Contemporary Classical

CD Review, Contemporary Classical

Music for Violas, Bass Clarinets & Flutes

Released on Thanos Chrysakis’s Aural Terrains label, Music for Violas, Bass Clarinets & Flutes unfolds as a considered gathering of voices. The instrumentation itself suggests a downward gravity, an attraction to breath, wood, and string as sites of glorious friction. Across the program, Jason Alder, Tim Hodgkinson, Chris Cundy, Yoni Silver, and Lori Freedman inhabit the lower reeds with an intimacy that borders on corporeal. Vincent Royer and Jill Valentine draw violas into their extremes in either direction, while Carla Rees and Karin de Fleyt allow flutes to hover, flicker, and occasionally wound the air.

The album opens with Gérard Grisey’s Nout (1983) for solo contrabass clarinet, a work that seems to arrive already half submerged. Its quiet beauty is multiphonically arrayed, each tone carrying the weight of an interior life too dense to be articulated outright. There is a self-examining melancholy at work, like a nautilus shell cracked open to expose its chambers, once inhabited but now resonant only with memory. The sound moves forward hesitantly, aware of its own fragility, until it is pierced by something harsher and more elemental. A foghorn-like call slices through the darkness, a fleshly blade that refuses narrative consolation. In its wake, biography itself seems to dissolve. Footprints are erased by high tide, and what remains is the fact of sound as survival in a hostile expanse.

From this eroded shoreline, Niels Christian Rasmussen’s Gestalten (2018) for bass clarinet and tape introduces a different kind of tension, one between the human trace and an environment that feels uncannily clean. Bell-like sonorities bloom within the electronic layer, accompanied by exhalations and points of light that seem to puncture shadow rather than dispel it. Against this backdrop, the bass clarinet enters as an imperfect presence, its tone roughened by time, carrying residue wherever it goes. There is a sense that the instrument stains the surrounding purity simply by existing within it. The music dwells in this unease, allowing purity and profanity to entangle until neither can be isolated. What emerges is not conflict but recognition, an acknowledgment that human sound is always marked, always implicated, and therefore alive.

Thanos Chrysakis’s Octet (2018) expands the field outward, bringing together two violas, three bass clarinets, baritone saxophone, and two alto flutes in a work that feels ritualistic without ever becoming ceremonial. The relationships therein are tactile and deliberate, offered up as if to time itself rather than to any listening subject. Overtones converge and separate, brushing against the perceptual edge, creating the sensation of watching a film while remaining acutely aware of what lies beyond the frame. With the composer positioned behind the camera, we are left to infer motive and movement, to speculate about cause and consequence. Yet the music offers space rather than instruction. In the gaps between gestures, the listener is free to wander, gather fragments, and rearrange them into provisional meanings. The result is quietly linguistic, a vocabulary shaped by force and friction rather than syntax.

Salvatore Sciarrino’s Hermes (1984) for solo flute returns the focus inward, tracing a line between tenderness and restless wakefulness. The music moves with the unsteady logic of insomnia, never entirely abandoning itself to calm. Extended techniques shimmer at the edge of audibility, suggesting something otherworldly, an aura that hovers just out of reach. It is less an effect than a presence, something felt before it is understood. Karin de Fleyt’s performance captures this fragility with remarkable poise, allowing the flute to become both messenger and message, its divinity inseparable from the physical act of producing sound.

That sense of exposure deepens with Aura, a bass clarinet improvisation by Yoni Silver based on Iancu Dumitrescu’s work of the same name. Here, the terrain grows rougher, more unstable, as if structure itself were beginning to fail. Notes split apart under pressure, their internal components laid bare. The reed salivates, the sound fractures, and what might once have been wonder turns inward, confronting its own limits. There is a foreboding quality to this performance, an intuition of collapse, yet it is rendered with such honesty that it becomes strangely affirming. The beauty here is not decorative but visceral, emerging from a willingness to remain exposed.

Lori Freedman’s To the Bridge (2014) stands as the emotional and conceptual center of the album. Featuring the composer on bass clarinet, clarinet, and voice, the work introduces the human presence as a culmination. Her vocalizations recall the fearless inventiveness of Cathy Berberian, even while being wholly her own. The bass clarinet playing is extraordinary, coaxing from the instrument a saxophonic sheen that bristles with a charged, almost dangerous pleasure. Across these miniatures, Freedman traverses extremes of temperament, from boisterous assertion to quiet self-examination, never losing sight of the work’s fundamental drive. At its core, this is music about endurance, about finding ways to persist when language alone is insufficient.

Tim Hodgkinson’s Parautika (2019) follows with a kind of gentle recalibration. Scored for two violas and three bass clarinets, it might suggest density or weight, yet the prevailing impression is one of translucence. The gestures are brief, direct, and unencumbered by excess, allowing the music to communicate with immediacy. Even as the piece closes on a more declarative note, it feels earned rather than imposed.

The program concludes with Chrysakis’s Selva Oscura (2017/18) for viola and bass clarinet, a work that distills the entire preceding journey. Its language is pared down to essentials, each sound placed with intention, each silence given weight. It is a sustained meditation, etched onto the surface of an unfamiliar world. In its economy, it invites reflection rather than resolution. We are not transported somewhere else so much as returned, altered, to the selves we were at the outset.

Taken as a whole, this collection is marked by a rare integrity. Despite its reliance on extended techniques and abstract forms, it never relinquishes its commitment to storytelling, even when the contours of that story remain elusive. The music does not explain itself, nor does it demand comprehension. Instead, it lets listening serve as a form of dwelling. Thus, we are free to encounter ourselves without judgment, to leave changed in ways that may only become clear when time grants us the distance to recognize what has taken root.

by Tyran Grillo
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Ukho Ensemble Plays Grisey (LP Review)

 

Gérard Grisey – Vortex Temporum

Ukho Ensemble Kyiv, Luigi Gaggero, conductor

Self-released LP

 

Composer Gérard Grisey (1946-1998) employed methods that often involved magnifying seemingly small details into overarching concepts. This is particularly true of spectrographic measurements taken of single pitches, such as the low E on a trombone, which revealed a series of overtones that he would use to craft harmonic systems for a number of pieces. This spectral approach, also employed by Tristan Murail, Hugues Dufourt, James Tenney, and others, was an important feature of French music, and later that in other countries, from the 1970s onward. In the piece Vortex Temporum (1995), another element is put under the magnifying glass, a flute arpeggio taken from Daphnis et Chloé (1912) by Maurice Ravel (1875-1927). The result is a hyperintensive investigation of, as the title suggests, circular motion through time. Scored for a Pierrot ensemble – flute, clarinet, violin, viola, cello, and piano – the piece does not leave Grisey with as many of the nuances of color that a full orchestra would, but he nevertheless manages to explore myriad timbral deployments. 

