Tag: @cbcarey

CDs, File Under?, Premieres, Video

New Single: Khruangbin remixes Arooj Aftab

Khruangbin remixes Arooj Aftab

Arooj Aftab’s Night Reign was one of my favorite recordings of 2024. Released today, the Thai funk by way of Texas artists Khruangbin have made a remix of one of the album’s most memorable tracks, “raat ki rani.”

 

As a bonus, here is another favorite from Aftab, live in London playing with Anoushka Shankar:

 

 

____

 

Aftab’s Night Reign Tour 2025 begins late March in North America, Brazil and UK/EU: 

  

NORTH & SOUTH AMERICAN TOUR DATES

3.27.25 | Union Stage | Washington, D.C

3.29.25 | Big Ears Festival 2025 | Knoxville, TN

5.22.25 | C6 Festival | São Paulo, Brazil

5.29.25 | Spoleto Festival 2025 | Charleston, SC

6.15.25 | Bonnaroo | Manchester, TN

6.21.25 | Fine Line | Minneapolis, MN

6.22.25 | Old Town School of Folk Music | Chicago, IL **2nd show added**

6.24.25 | Toronto Jazz Festival | Toronto, Canada

6.25.25 | Ottawa Jazz Festival | Ottawa, Canada

6.26.25 | Festival International De Jazz De Montreal 2025 | Montreal, Canada

 

UK/EU TOUR DATES

4.4.25 | House of Music | Budapest, Hungary

4.5.25 | Rewire Festival | Den Haag, Netherlands

4.7.25 | WOW Festival | Kallithea, Greece

4.12.25 | Sogodbe X Kino Šiška | Ljubljana, Slovenia

4.14.25 | Auditorium Parco Della Musica | Roma, Italy

4.15.25 | Teatro Della Triennale | Milan, Italy

 

5.2.25 | Polygon Live 360º | London, United Kingdom

5.5.25 | Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival | Belfast, United Kingdom

5.7.25 | Brighton Music Festival 2025 | Brighton, United Kingdom

5.9.25 | Norfolk & Norwich Festival | Norwich, UK

5.11.25 | Jazz à Liège 2025 | Liège, Belgium

7.6.25 | Love Supreme Festival | East Sussex, United Kingdom

7.9.25 | Ravenna Festival | Cervia, Italy

7.31.25 | Midzomer Festival Openair | Leuven, Belgium

8.2.25 | All Together Now 2025 | Waterford, Ireland

 

 

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

Lisa Illean Debut on NMC (CD Review)

Lisa Illean
Arcing, stilling, bending, gathering
NMC Records, 2024

Composer Lisa Illean (b. 1983) is from Australia and has been based in recent years in the UK. Her work encompasses a variety of techniques, including alternate tunings and sampled electronics. These are means to consummately expressive ends, and Illean’s music maintains an organic sensibility irrespective of how the sounds are formed.

The title piece, performed by the Australian Academy of Music, is split into various constellations of sound: small groups of strings, solo piano, and pre-recorded sound. Illean uses detuned pitch collections to make a supple harmonic language. Like much of the composer’s music, the primarily soft dynamics are belied by an underlying intensity.
This intensity comes to the fore in Tiding 2 (Silentium), recorded by the GBSR Duo (percussionist George Barton and pianist Siwan Rhys) and soprano saxophonist David Zucchi. Although much of the music remains hushed, there is a sense of unease in the interwoven counterpoint of the music. Gongs, piano chords, string samples, and sustained saxophone are broken up by sudden emphatic attacks, only to subside into another ominous, overlapping sequence. It culminates with several swells into coloristic chords with shimmering percussion.

The soprano Juliet Fraser has been a champion of Illean’s music, and she appears here in a group of settings of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Fraser and the Explore Ensemble are accompanied by electronics – samples of detuned zithers – which provides a haunting ambience that surrounds the soprano’s emotive singing and ensemble’s own microtonal excursions. Few composers whom I have heard set Hopkins have tapped into the essential melancholia and isolation he often expressed. Illean creates a slowly moving atmosphere that channels the doleful aspects of Hopkins eloquently.

