Tag: CD review

CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Best of 2021: Spektral Quartet Plays Thorvaldsdottir (CD Review)

Anna Thorvaldsdottir

Enigma EP

Spektral Quartet Clara Lyon, Maeve Feinberg, violin; Doyle Armbrust, viola; Russell Rolen, cello

Sono Luminus CD, 2021

 

Enigma, the first string quartet by Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdottir, arrives after a spate of engaging chamber works that have often featured strings, but never in this most traditional configuration. The piece has essentially two very different experiences to offer to the listener. The one considered here is a well engineered CD recording with detailed antiphony that gives a sense of the spatial dimensions of Enigma’s live incarnation, a multimedia work in a 360 degree full-dome theater space, with visuals provided by Sigurdur Gudjonsson. Premiered at the Kennedy Center and co-commissioned by Carnegie Hall, Enigma is likely to have audiences on the edge of their seats. 

 

In her informative program note, Thorvaldsdottir indicates that the piece is about both microcosmic and macrocosmic levels. This is an ideal vantage point from which to consider Engima. The composer is well versed in advanced string techniques. The granularity of details such as microtones, harmonics, and bow pressure, are nested in sweeping modal harmony. The first movement reveals these details gradually. 

 

Glissandos, especially the gull’s cry effect,  announce the second movement,  to which are added pizzicato and angular gestures to give the underlying grid a nudge in tempo. Grinding bow pressure and a fleet viola solo yield to the modal bass register harmonies found in the previous movement,  a more subdued return to harmonics and pizzicato, and then an addition of  sepulchral octaves paired with the return of the viola’s solo. Cluster chords and a narrow melody ratchet up the intensity against insistent bass octaves to close.

 

The final movement overlaps glissandos and harmonics to create an altissimo register colloquy only occasionally interrupted by the cello in the bass register, playing a skeleton of the first movement’s harmony. Gradually, the registers are filled in and a keening melody announces the return of the modal harmony first revealed in the opening. There are slow percussive blows that articulate a polyrhythmic grid and a subtle underpinning of bow pressure that provides another articulation. A descending line joins the microtonally tuned violin solo, providing tangy dissonance against the harmonic ground beneath. Synthetic scales then provide dissonances and augmented seconds that alter the mode (a nod to the title, it is perhaps the most enigmatic turn in the piece). Solo harmonics then outline the harmony and repeated notes create a fadeout to close the work. 

 

The Spektral Quartet performs both the micro and macro levels of the piece with an admirable sense of pacing and keen attention to detail. Enigma is our first Best of 2021 pick.

 

-Christian Carey

 

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

Bernhard Lang – Piano Music (CD Review)

Bernhard Lang

Piano Music

Wolfram Oettl, piano

Kairos Music CD

 

Bernhard Lang (b. 1957) writes in a number of different media, from chamber music to theatre works. His solo piano music is reflective of the composer’s omnivorous interest in various musical styles and his adroit sense of scoring, which allows the piano to have an orchestral impact in the two multi-movement works on his latest Kairos CD. 

 

In liner notes for the CD, Lang remarks that he is interested in free improvisation and DJ electronica as well as contemporary concert music. One can hear this in the angular digressions and motoric rhythms that populate his piece Monadologie V: Seven Last Words of Hasan (2008-2009). The introduction’s use of off-kilter repetition, the stentorian attacks on a single sonority in the piece’s second movement, Hodie mecum eris in Paradisum, and the looping arpeggiations in its fifth movement finale, all reflect an interest in uneven reiterations. Looking a little deeper underneath the surface, Lang  marries these rhythms with disparate harmonic languages. The introduction features Eastern modal writing, the third Messiaen-like color chords, and the finale co-opts post-minimalism a là John Adams. An average composer might be able to juxtapose these elements without harming the end result, but Lang is anything but average in his conception of Monadologie V, in which the traversal of “cellular automata processes” is unified by cohesive formal organization designed from Franz Joseph Haydn’s Seven Last Words from the Cross. While it coheres around Seven Last Words, the piece reacts to rather than merely mimics the original Haydn work. I am not familiar with the other Monadologie pieces, and look forward to tracking them down. 