 

A subtext that surely did not escape the notice of the piece’s intended audience is the fragmentation of the source material, in a sense the disassembling of a work firmly ensconced in the repertoire. Just as, in their day, the impressionists threw down a gauntlet and challenged the musical establishment, and Boulez and other members of the avant-garde did similarly with their elders, so Grisey and the other spectralists were interested in a radical reassessment of how music was to be ascertained. 

 

Ukho Ensemble Kyiv take a deconstructive approach of their own, providing a charged, intense, and incisive rendition of Vortex Temporum. Any reference to impressionism, besides the notes and gesture of the borrowed quote, is removed from consideration. This is faithful to the score and Grisey’s musical aesthetic. Interesting to note, too, that the Pierrot ensemble signifies a connection to modernism; from Schoenberg to the present day it has been a go-to scoring for countless post-tonal composers. 

 

While there are places in the outer movements that are quite forceful, there are also segments, such as the denouement of the first movement into the opening of the second, with a number of glissandos, where the music seems to liquefy. But a sense of conflict is never far away, as the muted clusters in the piano that support this passage suggest, and eventually the oasis of the middle movement is supplanted by intensity, led by nervous microtones and multiphonics and a crescendo of the piano’s dissonant verticals that is doubled by other members of the group. The strings also respond in kind to the clarinet’s effects, and the resultant music builds in amplitude to a hushed cadenza of descending slides, followed by a return to the first movement’s assertiveness in the final one. 

 

This third large section expands upon the way that the Ravel quote is addressed, via fragmentation, augmentation, and interpolations of the effects that sound in the second movement. The sense of reverberation is enlarged as well, and many phrases echo instead of having clean offsets. Then, a pizzicato strings passage moves to the fore. It could be seen as a bit of sly commentary on the second movement of Ravel’s string quartet, which contains a plethora of plucked notes. This is then juxtaposed with ever more frenetic arpeggiations and glissandos, overblown wind notes, and penetrating sustained pitches. All of this underscores temporal morphing, and it is made manifest that the title serves as both a reference point and a remit for the composition. Several sections of quietude are each in turn cast aside in favor of ever more intricate sonic whirlwinds. An eventual unwinding once again stretches out the material, with explosive interruptions keeping the intensity level at a peak. Hushed moments then crosscut with vicious attacks and fluctuating lines, and a long tremolando creates a dynamic hairpin. What ensues in its wake is reflective, with breathy woodwinds, sustained strings, and a tolling repeated note from inside the piano in a decrescendo to silence.

 

Vortex Temporum is a late piece in Grisey’s catalog. He died in 1998, at age 52, of a brain aneurysm. It fulfils a number of the objectives he set out to explore, both from technical and philosophical vantage points. Luigi Gaggero leads the Ukho Ensemble in a superb rendition of the piece. It is one of my favorite recordings of 2025.

 

  • Christian Carey 

 

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical

Four New Releases on New Amsterdam Records

Zeelie Brown, the apocalypse is not the end but the unveiling (NWAM202)

Essvus, What Ails You (NWAM201)

Ruby Colley & EXAUDI, Hello Halo (NWAM200)

Travis Laplante & JACK Quartet, String Quartets (NWAM199)

Based on the evidence provided by this exciting quartet of recent releases, the sails on New Amsterdam Records’ windmill rotate with ever-increasing productivity, invention and creativity these days.

The two most recent recordings, the apocalypse is not the end but the unveiling by cellist and multimedia artist Zeelie Brown and What Ails You by Essvus, deal directly with social, political, and personal issues.

Part of NewAm’s new series of composer’s lab releases, Brown’s debut album offers timely and sobering reflections on the politics of race in American history. As stated in the opening track “let go, let god,” also featuring Sierra Leonean-American singer and composer YATTA, “this album is a prayer for anybody looking at injustice and just needing the inspiration to stand up and fight.”

Brown’s arresting yet compelling concept album speaks to these matters with clarity, compassion, conviction and some urgency. In “gossamer,” Brown’s voice is placed in passionate counterpoint to floating, silky-sounding chords, while in the anti-capitalist diatribe “i pray for this country,” electronically generated beeps intersect with a soulful Bill Withers-style harmonic sequence on piano.

Two instrumental interludes foreground Brown’s skills as cellist—the first a soaring, freewheeling improvisation, the second modelled on a descending Chopin-like lament bass. A similar chaconne-type sequence on piano echoes through the empty corridors of “in the waters between life and death,” whose lyric is located in the queer clubs of the 1980’s during the AIDS pandemic, and with the plight of its shattered and slighted communities.

Powered by restless African-inspired rhythms and pulses (as heard in “mbele”), perhaps it’s inevitable that comparisons will be drawn with contemporary cellists such as Sheku Kanneh-Mason, Abel Selacoe, and Vincent Ségal, who have likewise interrogated the chequered histories of their own cultural backgrounds in relation to race and political history. Nevertheless, Brown’s corporeal music emanates powerfully from within, inseparable from its (or their) own body and the physicality of sound.

This sense of self-presence manifests itself just as effectively in Brown’s vocal extemporizations, where swooping falsetto lines carry within them a striking authenticity. Brown’s falsetto is the antithesis of false-etto, its unique sound a mix of vocal styles and gestures—Nina Simone (who is quoted in “in the waters”), Sylvester, Earth, Wind & Fire’s Philip Bailey, Jimmy Somerville of The Communards, and Anohni (previously Antony and the Johnsons), spring to mind.

In comparison, the nine-track What Ails You by Essvus (aka Gen Morigami) projects more raw and edgy qualities. Brown’s polyrhythmic Latin-American percussion patterns are replaced with industrial metallic noises, pounding found objects, clanging alarm bells, and Hüsker Dü-type screaming guitars, as heard on the opening track “Inner Violence.” The album comes across as a drawn-out primal scream—Edvard Munch in freeze-frame slow-motion—which is hardly surprising given that What Ails You is the result of Essvus’s struggles with mental health and familial estrangement.

The most intense tracks mesh gritty rhythms with manipulated vocal gestures and phrases, as heard on the unbalanced and disorientated, Sonic Youth-like “To Not Think.” Treated vocal interjections also underpin the sound-collage-heavy “Warmth,” its percussive wall-of-sound and sped-up speech utterances suggesting the influence of experimental rock duo Battles. Dystopian drum and bass patterns rattle through the rhythmic rubble of “Moldsporing” and “Every Hope, A Dream, A Prayer,” while “Counterfactuals” sets off as a Joy Division homage before spiralling into space-age The Doors, trippy disco, and glitchy musique concrete.

