CD Reviews

Manuel Zurria

loops4ever

music for flute and electronics

Mazangran

• Casaciescelsi – Giancinto Scelsi
• Portrait – Pauline Oliveros
• Almost New York – Alvin Lucier
• Madonna and Child – Alvin Curran
• The Carnival – John Duncan
• The Garden of Love – Jacob TV
• I Will Not Be Sad In This World – Eve Beglarian
• Lipstick – Jacob TV
• …Until… – Clarence Barlow
• A Movement in Chrome Primitive – William Basinski
• Last Judgement – Frederic Rzewski
• Dorian Reeds – Terry Riley

There is nothing typical about this 2 disc set. I would submit that when most flutists are putting together a recording project of music for flute and electronics, they would tend to shy away from the majority of the works that Manuel Zurria has so expertly collected and performed. Not only that, Zurria ups the ante by leading off with his own Scelsi-hommage. Casadiscelsi is really a combination of Scelsi’s bass flute work Maknongan and flute work Pwyll with sounds that Zurria himself recorded from Sclesi’s house in Rome. It sets the stage for this whole first disc which is one of luminesce and slow-moving atmospheres. The virtuosity of performance is not one of a million notes per second but one of tone, mood, and environment. Zurria nails it every single time and loops4ever is consistently captivating. In Portrait by Oliveros, Zurria is almost invisible, with the voice taking center stage, yet he could not be removed. Few flutists are brave enough to feature a work like Lucier’s Almost New York for flute and three oscillators, giving up 25 minutes of precious CD space so they can play long tones, but Zurria anchors the first disc around this particular work to great affect. After the Scelsi and the Oliveros, the Lucier is exactly what we want to hear, played in precisely the way we want to hear it.

Curran’s Madonna and Child is a relief from the stasis which culminated in the Lucier but still the work floats in a somewhat restless and rocking manner. Zurria’s bass flute tone is sumptuous and once layered upon itself, the lullaby nature of the piece is exponentially amplified. I couldn’t believe my ears with the last work on the disc, The Carnival by John Duncan. A single sustained piccolo pitch (and not the most comfortable one, I should add) is held, Lucier-style, for 17 minutes. There are gradual spectral and timbral changes through the electronics but for the most part, it is a monolith of piercing brightness. Imagine a piccolo arrangement of Lucier’s Silver Streetcar. I don’t mean any of this is a bad way, although some folks will be quick to skip this track. The Carnival is an amazing listen, the perfect tonic/alarm clock to the slumber found in the Curran.

Disc two contains works that are more expected of a “flute and electronics” recording. Zurria has packed in more peppy and traditionally-technical works with the same quality of performance found in disc one. Jacob TV’s works are rhythmic and cool, quirky and spiky with the electronic component coming almost exclusively from voice editing while the flute zips out perky punctuations. I Will Not Be Sad in this World by Eve Begrarian is the perfect palate cleanser, silky smooth and tender with subdued sustained vocal manipulations.

Clarence Barlow’s work for piccolo and drone finds the middle ground between Lucier’s work and Berio’s oboe Sequenza. Barlow’s repetitive melodic fragment changes subtly enough to keep me engaged while the drone does what drones do. It was also refreshing to hear a drone in the middle of the flute’s line as opposed to underneath. Once again, Zurria highlights his programming prowess by contrasting the bright sounds of the Barlow with the murky and luxurious sounds of Basinski’s A Movement in Chrome Primitive for bass flute, temple bells, and delays. Rzewski’s Last Judgement uses the bass flute as well but in a more strained and tense register, focusing more on propulsive energy than letting the listener wallow in sound. Either way, Zurria sounds great. Dorian Reeds, originally for soprano sax, gets the final word on the second disc. The overall take on this track uses more reverb than I expected, leaving the different delayed lines a grayish wash instead of dense contrapuntal lines.

The notes for the disc consist mainly of the short interviews that Zurria did with each composer and they make for a compelling read. I find the music and the performances speak for themselves, though. This is a terrific disc full of great repertoire and expertly performed.

