CD Reviews

Peter Garland

Waves Breaking on Rocks

Aki Takahashi – piano

Ari Streisfeld – violin

John Duykers – tenor

Santa Fe New Music:

David Felberg, Ikuko Kanda – violin

James Shields – bass clarinet

John Marchiando – trumpet

Lynn Gorman – harp

Madeline Williamson – piano

Jeff Cornelius, Angela Gabriel, Jim Goulden, David Tolen – percussion

John Kennedy – conductor

http://www.newworldrecords.org/album.cgi?rm=view&album_id=89976

Humans are quite remarkable when it comes to determining sizes. We can estimate how many people it will take to complete a job. If blindfolded, we have the skills to determine whether we are in a large amphitheater or small room. We can estimate the size of an airplane by its approaching sound. But music is the ultimate deceiver, isn’t it?

Hypothetical and literal size are beautifully separated in the newly released album of music by Peter Garland (b. 1952), Waves Breaking on Rocks. The album consists of his piano work, “Waves Breaking on Rocks (Elegy for All of Us),” and his piece for tenor and chamber ensemble, “The Roque Dalton Songs.” Garland is an American composer whose works have often been considered post-minimal.

Waves Breaking on Rocks pairs two very different compositions. The topic of deceptive “sizes” of the pieces spawns from the size of their instrumentation: “Waves Breaking on Rocks (Elegy for All of Us)” is for solo piano while “The Roque Dalton Songs” employ many musicians—but their impressions reflect the opposite. The piano work is expansive and watery, conjuring large images and panoramic landscapes. The songs for tenor travel in a narrower path—tribal in their percussion, gospel-like in their tone pairings, and purposefully targeted, they give off a small, focused vibe. Both of the pieces benefit from their aural sizes, and create an album of sounds that is attention grabbing and varied. Deceiving isn’t always a bad thing.

“Waves Breaking on Rocks (Elegy for All of Us)” is a suite of elegies. Divided into six parts, the suite commemorates six different people that Garland has lost in his life. It is composed almost entirely of chords, and creates more of a space than a linear narration. Each section might not get stuck in your head, such as a certain sentence from a lost one might not, but the overall ambiance of that person can be surfaced with subtle things, and this piece creates those moods.

Pianist Aki Takahashi could not have performed the piece better—she keeps the serene lines of the suite flowing and consistent with the stories being told. The last piece in the suite, “Waves Breaking on Rocks 2/Autumn (Again),” shows her control and ability to avoid even slight dynamic rises that would break the tranquility of the piece.

The suite begins with “The White Place,” referring to the limestone formations in Abiquiu, New Mexico called Plaza Blanca, and commemorates the photographer Walter Chappell. Beautifully piercing, monumental chords set up the foundations for each phrase of the piece and are followed by smaller, controlled hills of hushed tones. The entire suite utilizes ostensibly simple chords, but when listened to they create a dreamy story that is complex in the way nature is seamlessly intricate.

Through each of the pieces, the chords unravel into wandering and separated lines. Significant change comes in “A House in Island Bay,” composed for poet Alan Brunton. The listener is reminded of small rocks rippling on a lake as still as glass. It progresses to the intense solidity of previous chords. The last two sections of “Waves Breaking on Rocks” are Americana in their own ways—“Sierra Madre,” composed for composer Lou Harrison, is homey and nostalgic and is the only section to use violin, and appropriate and comfortable addition. “Waves Breaking on Rocks 2/Autumn (Again)” is a still and jazz-tinged piece, and is almost impossible to listen to without stopping for a minute (or five minutes and forty six seconds) and being absorbed by it.

“The Roque Dalton Songs,” the second collection on the album, is a collection with much more of a landing spot than “Waves Breaking on Rocks.” Though the instrumentation is larger, it is less expansive, and this isn’t a bad thing. The listener’s brain follows the music in a more direct line—if “Waves Breaking on Rocks” was a walk in a meadow, “The Roque Dalton Songs” are a hike through a specific path. Roque Dalton was a Salvadorian poet and revolutionary who was executed during El Salvador’s civil war.  Five of Dalton’s poems were set to music by Garland in this piece. The poems range from free verse to dialogue to prose (“he was a really super cool guy” is probably my favorite line), and they seem very human, like Dalton can be seen scribbling the words onto paper right in front of you.

The chamber ensemble, Santa Fe New Music, is comprised of percussion, harp, piano, trumpet, bass clarinet, and violins. The ensemble is successful in layering the very obvious sheets of sound—the percussion, piano, and harp construct a stable foundation, the bass clarinet and trumpet create the walls, and the violins occupy the figurative room of sound. The tenor John Duykers keeps a triumphant tone throughout the entire collection, and conquers the sometimes out-of-the-blue high notes. The music keeps a dance rhythm, resolving itself at the end of each phrase, and doesn’t really break free of this except for the second piece, the smooth and sly “Como La Siempreviva,” and inside the fourth piece, “History of a Poetic.” The final piece, “Como Tú,” employs the harp in a refreshing way by retaining the previous piece’s dance like feel. However, it makes it more of a sensual one, like a dance between two people in privacy.

A piano is one object. A chamber ensemble is many. But sound is one idea, and Peter Garland’s album Waves Breaking on Rocks enforces that. Deceived or not, these are waves worth listening to.

Alexander Berne

Flickers of Mime/Death of Memes (2 discs)

Innova Recordings

http://www.amazon.com/Berne-Flickers-Mime-Death-Memes/dp/B005S7JEOI

What do you get when you combine Kubrick moods, outer space, Middle Eastern vibes, clouds of metal timbre, and a lot of talent in mixing those ingredients? Something similar to a disc by Alexander Berne. How about combining the primeval, the creepily serene, and the sense of slow motion. You’ll get the same thing.

Now, coalesce both of those, and you’ll get an illustration of the arc of human nature woven into an ambient collection. Or, more accurately, you’ll get Alexander Berne’s new album Flickers of Mime/Death of Memes.

Flickers of Mime/Death of Memes is the third collection of works by Berne and his Abandoned Orchestra. Berne is a composer from New York who has primarily immersed himself in the jazz scenes of America and Belgium. He is a saxophonist and has also invented a new wind instrument, one he calls the “saduk,” a mixture between a saxophone and a duduk.

Flickers of Mime/Death of Memes is an album divided into two discs. The first, Flickers of Mime, is meant to symbolize what a mime might create using its bare movements. Many of the tracks off this disc include very 80s-space sounding, sustained notes, such as “Flicker I” and “Flicker VII,” while many others include eastern scales and timbres. However, these tracks are not obviously themed. Each is soon invaded with other ambient sounds that help the disc do what it was meant to do; through each of the “flickers” on the first disc, a different world, structure, or mood is built. Despite some of the celestial sounds, Flickers of Mime/Death of Memes does not use any synthesizers or the like. “Flicker VIII” sounds like calm, Middle Eastern-sounding club music, and can be compared to songs by Mocean Worker with its sassy wind motifs paired with loose piano phrases. “Flicker X” is a whirlwind of sounds that the listener arrives at in linear ways, like passing each one in a car.  While each track is one train of thought without much individual development, the way the flickers are lined up in the album creates one leg of the arch that is Flickers of Mime/Death of Memes.  “Flicker XI,” the last track on the disc, is eerily similar to “Flicker II,” but with faded glances back at previous flickers.

The second disc, Death of Memes, is meant to be the second leg of the arch—the one that recedes back to the ground. One would more literal apocalyptic sounds on a disc that illustrates the downfall of a society. But the pieces on the disc are mostly loosely primitive, like the aftermath of said apocalypse. While Berne’s album’s first disc focuses on the construction of aural formations, the second one is the destruction of those. The perspective is also different on the two discs. Flickers of Mime is, hypothetically, meant to come from the hands of one man. Death of Memes describes the downfall of a large mass, like a city. Many of the tracks on the disc are much more subtle, such as “Meme III,” a piece of unfettered yet serene piano accompanied by ambient drones. “Meme I” is one of the only tracks that moves slightly in the realm of more aggressive dystopia, with subdued timpani and other percussion.

Alexander Berne’s Flickers of Mime/Death of Memes is an album that doesn’t fall into the whirlpool that ambient music, or music of the sort, sometimes can—monotony. Because of the well thought-out relationships between the two discs, Berne has constructed a body of work that works together in ways not only aurally, but conceptually. It offers a new way of looking at the arch of humanity; the arch that we ourselves, as humans, might never understand.

A Different World 

string chamber music of James MacMillan 

Gregory Harrington, violin 

Estile Records 

• Kiss on Wood
• After the Tryst
• A Different World
• Fourteen Little Pictures
• Walfrid, on his Arrival at the Gates of Paradise
• 25th May, 1967
• In Angustiis…I
• In Angustiis…II (for violin solo)

James MacMillan’s lyrical instrumental writing often takes a back seat to his choral work and the compositions and performances on this CD make an excellent case against seeing MacMillan as someone restricted to the vocal idiom. Violinist Gregory Harrington is the central figure in these compositions and particularly shines on the opening three pieces for violin and piano. The wistful and lonesome melodic lyricism is expressive and emotionally compelling while still sounding very much of contemporary times. Pianist Simon Mulligan makes an excellent collaborator in these three works and is given a bit more to chew upon when cellist Caroline Stinson joins in for the Fourteen Little Pictures for piano trio. These miniatures are strung together in a seemingly stream-of-consciousness form that I find difficult to parse into separate components. On the one hand, the trio blends together extremely well for a singular chamber sound. On the other, the fourteen smaller works, almost entirely attacca, makes grasping the through line a bit of a challenge, at least to my ears. Programming this piece in the middle of the album makes a lot of formal sense. The shorter pieces do well to frame this 20 minute monolith.

The somber and haunting-yet-real musical material of the violin and piano works returns in Walfrid, on his Arrival at the Gates of Paradise for solo piano. Abruptly, the scene changes from the contemplative into a delightful dance tune towards the end. I find this move particularly enjoyable since it plays on the idea of being sad that someone is entering paradise. I can’t hear the dance tune strike up without smiling and, at the same time, being a little sad. Simon Mulligan has a generally light and breezy touch on the keys which keeps even the heaviest of chords from sounding too downtrodden. Similar treatment holds true for the piano works 25th May, 1967 and In Angustiis…I. The final track brings attention to the crystalline sounds of Gregory Harrington, who here brings an almost folk-ish quality to the solo violin version of In Angustiis…II. There is a permeating sadness to the piece but the affect is one of solitary contemplation instead of heart wrenching sobs. MacMillan’s music is evocative and expressive, even when he isn’t setting text which expresses those emotions. The performers and performances on this disc seize every opportunity for expression on this recording and make a very compelling disc.

Anna Thorvaldsdottir

Rhízōma

Iceland Symphony Orchestra, CAPUT Ensemble, Justin DeHart

Innova Recordings

http://annathorvalds.bandcamp.com/album/rh-z-ma

So much of music is meant to paint pictures of specific themes, images, or moments in life that the composer wants to recreate. Lyrics are written to songs that exemplify certain days, or orchestral compositions are often given a paved path in which they are meant to take the audience, as if guiding them into a narrow passageway of the composer’s brain. This practice of recreating moods on purpose and shaping them into sound is the large majority of music-making. But sometimes there are those sounds that are planned to be unplanned. The composer didn’t sit down and say, “Measure 87 is where the audience will hear the bird take off.” Instead of sounds that map out certain twists and turns, there is that music that is meant to build tangible spaces through its abstract, changing nature. This type of music that is meant to be almost a stream of conscious perspective instead of a controlling narrative is refreshing, and Anna Thorvaldsdottir has created music like this in her new album Rhízōma.

Rhízōma is a collection of works by Thorvaldsdottir, the Icelandic composer who focuses on large soundscapes and dense masses of sound. Rhízōma is Thorvaldsdottir’s debut album, but she has had works performed by the Icelandic Symphony Orchestra and other ensembles, has been performed at festivals such as Nordic Music Days, and had her composition “Hrím” awarded as composition of the year at the Iceland Music Awards in the past.  It is surprising that Rhízōma is Thorvaldsdottir’s first album—her body of work is enough to fill a handful of CDs.

Thorvaldsdottir’s album certainly holds true to her described preferences of composition. Rhízōma, whose title is a word referring to a stem that produces roots, is an album full of music that seems to be collected right off the surface of tundra. When one listens to the album, the sound can almost be seen seeping from a frosty mountain range or frozen lake (I guess it helps that she’s from ICEland… haha?). The album is full of soundscapes that fill the head of the listener, but they aren’t too abstract that one feels as though they are listening to an orchestra tuning. Their bare nature makes them incredibly intriguing, something that is difficult to achieve, as it is a thin rope to walk on.

Many of the album’s sounds are made up of Penderecki-esque, suspenseful moods. A constant bass line lays the chilled foundation of some pieces, such as the beginning of the chamber ensemble piece “Streaming Arhythmia” performed by the CAPUT Ensemble. Spikes of violin strokes bounce around the orchestra in this piece over the bass line, creating a tangible space out of the sound, much like echolocation. However, “Streaming Arhythmia” isn’t only occupied by hanging-by-a-thread string sound clouds. A war-like percussion interlude invades the space, and when it’s gone, the strings lurk in the background like watchful animals. Rhízōma’s other chamber work, “Hrím” (referring to the growth of icicles), is chilling. Though it has no protruding bass lines, it reminds one of Ingram Marshall’s “Fog Tropes,” or, more generally,  a lake covered with a layer of fog. Thorvaldsdottir is obviously talented—she can paint these open and echo-filled pieces, but she does not lose the interest of the listener as so many of these bare pieces often do.

“Hidden,” the 5-movement piece for percussion on piano by Justin DeHart, is a piece composed gamelan-like percussion and mysterious moods. The piece includes decisive plucks of the piano strings that snuggle up right against indecisive, frightened trickles of the higher-register strings. On the album, “Hidden’s” movements are split up between the other works. It acts as almost a palate cleanser to the denser orchestral/chamber works, but also can be a focus on its own. The piece does not have any clear development—this is obviously intended, but with exception to the last movement, “Past and Present,” all the movements seem to employ the exact same collection of strikes to the piano.

“Dreaming,” the album’s piece for orchestra performed by the Iceland Symphony Orchestra, uses similar techniques as the other pieces. These sounds and waves would get tiring, but “Dreaming” benefits from the use of stronger melody lines (small, but significant in comparison) and more of a sense of weaving than blurring. Singular lines of percussion or flute pulses become cornerstones of the work, and it’s odd but influential too see simple sounds like this become so powerful.

Thorvaldsdottir’s Rhízōma is an album that paints an incredibly vivid picture of who Thorvaldsdottir is as a composer. Her moods, thicknesses, and textures are exposed completely, something that is important to a debut album. Rhízōma succeeds in following in the footsteps of composers such as Penderecki and Ligeti, but also treads in its own side of the tundra by creating creamier and slightly less atonal works.  This music doesn’t tell obvious stories of specific moments, but rather constructs the feelings of landscapes and situations. And even though it doesn’t ever get too horror movie-esque, you probably don’t want to be listening to this in the dark.

Monica Harte, soprano 

Long Island Songs 

songs by George Brunner, Tom Cipullo, Christian Mcleer, and Anne Dinsmore Phillips 

MSR Classics 

• Long Island Songs by Tom Cipullo
• Three Japanese Songs by George Brunner
• See the Lilies of the Field by Anne Dinsmore Phillips
• In Remembrance of Me  by Anne Dinsmore Phillips
• Why Faith Abides  by Anne Dinsmore Phillips
• No Bird Soars too High  by Anne Dinsmore Phillips
• Three Light Pieces by Christian McLeer
• Longing Eternal Bliss by Christian McLeer

So Percussion

Steve Mackey: IT IS TIME

Cantaloupe CD/DVD

CA21076

IT IS TIME features the music of Steve Mackey. Mackey decided to make a four movement suite in which each movement serves as a “mini-concerto” for a different member of So Percussion. In addition to solo turns, there’s also plenty of formidably scored ensemble interactions. The piece has a diverse instrumentation, employing found objects, traditional instruments, metronomes, and more exotic components such as steel drums.

Indeed, it seems to include everything but the kitchen sink (as evidenced by the video below!). One is glad that the package includes a DVD, as this is a piece that is a feast for the eyes as well as a bedazzling battery for the ears.

IT IS TIME is a meditation on the ephemeral nature of our existence. The fleet-footed passage of time is underscored by its metronomic pulse-driven memento mori. But rather than allowing this trope to become too melancholic, Mackey instead chooses an affirmative celebration of polyrhythmic activity, underscored by So Percussion’s ebullient virtuosity.

MP3: Steel Drums

Snow White Turns Sixty
Gillian Hollis, soprano
Dale Trumbore, piano
Dissonant Gorgeous Productions CD/DL

In the call for scores for the Sequenza 21/MNMP Concert, we were smitten with twenty-something West Coast (by way of New Jersey) composer Dale Trumbore’s music. We’re thrilled that her string quartet How Will it Go is going to be performed by ACME on the concert (10/25 at Joe’s Pub: have you reserved your free seat yet?).

My own enthusiasm for Trumbore’s work recently received further confirmation when her debut CD arrived in the mail. Snow White Turns Sixty includes three of Trumbore’s song cycles, all of them settings of contemporary female authors. The musical language is post-romantic in tone, peppered with reference points ranging from high brow musical theater such as latter day Stephen Sondheim to the lush art songs of Dominic Argento and Daron Hagen. Occasionally, as in the song “Hazel tells Laverne,” one encounters a breezy jazzy cast, similar in temperament to that found in the cabaret songs of William Bolcom (but written for Gillian Hollis’ high soprano voice). Hollis sings with great flexibility, and never allows the punishingly high tessitura of some of the songs to deter her from poise-filled musicality. Trumbore performs the piano parts with a pleasing, delicate touch and in supportive fashion. While the disc strikes me as more gorgeous than dissonant, it whets my appetite for more music from this talented emerging composer.


Snow White Turns Sixty by Gillian Hollis & Dale Trumbore

yMusic

Beautiful Mechanical

New Amsterdam Records CD

Ever since the inception of the New Amsterdam imprint, we’ve been talking about the “indie classical” phenomenon: The genre cross pollination between contemporary classical artists informed by indie rock and indie rockstars who are interested in concert music. While there have been a number of significant releases on New Am and other labels, Beautiful Mechanical the debut release of yMusic, may be the most synergistic example of this fertile crossover domain’s musicking yet.

My Brightest Diamond & yMusic | A Take Away Show | Part 01 from La Blogotheque on Vimeo.

yMusic is a Brooklyn based sextet of classically trained yet versatile musicians (personnel: violinist Rob Moose, trumpeter CJ Camerieri, cellist Clarice Jensen, vlutist Alex Sopp, clarinetist Hideaki Aomori, and violist Nadia Sirota). All of them have performed conventional concert repertoire, more avant-garde material, and their fair share of pop gigs and recording sessions. As such, they’re an ideal collective to collaborate with both classically trained composers and indie musicians.

The contributors have similarly eclectic backgrounds. Son Lux, who composed the title track, is also a classically trained composer. But his motoric, electronica-inspired take on chamber music in the title track sizzles with chart-topping energy. And while it asks a lot of the musicians, it never puts them in the position of playing something unidiomatic. Annie Clark (better known in pop circles as St. Vincent) spread her wings for the first time in a chamber music context, but the results are most compelling; her composition “Proven Badlands” is one of the standouts on the album. It ranges in sentiment from pastoral Americana in a Copland-esque vein to jazzy brass riffs to post-minimal ostinatos: yet all of these styles cohere in a fascinating postmodern collage with considerable momentum.

Shara Worden (My Brightest Diamond) not only works with yMusic on Beautiful Mechanical, contributing two cuts to the album; she also employs them on All Things Will Unwind her latest record for Asthmatic Kitty. We’ll be talking more about that record in another post, but you can check out a video below of one of Worden’s “indie art songs” that she performed with yMusic at last year’s Ecstatic Music Festival. Here, her instrumental compositions exude a fetching conflation of gentle whimsy and supple lyricism.

Gabriel Kahane’s “Song” does indeed lead with melody, which begins in conjunct fashion but gradually becomes more questing and wide ranging. Trumpet and winds are ultimately given long-breathed and intricately shaped lines that channel something of Les Six’s enigmatic use of an extended triadic vocabulary. Sophisticated stuff that belies Kahane’s succinct title.

Two of New Am’s mainstays, Judd Greenstein and Sarah Kirkland Snider, each contribute a work as well. Greenstein’s “Clearing, Dawn, Dance” is lithe, airy, and fleet-footed; it’s played with mercurial grace by yMusic. Snider’s “Daughter of the Waves” likewise takes a delicate, almost Impressionist approach, with ebullient cascades of sound along the way.

Few albums with such a diverse array of participants can boast uniformly high quality. But Beautiful Mechanical is the exception: a case in which many cooks leaven and thicken the broth. It looks to be one of contemporary classical’s noteworthy recordings of 2011.


Beautiful Mechanical by yMusic

Drew Baker

Stress Position

featuring Marilyn Nonken, piano

New Focus CD FCR 116

Composer Drew Baker’s music is demanding stuff. Highly conceptual, viscerally physical, and often politically charged, it requires much from its performers. Baker is fortunate to have a staunch advocate in pianist Marilyn Nonken. She has championed his music, commissioning works and programming them frequently on her recitals. This New Focus disc demonstrates just how much she has internalized music that would fell many a less formidable artist.

Take the title work, which is named after the “vigorous interrogating techniques” that, during the past decade, proved to be one of many regrettable blights on the United States’ human rights record. The piece requires Nonken to have her arms extended to both registral extremes throughout, gradually stretching her hands to navigate wider intervals and thicker chords. Sensory assault – increasingly piercing amplification – and, live at least, sensory deprivation (the work ends with the lights out, imitating a detainee being blindfolded) are also part of the package. It’s an unnerving, deeply troubling piece about an equally squirm inducing topic. The most amazing thing to me about all this – Nonken asked for this piece: she’s a plucky pianist!  Asa Nisi Masa, another amplified work, features fists full of dense low register clusters, delivered in a battery of cannonades.

But, thankfully, Baker isn’t merely indulging a streak of danger music throughout the disc. National Anthem, another piece commissioned by Nonken, is a far more delicate affair. Yet it’s just as politically motivated as Stress Position. The Star-Spangled Banner is deconstructed, played in three different keys, in a slowly moving overlapping canon. What might seem like an Ivesian conceit is deployed in a more Feldmanesque fashion, to agreeable effect. Also quite appealing is Gray, another slowly developing piece featuring angular linear counterpoint and gently articulated yet dissonant harmonies, delicately shaded with careful attention to pedaling indications and keen awareness of the decay rates of various resonances. It’s played quite beautifully in this detailed performance by Nonken; she inhabits it with graceful poise.

Baker and percussionists Sean Connors and Peter Martin join Nonken for Gaeta, a work for two pianos and water percussion. I heard this piece’s premiere at the Guggenheim’s Works and Process Series back in 2006 and found it to be quite impressive.  One was awash in a plethora of water sounds, hand percussion, and prepared piano in a soundscape that was abundantly varied yet never overly busy. While Gaeta thrives in a live acoustic, the New Focus disc has done much to capture its shimmering sonic magic.