Despite the tangle of seemingly incompatible styles and influences, the end result makes marvellous sense, albeit in a twisted, contorted way.

There are quieter moments, too, such as in “Anaesthetic Midnight”—whose sounds appear to have been fed through a giant reverb wormhole—or the dreamy opening to “Hell and High Water.” During these moments, Essvus almost flirts with beauty. In What Ails You, one is left not so much with a ‘Law of Diminishing Returns’ but instead a ‘Law of Increasing Returns’: the more one listens to the album, the more one is struck by the detail buried inside its strange, solipsistic sound world.

A far gentler world engulfs Ruby Colley’s six-track EP Hello Halo. The talented, versatile composer, violinist and sound artist teams up with the excellent Exaudi vocal ensemble to present a suite that explores the intersection between contemporary music and health and wellbeing. The idea behind Hello Halo came from Colley’s experiences of growing up with her brother, Paul, who is neurodivergent and non-speaking. Despite Paul’s inability to communicate via ‘everyday’ language, Colley recorded the rich range of sounds and gestures her brother makes, using his voice and other sonic fragments to provide a vocal map for the music.

The result works both on a purely musical and programmatic (i.e., extra-musical) level—musical in the way in which Colley marries her brother’s vocal gestures with extended vocal and string techniques, and ‘programmatic’ because the suite operates effectively as a kind of “day in the life” of Ruby and Paul.

Given the self-imposed limitations (six voices, solo violin, soundtrack), Hello Halo is surprisingly varied in scope. “What Is It” is almost madrigal-like, the two “Duets” more fragmentary and collage-like, “Echoes” blending hocket-like textures with a quote from “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star,” and the alphabet-inspired “Cosmology” more earthy and folk-like.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the influence of Meredith Monk, Joan La Barbara, and Caroline Shaw comes across at various points—such as in the layered entries and stacked harmonies in the title track. Nevertheless, the use of such techniques in the context of the “non-verbal” world in which Paul inhabits yields a unique and different outcome. It’s as if Colley’s music has scraped away at the grain of the voice to capture the character of the person that lies behind it. If ever we needed reassurance that music is the perfect vehicle for communication beyond language and words, here it is.

‘Quartet’ takes on added significance in the last of the four releases surveyed: Travis Laplante’s String Quartets 1 & 2, performed by JACK Quartet.

I had previously listened to, and enjoyed, Human—Laplante’s 2019 album of solo saxophone improvisations—but it hadn’t fully prepared me for his two string quartets. Both contain lyrical qualities, in addition to microtonality, yet these elements are more subtle and integrated in the quartets.

Folklike and wistful, String Quartet No. 1 begins with a kind of pure resonance of the string quartet sound. Subtle use of microtonality gives way to flowing ostinato patterns, suggesting Philip Glass and Michael Nyman’s string quartets but with the added heft of a late Beethoven opus. Part 1 ends with a surge towards a series of flickering, pulsing open fifths.

These buildups are aided by Laplante’s treatment of the quartet as a homogenous physical force. These moments often appear to contain the seeds of their own destruction, collapsing from within. This happens in Part 2 of the String Quartet No. 1, where the process of atrophy ends in a valedictory-style duet between the two violins.

In certain respects, String Quartet No. 2 follows a similar recipe, but the musical outcome is quite different. It opens with the grace, tenderness and beauty of a marriage ceremony, but soon enough the mood changes into something more unsettling. The first violin struggles to extricate itself from the prevailing atmosphere, causing a rift within the ensemble. As in the String Quartet No. 1, the middle section of Part 1 is more free-flowing, ostinato-heavy. Eventually it breaks free via a passage that sounds like neo-microtonal Bartók.

Part 2 begins with a Partita-like passage for solo viola, before being joined by the rest of the quartet. Subtitled “the spirit takes flight after death,” the final section exudes a similar transcendental spirit to the ending of the first quartet, offering a glimmer of hope amidst doubt and uncertainty. Laplante’s aesthetic may be partly grounded in theoretical and conceptual writings on resonances, alternate tunings, and microtonality, but this is not ‘paper music.’ His music has been imagined into being as sonic reality.

As expected, JACK Quartet apply themselves with the same level of interpretative understanding, nuance, accuracy, precision, dedication, and distinction to Laplante’s music as they would, say, a Ligeti or Lachenmann quartet. Laplante’s music draws in the listener, commanding attention and reflection.

Which leads us back to that famous windmill logo again. Established in 2008 by composers Judd Greenstein, Sarah Kirkland Snider, and William Brittelle, NewAm may not be exactly ‘new’ anymore, but the label is still blazing a trail in those fluid cross genre intersections between experimental and alternative rock, post-classical, post-minimal, and everything-in-between. Powered by the winds of change and innovation, NewAm’s mission has always been to transcend traditional and outdated genre distinctions, offering a home to music that’s stubbornly “outside” and unclassifiable … and new music is all the better because of it.

by Pwyll ap Siôn
CD Review, Composers, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Piano, Twentieth Century Composer

Pierre Boulez Played by Ralph van Raat (CD Review)

Pierre Boulez Piano Works, Ralph van Raat (Naxos)

 

The Pierre Boulez centennial year has seen a number of important concerts, publications, and recordings devoted to his music. Boulez (1925-2016) wrote three piano sonatas, which are considered important both in his catalog and in the avant-garde repertory. Contemporary music specialists tend to gravitate towards these totemic compositions – Idil Biret has recorded them for Naxos – but there are several other works for piano by Boulez, and they too are worthy of attention. Ralph van Raat has previously recorded for Naxos two selections by him, the early pieces Prelude, Toccata, and Scherzo and Douze Notations (both composed in 1945), the latter of which underwent expansions of some of its movements into pieces for orchestra. 

 

Thème et variations pour la main gauche (“Theme and Variations for the Left Hand,” also from 1945) was written for Bernard Flavigny. Each of the variations is of a different character, and the virtuosity required to play them is substantial. Instead of the pointillism and counterpoint of Webern, who would soon become Boulez’s preferred composer among the early exponents of 12-tone music, the somewhat classicized deployment of the theme gives the piece a Schoenbergian cast. 3 Psalmodies, yet another piece from the watershed year 1945, owes a debt to Messiaen for its avian filigrees and additive rhythms. Compared to Boulez’s other early pieces, the psalmodies are expansive, adding up to nearly a half hour of music. 

 

There are also two pieces from later in Boulez’s career. Fragment d’ une ébauche (1987), lives up to its title, being an aphoristic yet dense occasional piece, written in honor of Jean-Marie Lehn’s winning of the Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Lehn was a colleague of Boulez at the Collége de France, where the composer gave a series of lectures from 1975-1995. 