David Crowell
Eucalyptus
Innova

It’s a long way from Brooklyn to Big Sur, isn’t it? Well, New York based composer (and Philip Glass Ensemble member) David Crowell’s work Eucalyptus suggests that the distance can be bridged with a single overtone series. This spectral imbued piece for saxophones allows for frequency pile-ups to suggest an aromatic evergreen grove just off of a Northern California beach: still within earshot of the crashing surf. And if you don’t like having this Big Sur inspired programme get in the way of your sonic immersion, it is a lovely and warm aural bath all by itself.

Crowell likes using consorts of instruments, homogeneous groupings (apart from occasional electronic manipulation). Thus, the saxophones of Eucalyptus and its jazzy post-minimal counterpart Point Reyes give way to the mallet instruments of Kaleidoscope. Here, the composer enlists the assistance of percussionist Brian Archinal, who populates the piece with a striking textural makeup of overlapping ringing ostinati.

Archinal is also on hand for “Throw Down your Heart,” a work inspired by a documentary in which Bela Fleck described the African roots of the banjo. It features the amadinda, a twelve foot long marimba played by up to six people. Indeed, the piece’s busily corruscating mallet-played melodies remind one of an entire shop of banjos and mbiras (thumb pianos) being played all at once. Here, as elsewhere, Crowell’s use of layering encompasses the cannily composed with just the right taste of aleatory to allow for a bit of improvisational sounding organicism to zestily season a distinctive sound world.

Boost/False Doors 

Mikel Rouse

ExitMusic Recordings

Boost

• Hurdle Rate
• Professional Smile
• Hardwired Superstition
• Dumb Young
• Side Pockets
• Orson Elvis
• Redemption Fee
• The Movie We’re In

False Doors

• Words are Missing
• Prosperity Gospel
• Sky Sprites
• Thumb Skills
• Make Her Won
• Blow Dried Bodies
• The Next World
• The Albany Handshake
• God Said No
• Homegoings
• Face Around
• Come From Money

Mikel Rouse has done it again. Today the two album set Boost/False Doors is released and once again both albums deliver powerful and unique listening experiences which couldn’t be created by anyone else. Last time Rouse released two albums simultaneously, Recess and Corner Loading Vol. 1, those albums were treated as separate entities and for good reason. While both discs capture quintessential aspects of Rouse’s musical vocabulary, each album obsessed on totally unrelated issues. It was as if there were two Mikel Rouses for a while, each doing their own thing.  Boost and False Doors, being packaged together, show how these two halves are gradually being brought back together. Each disc is a world in and of itself but these two different halves are binding with each other. The glue is Rouse’s omnipresent steel guitar.

Boost is the manic dance-party side of Rouse’s nature. Tight beats and crisp percussive sounds provide the foundation for his vocal layers of “counterpoetry.” Melodically, tracks shift between catchy sung tunes and spoken word. In many ways, the musical language is similar to Dennis Cleveland but updated to more contemporary dance music aesthetics and production values. There is an oblique narrative through-line as one might expect from a song cycle but what mainly catches my ear is the frenetic beat energy. The opening thoughts in “Hurdle Rate” draw you in quickly and I’m also partial to “Side Pockets” as a great stand-alone track.

No matter how the melodies float by, no matter how the harmonies freely drift, Rouse’s beat creation skills are the star of the show. I’m reluctant to call them “grooves” since Boost is driven and propulsive, never lazy and funky. Even slower-paced moments like the opening of  ”Orson Elvis” don’t dally long before beats take over. There is still a lightness to this disc, though, and these beats are clearly more than simple loops. Rouse’s metrical/rhythmical bag of tricks has been compressed into these crisp metallic pulses. He makes the stuff they play in dance clubs sound even more shallow and lifeless than it already does.

Everything that Boost is, False Doors is not. This is not to say that False Doors is in any way inferior. On the contrary, I listen to this album significantly more frequently than Boost. The pacing of this disc is slower and more contemplative which suits my own personal tastes. “Sky Sprites” is especially striking with a singular guitar lick that punctuates his sung melody (this lick returns in a most perfect way in “Come From Money”). In comparison to Boost, events are drawn out and repeated more obsessively. The poetry in the lyrics is more raw and plainspoken. “God Said No,” for instance, sounds a bit like Rouse is channeling a lost Simon and Garfunkel song with his own peculiar lyrical slant. A song like “Thumb Skills” sets you up lyrically but then twists the expectations ever-so slightly for more dramatic weight.

The opening track “Words are Missing” sounds like a direct outgrowth to the phasing techniques featured on Corner Loading. If Corner Loading was Rouse’s most spartan work, False Doors adds in just the right parts of what he had taken away. “Homegoings” is also just a perfect microcosm of everything that makes Rouse’s music what it is.

Should these be two separate releases? I don’t think so. Recess and Corner Loading were two clearly separated bits of work. Boost and False Doors represent these two parts of Rouse’s music coming back together. Boost is young people’s music: quirky dance beats (my daughter prefers Boost) yet Rouse’s steel guitar gives a slightly folky/country tinge to it all. False Doors is more adult: the music is more about contemplation and nostalgia. Many of the songs sound almost too personal to hear. Again, the guitar provides the soulful through-voice to it all. Any way you hear these two discs, each disc relies on the other to create a complete picture, though, and that picture is completely worth your time.

Bang on a Can All-Stars 

Big Beautiful Dark and Scary

Cantaloupe Music

Ashley Bathgate, cello; Robert Black, bass; Vicky Chow, piano; David Cossin, drums and percussion; Mark Stewart, guitar; Evan Ziporyn, clarinets, saxophones, gongs

• Big Beautiful Dark and Scary, Julia Wolfe
• sunray, David Lang
• For Madeline, Michael Gordon
• Music from Shadowbang, Evan Ziporyn
• Instructional Video, Matt Damon, Breakfast at J&M, David Longstreth
• Study 2a, 3a, 3c, 11, Conlon Nancarrow (arr. Ziporyn)
• Life, Marijke van Warmerdam (video) Louis Andreissen (music)
• Ridgeway, Kate Moore
• Closing (live), Philip Glass (iTunes exclusive track)

Bang on a Can certainly knows how to celebrate turning 25. This two-disc release of new recordings features the mainstay composers of BOAC and stellar performances all around. Big Beautiful Dark and Scary also showcases shrewd marketing and promotion. Not only was the recording made available as a free download before the physical CD release, the CDs come with Marijke van Warmerdam’s video component to Life. But, to complete the experience, you’ll also hop over to the iTunes store and pick up the live recording of Closing, an iTunes exclusive track. Yes, I’ve done all these things and I am pretty satisfied with the results.

Disc one contains music by the BOAC Quadrivium: Wolfe, Lang, Gordon, and Ziporyn and each work is an exceptional model of their musical personalities. Julia Wolfe’s title track Big Beautiful Dark and Scary is one continuous and compelling swell that lives up to every adjective in the title. Wolfe’s music is constantly pushing forward through waves of tension and tremolo until it finally releases a scant 10 seconds before the end of the piece. When I think of the music of Julia Wolfe, I think of intensely focused compositions that make even the most basic of materials into a mesmerizing kaleidoscope and this work is a perfect example of her technique, craft, and emotional shaping. Sunray’s vibrant rhythmic texture, lighter instrumentation, and somewhat emotionally detached affect make David Lang’s piece a great contrast to Wolfe’s previous composition. The music hovers around a bright textural groove with occasional heavier monophonic ensemble sections.

Michael Gordon’s For Madeline is more obsessive in its treatment of materials than the Lang. For Madeline floats around a nattering piano/vibraphone chatter while the others smear around in uncoordinated lines. After 5 minutes of almost undetectable raising tensions, the sliding lines take over as the prominent textural material. Eventually the chattering elements are wiped out, leading the rest of the ensemble into a sparse and vacant ending. Evan Ziporyn’s three movements from Shadowbang are equal parts fun and funky (Angkat), timeless and still (Ocean), and hypnotic (Meditasi, Head).

Disc two opens with pure awesomeness. Instructional Video by David Longstreth is a delightfully charming piece of postminimalism/totalism. The guitar strums instantly establish a wonky rhythmic environment and gradually other instruments join in and interlock with each other in mind-bending ways. The piece simmers as such for a short time and cadences with unison rhythms. At under 2 minutes, this track functions as the “elevator pitch” for what makes the album Big Beautiful Dark and Scary worth hearing. Longstreth’s other two compositions, Matt Damon and Breakfast at J&M are equally attractive for opposite reasons. Matt Damon is slow, lyrical, and just pretty. Breakfast at J&M has the same quirky spark as Instructional Video but focuses more on ensemble textures than cumulative processes.

The arrangements of four of Nancarrow’s player piano studies are right in the wheelhouse of the BOAC All-Stars. Ziporyn’s arrangements are sensitive and fresh sounding and the ensemble performs them with a joyful comfort and playful laziness that makes the music sound anything but mechanical.

The mood-painting in Louis Andriessen’s Life are thoroughly engaging as they are but when paired with the spartan video work of Marijke van Warmerdam the work is complete. Both the video and the music revolve around similar themes (movements are Wind, Couple, In the distance, and Light). Andriessen’s music is not a soundtrack to the video nor is Warmerdam’s video a reaction to the music. Both elements hang in similar spaces that reinforce each other while not interfering with each other. The video (exclusive to the CD release) captures environments over actions and I was especially impressed with the simplicity of Couple. An older couple is sitting on a bench while the camera gently sweeps up and over and around them. It sounds simple, yes, but it is incredibly entrancing nonetheless. The four video elements function as a cycle, too, with that couple appearing again in the final section. My biggest complaint is that the m4v file that is included on the second disc is not very high quality. At full screen resolution on my computer there was a high level of pixelation that really destroyed the elegance of van Warmerdam’s work. I would have happily paid for an HD file of this video.

Kate Moore’s Ridgeway is a panoply of polyrhythmic textures that serves as a strong finish for this 2-disc set. These textures are woven together with a direct narrative trajectory that keeps me engaged throughout its duration. The extra bonus track available via iTunes, a live rendition of Closing from Glassworks is a delightfully understated palette-cleanser. The obligatory minor-third oscillations are present, as are long melodic lines and all the harmonic progressions you have come to know and love. Unfortunately the piano’s entrance sounds overly compressed and unnatural and doesn’t mix well with the rest of the ensemble. Ignoring that detail, Closing is sonic comfort food. But in my opinion, you’d just be better off spending your $0.99 on the Expanded Edition Glassworks track.

Seven Steps 

Brooklyn Rider

Brooklyn Rider, Christopher Tignor, Beethoven

In a Circle Records

http://itunes.apple.com/us/album/seven-steps/id500064073 (available in-sore and online retail outlets April 10)

Whether conscious or not, it is difficult not to mentally prepare for the music you hear. You might be in an audience or listening to music on your iPod, but chances are your eyes will try to find the name of the upcoming piece on the program or screen. If you just heard a piece from the 20th century, seeing Brahms’s or Schumann’s name will most likely cause an involuntary shift in perspective, preparation for a different time period and genre.

So when I listened to Christopher Tignor’s piece “Together Into This Unknowable Night,” composed in 2008, transition to Beethoven’s monumental String Quartet No. 14 opus131 naturally, I knew the quartet and album they came from were special.

The quartet is Brooklyn Rider, and the CD is their recently released Seven Steps. The unforgettable group from New York, composed of Johnny Gandelsman and Colin Jacobsen on violin, Nicholas Cords on viola, and Eric Jacobsen on cello, definitely lets the concept of “variety” run through their veins: not only do their albums include selections from different times and genres, but they’re as collaborative and creative as they are interpretive—they work with other musicians, Colin Jacobsen often writes music for the quartet, and Seven Steps’s title track is the group’s first collaborative composition.

Brooklyn Rider’s Seven Steps uses Beethoven’s showstopper as just that—but instead of the contemporary pieces simply filling space, they are magical themselves and work with the colossal piece. The number seven figuratively appears in multiple forms throughout the CD. The Beethoven quartet is seven movements, “Seven Steps” is divided into seven parts, and the number seven relates not only to Beethoven’s later life, but life in general (Buddha allegedly took seven steps at birth).

It’s rare when the programming of a body of work contributes almost as much as the music itself, and this aspect of Seven Steps is a sort of lesson. Sounds don’t have to be thought of as “old” or “new” and heard as such. Brooklyn Rider reminded me that when music is being played, it’s always in the moment, no matter what century it was created in. Maybe this seems obvious, but in a forward-thinking and trend-obsessed world, it is often forgotten. Seven Steps engulfs the listener in the music and pure fun of listening to it. The labels we have been trained to remember and assign melt away.

The bulk of the album is Beethoven’s opus 131. The piece is known for its enormity (in both size and importance), but Brooklyn Rider’s successful interpretation is sincere and approachable. The piece’s movements range from a melancholy fugue to a high energy scherzo with a theme difficult to stop humming after a listen. The sounds that wriggle into the deepest parts of the brain put the listener inside the work, deep inside the conversational movements. Brooklyn Rider’s attitude pairs well with this. While listening to the quartet, you can almost see their eyebrows rising and their moving shoulders interacting with each other. This approach is refreshing–you feel like a part of the action instead of an onlooker. However, there are moments, such as the calm, descending transitions in the second movement, when the organic feel of Brooklyn Rider sounds odd with the tight and particular structure of Beethoven. There are phrases that sound too casual, too linearly thought out.

The CD starts with the title track, “Seven Steps.” It’s not surprising the piece was composed by Brooklyn Rider—the immediate folk influences, the suspenseful bow bounces, and the overarching sense of collaboration make you grin and brace yourself for what’s coming next. It’s incredibly easy to listen to, probably because it was partially improvised. While the different sections have widely different themes and flavors, none adhere to a certain “genre,” and it becomes its own type of music. “Seven Steps” is like a person, quaint in some ways, intense in others, with countless personality traits.

“Together Into This Unknowable Night” by Christopher Tignor, the second track on Seven Steps, brings the quartet into a cloud of similarly-moving lines. The sounds, metallic and adventurous to calm and melancholy, are backed up by distant percussion and sampling. While each instrument is recognizable and can be separated in the listener’s head, the piece feels much larger. The emotion produced cannot be taken in one dose. There is not much variance in the structure of the strings, and this can get redundant if you try to focus on the quartet separate from the meditative nature of the entire work. The section that causes a gaping mouth (in the good way) is the last few minutes, when the strings are exhaling, dissolving into the distance, and the recorded voices echo in the distance. The piece is human, but also celestial.

Music never goes unlabeled, and these groupings often cause perspectives to change when listening to pieces from different genres or time periods. By doing this, we restrict sounds from living with each other and from mingling the “old” with the “new.” Brooklyn Rider’s CD Seven Steps breaks these culture and time barriers by giving us a collection of music that not only is performed exquisitely and is exhilarating to listen to, but redefines the aspects of periods. Sure, Beethoven’s opus 131 is a colossal, classical period work, but it blends instinctively with contemporary pieces. Brooklyn Rider may be creating the new attitude and role of today’s string quartet, but they’re also showing us how to simply listen, without presumption.

This Was Written by Hand

Piano Music by David Lang

Andrew Zolinsky, piano

Cantaloupe Music CD

Wed, the audition piece for the David Lang 2011 Competition, is featured on This Was Written By Hand, David Lang’s latest CD, a recital disc recorded for Cantaloupe by pianist Andrew Zolinksy. It is one of eight “Memory Pieces” included on the disc. This group serves as postminimal “Characterstucke,” an attractive and mercurial group of contrasting miniatures.

Then there is the touching title work. One of Lang’s most organically constructed pieces, it was, indeed, written by hand and intuitively constructed. A meditation on the ephemeral nature of life, it captures a similar poignancy to Lang’s recent vocal work “Little Matchgirl Passion,” but writ smaller, more intimately. To both this and the Memory Pieces, Zolinsky brings a fluid grace and subtlety that abets the spontaneous, almost improvisatory, character of the material.

Please welcome a new contributor to Sequenza 21: Andy Lee: pianist, academic, and writer.

Returnings

Eve Egoyan, Piano

Works by Ann Southam

Centrediscs CMCCD 17211

As musicians we are trained to listen with a critical ear, to automatically dissect, analyze, and evaluate each musical performance we encounter. Knowing that one will have to write about a musical experience brings all this training to the forefront, or at least it should. That didn’t happen for me—at least not initially.