 

The recording also includes three Intermezzi (written in 2015-2016). The use of “cellular automata processes” persists here. Instead of Haydn, some of the material deals with the figuration, metric evasions, and elusive harmonic progressions of Johannes Brahms, only fitting given his predilection for writing intermezzi as well. The spontaneity of these pieces is not happenstance. According to Lang, the first Intermezzo was entirely improvised “on a gray afternoon.” Another aspect of Lang’s musicianship, his experience as a jazz pianist, takes a role here, with extended tertian sonorities and biting seconds reminiscent of bebop. Bebop plus Brahms? Entirely plausible in Lang’s musical output. The second and third intermezzi use algorithms built from the first to develop organically related, yet disparate creations. Intermezzo 2, Abstract Machines 1, plays with strands of whole-tone scales stacked with dissonant seconds. It is like a broken crank, a bumptious deployment of the verticals from the first intermezzo in relentless fashion. In the third intermezzo, an adagio, Lang arpeggiates the original harmony, blurring offbeat treble dissonances. 

 

Those skeptical of the yin-yang of human improvisation and algorithmic composition would do well to attend to these works, which use both techniques quite successfully.

 

-Christian Carey

 

An interview with Bernhard Lang:

 

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

Nite Jewel’s No Sun (CD Review

Nite Jewel

No Sun

Gloriette LP/DL

 

How closely does art imitate life and vice versa? It is a question that has been debated since antiquity. Ramona Gonzalez, who records as Nite Jewel, provides an offering that serves to revive the debate. Nite Jewel has released No Sun, her first full length in four years, on her own imprint, Gloriette. It explores mourning and loss. Not so coincidentally, Gonzalez is researching those same themes in her graduate work in musicology at UCLA: women performing mourning songs and rituals. Another wrinkle is that Gonzalez has reason for grief in her own personal life, having recently come to the end of a twelve year long marriage. As she has remarked, grieving plus (synth) pop creates an interesting character: a diva who is a professional mourner. 

 

Gonzalez is one of a number of synth artists recently who have pursued their craft and kept their day jobs in academe. She teaches music technology and songwriting. One of the other members of the graduate student cohort in musicology at UCLA is electronic recording artist Sarah Davachi. Gonzalez’s frequent collaborator Julia Holter, who plays synthesizer on No Sun, did her graduate work at CalArts. Their respective training has helped to make their music sophisticated while sacrificing none of the immediacy and memorability one craves in pop songcraft. 

 

No Sun contains eight songs, a number at the usual three minute length and a few that stretch out. One clocking in at over seven minutes is “Anymore,” which has a mid-tempo pulsation throughout. Added to this is a gradual layering of voices and synthesizers, periodically moving us to double time percussion and then back to the medium groove and from a lilting vocal melody to walls of complex backing vocals. Synths send the harmony sidewise while a bass line is evasive in its punctuations. Partway through it deconstructs down to the solo vocal a cappella before rebuilding the layers with the voice slowly receding into the rest of the arrangement, making the isolation of its lyrics explicit, and then once more dropping everything but the voice, making aloneness even more overt. 

 

“No Escape” plays with different types of bass-lines and kaleidoscopic synthesizers. The song is propelled by Cory Fogel’s percussion. Gonzalez’s double-tracked vocals evince particular passion here. “This Time” features an honest to goodness extended solo section as an outro, with Corey Lee Granit laying down squalling guitar riffs.Here, as elsewhere, Nite Jewel is unafraid to lean in and encourage arrangements that reassemble past tropes of pop. Fogel guests again on “Show Me What You’re Made Of,” as does Julia Holter, who contributes additional synthesizers. Supple voice, corruscated bass and drums, and slowly articulated synth chords all move at different rates, making a polyphonic rhythmic scheme that grooves but requires more than just head bobbing to express. In a hat tip to the album title, Gonzalez covers Sun Ra’s “When There is No Sun,” in a six-minute version that combines electric piano sounds, grainy bass, and soulful singing: a most successful interpretation. 

