DVD Review)

Photo: Michael Trippel

Chaya Czernowin

Heart Chamber

Naxos DVD

Patrizia Ciofi, soprano; Dietrich Henschel, baritone; Noa Frenkel, contralto; Terry Wey, countertenor; Frauke Aulbert, vocal artist 

Deutsche Oper Berlin, Johannes Kalitzke, conductor

 

Chaya Czernowin’s opera Heart Chamber deals with the emotional journey involved in navigating a relationship. It does so with large-scale forces; in addition to vocal soloists, a substantial orchestra, a chorus and chamber ensemble placed on the sides of the stage, and surround electronics. Because this is a love story that is not without its travails, and the interior lives and subconscious feelings and fears of the characters are so potent, the use of all of these resources seems fitting. 

 

The involved couple, played by soprano Patrizia Ciofi and baritone Dietrich Henschel, are paired with two additional singers, Ciofo with alto Noa Frenkel and Henchel with countertenor Terry Wey. They serve as reflections of the deep unconscious of the protagonists, sometimes revealing hidden truths that contradict what is overtly stated. Czernowin crafted the libretto, which is non-linear in its narrative but touches on many essential themes: courtship, commitment, conflict, and parenting among them. The viewer is often invited to see the distortions of memory playing a formative dramatic role. The meeting scene, which takes place on a staircase where Ciofi drops a jar of honey and Henschel retrieves it for her, is replayed a number of times with variations, suggesting that memories are pliable and renewable dependent on a person’s current mindset. 

 

All four of the soloists display superb control, detailed musicality, and considerable acting abilities. Vocalization moves from hushed whispers to full-throated cries, with glissandos prominent in the declamation. When the vocalists are enacting the plot, Czernowin likens the sections to close-ups in a film. The electronics incorporate vocal samples, which allows for elaborations of the singing that at times take on a prismatic cast, particularly when coupled with additional layers of singing from the chorus. Some of these can be quite delicate breath and mouth noises. The opera’s dream sequences all feature interactions between the singers and chorus, some of the best music in Heart Chamber.

Photo: Michael Trippel

The relationship between the chamber group – the Ensemble Nikel – and the Deutsche Oper Berlin is similarly multifaceted, sometimes cooperative and at others acting independently. Bassist Uli Fussenegger joins Ensemble Nikel and serves a featured role; the weight of the double bass is used in what Czernowin calls “sound floods/surges,” and it often announces and depicts pivotal dramatic sequences. Different fractals of the ensemble play “Forest” segments. Conductor Johannes Kalitzke has been set a formidable task, and he rises to the occasion, eliciting a detailed and vivid rendering from the performers. The production values of the DVD are strong, capturing arresting visuals and many vantage points of the performers that allow for the viewer to get a sense of the enveloping live experience. Heart Chamber is a potent work ripe for additional productions. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
Awards, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Tania León is awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Music

Congratulations to Tania León for being awarded the 2021 Pulitzer Prize in Music for her work Stride. The piece was commissioned and premiered by the New York Philharmonic as part of its Project 19 initiative, which marked the centenary of the 19th amendment with nineteen commissions from female composers. The Oregon Symphony shared in the commissioning of Stride.

Below is a rehearsal of Stride. You can hear the whole thing by heading over to NYPhil+ (paywall).

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Piano

Ian Pace Plays Ferneyhough and Yeats (CD Review)

Brian Ferneyhough

Complete Piano Music 

Ian Pace, piano (Ben Smith, piano on Sonata for Two Pianos)

Metier CD

 

Marc Yeats

The Anatomy of Melancholy

Ian Pace, piano

Prima Facie CD

 

Ian Pace is one of the finest interpreters of complex contemporary music currently active. Two recent recordings of music by British composers of exquisitely intricate scores – Brian Ferneyhough and Marc Yeats – serve to further cement his reputation as the go-to artist for this repertoire. 

 

Brian Ferneyhough studied with Klaus Huber and others, but a great deal of his early work in the 1960s consisted of autodidactical pieces. Invention, Epigrams, Three Pieces, and Sonata for Two Pianos all date from 1965-’67 and fall into this framework. Apart from the sonata, they are aphoristic creations, dealing with the surface textures of total serialists Boulez and Stockhausen but with a more intuitive approach to construction. Joined by Ben Smith, Pace underscores the vivid dynamic contrasts and registral stratification of Sonata for Two Pianos. 

 

By 1980, Ferneyhough’s reputation had been enhanced from prodigious emerging talent to that of one of Europe’s pivotal figures. The New Complexity tag was coined for his work and that of a few other composers (Michael Finnissy, Chris Dench, and James Dillon prominent among them). However dubious and reductive any stylistic pigeonhole may be, Ferneyhough has created scores of exacting technical difficulty and interpretative requirements. A watershed work in this regard is 1981’s Lemma-Icon-Epigram, which Pace first performed while a student at the Juilliard School in the early 1990s and has presented many times since. Ferneyhough has suggested that the sixteenth century poetic form the Emblema provided a formal design for the work, with references between the movements culminating in the hyper-distillation of its Epigram. 

 

Three excerpts from Shadow (Opus contra naturam) are reconfigured from the opera Shadowtime. In his note, Ferneyhough suggests a Liberace or Joker styled performance, one that allows for the piece’s abundant virtuosity and periodic vocalizations to take on a kind of macabre lightness.

 

Quirl is Ferneyhough’s most intricate piano score to date, with a self-similar rhythmic structure based on fractal geometry from which are deployed gestures within gestures in a whorl of activity (hence the title). There is also a renewed interest in linear counterpoint reflective of the composer’s exploration over the past two decades of Renaissance music. El Rey de Calabria (2019) provides a brief recapitulation of Ferneyhough’s early style. The piece is an affectionate remembrance of his family’s three-legged cat.

 

Pace’s program essay on Ferneyhough’s piano music acknowledges the difficulties of realizing its notation while strenuously rebutting the notion that it is impossible to play accurately or perversely written to look more complex than will actually be realized. The pianist underscores the increasing number of performers who convincingly present  Ferneyhough’s music. He suggests that his own journey with the scores has been an evolving one, with the current recordings a snapshot of his understanding of their rich details. 

 

Marc Yeats specializes in polymetric composition, using multiple meters in an asynchronous fashion in pieces for large ensemble and layering polyrhythmic designs in solo works. Yeats takes the polyrhythmic investigations of Elliott Carter and Conlon Nancarrow and puts them on steroids. His piano pieces are in single movement design, ranging from 10 to 18 minutes in duration. Dense and detailed, dynamic extremes, formidable technical challenges, and mercurial gestures with sharp turns in demeanor make Yeats’s music a daunting prospect for performers. 

 

However, Pace supplies powerful and extraordinarily detailed renderings, once again making the case for the playability and interpretive potential of tremendously complex music. Each piece is distinctive. Particularly memorable are the whipsnap contrasts of Enûma Eliš, the delicate and rhythmically supple lines in Ouroboros, and the layered structure of the title work. Yeats has a strongly individual voice, and he effectively ups the ante on complexity. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey