Tag: @sequenza21

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
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
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
CD Review, File Under?, Rock

Guided by Voices – “I Am A Scientist” (30th Anniversary Version)

Photo: Trevor Naud

Video: Guided by Voices: “I Am A Scientist,” 30th Anniversary Version

 

Guided by Voices celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of their album Bee Thousand with a remake of one of their early, most-beloved songs, “I Am A Scientist,” via Rolling Stone.

In an interview with RS, frontman and principal songwriter Robert Pollard describes “I Am A Scientist” and Bee Thousand as follows:“The song and the album opened the door for me and allowed me to play rock music for a living.” Prior to that, he was a science teacher.

Guided by Voices

Strut of Kings

GBV Inc. (2024)

The ever-prolific Pollard and band have released dozens of titles. Their most recent recording, Strut of Kings, streeted late last month. Pollard is joined by guitarists Doug Gillard and Bobby Bare, Jr., bassist Mark Shue, and drummer Kevin March in the current iteration of Guided by Voices, which debuted in 2017 and has proven a durable unit.

The opener, “Show Me the Castle,” has a slow, crunching guitar riff over which Pollard sings the first verse laconically, the second double-tracked with quirky interval relationships. The band double times in the chorus while Pollard’s line remains in the original tempo. A flute synth interlude leads into the third verse, which is adorned with a different vocal harmony, followed by a brief burst of sustained guitar. This moves directly into the next song, “Dear Onion,” which is played in a loping mid-tempo groove of interlocking rhythm guitars. Unlike “Show Me the Castle,” which is built up in multiple sections, “Dear Onion” is typical of Pollard’s more aphoristic song craft, in which an entire narrative can be found in under two minutes and the skin of an onion.

Even by the elliptical standards of Pollard’s titles and lyrics, “Olympus Cock in Radiana,” which includes the phrase “Strut of Kings” in the lyrics, is one of the more unusual ones. Power chords speed up and slow down, with Pollard’s voice serving as the eye in the hurricane. “Caveman Running Naked” is another weird title for a tuneful song, with March’s brusque fills offsetting the guitars’ duet breaks and Pollard’s quick delivery. The coda overlaps open string arpeggiations in a marked contrast to the rest of the song. “Leaving Umbrella” is led by a sinuous vocal, the band punctuating it with emphatic downbeats.

“Timing Voice” embodies the grandeur of seventies prog, incorporating a Romantic chord progression and a guitar solo that channels Steve Howe. “Fictional Environment Dream” is another standout, with duet vocals on a memorable chorus. “Serene King” and “Bicycle Garden” deliver a one-two punch to conclude the album, with its best hooks and most energetic performances from Pollard.

Some artists creatively dry up as they age, others flourish. Pollard is among the latter camp, and Strut of Kings is ample evidence. While Bee Thousand and other earlier albums should still play a part in live set lists, Guided by Voices also has memorable new songs to play.

-Christian Carey

by Christian Carey
CD Review, File Under?, Orchestras, Twentieth Century Composer

Falletta Conducts Foss on Naxos (CD review)

Lukas Foss – Symphony 1

Amy Porter, Flute; Nikki Chooi, Violin

Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, JoAnn Falletta, conductor

Naxos American Classics

 

Lukas Foss (1922-2009) was an omnivorous composer who, over the course of his career,  went through multiple style periods. When he was a teenager, he studied with Hindemith at Yale and then made close contacts at the Berkshire Music Center (now Tanglewood) with Serge Koussivitzky, Aaron Copland, and Leonard Bernstein (a lifelong friend and supporter). In the 1940s, his music resembled the Americana and neoclassical styles being pursued by a plethora of American composers. In Ode (1944, revised 1958) Foss clearly adopted Americana’s signatures, with thunderous brass and timpani, and intricate string and wind lines. There are tonal centers, but ones elaborated by polytonal chords. While one could imagine this kind of material sounding triumphal, there is instead a portentous atmosphere, and with good reason. Foss was inspired to write Ode to lament the loss of Allied soldiers during the Second World War. On this Naxos CD, JoAnn Fallatta leads the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra in a muscular performance with brilliant tone and clear balancing of the various sections.