 

Those aforementioned three-minute songs are imaginative, tuneful, and expressive. “Before I Go” allows Gonzalez to play with space in the arrangement, into which she pours singing of a more bluesy cast than elsewhere.  Brian Allen Simon supplies saxophones on “#14,” with undulating melodies reminiscent of Branford Marsalis’s playing on “The Dream of the Blue Turtles.” “To Feel It” has an angular yet catchy vocal melody, a disco chord progression rife with ninth chords, and a syncopated electronic rhythm section. If there is a breakout song among those on No Sun, this is it. One hopes it will vaunt all the attractive material arrayed here to greater attention.

 

-Christian Carey  

 

 

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

Two Wandelweiser Recordings (CD Review)

Sivan Silver-Swartz

Untitled 6

Wandelweiser CD EWR 1920

Nigel Dean, violin; Patrick Behnke, Tanner Pfeiffer, viola; Tal Katz, Julian Tedaldi, cello

 

Antoine Beuger

Jankélévich Sextets

Another Timbre CD at168

Apartment House – James Opstad, double bass; Mark Knoop, accordion; Heather Roche, bass clarinet; Mira Benjamin, violin; Joe Qiu, bassoon; Bridget Carey, viola

 

At twenty-eight years of age, Sivan Silver-Swartz is the youngest member of the Wandelweiser collective. A native of Ohio, he received his undergraduate degree at Oberlin College and then relocated to California to get his Master’s at CalArts. He has remained in Los Angeles since getting his degree in 2019.

 

Silver-Swartz’s work fits in well with the interest of Wandelweiser composers in the New York School, notably late pieces by John Cage and Morton Feldman. Six of his string player friends perform Untitled 6, an hourlong piece that takes its cue from the slow, soft music Feldman favored and that Cage adopted in his Number Pieces. Silver-Swartz pursues a quasi-aleatoric device in the score, with one chart of events that “change and do not return” and one of events that “change but do return.” The design of the events structure is the composer’s, but it gives the musicians considerable latitude in realization. There is a fair bit of overlap and harmonic presentation in Untitled 6 and the tuning reveals overtones from just intonation. The pace is steady and gradual, sumptuously so.

 

Antoine Beuger is one of founding members of Wandelweiser. From 2003-2005, he wrote a series of pieces, each for a different ensemble, that referenced cultural or intellectual figures in their titles, including Canto, Ockeghem, and Tschirtner; these three have all appeared on the label Another Timbre. The group Apartment House recorded the fourth in the series, Jankélévich Sextets, written for an interesting hybrid ensemble consisting of three strings (violin, viola, and double bass), bass clarinet, bassoon, and accordion. Vladimir Jankélévich (1903-1983) was a philosopher and musicologist. A French child of Russian-Jewish parents, he fought in the Resistance during the Second World War and later taught at the Sorbonne.

 

Jankélévich Sextets is also an hourlong piece that is primarily slow and soft. The performance instructions indicate that tones should be “very quiet; long to very long,” and that rests should give time to breathe or be much longer. Each pagelong section starts with a unison pitch in all voices (notes may be played in any octave) followed by an additional six pitches on each staff, with some repeated notes. Beuger indicates that the number of these sections used in a performance, as well as their ordering, is free.

 

Generally, the Sextets are, in this recording, presented in a thicker texture than that of Untitled 6. Given the freedom of ordering provided, the sense of trajectory alongside spontaneity is noteworthy. Octave displacements and freedom of pacing result in complex verticals, which are frequently fascinating. Arresting too are the places where simple intervals are given voice. For example, a multi-octave presentation just shy of twenty minutes in is a powerful point of arrival.