David Robertson conducts the Sydney Orchestra in Land’s End, the final piece on the recording. Illean’s penchant for piano dynamics is made all the more poignant by the held-back quality of the ensemble. Robertson takes care to balance the various textures, a web of sliding tones and piquant verticals alongside occasional brass interjections. The landscape drawings of Latvian artist Vija Celmins were a point of inspiration, and these spare, deserted pictures correspond well to the gradual movement of Land’s End. An ascending harp pattern and sustained solo violin send the piece into a slightly more animated section, as if the patterns of the wind have shifted, and a piano solo that adds arpeggiations doubling the melodic material follows. Wispy descending lines that offset one another gradually crescendo into a smearing of dissonance. A darkly hued cloud of low register harmonies provides a portentous moment, only to have strings and winds return playing pianissimo counterpoint, with single trumpet notes, drums, and soft gongs punctuating the passage. Instruments begin to slide towards the same pitch in octaves, only to have a mysterious and harmonically ambiguous close take over, with ascending piano scales and solo violin bringing the piece to a stratospheric close.

Illean’s music is distinctively compelling, and one expects that more orchestras and ensembles will be clamoring for new pieces from her.

Christian Carey

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

Frederica von Stade bids farewell on Naxos Recording (CD Review)

Crimson Roses: Contemporary American Choral Music

Naxos Music CD

Musica Viva Choir and Orchestra, Alejandro Hernandez-Valdez, conductor

Erin Sensenig, soprano

Frederica von Stade, mezzo-soprano

 

After a lengthy and illustrious career, the mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade says farewell on Crimson Roses, an album recorded by Musica Viva that includes three contemporary choral pieces. The title work, And Crimson Roses Once Again Be Fair,  composed by Joseph Turrin, features both von Stade and soprano Erin Sensenig. It is a forty-five minute long cantata that commemorates the 100th anniversary of the First World War. Turrin set three poets who were part of the war effort or wrote about those they had lost, Wilfred Owen (also set in Britten’s War Requiem), Vera Brittain, and Siegfried Sassoon. The soloists are both in fine voice, with von Stade making up for a bit less bloom in tone with an expressive, indeed moving, performance of the cantata’s penultimate movement “Perhaps.” Sensenig, who is a member of Musica Viva, demonstrates both musicality and radiant top notes on the seventh movement, “Soliloquy and the Last Meeting.” The orchestra and choir acquit themselves well in Turrin’s neo-romantic score. Kudos to conductor Alejandro Hernandez-Valdez for leading the piece in a well-paced and thoughtful interpretation.

 

Gilda Lyons’ Monotombo is a five-movement a capella piece in which she sets poems about the volcanic landscape in Nicaragua. Lyons uses overlapping counterpoint, color chords, glissandos, and steaming sound effects to provide vivid renditions of the texts. Richard Einhorn’s The Luminous Ground uses plucked strings and vocalise to depict the eponymous light installation by James Turrell. While economical in material, the pieces is most affecting. 

 

This is the tenth anniversary of Hernandez-Valdez’s tenure with Musica Viva, and the contemporary pieces that were selected for the recording demonstrate both his dedicated curation and the versatility and talent of the group. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

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

Žibuoklė Martinaitytė Aletheia – Choral Works (CD Review)

Žibuoklė Martinaitytė

Aletheia – Choral Works

Latvian Radio Choir, Sigvards Kļava, artistic director and conductor

Ondine

 

Žibuoklė Martinaitytė (b. 1973) divides her time between her home country, Lithuania, and the United States. Her works have earned her accolades and laurels such as the Guggenheim Fellowship and a residency and commission from Aaron Copland House. She is well known for exquisitely constructed and powerfully scored orchestral music. On Aletheia, a different side of Martinaitytė’s music is shown; her music for a cappella mixed chorus. None of the pieces programmed on the recording use conventional texts, instead exploring a number of wordless approaches to singing. 

 

Martinaitytė may not be using textual narrative, but the sounds she uses are equally communicative. The title work was written shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Built entirely out of vowels, its stacked harmonies and arcing glissandos suggest a mournful demeanor entirely in keeping with the subject matter. The composer’s harmonies move between cluster chords and deftly tuned overtones, with a gradual development of greater individuation of the parts and faster rhythmic cycling. The piece’s climax is an enormous yawp, followed by a precipitous descent in all of the voices.

 

Chant des Voyelles (2018) has an interesting genesis. Initially, Martinaitytė selected disparate texts to set, then decided to use just vowels from the text. At this point, she realized that she needn’t be so proscriptive, and decided to construct the piece based on vowels of her own choosing. An intricate web of harmonies and sustained lines, sung with pristine tuning by the Latvian Radio Choir, conducted by Sigvards Kļava, Chant des Voyelles is a luscious work that doesn’t require a program in order to make a strong emotional impression. Ululations (2023) uses the title technique to create a piece filled with varying speeds and types of keening. Rather than a specific topic, Ululations expresses grief for the violence, suffering, and separation occurring throughout the world in current times.  

The recording concludes with The Blue of Distance (2010). The title is taken from a quote in Rebecca Solnit’s book A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Martinaitytė’s first textless piece, it is composed entirely of phonemes, whose variety engenders a number of vowel spaces that score the voices with a host of colors. So too the gestures found here, which range from held overtones to strongly punctuated utterances. Partway through, minor second oscillations in the soprano pile up into a blur, a reminiscence of Solnit’s “blue of distance,” but in the audible rather than visual domain.

 

Martinaitytė is moving into mid-career with a number of durable pieces in her oeuvre. Given the theatricality she can bring to textless vocal music, one wonders what she might do with a fresh libretto; her only stage work, to date, Steppenwolf, is over twenty years old. Regardless, her next compositions are eagerly awaited. Aletheia is one of my favorite recordings of 2024.

 

Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, File Under?

Splinter Reeds – Dark Currents (Recording Review)

Splinter Reeds – Dark Currents (Cantaloupe)

 

Splinter Reeds, the West Coast’s first wind quintet, has distinguished themselves as advocates for living composers. Dark Currents, their latest recording for Cantaloupe, features two twenty-ish minute long pieces, Tall Grass (2022) by the totalist composer and Bang on a Can member Michael Gordon, and Antenna Studies (2018) by Paula Matthusen, a professor at Wesleyan who is one of the finest experimental electronic composers of her generation; both works were written for Splinter Reeds.

 

Gordon  has steadily developed an eclectic musical language that exhibits fluency and variety in large scale forms. The entire first section of Tall Grass is about ascent, with overlaid ostinatos in polyrhythms reaching for the skies. Alongside the melodic material are held notes that accompany and intersperse them, as well as periodic rests. The lines drop out for a long held altissimo note, then resume, the bass clarinet joining with a microtonal scale. The brakes are put on the section by a held low note, followed by an effects-filled solo from the bass clarinet. In the next section, the material slows, creating triadic arpeggiations that both ascend and descend, with octave leaps in the bass. It is like the aural equivalent of a close-up. A chorale-like passage ensues, and the section cadences in mid-register octaves and trills. The fast tempo returns with the melody ghosted in pairs and passages of hemiola that gradually unravel into their constituent elements and then knit back together, punctuated by multiphonics. The slow tempo returns in a soft, mysterious section. A galloping fortissimo passage announces the piece’s climax, rife with repeated notes. A denouement provides a slender version of the piece’s original ascent, and Tall Grass ends with an inconclusive single note. 

 

Matthusen’s Antenna Studies starts pianissimo with half tuned-in radio blasts and held sine tones, and sampled percussion, followed by non-pitched wind sounds, such as breath and pops. Sustained single tones in the winds enter on the same pitch as the electronics and accompanied by flashes of radio static. Brief canonic passages are introduced, with secundal intervals and deliberate detuning used to create beats. Sustained bass clarinet arrives two octaves lower, working its way up harmonic partials, soon followed up an octave and then haloed by electronics. The entire group soon engages in holding notes and hocketing in various registers. An interlude contains repeating patterns, warm synth chords, a held altissimo note and, once again, a plethora of non-pitched wind sounds. Overlapping mixed interval scales, the winds re-enter as the electronics recede to an upper register drone. A general crescendo is sculpted from repeated notes in the winds and another secundal tune, this time in the electronics.  Uptempo ostinatos, interspersed by a tart chord, continue alongside a wide registral swath of electronics. There is a long decrescendo in which a sampled voice joins sustained winds, closing with the electronics and acoustic instruments finally on equal footing

 

The two pieces that are on Dark Currents contrast well. Both are strong additions to their respective composers’ catalogs  that benefit from skillful playing and artful musicality by Splinter Reeds. Recommended.