Photo: David A. Beloff

Three Early American Pieces (1944-1945, orchestrated in 1989) finds Foss returning to early material, three pieces for violin and piano. Rather than score the work in his late style, Foss returned to the sound world of his early music. No. 1 Early Song: Andante is reminiscent of the neo-classicism of Hindemith, with paired flutes playing an introduction followed by a supple violin solo accompanied by modal writing in winds and strings that concludes with a propulsive dance section. No. 2 Dedication: Lento has a pastoral quality. Vaughan Williams is not a composer usually associated with Foss, but there is more than a whiff of The Lark Ascending in Early Song. No. 3, Composer’s Holiday: Allegro, in an obvious nod to Copland’s Rodeo (1942), is an ebullient hoe-down. In all three, violinist Nikki Chooi plays the violin solo part with artful phrasing and ebullient demeanor.

 

The First Symphony (1944) was written (as was Ode) during a residency at the MacDowell Colony. It is the apotheosis of Foss’s Americana and neoclassical period. The piece is conservatively made, with four movements that correspond to those expected in a symphony by Mozart or Beethoven: The first movement has an andantino introduction followed by an allegretto sonata form, the second is an adagio, the third a scherzo, and the finale mirrors and recalls the first movement, with an andante introduction followed by an allegro finale. Many American neoclassicists employed tried and true formal designs, but the harmonies and rhythms that caught their ear were decidedly from the twentieth century. There is an interesting dichotomy in Foss’s First Symphony, between Hindemith’s sense of balance and Stravinsky’s zest for innovation. Adding a bit of Americana á la Copland, and Foss provides a comprehensive picture of his influences in the mid 1940s. The symphony is a stalwart addition to the mid-century  repertoire. Falletta leads the Buffalo Philharmonic in an ideal rendition of the piece.

 

Renaissance Concerto comes from the 1980s, when Foss had moved through two decades of experimentation at UCLA and Buffalo and begun to write works in a postmodern style that channeled early music. The composer likened it to a “handshake across the centuries.” The soloist, flutist Amy Porter, is a marvel, providing the microtonal inflections, frequent trills, and liquescent phrasing that this piece requires. She has an extraordinarily beautiful tone as well. The first movement, Intrada, begins with a long cadenza followed by a dancing section based on the English song The Carman’s Whistle, which was arranged for harpsichord by William Byrd. The cadenza returns and then dance and flute solo are juxtaposed, with the rest of the orchestra first shadowing and then boisterously accompanying the soloist. It ends with a delicate and slow passage for the soloist alone. The second movement, Baroque Interlude, is based on L’Enharmonique, a harpsichord piece by Rameau. The flutist plays a set of variations on the tune that twist and turn through a series of harmonic shifts and embellishments, while the orchestra provides a puckish accompaniment. The third movement, Recitative, is based on the lament aria from Monteverdi’s Orfeo. Rife with pitch bends and chromaticism, it replicates the keening of Orpheo in the opera, when he has realized that Eurydice has died. Porter and the orchestra provide a captivating rendition of the section. The finale, Jouissance, is based on a bawdy round from early seventeenth century composer David Melvill. Percussive extended techniques are added to the flute’s kit bag of extensions, and feisty lines from Porter contend with a web of counterpoint from the orchestra. A fugue rife with syncopation supplies the piece’s climax, after which the flute and tambourine provide a boisterous duet. The piece concludes with tightly overlapping melodies in the ensemble while the flute, with a bevy of ornaments, deconstructs the tune.

 

Like many of the chameleon-like identities Foss adopted, the concerto provides a window into his perspective on music of the past. In most of his late music (apart from a few pieces, like Solo Observed, that dally with minimalism), he approaches earlier composers’ music with curiosity, interested in mining their works’s capabilities and putting his unique stamp on the results. One hopes that Falletta revisits Foss on recording – often.

 

-Christian Carey

by Christian Carey
Concert review, File Under?, Opera, Orchestras, Twentieth Century Composer

The Met Opera Orchestra at Carnegie Hall (Concert Review)

Credit: Evan Zimmerman / Met Opera

The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Music Director

Carnegie Hall

June 14, 2024

By Christian Carey for Sequenza 21

 

NEW YORK – In their last concert appearance this season at Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, conducted by their Music Director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, presented a program of music from two early twentieth century operas that both explore French folktales alongside one of the most famous nineteenth century opera overtures, based on a legend first promulgated by mariners in the eighteenth century. 