 

Neophytes who think that Wandelweiser pieces must all ‘sound the same,’ because of the affinity of its members’ aesthetic aims, would do well to compare these two works. They may be contained in similarly constructed vessels, but each has an individual character all its own. Kudos to the performers of both pieces for their tremendous attention to detail and keen sense of collaboration.

 

-Christian Carey

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

City of Tomorrow on New Focus (CD Review)

City of Tomorrow

Blow

New Focus Records

 

The City of Tomorrow is a woodwind quintet dedicated to 20/21 music, particularly compositions that explore environmental themes. They first convened to play the title work on this recording. Blow, by Franco Donatoni, is a tour de force for woodwinds. In addition to the obvious association with embouchures, the piece also explores the qualities of wind, from a soothing breeze to gusts to gale force. The use of counterpoint in polyrhythms reminds one of the formidable craft Donatoni possessed – and expected of the musicians who play Blow. The confluence of “wind painting” and proportional imitation, as well as the piece’s relentless energy, are thrilling in City of Tomorrow’s authoritative performance. 

 

Hero and Leander, by Hannah Lash, also explores an environmental theme, if somewhat obliquely. The Greek myth involves Leander swimming the sea each night to reunite with Hero, only to be taken away by Poseidon in a vicious storm. In the wake of Tropical Storm Henri, and all the other hurricanes yet to come as climate change bears down on coastal communities, the piece has psychological resonances well beyond the archetypal tale of unrequited love. Hero and Leander is a nine-movement suite both varied in texture and harmony and unified by recurrent use of birdsong (played in piccolo and e-flat clarinet) and Poseidon’s heavy weather. Unlike Donatoni, Lash takes her time revealing the tale, with the calm before the storm just as emphasized as the lovers being kept apart. The last three movements bring Stravinskyian dissonances and clipped utterances (there are connections to his Oedipus)  and poignant stillness to the depiction of Hero’s grief at finding Leander’s body.  

 

In 2003, Esa-Pekka Salonen wrote a piece dedicated to the memory of Luciano Berio: Memoria. It was premiered alongside Laborintus 2, Berio’s own work dealing with memory. Beginning with heterophonic overlap and moving to a main section of vivacious rhythms, the short motifs and shifting meters suggest Stravinsky. Later there is another Stravinsky connection in Memoria. The finale consists of chorales that recall the Symphonies of Wind Instruments. Salonen manages to channel two great composers of the twentieth century while imposing his own kinetic spin on the proceedings. Once again, City of Tomorrow impresses with its dextrous delivery and the silvery tone of its soloists. Recommended. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

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

Cantus Records Manifesto

Cantus

Manifesto

Signum Classics

 

The all-male vocal ensemble Cantus’s first full length recording in seven years, Manifesto, features pieces, all in world premiere recordings, that explore relationships and identity. The title work is a piece by David Lang, the text taken from answers to a Google Search auto-complete list of the query “I want to be with someone who…” It was originally commissioned by Cantus for a program titled “The Four Loves.” Lang’s piece signifies romantic love and is written in a minimal style, the textual repetitions being a hallmark of his approach. “If I Profane,” by Libby Larsen, which features a tenor solo and swelling crescendos in its accompanying voices, is a setting of the love sonnet from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.  

 

Roger Treece’s Philia signifies friendly love, as does Timothy C Takach’s Luceat Eis, written in commemoration of service personnel who died on 9/11. Both artfully use polychords, the Luceat Eis bifurcated into low clusters and a chant-like upper melodic line. Ysaÿe M. Barnwell explores divine love in Tango with God. Here, the ensemble’s performance emphasizes exuberance rather than the suavity of the dance. To My Brother, by Joseph Gregorio, is about familial love. It begins with angular melody, gradually adding suspensions, homophonic declamation, and a few arpeggiations lending colorful cadences. 