 

  • Christian Carey

 

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, File Under?, Improv, jazz

Miles Okazaki – Miniature America

photos dimicology.net

Miles Okazaki – Miniature America (Cygnus Records)

Miles Okazaki – guitar

Jon Ibragon, sopranino saxophone, slide saxophone, voice

Caroline Davis, alto saxophone; Anna Weber, flute, tenor saxophone

Jacob Garchik, trombone, bass trombone

Matt Mitchell, piano; Patricia Brennan, vibraphone

Ganavya, Jen Shyu, Fay Victor, voices

David Breskin, producer

 

Miles Okazaki’s latest recording, Miniature America, is one in which his compositional process has changed. He spent time sketching elements of sculpturist Ken Price’s work and was also inspired by the intricate line drawings of Sol Lewitt. The pieces created as a result of this research were coined “Slabs” by Okazaki, process pieces that include text, notation, and his own line drawings. These are then performed with a measure of aleatory.

 

The chance procedures don’t end there. In addition to sung passages, there are also spoken word snippets from various poets, ranging from Sylvia Plath to William Blake. Most of the texts were obtained using a findex, a compendium of final lines from poems. The speech rhythms of these are in turn used by Okazaki and his colleagues to create musical phrases. It is an ingenious amalgam that Okazaki credits to collaboration with producer David Bresken, who first suggested the findex. 

There is a masterful group of instrumentalists in Miniature America’s ensemble, as well a trio of female voices that embody both singing and speaking in an equally expressive approach. Sometimes, the musicians and singers hold the same pitches or intone using the same rhythms, at others, such as in the beautiful, soulful “And the Deep River,” a voice takes a melodic solo turn. The album’s opening, “The Cocktail Party,” features pianist Matt Mitchell playing an alt version of cocktail piano while the rest of the space is abuzz with chatter. “The Funambulist” uses a chromatic set of pitches spread out over multiple octaves, with Okazaki and trombonist Jacob Garchik accompanying the voices, which include stratospheric squeaks Swingle Singers style. The participants are willing to bring a lightness to the proceedings that moves alongside the ample virtuosity. Speaking of which, there is “The Funicular,” in which Okazaki, vibraphonist Patricia Brennan, alto saxophonist Caroline Davis, and Garchik trade mercurial riffs with expert timing. “Lookout Below” contains flurries of riffs and dissonant interjections at a hypersonic tempo. “Zodiacal Cloud” is more reserved, but its mysterious chords shimmer in a captivating way.  

 

Miniature America includes many miniature pieces, and the overall feel is of a suite of interconnected music. A longer serving of music is supplied in the penultimate piece, “In the Fullness of Time,” where the players work with drone bass octaves to create overtones, with a melismatic vocal added alongside instrumental arpeggiations. The closing track, “A Clean Slate,” is a spoken fugue with guitar accompaniment, ending with the line, “The Show is Over.” Okazaki’s compositional shift is abundantly rewarding, and Miniature America is highly recommended.

 

 

 

by Christian Carey
Concert review, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Louis Karchin A Retrospective at Merkin Hall (concert review)

Louis Karchin: A Retrospective

Merkin Concert Hall

September 22, 2024

NEW YORK – Composer Louis Karchin has been prolific, even during the pandemic years. In a program at Merkin Concert Hall of chamber works and songs composed between 2018 and 2024, he was abetted by some of New York’s go-to new music performers, who acquitted themselves admirably throughout. 

All photos: Julie Karchin.

Stephen Drury is an abundantly talented pianist. But even with a repertoire list as lengthy and challenging as Drury’s, Sonata-Fantasia (2020, New York Premiere) is an imposing addition. The piece is in four large sections combined into a single movement, with elements such as chromatic and bitonal harmonies, chains of angular gestures, trills, and thrumming bass notes appearing frequently. One of the distinctive techniques employed pits a middle register chord repeated against impressionist sounding arpeggios cascaded above and below it. Apart from the meditative third section, sprightly virtuosity ruled the day. 

Two Sacred Songs (2018, World Premiere) were workshopped via Zoom during the pandemic. Soprano Marisa Karchin and pianist Steven Beck performed these settings of George Herbert, a seventeenth century poet and Anglican priest. The soprano has radiant top notes, clear diction, and a sure sense of phrasing. “Denial” requires all of these characteristics, its wide vocal range matching the various emotions on display in the poem. Beck is a versatile pianist, who matched Marisa Karchin’s attention to the intricacies of the texts and provided vivid accompaniment. The two were a powerful pair when demonstrating the intensity of “The Storm.” 

Beck frequently plays with instrumentalists too, and he performed Sonata quasi un Capriccio (2023, world premiere) with violinist Miranda Cuckson, a longtime collaborator of Karchin’s. This association benefited both piece and performance, as the composer knows how reliable Cuckson is, even in stratospheric altissimo lines. Sonata quasi un Capriccio is a white-hot piece filled with dramatic flair. It closed the first half.

The second half was also a mix of vocal and chamber music. The poet Steven Withrow heard Karchin’s music and was impressed. He approached the composer and suggested providing two texts based on paintings – San Vigilio: A Boat with a Golden Sail by John Singer Sargent and I And the Village by Marc Chagall – for Karchin to set as art songs, the result being Compositions on Canvas (2021, World Premiere). Soprano Alice Teyssier, joined by Beck, clearly reveled in the detailed texts, the first describing Sargent’s relationship to Italian patrons, the second detailing a virtual menagerie of animals found in Chagall’s painting. Karchin’s songs supply many coloristic shifts, dynamic gradations, and widely spaced gestures to encompass the imagery found in Withrow’s words. Teyssier navigated these handily, and Beck’s accompaniment glistened persuasively, particularly in the impressionist-simulating arpeggiations.

 

The concert concluded with a substantial work that, while maintaining Karchin’s musical language, provides a few hat tips to the concert tradition. Trio for Violin, Cello, and Piano (2019) was performed by the Horszowski Trio: Jesse Mills, violin; Ole Akahoshi, cello; and Rieko Aizawa, piano. Cast in three movements that run over twenty-five minutes, its first movement is marked Allegro con spirito and in sonata form. It begins with a mercurial upward arpeggio in the piano that references the opening gesture of Robert Schumann’s Piano Quintet. This is quickly countered by descending sixteenths. Gradually, lines compact into whorls of stacked thirds and seconds with trills adding zest. The presence of ascent is underscored by upward leaps in a subordinate theme in the cello. The tempo of the development shifts three times, slower and then quicker, with a misterioso section deconstructing the constituent themes. A recapitulation embellishes the material with even more scalar sixteenths, building in intensity until it closes with a forceful, registrally duplicated major third. 

 

The second movement, marked Lento, begins with thirty-second note pile-ups and octave bass notes in the piano undergirding a sustained violin solo. A tremolando duet between the strings is succeeded by sul ponticello playing. The cello and piano imitate the violin’s sustained tune in canon against pulsating piano left hand octaves. A slow chain of rising, alternating intervals unveils a gradual reference to the first movement. Silvery piano arpeggiations and long chromatic ascent in the piano accompany the theme in several string variations. 

 

The final movement, marked Vivace, begins with sustained low F octaves in the piano and a low F tremolando in the cello. The latter instrument adds short trills to abet a triplet-filled motive in the violin. These are succeeded by angular imitation in all three instruments, with the conflict between ascending and descending permutations of similar lines being restored. Pizzicato and trills in the strings are next set against the triplet passages in the piano, the variations in instrumentation opening a potent development section. Eventually, arpeggiations of seconds and fourths succeed the added note triads, and eighth note triplets once again propel the violin. A series of descending sustained bass notes in the piano are set against quarter note triplets in the strings, effectively stretching out the prior thematic material. This is followed by a kaleidoscopic reframing of all the motives from the third movement. The coda has a compound feeling, with quarter note and eighth note triplets overlaid and a fortissimo Bb major chord to conclude. 

 

One of Karchin’s gifts as a composer is the ability to employ a relatively consistent musical language to a number of expressive ends. The variety of the program at Merkin Hall was impressive, as was the high quality of all of the music. One hopes that recordings of these pieces will soon be forthcoming.

-Christian Carey 

 

by Christian Carey
Brooklyn, CD Review, File Under?, Improv, jazz, Piano

Marta Sanchez – Perpetual Void (CD Review)

Marta Sanchez

Perpetual Void

Intakt CD 421

Jazz pianist and composer Marta Sanchez was born in Madrid and now resides in Brooklyn. She presents eleven originals on her fifth recording, Perpetual Void (Intakt, 2024).  Usually Sanchez performs and records with a quintet featuring two saxophonists. Here, in her first trio outing, she is joined by bassist Chris Tordini and drummer Savannah Harris. The leaner lineup works well, as it allows Sanchez abundant room to solo and, moreover, to express elements of the emotional journey that transpired during the time she composed the works on Perpetual Void. She had lost her mother and subsequently coped with frequent insomnia and anxiety.

The tracks are titled to reflect these challenges. “I Don’t Wanna Live the Wrong Life and Then Die,” which opens the album, is uptempo and nervous-sounding, Sanchez and Tordini run through presto melodic lines while Harris lets rip on both crash symbols. This is followed abruptly by “3:30 AM,” which once again presses the tempo and uses crunching half steps and abundant syncopation to channel an angst-filled bout with insomnia. 

“Prelude to Grief” is a solo by Sanchez with the yearning bird calls of early morning set against wide-ranging arpeggiations and biting dissonant attacks. It is followed by “The Absence of People You Long For,” a mid-tempo ballad with an offset duet between piano and bass and subtle percussion effects. “Perpetual Void” has a chromatic melody overlaid with Latin rhythms. The second time through, a countermelody in the bass is juxtaposed against it. Sanchez’s solo is the most overt use of Spanish and Latin American materials, and it exudes a sense of exuberance. Tordini accompanies with bits of the countermelody interwoven with a walking line. Harris’s drumming is virtuosic, following the melody and adding ample fills. 

“The End of That Period” allows for a momentary cessation of the previous intensity, with a major key melody split between piano and bass and economical drumming. On “Prelude to a Heartbreak,” Sanchez again plays solo, building arpeggios in both hands into faster and faster gestures. The piece’s coda is a slow exploration of tender harmonies and tuneful feints. “The Love Unable to Forgive” spotlights Tordini, who plays ostinatos and a bass tune that guides the proceedings. After Sanchez contributes a mercurial solo, she rejoins Tordini on the ostinato passages, dovetailing in counterpoint with the bassist.  “Black Cyclone” has an intense opener, with stabbing fortissimo jabs, followed by a swinging melody and zesty harmonic changes.

Eventually the album announces a turn. With “This is the Last One About You,” a blues-inflected tune and driving tempo are bounteous terrain for fleet soloing from all three members of the trio. The final track, “29B,” is a fiery climax. After Sanchez’s solo, Tordini shares a slower one of his own, building to a final section that adds the other players and speeds back up to the original tempo, ending abruptly. 

One hopes that Perpetual Void proves to be cathartic for Sanchez. Her lived experiences are exemplified in this moving and musically superlative set of compositions: recommended. 

-Christian Carey

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Chamber Music, Classical Music, File Under?, Twentieth Century Composer

Neave Trio – Rooted (CD Review)

Neave Trio

Rooted

Chandos Records (2024)

 

Neave Trio – violinist Anna Williams, cellist Mikhail Veselov, and pianist Eri Nakamura – has recently made several imaginative recordings for Chandos. Rooted is influenced by traditional music and by Antonín Dvořák, who brought the concept of using your country of origin’s folk music in concert works to the United States and, in the case of one of the programmed composers, influenced those in the UK as well.