 

The final piece on this CD, Incises (2001) is well-wrought  and substantial in its own right, but it was  taken as the starting point for a more elaborate ensemble composition, sur Incises. Indeed, the processes undertaken in the composition of Incises serve as a lynchpin for the materials deployed throughout many of Boulez’s later pieces. Rather than tone rows, intricate manipulation of pitch material based on hexachords (six-note collections) yields a variety of colorful gestures, many based on sonorous verticals, elaborate runs, and trills. 

 

This is a particularly revealing recording that has been prepared with consummate care. Biret’s renditions of Boulez’s piano sonatas do Naxos proud, but a second installment of the pieces by van Raat would be a welcome addition to their catalog.

 

  • Christian Carey 

 

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical

Meredith Monk in review

The acclaimed singer, minimalist and intermedia artist gets a new documentary and a new record

Billy Shebar: Monk in Pieces (2025, 110th Street Films, 95 minutes)

Meredith Monk has long attracted the attention of journalists and filmmakers intrigued by her synthesis of minimalism, vocalism and theater, and by a personality whose conversational informality masks the stoic tenacity that’s propelled one of the most iconic careers of any avant-garde performing artist. Monk in Pieces, premiered in February 2025 and currently making the rounds of indie movie houses, is the latest and most biographically-oriented entry in a line of Monk documentaries whose predecessors include Peter Greenaway’s 1983 portrait for BBC 4 (which remains a useful guide to her earliest and most experimental works) and Babeth VanLoo’s 2009 Inner Voice (which emphasizes Monk’s engagement with Buddhism, a topic that receives only glancing attention in Monk in Pieces).

Neutron and Meredith Monk in Monk in Pieces

What’s most notable about Monk in Pieces is that it shows its subject, 82 years old at the time of its release, preparing for the inevitable final chapter of her life, whose trajectory is traced in a broad (though not strictly chronological) arc, divided into a dozen-odd chapters each centered (as the title implies) on a single major work. Helping to underscore the theme of mortality is Monk’s pet tortoise Neutron, given to her as a gift by Ping Chong in 1978 and the inspiration for her 1983 album Turtle Dreams. We hear Monk conversing with Neutron (“Do you even know who I am…who’s fed you 42 years? It’s like, what does turtle consciousness tell me?”), and nursing her through an ultimately fatal illness that leads into the film’s final and most touching scene in which Monk is shown by herself contentedly eating a simple supper in the kitchen of the Tribeca loft she’s occupied since 1972.1 Afterwards she cleans the table, the ritual poignantly accompanied by one of her earliest songs, Do You Be?, first recorded on her 1970 debut album Key (though the version used in the film is a later one from the eponymous 1987 album).

Ping Chong and Meredith Monk in 1982

It’s Chong who contributes the film’s most candid and insightful commentary. Four years Monk’s junior, he was her student at NYU in 1970, and later her lover and company member. To the accompaniment of Madwoman’s Vision, he recounts how Monk suggested that they have children together. “I went, ‘Uh, I don’t think so! Artists shouldn’t have kids because the art comes first'”. The tension between family and art turns out to be a recurring theme in Monk’s life. Chong eventually left Monk after a decade to focus on his own art (“I wanted to be a director, and I kept giving her direction when she didn’t want it”). And he attributes much of Monk’s career motivation to the strained relationship she had with her mother, the swing singer Audrey Marsh. (“I think a lot of Meredith’s anger comes from not being valued by her mother. She just wasn’t there for her. And also she had to fight to be accepted in the performing arts world. In a way it’s a fight to survive. Pain is where art comes from, it has to come out of need. EM Forster stopped writing when he found his lover—he was too happy!”).

Monk seems to concur with Chong’s assessment. As Marsh sings These Things You Left Me (she enjoyed great success as a young woman singing jingles for radio commercials before becoming another expendable industry castoff), Monk relates: “She wasn’t home a lot. I was dragged around from job to job when I was a little kid, like going through a meatgrinder. I saw her pain of the conflict between being a mother and being an artist, and that both of them were not 100% satisfying. I vowed that that would never happen to me, and that I wanted to do my own work and make my own path.”

Monk is more circumspect when discussing the other major love interest of her life, the Dutch choreographer Mieke van Hoek, who like Chong was Monk’s student before becoming her partner of two decades. She’s seen only in still photos and silent vignettes, and it was her sudden death of cancer in 2002 that inspired Monk’s Impermanence. But though Monk concedes that “I learned more from [her death] than from anything [else] that ever happened to me—I wasn’t the same person after that”, she declines to tell us just what she learned or how she changed. In contrast to Chong, Monk is a person who only reveal her vulnerabilities through her art.

Meredith Monk and Björk at the Guggenheim Museum by Gerry Visco

The remainder of the film is constructed from a montage of mementos, reflections, performance footage, excerpts from Monk’s dream journals (accompanied by cutout animations by Paul Barritt), and testimonials by colleagues and collaborators, some of them archival (including Merce Cunningham, who died in 2009), others shot specifically for the film (such as New Sounds host John Schaefer). The eccentric Icelandic pop singer Björk makes an appearance on behalf of the younger generation, recounting the impression made by Monk’s 1981 Dolmen Music album when she heard it on her boyfriend’s record player at the age of 16. As the soundtrack dissolves from Monk’s recording of the track Gotham Lullaby to Björk’s own 1999 cover, the uninhibited Icelander—apparently harboring a dim view of lower Manhattan—opines “her loft that she’s lived in for half a century is an oasis in a toxic environment, and I feel that Gotham Lullaby represents that as well”.

In another vignette Monk describes the strabismus (eye misalignment) that plagued her as a child. “I wasn’t able to see out of both eyes simultaneously”, so her mother took her to Dalcroze eurhythmics from ages 3–7 to help with the integration of body and rhythm. Monk approvingly cites Dalcroze’s assertion that “all musical ideas come from the body”. (“Ding! I think that’s where I’m coming from.”). And on other occasions she’s credited Dalcroze with “influencing everything I’ve done. It’s why dance and movement and film are so integral to my music. It’s why I see music so visually”—a key to one of the fundamental differences between her approach and the more formal and abstracted patterns of the classic minimalists.

Meredith Monk in Peter Greenaway: Four American Composers

Monk In Pieces is very much an in-house affair. It was co-produced by longtime Monk ensemble member Katie Geissinger, whose husband, Billy Shebar, directed it. And as might be expected, it occasionally drifts into hagiography, most notably in the montages of bad reviews and—in the case of Atlas (1991)—snarky communications with Monk’s collaborators at Houston Grand Opera, all serving to invoke the time-honored fable of the misunderstood genius who’s ultimately vindicated. Chong also picks up this trope (“Critics were saying that what she was doing was nonsensical, was crazy, was not serious.”), and it’s true that Monk was the target of harsh invective from the notoriously snobbish Clive Barnes during the 1970s. But other critics were more supportive, including Barnes’ New York Times colleague Anna Kisselgoff, who praised the 1969 premiere of Juice at the Guggenheim Museum. Notwithstanding her detractors, it was the modern dance community, already largely dominated by women, that took Monk seriously well before she’d established much credibility with musicians. Ironically by the mid-1980s those attitudes had largely flipped, with composers reacting favorably to the long forms and newfound sophistication of Dolmen Music (compared to the more embryonic Key and Our Lady of Late), while dancers were more inclined to dismiss her choreography as amateurish (“Her movements haven’t evolved, they’re just doing shuffle steps in unison” was one New York choreographer’s complaint).

Meredith Monk and Don Preston in Uncle Meat

I would have preferred to hear less from the celebrity talking heads (including an original Talking Head, David Berne) and more insight into Monk’s early years, especially her time in Los Angeles in the late 1960s when she belonged to Frank Zappa’s extended circle (she appears as the ”Red Face Girl” in Zappa’s film Uncle Meat, and her housemate and music director was Mothers of Invention keyboardist Don Preston, who is still alive and lucid in his 90s). I’d also be interested to know why, despite having been in fairly close proximity to the Bay Area origins of classic minimalism, Monk has seldom embraced La Monte Young, Marian Zazeela, Stimmung, or the triumvirate of Riley, Reich and Glass as formative influences. But whatever might appear on one’s list of omissions, it’s still gratifying to revisit many of the now-obscure source materials that did make it into Monk in Pieces, including Phill Niblock’s original film documentation of Juice.

Coming on the heels of Monk in Pieces is Cellular Songs, Monk’s latest release for the ECM label, extending a storied discography that commenced with Dolmen Music, and which now encompasses 13 albums, of which the first twelve were repackaged and given an new and expanded accompanying booklet in the 2022 compilation Meredith Monk: The Recordings, cherishingly assembled by ECM for her 80th birthday (it was one of my picks for that year). Cellular Songs features Monk’s all-female vocal ensemble in a medley of mostly unaccompanied songs (with piano, simple percussion instruments or hambone-style body percussion making the occasional appearance). Only one of the songs (Happy Woman) has a text. In the aforementioned Peter Greenaway documentary Monk proclaims “I don’t really have contempt for the word. I have contempt when the word is used as the glue of something, which has happened in theater and a lot of film”). Indeed, it’s Monk’s avoidance of texts that has helped keep her often joyful music from running aground on the shoals of sentimentality.

Cellular Songs by Julieta Cervantes

The titular reference of Cellular Songs is to biological cells (“the fundamental unit of life”), not to mobile phones. And the music is subdued but affirmational. In Monk in Pieces, the composer says “In the 80s I was doing apocalyptic pieces [e.g., Quarry and Book of Days], and then I started thinking about how maybe offering an alternative was more useful”. With Monk’s still-capable but undeniably aging voice in the forefront, and with the sparse texture conjuring the sound world of her early recordings more than her recent excursions with larger forces (e.g., Songs of Ascension), it reads like a bookend to Dolmen Music—a gentle lullaby for the faithful from the twilight of her career.

Meredith Monk: Astronaut Anthem (from Do You Be)

When assessing the oeuvre and legacy of Meredith Monk, there’s a sum-of-the-parts factor that Philip Glass alludes to in Monk in Pieces: “The thing about Meredith is, she was a self-contained theater company. She among all of us was the uniquely gifted one [as a performer]”. Monk’s talent as a singer, including a three-octave range and command of ululations and other extended techniques, is undeniable. And by emphasizing the voice she stands apart from the classic minimalists, including Glass, who tended to treat singers as part of a larger instrumental group. In other respects, though, she’s often been accused of dilettantism—a jill of all trades, but not a master composer, choreographer or dramatist. In some ways her reception has been similar to Alwin Nikolais’, who began as a musician, learned the theatrical crafts of lighting and costuming, and ultimately became known primarily as a choreographer and teacher, but was seldom cited as an exemplar by specialists in any of those fields. It was rather the totality of his futuristic visual and auditory spectacles that drove his influence and reputation.

Interestingly, one of Monk’s key teachers at Sarah Lawrence College was a Nikolais alum (Beverly Schmidt Blossom). And like Nikolais, her greatest impression may ultimately be felt in the domain of new music theater, an area where she’s remained a bona fide avant-gardist, eschewing text-centric storytelling and the trappings of traditional opera that Glass retreated to after Einstein on the Beach in favor of wordless, non-linear forms, often in service to female-centered narratives.

Meredith Monk in Education of the Girlchild via The House Foundation for the Arts

Speaking about Education of the Girlchild (1973), whose plot—such as it is—proceeds in reverse chronological order, Monk said: “I don’t really feel that by nature I’m a political artist. The piece has six women characters. Usually you’ll see men-bonded groups like The Seven Samurai or the Knights of the Round Table. You don’t usually see six strong women who are not angry women but are just fulfilled women as the main heroes of an artwork”.2 Whatever one thinks of Monk’s simple, ambient-adjacent music, it’s hard not to be impressed by her corpus of aesthetically radical multimedia works that manage to avoid the clichés of both strident militantism and New Age sentimentality.

Toward the end of Monk in Pieces, Monk embraces a sentiment expressed earlier by Ping Chong: “Doing the work is still meaningful. The other stuff just falls away. Maybe this whole thing is a way that I created something to affirm that I exist.” There may or may not be anything genuinely new in the film or in Cellular Songs, but both do justice to a career that’s remarkable for its meaning, resilience, and impact.

Meredith Monk, Philip Glass and Conlon Nancarrow at Djerassi in 1992 by John Fago

[1] a six-story L-shaped building on West Broadway that also once housed Roulette Intermedium
[2] recounted in Sidsel Mundal’s 1994 film Meredith Monk

by Michael Schell
Concerts, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, New York

Pierre-Laurent Aimard at the 92nd Street Y

Composer George Benjamin.

Pierre-Laurent Aimard in Recital

92nd Street Y

November 19, 2025

Published in Sequenza 21

 

NEW YORK – Pianist Pierre-Laurant Aimard has had a long and fruitful collaboration with the composer George Benjamin. Aimard’s recital program this past Wednesday at the 92nd Street Y was conceived and built around two of Benjamin’s pieces, Shadowlines, a group of six canons for solo piano, and Divisions, a new four-hand piece on which the composer joined him for this New York premiere. 

 

The other programmed works were meant to complement the Benjamin pieces and proved to be strong foils for them. Nikolai Obukhov (1892-1954), a Russian who, during the Bolshevik Revolution, resettled in Paris, is an esoteric and intriguing figure. He created an alternate version of music notation, developed decidedly different methodologies for total chromaticism, and engaged in a kind of mystical masochism: he used his own blood to correct compositions, mirroring artistic travails to the sufferings of Christ. Eccentricities aside, Obukhov’s Révélation (1915), performed with great intensity by Aimard, is highly engaging, a tantalizing glimpse of an underserved oeuvre.

 

Aimard is regarded as one of the most eloquent interpreters of the music of Pierre Boulez (1925-2016). Indeed, he was heard just last month performing selections from Douze Notations (1945) with the New York Philharmonic. Here he played the composer’s Piano Sonata No. 1 (1946), another prodigious piece from the nascency of the postwar avant-garde. Unlike the second sonata, in which Boulez suggested he “blew up the form,” this piece keeps a toehold in the tradition of the genre, all the while testing its limits with post-tonal formations and elliptical phrasing. It is, like all the other works on the program, considerably demanding. 

Aimard and Benjamin.

Like Boulez, Benjamin studied with Olivier Messiaen, and the two were also connected by collaborations in performance. Shadowlines may not entirely blow up classical tradition – it is, after all, composed of a half dozen canons – but Benjamin shares with Boulez an affinity for post-tonal writing and herculean virtuosity. And like the Notations, each section takes on an entirely different character, with mercurial shifts of register, gesture, and density. 

 

The second half featured Le Tombeau de Couperin (1919) by Maurice Ravel (1875-1937). The Couperin in question, in a line of distinguished composers, is François (1668-1733), whose elegant suites formed a template for Ravel’s own tombeau, this one commemorating friends of the composer who had been killed in World War I. If listeners might reasonably expect the piece to have a mournful cast, they are likely to be surprised by the ebullience of much of it. Most of the movements of Le Tombeau de Couperin have been orchestrated, and in the piano version one can hear the vivid colorations that may have helped to inspire their being recast for larger forces. 

 

Divisions was finished just this year, and when crafting the work Benjamin clearly had his collaboration onstage with Aimard in mind. Four-hands music has a choreographic element to it: how do two pairs of paws operate without overcrowding among 88 keys? Is there enough “elbow room?” Benjamin writes parts that take risks in this regard, with the primo (right side) player occasionally reaching over an active secondo (left side) player to add a bass note to the proceedings. Similarly, the secondo invades primo territory for alto register countermelodies and widely dispersed harmonies. In Divisions, one can hear affinities to all of the other pieces on the program – kudos for curating – with use of dissonance alongside counterpoint, dance-like rhythms alongside angular gestures – in a mélange of materials. Benjamin and Aimard have been touring this program to a number of cities. One hopes this serves double duty as rehearsals for a forthcoming recording.

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical

Gaia-24. Opera del Mondo (Lesya Ukrainka National Academic Theatre, Kyiv), November 27, 2025

Can art be created during a time of war and conflict? Is it even required when a country is besieged by bombs, ballistic missiles and drone attacks, its borders pushed back by the constant assaults of a belligerent invading army? Should we make time for theatre, dance, music, and song when a far more real, deadly drama is unfolding in a theatre of war on one’s doorstep?

These questions are never far from the people of Ukraine. With the country locked in a bloody battle with Russia—three months shy of its grim four-year anniversary—it would be easy for Ukrainians to question the point and purpose of artistic expression in such times.

For me, these realities were laid bare within hours of arriving in Kyiv. After the ten-hour night train from the Polish city of Przemyśl, my first evening was spent mostly underground in a bomb shelter deep inside Hotel Ukraine, while Shahed drones and Iskander, Kalibr and Kinzhal rockets rained down on the city. Although I never felt in any imminent danger, descending several flights of stairs to the urgent wail of air-raid sirens was both intimidating and terrifying.

I had arrived a few days before the much-anticipated performance of Opera Aperta’s Gaia-24. Opera del Mondo at the Lesya Ukrainka National Academic Theatre on 27 November. Described by its composers and musical directors Roman Grygoriv and Illia Razumeiko as a contemporary geohistorical opera—and produced by Olga Diatel, Volodymyr Burkovets and Yuliia Parysh—Gaia-24 premiered in Kyiv in May 2024. It toured several European cities before being staged again in Berlin, Kyiv and Zaporizhzhia in 2025, and received the Classical:NEXT Innovation Award in May 2025.

I had to see it. But that meant travelling into a war zone.

People still smile in Kyiv. One can almost be fooled into thinking life is normal. With over a thousand years of architectural history, ancient and modern sit side by side. It feels like any East European city, yet war hovers over conversations like a dark cloud. Scratch the surface and Ukraine reveals a country weighed down by tragedy, sorrow, conflict and suffering.

I was in Kyiv only four nights. I shudder to think what it must be like to live under such anxiety and stress for more than 1,000 days—over three and a half years since Russia’s full-scale invasion.

In such circumstances, art becomes even more vital. Its messages feel more urgent. As W. B. Yeats once said, “we sing amid our uncertainty.” And in Ukraine, they must sing.

Gaia-24 is a child of its time. Its main catalyst was the Russian army’s decision in June 2023 to blow up the dam holding the Kakhovka reservoir—an act of cowardly ecocide that caused an environmental catastrophe. Within days, eighteen billion cubic metres of water had vanished into the Black Sea, and the Kakhovka Sea simply disappeared off the map.

In three acts and almost two hours, Gaia-24 builds toward this terrible moment. Act III quotes the Latin Agnus Dei over videos of parched earth and the now-iconic image of an old upright piano swept away by the floods (the image was actually taken on Khortytsia Island in Zaporizhzhia).

Acts I and II place these images in a wider frame, though the opera offers no linear narrative. Subtitled “Songs of Mother Earth,” Act I unfolds in front of the proscenium arch and along the gallery spaces—at one point, three dancers even climb over the seated audience. Drawing on Sephardic, Crimean Tatar and Ukrainian folk and dance cultures, with hints of other traditions—perhaps an Argentinian tango or a touch of Parisian salon music—Act I is Dionysian and energetic, a celebration of life and its connection with nature.

Act II turns darker. Subtitled “Cabaret Metastasis,” it opens with slip-sliding slow-motion Xenakis, disjointed cellos giving way to metallic percussion and acousmatic noise. A Bulgarian folk melody sung in close harmony by three female voices is punctuated by random piano clusters. Disembodied fragments of Schoenberg’s Pierrot Lunaire and Pergolesi’s Stabat Mater intrude, cut through by pulsing generator sounds.