 

It is not just love that resonates in this attractive program. Gagót, by Sidney Guillaume, is about dealing with life’s vicissitudes. Sarah Kirkland Snider’s luminous Psalm of the Soil connects nature and the divine. The longest setting on the recording, it is also the most intricate and interesting formally. 

 

Two song cycles complete the program. Poems by Hafiz, Rumi and Kabir are set in Paul John Rudoi’s Song of Sky and Sea. “At Every Instant” features elaborate syncopations, “The Infinite Dwelling” layers a webbing of contrapuntal passages. “Two Falling Stars” uses glissandos and descending lines in elaborate word painting, and spoken word and equally declamatory singing are featured in “As One Sky.” In addition to being a composer, Rudoi is a tenor vocalist, and one can hear him revel in writing the solo passages of “As One Sky.” 

 

Dale Warland incorporates piano, played here by Andrew Fleser, in his Evening Star triptych. Warland is well known for his direction of vocal groups, including his own Singers. Evening Star demonstrates his skillful composing in a neo-romantic idiom. Sara Teasdale’s poetry is about the stages of grieving that ultimately lead to acceptance of loss. Octave leaps supply “The Falling Star” with powerful resonance,“On a Winter Night,” the middle movement, is particularly haunting, and Cantus impresses in its a cappella tuning between piano interludes in “Stars Over Snow.” Cantus combines beautifully blended passages with strong individual voices. They are welcome to return to the recording studio ASAP. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, File Under?

My Tree (CD Review)

My Tree

Where the Grace Is

Self-released, 2021

 

The duo My Tree consists of vocalist Caroline Davis and multi-instrumentalist Ben ‘Jamal’ Hoffmann. Davis is best known as a jazz saxophonist and flutist, but on My Tree’s latest recording, Where the Grace Is, she demonstrates an attractive voice comfortable in a hybrid blend of musical styles. These encompass funk and fusion from the seventies and more recent electronic pop. Hoffmann favors vintage gear, including analog synths and a Linn drum machine. He crafts intricate and memorable arrangements and demonstrates keen versatility.

 

Davis’s supple singing serves well the uplifting songs “One More Time,” “What a Joy,” and “Afterglow.” My Tree also addresses social issues in more challenging pieces. “Where the Grace Is” documents the murder of Ahmaud Arbery. Rico Sisney is a guest MC on “Run and Rag On,” an energetic and socially conscious anthem repudiating the New Jim Crow. “Our Land Oh” is another track about a recent and regrettable event, the Pulse Nightclub shooting. One can sense the grief contained in Davis’s overdubbed delivery and Hoffmann  plays a tense ostinato riff on Rhodes beside a weighty countermelody in the bass. “Liteshine” juxtaposes the power of the sun with the climate crisis. 

 

My Tree reminds us that we needn’t forget hope and even joy in the midst of the adversity of recent days. Where the Grace Is — a balm for late summer blues. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Choral Music, early music, File Under?

Cinquecento Sings Isaac (CD Review)

Heinrich Isaac

Missa Wohlauff gut Gsell von hinnen and other works

Cinquecento

Hyperion Records 

 

While not as famous today as Josquin, Heinrich Isaac (1450-1517) was a contemporary and rival much esteemed during his lifetime. The main work programmed on this recording, Missa Wohlauff gut Gsell von hinnen, makes an explicit connection between the two composers. Comment peult avoir joye?, a monophonic chanson also set polyphonically by Josquin (included on the CD for comparison’s sake), was the subject of a paraphrase mass set early in his career by Isaac. Later, when Isaac was in the service of the Habsburg Emperor Maximilian I, the composer discovered a contrafactum text of the song in German, Wohlauff gut Gsell von hinnen. With this in mind, Isaac decided to revisit his earlier mass and greatly expand and elaborate it. The result was one of the most extensive and imposing works of his career. 