 

Bedrich Smetana (1824-1884) was thought of as the premiere Czech composer of his day. Piano Trio, Op. 15 (1857), was written in the midst of grief at the loss of his four-year old daughter Bedřiška. The first two movements, a sonata and a march-like scherzo, take on a mournful cast. After stricken music at its outset, the soaring tune in the finale seems transcendent. The piece is known to be a challenging example of the piano trio literature, but the members of Neave Trio perform it fluently and expressively. Particularly admirable are the inflections of dynamics and slight fluctuations of tempo, both to expressive ends. 

 

A composer of African descent on his father’s side and British on his mother’s, Samuel Coleridge Taylor (1875-1912) used American folk and vernacular melodies in his music, arranging spirituals from a set of piano pieces as Five Negro Melodies for Piano Trio (1906). “Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child” employs chromaticism and various borrowed sevenths to replicate the inflections a gospel choir would use to spice up their performance. “I Was Way Down Yonder” takes on the ambience of parlor music. “Didn’t My Lord Deliver Daniel” has a sheen of piano glissandos and corresponding slides in blues scales played by the strings. An octave-doubled descent through the blues scale is followed by an unadorned tutti major triad. “They Will Not Lend Me a Child” starts in a minor key blues, with chromatic adornments and colorful harmonies in the piano buoying a melody in the violin. A winsome countermelody in the cello makes for a supple, poignant duet. The piano adds echoes of both’s melodic gestures and then points them up with rolled arpeggios. Its conclusion moves into a major key with borrowed chords that creates a touching conclusion. The final movement,”My Lord Delivered Daniel” has a repeated refrain over barn dance rhythms. Its eventual destination is full of emphatic octaves underscoring quickly shift harmonies.

 

Joseph Suk studied with Dvořák, and his Petit Piano Trio, Op. 2, was written under the elder composer’s tutelage. Given its early status in Suk’s catalog, it is remarkably assured. A typical three-movement form, it has a boisterous sonata allegro, a gently dancing andante movement, and a vivace allegro movement that is the best of the three, an energetic conclusion that displays the technical and interpretative skills of the Neave Trio to best advantage.

 

The final work on the recording emphasizes the connection between French composers and Irish folk music: Frank Martin’s Trio sur des mélodies populaires irlandaises. The first movement briskly explores multiple pentatonic tunes. The second features a ballad, first played solo in the cello, then accompanied with modal harmonies in the piano, and finally explored contrapuntally by the entire trio. Almost inevitably, the last movement is a jaunty gigue with Martin’s characteristic impressionist harmonic inflections.

 

Rooted is a well-conceived program that Neave Trio executes with seamless ensemble coordination and distinctive musicianship. Recommended.

 

-Christian Carey

 

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

Zwilich Recorded by BMOP (CD Review)

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich: Symphony No. 5

Sarah Brady, flute; Gabriela Diaz, violin

Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Gil Rose, Music Director

BMOP/Sound 1098

 

Composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich turned eighty-five in April, and one of the many celebrations of her life and work is a recording by Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Directed by Gil Rose and featuring flutist Sarah Brady and violinist Gabriela Diaz as concerto soloists, it is a generous program of her music. The centerpiece is Zwilich’s Symphony No. 5 (2008), a powerful four-movement work that combines traditional formal structure with a musical language of a more recent vintage. 

 

Upbeat! (1998) opens the recording with a brief, sprightly overture that resembles its title, with neoclassical string motives and ebullient brass and percussion entrances juxtaposing in comedic fashion. Concerto Elegia for Solo Flute and Strings explores an entirely different emotion, that of mourning. The first movement, “Elegy,” introduces flutist Sarah Brady as its protagonist, with a fluid sound and emotive, but never bathetic, delivery of limpid runs and ardent crescendos. “Soliloquy” features a modal theme against poly-interval chords and another motive on the violin’s g-string. The music proceeds through a variety of melodies and embellishments that have a doleful demeanor. The “Epilogue” begins with diaphanous string verticals, and then a legato main theme that is offset by pizzicatos. Then the music shifts towards early jazz. The pizzicato theme recurs, but this time played arco, with the flute doubling it in octaves. The melodic doublings continue, with the rest of the strings going back and forth between pizzicato and sostenuto chords, and the piece ends in an apotheosis of major harmony. 

 

Still another set of moods, along with historical characters, is explored in Commedia dell’Arte for Solo Violin and Orchestra (2012). Hundreds of years ago, each of the Commedia characters were memorably deployed at the Venice Carnival. They have evolved over the centuries; in England, one can see a resemblance to them in Punch and Judy. Both Stravinsky and Schoenberg revived them in the 1910s for Petroushka and Pierrot Lunaire, and several composers have investigated the characters since. 

 

Zwilich depicts the commedia in four separate movements. Arlecchino (the Harlequin) is propelled by slaps in the percussion and a florid melody, with blue note glissandos, ricocheting back and forth between the soloist and strings. Alongside it are puckish pizzicatos and brawny octave punctuations. Columbina, the romantic interest of both Arlecchino and the Capitano is given appropriately heart-throbbing music and a high-lying solo line. Martial drumming accompanies Capitano as well as a brisk tune that mercurially shifts through various keys. The close of the movement is a long decrescendo of drumming: the captain marches away. Cadenza and Finale begins with bell sonorities, out of which a cadenza that coopts all three previous tunes is played with energetic brilliance. The orchestra rejoins in luminous fashion, bells signaling a final flourish from the violin and the piece’s repeated octaves to conclude. 

 

Symphony No. 5 opens with a Lydian motive and fortissimo brass chords. After the relatively chamber-like ambience of the concertos, tutti strings and tangy brass up the ante. The transition incorporates winds in tropes on the first theme. The second theme is a Beethovenian gesture, an oscillating minor third that recalls a different fifth symphony. Timpani and hand drumming add driving intensity, but it is short-lived, broken up by a brief interruption of soft winds and high violins. Again, the forte brass and Beethoven’s minor third return. This alternation repeats once more, the movement concluding piano.

 

The second movement is a scherzo, with arcing chromatic lines in strings and winds, timpani punctuations, and overlapping trumpet solos. This is succeeded by the theme in mid-register winds and then emphatic repeated octaves, a gesture in common with the concertos. The strings return to the fore with quick ascending lines, played with admirable coordination by BMOP. Winds and brass repeat terse phrases, while soloists ascend too. Vigorous percussion is unleashed, and repeated chords conclude the movement. It is the briefest, but most potent, of the symphony’s sections. 

 

The third movement is slow, alternating rigor and lyricism. It opens with a flute solo, once again in Lydian. Brass takes on a chordal role beneath altissimo register violins, which develop the flute melody into a breathless line, accompanied by downward arpeggios. Brass, snare drums and timpani are added to the proceedings as modal scalar passages are deployed in the strings. A general crescendo is brought to a halt, the texture thinning, punctuated by snippets of the arpeggiated descending line. A shift in pitch center moves the thematic material upward, helping to gather intensity. A sudden hush, and oboe and bassoon get their own solo turns. Sostenuto violins and violas return, as does the arpeggiated motive in solo clarinet and low strings. Softly, low register repetitions of the wind solos and repeated brass chords provide a final thematic utterance, and pizzicatos conclude the movement.

 

The finale begins another Beethoven allusion, the thrice repeated string gesture found in the Eroica Symphony. The bassoon and double flutes are pitted against repeated brass chords and cymbals, while the minor third motif, from previously, is heard again as an accompanying gesture. In the next section, horn stabs and sustained low trombones build the texture, while the violins play a wide-ranging chromatic theme. The strings then hold a long, high note while brass and percussion repeat the rhythmic ostinato that has undergirded so much of the movement, but this time with thunderous attacks. The violins return to their expansive melodic material, but at yet a slower pace, with rearticulations continuing to contrast it. The modal scales come back, descending first in strings and winds, then ascending in high violins. The symphony comes to a powerful conclusion with the repeating verticals and clangorous percussion in a slow ritardando. 

 

Zwilich is well-served throughout, both by soloists and BMOP under Rose. These are benchmark recordings of pieces in her catalog that show both her connection to tradition and eagerness to explore. As she celebrates her eighty-fifth birth year, one hopes that more pieces are forthcoming from Zwilich. Recommended.

 

-Christian Carey


by Christian Carey