Sequenza21/

 Bela Bartok, Dmitri Shostakovich

Yossif Ivanov, violin; Pinchas Steinberg conducts Royal Flemish Philharmonic

Naive Ambroisie

Yossif Ivanov, born in Belgium to a musical family with roots in Bulgaria and winner of a flock of international violin competitions before he was 20, confirms his high promise with performances of two of the most difficult concertos in the modern repertoire. No more than 22 when he recorded these masterworks by Bartok and Shostakovich last July, he shows not only the requisite technique but also an astonishing musicality, presaging an early maturity. His tone is so incredibly beautiful, one must go back to an earlier generation of violinists for comparison. (Ivanov studied in fact with Igor and Valery Oistrakh, and regards David Oistrakh, Igor’s father, as a “god” of the violin). He also has the ability to accommodate changes in bowing position, meter, texture and dynamics seamlessly within the musical line.

That last-mentioned trait is absolutely vital when playing Bela Bartok’s Violin Concerto No. 2 in B Minor. From the opening measures in which the violin enters quietly over softly strummed chords played by the harps, Bartok puts the violin through its paces. At times, when it isn’t playing long, soulful melodies, it sounds almost like a percussive instrument. More often, it plays short chromatic passages with a pronounced rise and fall, with stunning changes in texture and rhythm. There is a sorrowful mood here, calling forth from Ivanov a decided vocal quality that hearkens back to an earlier era of violin artistry. The richly colored second melody goes through all 12 tones of the chromatic scale (though for my money it is a lot more attractive that the “Serialists” would have it), and then we have a fiendish cadenza built on quartertones, all of which Ivanov takes with remarkably deceptive ease.

And that, mind you, is just the opening movement. The slow movement, Andante tranquillo, begins tranquilly (just like the man said), but later pits the violin against more stirring music from the orchestra, including cymbal crashes. Ivanov has a grand time with the songlike melody which the composer puts through six imaginative variations. The finale, steeped in Hungarian folk elements, ends quietly where the opening began, stressing the work’s highly symmetrical cyclic form.

Shostakovich’s Violin Concerto No. 1 in A Minor, Op. 77 again casts the soloist in close partnership with the orchestra, which is used more sparingly than would be the case in a symphony, but highly effectively. In four movements, it begins in moderate time with a highly poetic Nocturne, sorrowful but pensive, becoming more urgent and dissonant in the middle section before ending quietly, with an ethereal texture in the violin that makes a remarkable effect in this performance. The exuberant Scherzo takes soloist and orchestra on a swirling, tension-filled ride with traces of the macabre. The third and fourth movements, a dreamy Passacaglia and a demonic Burlesque, decidedly parallel the first two in terms of contrast. A stunning cadenza in the former leads to the abandoned frenzy of the finale, like a circus or a fair fueled by 100 proof vodka and requiring very quick, tricky fingering of the soloist.

Steven Ricks

Mild Violence

Bridge Records CD 9256

The term “Mild Violence,” a PG Rating on a video game box, inspired the title for a 2005 chamber work on Steven Ricks’ Bridge recital CD. Performed by the New York New Music Ensemble with characteristic ėlan, the piece features explosive percussive utterances, juxtaposing moments of pointillism with quirky ostinato and shimmering splashes of harmonic color. While one ‘gets’ the tongue in cheek humor, the music is anything but mild; Indeed; it’s stirring stuff!

Ricks runs the electronic music studio at Brigham Young University in Utah. Two works for chamber groups and electronics are included here. “Boundless Light” is a meditation on the Tibetan Book of the Dead. Featuring shakuhachi-styled effects and vigorous electronic interjections; one is reminded of Davidovsky and Krieger here. It’s excellently rendered by Carlton Vickers. “American Dreamscapes” features the most thrilling moment on the CD – a swelling crescendo of electronics that introduces an ensemble tutti of considerable fervor. The piece features alto saxophonist John Sampen; who impresses with all manner of playing – including copious bends, microtones, and altissimo notes.

The Talujon Percussion Quartet performs “Dividing Time;” the piece’s background deals with the Divisions of time at the beginning of creation.Cleverly, Ricks uses overlapping polyrhythms to illustrate this inspirational focus, accumulating a rhythmic canvass of considerable flexibility and coloristic variety.

Curtis Macombcer is the “go-to guy” for violin-electronics pieces. “Beyond the Zero,” based on Pynchon’s “Gravity’s Rainbow,” contains sudden outbursts of fury, uncommon to the Synchronisms. But after an early focus on ‘effects’ – an explosive musical illustration of the V2 rocket from Pynchon’s novel, Macomber is given a great deal of angular electroacoustic interplay of the high modernist variety – his bread and butter. The piece is an excellent addition the solo plus electronics repertoire.

The CD closes with “Haiku,” a tenderly evocative piece for percussion and electronics. Spoken poetry is interwoven with prayer bowls and tam-tams, creating and ethereal, Eastern-influenced soundscape. Its inclusion is fortuitous; it allows us a full length glimpse at a talented composer of considerable versatility.

Danny Holt

Fast Jump

Innova CD 734

LA-based pianist DANNY HOLT, currently on the faculty at Cal-Arts, is a brilliant player. A percussionist as well as a pianist, he attacks the instrument with verve. On his Innova recital disc, the pianist presents five world premieres; all pieces written since 1997. The disc opens with Caleb Burhans’ In Time of Desperation (2003). Written to commemorate the passing of Luciano Berio, the piece is a series of variations on a ground. This venerable technique is refreshed by pop-inflected harmonies and a postminimal rhythmic ostinato. While the language seems distant from Berio’s, Burhans’ engagement with elements from the distant musical past, as well as his willingness to explore vulnerable emotional terrain, resonant with the departed as music of a kindred spirit.

Holt’s fulsomely energetic approach seems well-suited to the Yamaha grand he favors. Brightly shaded incisive attacks give appropriate luster to the CD’s title work; Lona Kozik’s Fast Jump; Etudes and Interludes for Piano. Kozik writes brilliantly for the piano, inhabiting an earnest, postmodern language rife with virtuosity. “A Tangled Web We Weave (We Keep our Demons Intact)” is filled with whirling arpeggiations and punchy repeated clusters. Traversing the entire keyboard, it alternates registers in strategic, dramatically-charged juxtapositions. Another highlight is “Disperse (the quick but calm spread of sunlight - on water - at dawn)” is an appropriately Impressionist etude in polyrhythmically overlapping arpeggiations, creating a diaphanous swath of shimmering harmonies.

Jascha Narveson’s ripple (2005) is a welcome respite in the midst of these stormy musical proceedings. Its spare harmonic palette and gentle demeanor remind one a bit of Tobias Picker’s “Old and Lost Rivers;” but Narveson favors a more pointillist sensibility. In a clever programming choice, this “eye of the hurricane” is followed by Graham Fitkin’s “Relent.” This postminimal powerhouse is a live staple of Holt’s; and he plays it assuredly and impressively. At eleven minutes in duration, Fitkin’s constant keyboard assault is a grueling gauntlet, containing enough material to keep the players in his multi-piano works happy; Holt manages to grab it all with two hands - con fuoco!

The disc closes with another set of elegies: David Lang’s memory pieces (1997). Although his recent Pulitzer prize award has garnered Lang increased scrutiny of his latest works, these pieces serve as a reminder that he’s been a consummate craftsman and thoughful composer all along. Each of the pieces serves as a memorial to a departed friend. The half-hour cycle is frequently poignant, but also serves as a collection of etudes. “cello” highlights cross-hands playing; “cage” is an exploration of ambient effects. “Spartan arcs” is a delightful showcase for one of Holt’s favorite techniques: overlapping arpeggios. While one seldom thinks of etudes solemnly emotional works, “memory pieces” is both a technical tour de force and a considerably eloquent collection. 