 

A six-voice setting, subgroups thereof appear frequently, and the same reduced scorings seldom recur adjacently, creating a wide variety of textures. The male vocal sextet Cinquecento sings with impressive resonance, rendering the counterpoint with clarity, phrasing with sensitivity,  and tutti passages with sonority. They adopt flowing tempos that befit the overlapping lines, particularly those in canon. Missa Wohlauff is a tour-de-force of a variety of canons:  intervallic, proportional, 4-ex-2, and 3-ex-1 (two of them used in the Agnus Dei to end triumphantly). 

 

The recording also contains a half-dozen motets: some of Isaac’s finest. O decus ecclesiae has a tenor built out of the white note, or “natural” hexachord, that subtracts and replaces notes throughout the piece, creating an intricate structure out of initially simple means. The motet is formidably scaled, in excess of twelve minutes in duration, with melismatic upper parts, thickly scored tutti, and a subterranean bass line. The second half moves in a sprightly three against the steady tenor. Recordare, Jesu Christe has a canon in the middle voices and overlapping rhythms in the others that prevent the procedure from being obvious; it closes with a hushed cadence of considerable beauty. Judea et Jerusalem may be by Obrecht, another member of the Josquin generation who deserves more attention today, instead of Isaac. A responsory from the Christmas Vigil built up from the chant in the bass, it consists of imitative counterpoint in long phrases adorned with sumptuous verticals. 

 

Cinquecento’s recording makes an eloquent case for Isaac as a composer of the first rank. Recommended.

 

  • Christian Carey

 

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

Danny Driver Records Ligeti (CD Review)

 

György Ligeti

The 18 Etudes

Danny Driver

Hyperion

 

Composed between 1985 and 2001, the 18 Etudes by György Ligeti are an eloquent summary of the techniques he had developed throughout his career. They rival the best collections of etudes for piano while adding substantially to the variety of technical means to be explored, particularly in the realms of polyrhythm and sonority. 

 

There are a number of recordings of the Etudes and it is difficult to choose a favorite: different ones excel at various aspects of these multifaceted works. Danny Driver’s is a strong contender. Amply powerful where required, Driver’s playing also brings out a variety of dynamic shadings, with passages of exceptional delicacy (notably absent in some other interpretations). For instance, Driver’s rendition of “White on White,” in which both hands play white note collections, is diaphanous in the beginning and coda and incisive in the moto perpetuo middle. He demonstrates mastery over the technical challenges and has a keen sense for the reference points found in each Etude. 

 

Several interests that Ligeti developed late in his career impacted the language of the Etudes: the minimalism of Steve Reich, African music, and an abiding love of rhythmic canons that expanded to encompass the work of Conlon Nancarrow. One can also see in the list of dedicatees – Pierre Boulez (to whom the first three Etudes are dedicated), Mauricio Kagel, György Kurtág, and Pierre-Laurent Aimard among them – the music and performance qualities of others respected by Ligeti that in turn filter through the Etudes. 

 

There are three books of Etudes, the first containing six, the second eight, and the last book four. Many have self-imposed restrictions that create intriguing, at times playful results. For instance, the first Etude Désordre consists of ascending and descending polyrhythms, with the left hand playing only black keys and the right white keys, thus juxtaposing pentatonic and pandiatonic collections. Galamb Borong also has a different scale for each hand, the two whole tone collections meant to stand in for the scales of Balinese gamelan. Automne à Varsovie is a canon in polytempo, with overlapping relationships of 3,4,5,6,7, and 8, and a perpetually descending motive.

 

Coloana Infinita, the 14th Etude, is the tour-de-force among formidable pieces. The original version was viewed as unplayable by humans, and made into a player piano piece a lá Nancarrow. The revised version is scarcely less daunting, Thick pile ups of chords build a multi-textured ascent. It sounds like at least three hands are required, but Driver manages just fine with two, wielding intensity and virtuosity in impressive fashion. He provides a similarly energetic performance of Vertige, its fortissimo, chromatic music, this time descending, devolves into a soft rumble only at its conclusion. 