 

The latter, Richard Wagner’s Overture to the Flying Dutchman (1843), opened the concert. It has a memorable and bellicose main theme, one that particularly will delight brass fans. Aside from a couple of phlegmatic entrances at the very beginning, the Met’s brass section played admirably, with brilliant, powerful tone and incisive rhythm. Nézet-Séguin’s interpretation emphasized a strong and questing demeanor. The accentuation of leitmotifs associated with the ship’s captain and the sea’s rollicking waves suggested a character ready to break free from the curse inflicted upon him. 

Credit: Evan Zimmerman / Met Opera

Claude Debussy’s opera Pélleas et Mélisande (1902) is one of the composer’s crowning achievements. He never made a suite from the opera, and conductor Eric Leinsdorf decided to craft one, assembling a bit more than twenty minutes of its instrumental music. The piece received its Carnegie Hall premiere at the concert. 

 

Keeping with the Dutchman’s aquatic theme, Leinsdorf’s selections from Pélleas et Mélisande often involve water inspired passages, including music from the incomparable grotto scene. The music is frequently subdued, primarily operating in a dynamic spectrum between pianissimo and piano. There is forte music in Pélleas, but much of it involves the vocalists, particularly the role of Golaud and the penultimate scene that goes from love to murder. Thus, apart from a few portentous passages, Leinsdorf crafted a suite with more than a passing resemblance to the composer’s tone poem La Mer (1905). The Met orchestra played exceedingly beautifully, with a luminous sound that seamlessly blended winds and strings. Nézet-Séguin gave the piece a detailed and delicate reading, with well-paced phrasing providing continued vitality in a work  that, in the wrong hands, could be treated to an overly sentimental and languid rendition.

Credit: Evan Zimmerman / Met Opera

The Met’s orchestra concerts usually feature at least one piece for vocalists. Concluding the evening was an unstaged one-act opera, Bluebeard’s Castle (1918) by Béla Bartók. Even by the standards of early modernist opera, the story is exceedingly morbid (“creeptacular,” opined a concertgoer near my seat). Bluebeard brings Judith, his latest wife, to his castle. She is both fearful of his reputation and smitten with him. There are seven doors in the home, which include a torture chamber, armory, treasury, garden, et al. Judith is insistent that all of the doors be opened, that light be let into the gloomy castle. Behind the last door is a room that contains three of Bluebeard’s previous wives, all murdered. He describes this room as “a space on the border of life and death.” Judith is sent to join the other wives, never to depart. 

 

Why Judith doesn’t run the other direction when she sees the bloody implements in the torture chamber behind door one I’ll never know, but the progression from door to door isn’t just a realistic depiction of a castle. Maeterlinck was an important Symbolist writer, and the play and, by extension, the libretto for Bluebeard’s Castle, is rife with archetypal imagery. Bartók leaned into this understanding of the story, creating music that clearly delineates both of the characters and the progression through a castle that is equal parts nightmare dwelling and the inner life of Bluebeard. 

 

Mezzo-soprano Elina Garanča played Judith and Christian Van Horn took the role of Bluebeard. Garanča’s voice is a high, lyric mezzo, which served the challenging tessitura of the role well. In addition, she embodied the character’s mixture of feelings with eloquent expression, affording Judith successively greater curiosity and dread as more is revealed. Van Horn has a darkly sonorous instrument which he used to diabolical effect. The contrast between the two characters, one vulnerable and the other villainous, was well interpreted, Garanča singing with excitement and insistence, Van Horn sepulchrally forceful. Not for the faint of heart, but as Bartók’s only opera, it makes one yearn for him to have composed more for the stage.

 

There is an interesting connection between Pélleas et Mélisande and Bluebeard’s Castle. Maeterlinck, whose plays were the basis of their librettos, depicts Mélisande as a wife who escaped Bluebeard’s predations. Perhaps this explains her dissociative and even perplexing behavior in the opera. 

 

The concert’s program contained vivid contrasts as well as intriguing commonalities. The orchestra and Nézet-Séguin proved as compelling in concert as they are in the pit. 



by Christian Carey