CARTER: Selected Works. Various Artists. Nonesuch 510893-2 [4 cd]. 269 minutes.

This four disc set, titled “A Nonesuch Retrospective”, was released in honor of Elliott Carter’s 100^th birthday. It is an outstanding (and bargain-priced!) introduction to the composer, covering the majority of his work between the Piano Sonata (1945) to the Robert Lowell song cycle In Sleep, In Thunder (1983).

The music is arranged in chronological order on the four discs, so Carter’s development in these crucial years is audible. We almost never listen to concert music this way—in the order in which it was composed. We usually listen to groups of pieces by genre and/or instrumentation, and the unusual order is quite telling. At times, it feels like one large piece with different sections having different instrumentations.

An important and welcome addition is the inclusion of a titanic reading of the Variations for Orchestra (1955) by the Chicago Symphony, led by Carter champion James Levine, previously released by DG. Less welcome is the omission of the Paul Zukovsky/Gilbert Kalish premiere recording of the Duo for Violin and Piano (1974), which is one of Carter’s most personal compositions. (Does anyone know if that performance is available on CD?)

Most enthusiastic Carter fans will have most, if not all, of these recordings; highly recommended if you don’t.

CARTER: Quartets 2, 3 and 4. Pacifica Quartet. Naxos 8.559363. 74 minutes.

The first disc (Naxos 8.559362) of the Pacifica Quartet’s traversal of Elliott Carter’s string quartets consisted of compelling performances of the First (1951) and Fifth (1996) Quartets, the bookends of the composer’s essays in the medium (so far). The current disc completes the cycle in fine form, and the two discs together document Carter’s development both as a quartet composer and as a composer in general.

These “middle” quartets track the composer’s journey through the explorations of the 1950s, the extremities of complexity of the 70s, to the cusp of his late late style at the end of the 80s. The Second Quartet (1959) marks a big step in the development of Carter’s musical discourse, in which the instruments embody individual expressive characters, delineated by unique musical vocabularies. The result is, to my ear, a kind of music that leans heavily on gesture rather than on theme. In this strong and expansive performance, the players of the Pacifica give the gestures of this piece the weight they need for the work to communicate its expressive content.

The Third Quartet (1971) remains one of Carter’s most complex structures, so much so that even some fans of the composer find it merely “complicated”. I like the piece quite a bit, and the performance here is a revelation—the players bring out the lines in each duo more clearly than I’ve ever heard before. I think this reading of the Quartet will cause some to take a new listen to it.

The Fourth Quartet (1986) is the most traditional piece in the cycle, at least in terms of its structure. The by-now-standard-for-Carter partitioning of musical materials between instruments is at the service of a Beethoven four movement structure. At first hearing, this is a far less vital work than the other quartets, but it grows on you, and there is much of value in it. The reading it is given by the Pacifica is strong and expressive.

There is so much for interpreters of these works to explore that I would be hardpressed to call any reading them definitive, but you could do worse than start with the Pacifica Quartet recordings of Carter’s string quartets.

 Karol Szymanowski

Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra & Chorus, Antoni Wit

Naxos

Antoni Wit, artistic director of the Warsaw Philharmonic Orchestra, continues his splendid survey of the major works of Poland’s Karol Szymanowski (1882-1937) with the much-neglected ballet-pantomime Harnasie. This tale of a brigand chief who storms his way into a rustic wedding and abducts the bride gave the composer the opportunity to employ rhythms and harmonies based on the folk music of the Gorals, the natives of the Tatra Mountains. With its angular melodies and irregular accents, plus its characteristic vigor, this was just the sort of tonic Szymanowski needed to bring the nationalistic agenda of the Young Poland movement to fruition in music. His personal artistic journey, beginning at the turn of the century and wandering through Chopin, Wagner, Scriabin, Debussy and Ravel, with excursions into the Sufi mystics Hafiz and Rumi, had reached its climax. Harnasie became a part of the Polish ballet repertoire after successful stagings in in 1937-1938. Sadly it was too late for the composer, who died of Tuberculosis at Lausanne in March 1937.

Harnasie represents Szymanowski’s apex. He throws some unusual instruments, including blocks, snare drum, whip and xylophone into an orchestral mix already characterized by his unique feeling for rich, complex harmony. The rhapsodic nature of his music is much in evidence in the tableau “The Harnas and the Girl.” Which brings to mind: just what does the title signify? At first blush, we might have taken it for the name of the girl. Actually, a Harnas is a brigand chief, and the Harnasie are his followers. Why not just translate the title? And while we’re at it, why not eliminate the brief vocals for tenor and even the stirring march of the of brigands, sung by the Warsaw Philharmonic Chorus in Tableau 3. The vocal solos add little or nothing, and the chorus could easily be re-scored for the orchestra. My rationale is this: Harnasie needs to be heard more often in our symphony halls in order to secure its place in Szymanowski’s opus. But its opportunities are limited by the vocal requirements and the fact that they are sung in a language not widely spoken outside of Poland.

The other works on this Naxos release are the pantomime Mandragora and the incidental music for the play Prince Potemkin. The former, designed for inclusion in Act 3 of Molière’s play Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, is surprisingly witty and imaginative for a composer in whom I had not previously noticed a sense of humor. As a sparkling neo-classical work, it begs comparison with Richard Strauss’ Bourgeois Gentilhomme Suite and Stravinsky’s Pulcinella. Antoni Wit and the WPO really seem to enjoy this scintillatingly scored music that engages all the resources of the orchestra and includes darker sounding music for a change of pace, possibly referring to the ancient association of the Mandrake root (Mandragora) with black magic.

The Prince Potemkin music did not engage me at first, possibly because I was expecting choice satirical writing. (Evidently, this is not the Potemkin who pulled the wool over Czarina Catherine’s eyes with his pre-fabricated model villages, giving rise to the expression “Potemkinize.”) This music, wholly serious in character, impressed me upon further auditions by Szymanowski’s characteristically luminous writing for the strings, a plangent oboe solo, and an eloquent choral section that is very much an essential part of this score.

 Leoš Janáček

New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, Peter Breiner

Naxos

Peter Breiner, music director of the New Zealand Symphony Orchestra, has done us a service in arranging and recording a series of suites from the operas of Czech composer Leoš Janáček (1854-1928), with the object of making some of the composer’s most vibrant music accessible to a wider public outside the opera house. To judge from what I hear in these suites from Jenůfa and The Excursions of Mr. Brouček, Breiner has succeeded admirably as both arranger and conductor. (Even as we speak, a second volume of Janáček suites, consisting of Kátya Kabanová and The Makropoulos Affair, has been released by Naxos.)

Janáček has been called “the first minimalist composer,” but the analogy is misleading. Much of the effectiveness of his writing is due to his assimilation of the natural pitch, rhythm, and inflections of the Czech language. From this study, he derived what he called “speech tunes.” These he applied as as short, repeated motifs to build his unique dramatic style. The repetition of these motifs has a powerful cumulative effect. It is, however, quite different from the way repetition is often used by our present-day Minimalists, which to my mind can be quite boring compared with the result Janáček achieved.

In terms of his orchestrations, on the other hand, you’d have to consider Janáček a “Maximalist,” if there is such a word (if not, coin it at once!) His scores are continuously busy, involving every family of the orchestra. Symphonic players must really love Janáček. No matter what your instrument, he doesn’t keep you sawing away in the background on some boring accompaniment for long; sooner or later, you will have your moment in the sun. In particular, his distinctive writing for the brass is highly imaginative and is often used for expressive purposes. In Jenůfa, a dark, troubled tale of passion and jealousy in which, among other things, the heroine’s love child is drowned in a mill race by her envious stepmother, the sounds of the brass are often blurred as in a miasma, psychologically reflecting the internal turmoil of the characters. The mill itself is characterized by the ceaseless tapping of the xylophone, to be replaced later by the smoother, undulating sound of the harp, when the sinister crisis has been resolved and Jenůfa has at last found happiness.

The Excursions of Mr. Brouček is an opera in a different mood, based on a fictional Czech hero who rivals Baron Münchhausen as a shameless liar. As befits a drunken hero who lives in a wine vat and is at one point sentenced to die in a beer barrel, the music associated with Brouček is highly colored. In the opening movement of the suite, our hero’s name, Matěj Brouček, is blared out for us by the horns and trumpets. When one of his imaginary “excursions” takes him to the moon, we hear mystic strings and harp glissandi. In the last excursion, when Brouček finds himself in 15 th century Prague, the savior of his country against the onslaughts of the Austrian Emperor, the scoring becomes more robust as Janáček invokes the same Hussite chorale that Smetana had previously used in Ma Vlast (My Homeland), and for much the same nationalistic purpose.

The Phenomenon Of Threes

Innova Records

Esther Lamneck, clarinet; Keith Underwood, flute; Martha Locker, piano

Each of the five works has its own sense of fluidity and flow. Lawrence Moss’ Suite is a delightful collection of miniatures, rich with color and vibrant gestures. Breezes of Yesteryear is an impressionistic-inspired fantasia that swims through time and timbres. Richard Brooks’ three movement Circular Motions takes the performers through spritely and playful material, keeping everything light and airy the whole time. Isomorphic Plenum is the thorniest work on the disc but is engaging and compelling with rich contrapuntal lines and long, sinewy passages. The final work, A Time To… is an energetic and passionate work with abstracted electronic sounds which are well-orchestrated into the acoustic fabric. I preferred the shuffled vocal textures over the synth punctuations, but everything works well together.

The performances on the disc are first-rate. The ensemble has a wonderful sense of blend and a smooth, rich sound overall. The cohesiveness in their playing makes every piece shine, shimmer, and sparkle regardless of compositional language. I can’t wait to hear more from them!

Les Jardin des Paons – The Garden of Peacocks

Jennifer Swartz, Lori Gemmell, harps

Atma Classique ACD2 2539

Les Jardin des Paons is entirely devoted to a very small repertory: music for two harps. So small, in fact, that harpists Jennifer Swartz and Lori Gemmell include a transcription of a concert work and an arrangement of a pop song to fill out their disc. While the balance of the CD is by relatively minor figures, mostly harpist-composers, Swartz and Gemmell perform the fare convincingly enough to mitigate some curious programming choices.

True, the transcription of Ottorno Respighi’s Antiche Danze e Arie  by Stanley Chaloupka (1922-2002), harpist for many years with the LA Philharmonic, is a deft one. Respighi’s interest in ancient instruments and styles suits the harp duo nicely. The suite features several Respighi signatures: evocative neo-medievalism, lilting dance rhythms, and supple modality.

The barnstormer repertory example is the Grand Duet by John Thomas (1826-1913). Admired by Berlioz and Liszt, the harpist-composer wrote gorgeously for the instrument. Swart and Gemmell thrive with this kind of idiomatic writing underneath their fingers: their playing here is glorious. The title work, by French harpist Bernard Andrès (b. 1941), is also well written, emphasizing lush glissandi, whole-tone scales, and other Impressionist devices à la Ravel.

Andrew Creegan is best known for his work as keyboardist of the rock group Barenaked Ladies. In recent years, he’s studied composition at McGill and composed several concert works. “Going West” is pleasant enough; its unswervingly diatonic arpeggiations are designed take the listener on a panethnic tour: of Bali, Africa, and the American West. While these rhythmic inflections are palpable on the surface, it’s not entirely clear why they’re juxtaposed. More interesting as a world music experiment is Montreal harpist Caroline Lizzotte’s trope of Indian music on “Raga,” which includes effective incorporation of percussive effects.

The disc closes with an arrangement of Eric Clapton’s “Signe.” It’s a lovely cherubic arrangement by Kevin Fox, but its inclusion leads one to wonder whether a commissioning project for harp duo isn’t in order.