 

The final work of Book Three, a brief Canon, is rendered with effusion and a coy, pianissimo coda that is an enigmatic valediction. Canon demonstrates Ligeti’s continued inspiration and considerable imagination late in life. Driver’s recording is a fitting celebration of the composer’s legacy. Recommended.

 

-Christian Carey

 

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

Magnus Lindberg on Ondine (CD Review)

 

Magnus Lindberg

Aura – Marea – Related Rocks

Emil Holmström, Joonas Ahonen, piano and keyboards; 

Jani Niinimaki, Jerry Plippomem, percussion 

Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra, Hannu Lintu

Ondine

 

This recording includes three live recordings of compositions from the 1990s by Magnus Lindberg. Hannu Lintu leads the Finnish Radio Symphony Orchestra in energetic and focused renditions of two of these challenging works, bringing out considerable detail from Lindberg’s vivid orchestrations. A quartet of pianists and percussionists perform the chamber piece, Related Rocks, an interesting corollary to the larger compositions. 

 

By 1990, when Lindberg had completed Marea, he was already an established composer. Particularly noteworthy was 1985’s Kraft, with a large orchestra, multiple soloists, enormous gongs, and influences from German industrial music, notably Einstürzende Neubauten. Marea is for more modest forces, a sinfonietta; however, it sounds larger than the sum of its parts. The title means “tides,” and the piece is a single movement set of variations. There is much in Marea that is muscularly scored, indicating the powerful ebb and flow of the ocean. Indeed, the flowing nature of the music overwhelms its constructivist design to create densely imprinted textures and dramatic climaxes.

 

The chamber piece Related Rocks (1997). for a quartet of pianists and percussionists with electronics, was written at IRCAM. It has a similar instrumentation to the Bartôk Sonata for two pianos and percussion, and its raucous ending is certainly Bartôkian in design. Most of the piece departs from this script, with a blending of the instrumental cohort rather than the bifurcation of the Bartôk sonata. Lindberg explores gamelan-like harmonics with spectacular shimmer. Rhythmic canons between piano and pitched percussion provide rigorous contrast for the more vertically oriented passages. Lindberg demonstrates both the percussive and sonorous qualities of the instruments, and the software he uses allows one to morph from one sound to the next. 

 

Aura (1994) is dedicated to the memory of Wiltold Lutoslawski, who passed away while Lindberg was composing the piece. At forty minutes in duration, it is the longest piece in his catalogue. Cast in four movements, played attacca, with a scheme of fast-slow-scherzo-finale, Lindberg has said it is neither a symphony nor a concerto for orchestra. Instead it seems to flow organically, with successive movements commenting on their predecessors. The concerto designation is tantalizing because material is often deployed in smaller cohorts of the orchestra and soloists. The first movement’s brass fanfares are followed by ricocheting counterpoint from winds and strings. Each successive climax adds to the complexity of the vertical chords that announce it. Winds, strings, brass, and percussion each take a turn as active ensembles. A general pullback allows for diaphanous strings and whorls of woodwinds to blend together. This is supplanted by edgy ostinatos and rangy clarinet passages. The trading off intensifies, bringing the movement to a fortissimo pileup and moto perpetuo coda that leads into the spectral verticals that begin movement two. 

 

Lindberg is not known for writing slow movements, but the second one of Aura qualifies. Blocks of harmony are connected by trumpet filigrees. Overtone chords and long string lines are underscored by stentorian timpani and succeeded by wind trills. The chorale-like movement of the harmony continues, until heraldic brass announce descending cellos and divisi string harmonies. Oscillating cells and intricate blocks of chords cascade through much of the rest of the movement, with echoing harmonics and busily moving pitched percussion giving decay a boost. Percussion – gongs notable in their appearance – and glinting winds bring the movement to a close. It is followed by a Scherzo, with skittering lines, repeated motives, and wide-ranging cascading verticals. The finale is a boisterous summation, with allusions to the music that has come before, motorized by post-minimal ostinatos, generously scored string melodies, and triumphal brass. Aura is an imposing, impressive piece. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey