Music for Guitars, Bass Clarinets & Contrabasses – Various Artists (Aural Terrains) Last month, I was pleased to have my music visit Cafe Oto for the first time, with Feier, a solo piece, performed on a contrabass clarinet. The venue is well known for presentations of experimental music of many kinds. Not all of the shows there are in circulation, but Cafe Oto has some releases for sale on their website. Others have been documented for the label Aural Terrains, including a new recording of a gig from 2023, made by a most heterogeneous grouping of instrumentalists: guitarists, bass clarinetists,
Read moreSome composers refine the language they inherit. Others trouble it, bend it, and compel it to confess what it would rather conceal. Jan Dismas Zelenka (1679-1745) belongs to the latter lineage. His music does not decorate Baroque convention so much as interrogate it from within, testing how much strain the form can bear before it reveals something truer than elegance. Nowhere is this more evident than in the six Trio Sonatas, ZWV 181. To encounter them is to overhear the composer thinking aloud: restless, contrarian, devout, and faintly dangerous. Zelenka came to Dresden as a virtuoso of the orchestra’s lowest
Read moreTo mark the enduring impact and legacy of Steve Reich’s music on the music of our time in this his ninetieth anniversary year, my plan is to attend and review one concert every month featuring one or more of the great American’s compositions. And what better place to start this celebratory journey of discovery than a performance of Reich’s landmark Music for 18 Musicians at Kölner Philharmonie featuring the brilliant Ensemble Modern & Synergy Vocals. There are probably only a handful of works I’d go to the end of the world to hear performed live, and Music for 18 Musicians is one of
Read moreA veneer is a promise made by surfaces. It is the thin layer we polish so the hand does not snag on splinters, the face we present so the wound can breathe without being seen. Stephen Upshaw’s debut recording understands this double bind with unnerving clarity. Across four works, his viola does not seek to anesthetize pain but study it as a corporeal fact, as memory lodged in muscle and bone, as a story retold until it becomes survivable. The cumulative effect is that of the self in rehearsal, learning how to carry its history forward without collapsing beneath it.
Read moreThe first rule of MANTRA is “You do not talk about MANTRA.” The second rule is that if you find yourself unable to stop thinking about MANTRA, you talk around it, circle it, cultivate the soil from which it grows. That is how this album begins, not with Karlheinz Stockhausen’s looming monolith, but with John Liberatore’s Sedgeflowers, a choice that feels both mischievous and deeply principled. Pianists Ryan McCullough and Andrew Zhou do not kick down the door. They plant something. And what emerges is an astonishingly inventive and coherent program that understands that radicalism is a spirited little ouroboros
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