The Noon to Midnight event at Disney Hall allows you to choose from twenty different performances at various places throughout the venue. It is impossible to see everything over the twelve hours, but here is more about of what I heard. Jacaranda Music took the main concert stage at 2:00 PM to perform The Illusion of Permanence, by Rajna Swaminathan, a world premiere and LA Phil commission. The ensemble arrived, consisting of double bass, cello, viola and violin along with a flute, oboe, trumpet, marimba and piano. The composer played the tabla and provided vocals. All were led by conductor
Read moreJ.S. Bach: St. Matthäus-Passion Pygmalion, Raphaël Pichon Harmonia Mundi 2xCD J.S. Bach: St. John Passion English Baroque Soloists, Monteverdi Choir, John Eliot Gardiner, conductor Deutsche Grammophon 2XCD The Bach Passions are a staple of the choral repertoire for Holy Week, and there are a number of fine recordings of them. There’s room for more; two additions to this corpus from 2022 are extraordinary: a St. Matthew Passion recorded by Pygmalion, directed by Raphaël Pichon for HM, and a St. John Passion by one of the great Bach conductors, John Eliot Gardiner, with his house bands the English Baroque
Read moreOn Saturday, April 9, after a pandemic-enforced hiatus of two years, the Noon to Midnight: A Day of New Music event returned to the Disney Concert Hall sponsored by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. This popular open house features local new music groups and performances throughout the Disney Hall venue. It is informal, low cost, and a chance to catch up with musical friends and listen to a variety of new sounds. The LA Phil commissioned a number of pieces and their New Music Group also performed. The many offerings overlap so you can’t hear all of it, but with 12
Read moreOn April 2, 2022 in Salmon Hall at Chapman University, Grammy Award-winning pianist Nadia Shpachenko was the guest artist for a recital of piano music that featured two world premieres. Recent pieces by contemporary composers Ian Dicke, Dana Kaufman, David Sanford, Adam Schoenberg, and Pamela Z were included, centering on a theme inspired by the game of soccer. The final work of the evening was Invasion, by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Lewis Spratlan, performed by an instrumental ensemble and composed in response to the horrific events unfolding in Ukraine, Ms. Shpachenko’s home country. The first piece on the program was Telstar
Read moreHans Abrahamsen Schnee Lapland Chamber Orchestra, John Storgårds, conductor DaCapo This is the second recording of Hans Abrahamsen’s Schnee (‘Snow,’ 2008), an hourlong imaginative ensemble work populated by idiosyncratic canons interspersed with intermezzos. The first, by Ensemble Recherche in 2015, was an excellent document of the piece. That said, this second interpretation is welcome, as it brings out different aspects of Schnee. Recherche’s recording is atmospheric and colorful, while Lapland Chamber Orchestra provides a rhythmically charged and dramatically intense rendition, in vivid sound with a wide dynamic range, and incisive delineation of canonic voices. One needn’t adopt a
Read moreMicrofest Records has recently released Memories of a Shadow, a new CD by Chris Votek. The liner notes state that Votek is “…an innovative composer refracting Indian Classical music through the lens of modern chamber music.” The string ensemble performing on this recording consists of two violins, two cellos and a viola. The lower registers predominate, creating an unusual sonic balance and perspective. The resulting album is an appealing blend of raga forms incorporating Western medieval harmonies clothed in deep tones and a rich timbre. Serpents, the first piece of the album, opens with sustained tones dominated by the cellos
Read moreKit Downes Vermillion Kit Downes, piano; Petter Eldh, double bass; James Maddren, drums ECM Records After listening to Obsidian, Kit Downes’s debut as a leader for ECM, one might justifiably think from his considerable prowess as an organist that it was his sole specialty. Not so, as is eminently demonstrated on Vermillion, a piano trio album in a modern jazz idiom for ECM. On a set of originals by Downes and bassist Petter Eldh, along with a rendition of “Castles of Sand” by Jimi Hendrix, these two musicians along with drummer James Maddren demonstrate a simpatico collaboration, filled with
Read moreBarbara Monk Feldman Verses GBSR Duo with Mira Benjamin Another Timbre CD Given her association with Morton Feldman, both personal and professional – he was both her spouse and her instructor at Buffalo University – it is tempting to look for comparisons between their compositions. Tempting but unrewarding. Yes, Monk Feldman creates slow, quiet pieces, but so do many composers since Morton Feldman who have greatly departed from his legacy. A fundamental distinction one hears on Verses, Another Timbre’s Monk Feldman recital disc, is that the composer has a cogent sense of form; the longest piece is thirty-one
Read moreMorton Feldman Late Works for Piano For Bunita Marcus, Palais de Mari, Triadic Memories Alfonso Gómez Kairos 3xCD Morton Feldman’s late piano works are totemic structures, influential on a generation of composers from the Wandelweiser collective to American experimentalists. Slow-moving, prevailingly soft, and quite long, apart from the Palais de Mari, which still clocks in at nearly a half hour in duration. This Kairos recording presents compelling renditions of Feldman in clear, focused sound that captures the pedaling and decay of notes with admirable detail. Alfonso Gómez’s recent recording of Messiaen’s Vingt Regards, also on Kairos, was an impressive
Read moreCatherine Lamb: String Quartets JACK Quartet Kairos 2xCD Catherine Lamb’s studies with James Tenney at Cal Arts, as well as substantial research of figures such as Erv Wilson, have led her to crafting compositions with subtle tuning systems based on just intonation. On a double-CD from Kairos, JACK Quartet performs an early piece, Two Blooms (2009), and a recent, gargantuan opus, divisio spiralis (2019). Where extended just-intonation composer Ben Johnston created quartets like his Fourth, based on “Amazing Grace,” where the focus is melodic cells, Lamb is interested in the confluence of different intervals, creating beats from difference and
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