My problem, if you can call it that, was that Ann Southam’s piano music was so beautiful and Eve Egoyan’s interpretation so exquisite, that I didn’t want to listen critically; I wanted to lose myself, disengage my analytical mind, and simply enjoy. In time I was able to cobble together notes for this review, but even after several hearings I must say that this desire to become lost in the music remains ever-present. What follows is my evaluation, such as it is, but if I haven’t yet convinced you to purchase this recording, I’m not sure that anything else I could write will.

Returnings represents perhaps the last musical statement of the phenomenal Canadian composer Ann Southam (1937-2010). She chose the pieces and their ordering for this CD in the last year of her life, and the album also includes the last two pieces she wrote, Returnings I and Returnings II: A Meditation. These pieces, along with Qualities of Consonance (1998) and In Retrospect (2004), were all written for the Eve Egoyan. (I might also add that the image on the cover is original artwork by Southam.)

The CD works marvelously as a whole, to the extent that you might find yourself hard-pressed not to consider this one single composition. Each of these four pieces seems to grapple with its own internal conflict: consonance and dissonance, minimalism and dodecaphony, or restraint and restlessness. What makes this conflict work, and what draws the listener, is that these conflicts never resolve. Southam merely presents these seemingly disparate ideas one against another and lets them be, never allowing one to dominate, and to great effect.

The second piece on the album, In Retrospect, is very reminiscent of a later work (also recorded by Egoyan), Simple Lines of Enquiry (2007). A single twelve-tone row is presented across the keyboard in small sections, and with generous use of the damper pedal, these tones are allowed to interact with one another and slowly build into chords. The pacing and balance of tone that Egoyan provides is spot on. The delicacy of her interpretation tells you that this is a pianist listening intently to every single sound she creates, and that each note is placed in a precise moment in time.

The third track is Qualities of Consonance, by far the most overtly virtuosic work on the CD. It is grounded in serene chords and ostinati, but is frequently interrupted by rapid passagework. Here, the conflict is seems to be presented by two separate pianists, as Egoyan contrasts these two elements extremely well. While her sensitive touch has been well noted in other recordings, here we are given a taste of her technical prowess and adept articulation. Yet this is never virtuosity for its own sake, as each gesture is executed with a clear sense of line.

That said, if there is any weakness on this CD, it is this piece. Despite the Egoyan’s exuberance of the difficult passages, I felt like there was more room for rubato and dynamic contrast in some of the lines of the more serene sections. Likewise, from a compositional standpoint Qualities of Consonance lacks the cohesion of so much of Southam’s other music, making it feel disjointed at times. That said, this remains a remarkable CD, and looking for weaknesses is a bit like deciding which is your least favorite 20-year-old scotch.

The first and last pieces on the album, Returnings I and II, are quite similar to one another. Here, the conflict is between a gentle rolling bass ostinato supporting consonant chords and another twelve-tone row. The row is presented at the outset of both pieces before the ostinato enters, at which point the notes of the row are presented between chords of the right hand. The effect is marvelous, as at times the row adds depth to the harmony and at other times clashes against it. Again, this conflict is never resolved, but allowed to play itself out, and the overall effect becomes one of great calm despite the dissonances that arise.

This sense of calm pervades all four pieces, and I cannot but help think of Southam’s passing when I listen to this CD. Her ability to find beauty in the unresolved dissonance and to allow things to be as they are seems like a beautiful metaphor for life. La vita è bella, and without caveat. It saddens me to think that this will be the last collaboration between two such talented artists, but as Egoyan writes, “each time I perform her music, Ann returns as a radiant resonance, with us, forever.”

I’ve no doubt that many more Southam recordings will be produced in the coming years, but as this contains her last compositions, performed by the pianist for whom they were written, I cannot help but feel a sense of finality when the album ends. I will listen often to this truly beautiful CD, and each time raise my glass to Ann. May she rest in peace.

-Andy Lee

Contrechant
Reto Bieri, clarinet
Works by Berio, Carter, Eötvös, Holliger, Sciarrino, and Vajda

ECM New Series CD 2209

One of the best recital discs I heard in 2011 did not feature an instrument typically associated with the genre. Contrechant is a disc comprised of all contemporary works performed by Swiss clarinetist Reto Bieri. All solos: no piano accompaniment or contributions from other instrumentalists. But the proceedings are hardly monophonic or monochromatic. Even Luciano Berio’s  Lied (1983), which opens the disc with a phrase or so gently articulated “song-like” melody, does not remain a “single line” piece for long: this texture is complicated by repeated note ostinati and wide-ranging leaps.  While Lied isn’t as hypervirtuosic as the clarinet Sequenza, it proves to be an elegant introduction to the rigorous material that will be found on the disc, as well as the formidable technical skill and focused interpretative powers possessed by Bieri. Indeed, Contrechant is a showcase for the clarinet’s versatility and its extensive repertoire of extended techniques.

A case in point is “Lightshadow-trembling,” by Hungarian (now residing in the US) composer, conductor, and clarinetist Gergely Vajda. The piece spends a great deal of its duration requiring the clarinetist to perform pedal tones in conjunction with a compound melody and copious trilling, creating a far denser texture than many listeners would assume possible when presented with the mislabel “single line instrument.” After this sustained, breathless (or, rather, circular breathed) flurry, late in the piece, Vajda allows the clarinetist to attack single sustained notes: the resultant starkness is startling. This was the first piece I’ve heard from Vajda: I look forward to hearing more.

One of Vajda’s teachers, the acclaimed composer and conductor Peter Eötvös, contributes a very different work: Derwischtánz. It is lyrical and questing, with beautiful runs that start in the chalumeau register and cascade up to long, sustained, pianissimo notes in the instrument’s upper register to end each phrase. A few trills at the work’s close seem to serve as foreshadowing for Vajda’s later perambulations.

“Let me die before I wake,” by Salvatore Sciarrino revels in extended techniques, such as  multiphonics and whistle tones. But these never seem gimmicky; instead they give the clarinet an otherworldly, “sci-fi” ambiance that is quite haunting. Virtuoso oboist and composer Heinz Holliger knows a thing or two about wind instruments. His Contrechant (2007) cast in five short movements, takes up where Sciarrino leaves off, putting the clarinet through its paces, including extraordinary measures: slap tonguing, extended glissandi, vocalizations, microtones, and  altissimo register squalls. It is a bracing, yet dramatically compelling, ultra-modernist composition. More reflective, although still possessing considerable angularity and a wildly shifting demeanor, is Rechant (2008), a through-composed companion piece.

This is Bieri’s second recording of Elliott Carter’s Gra (1993), one of the ‘early’ works of the now 103 year-old composer’s ‘late’ period. It is one of a number of relatively brief single movement piecess that Carter penned during the 90s and 00s and, I believe, one of his best. In Gra, for the most part  Carter eschews the special effects employed by the aforementioned composers; he instead displays absolute command, both of the instrument’s idiomatic capabilities and of a rigorously compressed harmonic and gestural language. The piece’s exquisite pacing and, for Carter, relatively new found directness of expression, make it one of the great works for solo clarinet. Since his first recording of the piece, Bieri’s interpretation has grown, is ever more sure-footed and specific in all of its details: I’m glad he recorded it a second time. Let’s hope ECM invites him back to make another CD. Pairing him with one of the label’s many talented pianists could make for a deadly duo disc.

Daniel Stearns
Golden Town
Spectropol CD

Spectropol Records is a small outfit dedicated to short runs of adventurous music, including xenharmonic (microtonal) composers, electroacoustic experimenters, avant improv performers, ‘out’ instrument builders, and those specializing in field recordings.

Where can one reasonably locate Daniel Stearns?  On Golden Town, his latest full length release, he readily fits most of the categories above. Combined with distressed soundscape recordings – bleak windswept places seem to be a frequent environment – are brittle whiffs of guitar drones, tendrils of electronics, edgings of psych-tinged noise, and deep rumbling bass. Stearns calls these “waking dreams,” but I’m not sure one would describe the visions unleashed alongside his potently dystopian pieces to be anything short of spooky nightmares. Still, while you may want to bring a flashlight along, “just in case,” Stearns’s Golden Town is a weirdly appealing, often engrossing, sonic experience.


GOLDEN TOWN by daniel stearns