The opera’s full Dionysian spirit erupts in the chaotic Act III (“Dance for Mother Earth”), where thrash metal shifts abruptly into bubblegum Europop, and nineteenth-century operetta quotations lead to a hilarious spoof of American rapper Cardi B, one of the opera’s many highlights. As the work spirals further out of control, an epilogue returns it to its folk roots with a rousing version of the Ukrainian song Ой у неділю (“Oh on a Sunday”).

Vivid, visceral, engrossingly eclectic and utterly compelling, Gaia-24 is many things, but above all it stands as a passionate cry against the destructive forces of evil and cruelty. Gripping, urgent and unmissable, it serves as an extraordinary artistic statement in a time of war. When presented in this way, art remains a deep and vital form of human expression and communication: an opera the world should see.

by Pwyll ap Siôn
Contemporary Classical

Teresa Virginia Salis, Adam Gołębiewski, Anna Jędrzejewska & Kamil Kowalski, R2

Wesoła Immersive New Media Art Center, Krakow, November 22, 2025

One cannot draw too many conclusions from the evidence of one concert, of course, but from the rich wealth and diverse array of live electronics, multimedia, sound design and improvisation presented at Wesoła Immersive New Media Art Center in Krakow on November 22, 2025, it appears that the Polish new music scene is undergoing something of a creative resurgence.

In the presence of a packed and enthusiastic audience, Teresa Virginia Salis’s Natural Paths, for alto flute, electronics and video, took the listener out of the performance space and deep into the natural world. I was fortunate enough to catch a presentation by Salis earlier in the day at the Krzysztof Penderecki Academy of Music on Listening Soundscapes. The Sardinia-born musician talked at length about an aesthetic approach rooted in residual spaces and sonic environments, where sound mapping, bioacoustics, and ecological memory intermingle and coalesce.

Salis originally trained as a flautist, and one can see how the instrument’s associations with nature, wind, breath, and pulse has led the composer to explore soundscapes that often go unnoticed, but which nevertheless exert their own haunting, living presence and beauty. As Gilles Clément’s concept of the ‘third landscape’ suggests, such sounds resonate with the undetermined fragments of a planetary garden. Salis cites Barry Truax, Hildegard Westerkamp, Max Neuhaus and Ryoichi Kurokawa (among several other names) as influences, but her evocative and alluring soundscapes inhabit unique qualities of their own. Natural Paths made me want to hear more from the Italian composer, which is always a positive litmus test for musical durability.

A very different kind of immersive experience belonged to percussionist Adam Gołębiewski’s live extemporisations. On one level, his thirty-minute Untitled, for drums, objects, and electronics, was an assault on the senses: viscerality cranked to the max. Gołębiewski’s Jackson Pollock-esque sweeping and circling hand-cymbal movements across the diameter of an upturned bass drum generated a series of loud cloud-like sound masses, evoking Helmut Lachenmann’s instrumental musique concrète style. Some in the audience struggled to cope with the sonic bombardment, shielding their ears during much of the performance.

Grappling with the raw physicality of sound, Gołębiewski’s performance practice was striking and original, suggesting comparisons with a latter-day Han Bennink. During a short intermission that followed Gołębiewski’s piece, I quizzed the percussionist about his frame of reference. He paused, signposted me to an interview he gave with Claire Biddles in The Quietus earlier this year, and uttered one name: Xenakis. Perhaps the key to the new music of today can be found in Pléïades, then…

With Gołębiewski’s large-scale sweeping gestures still ringing in my ears, Anna Jędrzejewska’s Talkativeness of Trees, for live electronics, inhabited a very different world: tiny timbral fragments placed underneath a sonic microscope. Kamil Kowalski’s accompanying video did much to guide the listener’s gaze in similar ways. Its impact was gently subversive. Perhaps the devil is in the detail after all.

The evening ended with Krakow-based R2 (Kuba Rutkowsi on drums and Redink Thomas on live electronics), whose music seemed to take the patterns and pulses of electronic dance music and feed it through something akin to an interplanetary recycling cyberpunk machine, resulting in something that sounded strange yet familiar.

I didn’t stay on for the Audio Art Festival’s closing afterparty at 11pm. The concert itself had overrun and it was getting late. Walking back to the hotel as the snow fell steadily on Krakow’s picturesque buildings and quiet cobbled streets, I reflected further on today’s new music scene in Poland. With rock musicians such as Radiohead’s Jonny Greenwood and Manic Street Preachers’ James Dean Bradfield acknowledging the influence of composers such as Lutosławski, Penderecki and Bogusław Schaeffer, perhaps now is the time to look forward to new generations living and working in Poland who push musical boundaries. Having been established for over thirty years, the Audio Art Festival under the guidance and leadership of composer, sound artist, performer and mentor Marek Chołoniewski, remains at the centre of new music innovations in this country. It will be interesting to see how things develop during the next few years and decades.

by Pwyll ap Siôn
Classical Music, Commissions, Concert review, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, jazz, Lincoln Center, New York, Orchestras, Premieres

NY Philharmonic Revels in a Rainbow of Colors

Violinist Nicola Benedetti performed Wynton Marsalis’s Violin Concerto with the New York Philharmonic on November 13-16, 2025 (credit Jake Turney)

An expansive palette of colors was on display at the New York Philharmonic concert at David Geffen Hall on Friday. David Robertson shone a light on the performers and the scores, exposing nuances of hues, pastels, brights and brilliance.

The entire program – Igor Stravinsky’s Petrushka, the Violin Concerto by Wyton Marsalis and the world premiere of a new work by Caroline Mallonee – focused on color and mood. I had high hopes in particular for this performance of Petrushka, to erase my memory of a flaccid reading of the work a couple of years ago. The Philharmonic redeemed themselves, as Robertson elicited a vivid performance that was cinematic in its expression. The work exploits every section of the orchestra, so much so that it is practically a concerto for orchestra.

Lakeside Game by Mallonee also evoked rich visual images. The work was co-commissioned by the Philharmonic, as part of its impressively large commissioning effort Project 19. Mallonee’s inspiration was her childhood memories of walks along Lake Michigan, with the sound of skipping stones and imagery of shimmering sun-dappled water. The music was a montage of scenes on a carefree summer day, and more than once was reminiscent of Samuel Barber’s bucolic composition Knoxville: Summer of 1915.

The great musical polymath Wynton Marsalis wrote Concerto in D for Violin and Orchestra in 2015 for Nicola Benedetti (the two wed this year). It’s a tour de force for both soloist and orchestra, a display of virtuosity for the entire 45 minutes of the four movement work. Benedetti was completely at home with the artistry, varied techniques and technical demands that the score called for. A mix of jazz and classical genres, the music boasted a shifting kaleidoscope of styles. From the first moment of the piece to the last, everyone on stage looked like they were having a ball.

by Gail Wein
Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Los Angeles, Orchestral

Ventura College Orchestra – Celebration!

On November 1, 2025, the Ventura College Symphony Orchestra presented “Celebration!”, a concert of contemporary music marking the Centennial of the founding of the school. Yunker Auditorium filled with a capacity crowd and the College Symphony – some 70 players strong – sprawled across every inch of the concert stage. Over two hours of music was programmed, featuring four world premiers and including compositions by past and present music faculty. Highlight of the concert was the premiere of Encantos, a piece by New Zealand composer Mark Menzies commissioned by Conductor Ashley Walters. Appropriately, the concert concluded with George Gershwin’s popular Rhapsody in Blue, a work that, like Ventura College, premiered 100 years ago this year. “Celebration!” was an ambitious program and a milestone in the evolution of the Ventura College Music program.

First up was Encantos (2025). Mark Menzies, the composer, is a virtuoso violinist, chamber musician, pianist, conductor and a strong advocate for contemporary music. He has appeared at the Ojai Music Festival and performed throughout the US, Europe, South America, Australia and Japan. Menzies is presently Professor of Music at the University of Canterbury in Christchurch New Zealand. Starting in 1999, Menzies was on the faculty at Cal Arts for some 17 years. While there, he founded the Formalist Quartet, whose members included Ashley Walters and Andrew Tholl, now both music faculty at Ventura College.

During his time at Cal Arts, Menzies had occasion to visit the Ventura College music department. In the program notes he writes: “…when I drove for the very first time to Ventura down the 126 (and I had only begun to drive), all the orange blossoms were in full bloom. It was an incredible feeling…” Encantos, the opening work on the concert program, reflects the joy Menzies felt coming here to Ventura. The piece was written in tribute to Ventura College on its 100th anniversary.

Encantos begins with slow string tones accompanied by solitary notes from a harp. More strings join in underneath with a lush wash of warm sound. Percussion is heard, yet the overall effect is quietly soothing and exotic. The large orchestra successfully maintained careful control over the dynamics and the result was an almost pastoral feeling. As the piece proceeded, a crescendo in the strings ended in a sharp brass sforzando passage signaling new drama and suspense. At that moment, a series of mechanical clickers were heard rising from the audience accompanied by random clapping from the members of the orchestra. The overall effect was like the splashing of raindrops in a heavy rainfall. This escalated into a violent storm with a series of loud and rapid phrases from the trombones and upper brass. The wild texture continued and culminated in a heavy wash of loud sounds that evoked a sudden California flash flood. The energy of this rose quickly to a peak, and ended in a sudden silence.

A skittering of quiet woodwinds followed – perhaps the calm after the storm. Solemn viola notes were heard along with a strong bass drum beat. As the full orchestra joined in, Encantos took on a more familiar and conventional form after the chaos of the preceding section. The strings coasted on, led by a bouncy clarinet solo. After a period of low throbbing in the basses, followed by a stout sforzando brass chord, Encantos faded to a quiet finish.

Encantos is challenging contemporary music and the orchestra navigated the complexities and nuances of the music in good order. The applause was sustained and sincere and the composer led in the cheering for the orchestra who gave a fine performance of his piece.

Another world premiere, Celebration for Orchestra (2025), by O. Powers, followed. Ollie Powers teaches composition and music technology at Ventura College and has studied with Pauline Oliveros. Celebration unfolds in layers so that each section of the orchestra plays a separate theme, in turn. As the piece proceeds, all the sections are combined together at the finish. It is just the sort of musical experiment of which Pauline Oliveros would approve, simple in concept and with surprising results.

The string section begins Celebration with a sharp opening chord followed by a strident pizzicato. The feeling here is purposeful and march-like, delivered with precise ensemble playing by the large string section. The brass entered next, with lush chords and strong passages accompanied by solid percussion. This was heard clearly in the audience, even with the brass section located in the very back of a crowded stage. Finally the woodwinds picked up their theme, a bright and bubbly passage full of movement and joy. The final section included all of the parts previously introduced, now in a great wave of sound. The combination of parts had a more conventional feel, but still surprising when finally played together. This formidable body of sound produced by the tutti orchestra was well balanced and did not overwhelm. Celebration was received with extended applause.

Next on the program was Another Way Forward (but still in front of you) (2025) by Andrew Tholl, still another world premiere. Tholl is faculty at Ventura College, teaching composition and violin. In his musical career he has worked closely with such notables as David Lang, Christian Wolff, Wadada Leo Smith and Harold Budd. Andrew was a member of the Formalist Quartet, the string ensemble that included Ashley Walters and Mark Menzies. Tholl’s compositions have been heard at the Walt Disney Concert Hall, Beyond Baroque and the Hammer Museum. His comments in the program notes describe Another Way Forward: “There are no parts, all players read from the same score and, at times, some players may be on one page of the score while other are playing off another.” Sounds like a recipe for chaos, but does it work?

Another Way Forward opens with a sumptuous chord in the brass, filled with unexpected and colorful harmonies. A light vibraphone trill above adds to the singular feeling. The triangle enters with its bright pinging sound as the low brass issue long, deep tones. The violins join in with more unusual harmonies and this adds a pleasing warmth to the overall emotional color. The brass section then replies with simple declarative chords, sometimes ominous and sometimes tense. All of this soon creates a great wash of sound driven forward by the strings while a quietly solemn violin/cello duo rises lightly above the texture.

At this point the woodwinds enter, playing in a separate tempo. This is not as jarring as might be expected, given the strong support underneath by the strings. The structure now is unconventional, yet very accessible, and the contrast in the textures and rhythms heard from the woodwinds are surprisingly effective. Soon, the brass enter with yet a different set of rhythms, creating a general wash of sound. This slowly resolves into more organized and conventional forms and there are some lovely harmonies now heard in the brass. The triangle keeps the beat as the various orchestra sections fade to the finish. Another Way Forward is a robustly unconventional piece yet it is not alienating to the ear. No doubt difficult music to play, the VC orchestra managed all the nuances with discipline to deliver Another Way Forward successfully.

Tumaini, by Robert Lawson followed. Lawson was past music faculty and a seminal force in shaping the VC music program in the 1980s. His influence is still being felt today. He was the Chair of the Performing Arts department at one point, and was instrumental in developing the Schwab Academy of Music. Lawson was also a composer and Tunmaini is one of his larger orchestral works.

“Tumaini” is a Swahili word meaning “Hope” and the piece opens with distant horn tones followed by a quiet entry in the string section. The contra basses carry the beat, supporting a gentle melody that emerges from the strings. The oboe tops this off with warm and relaxing solo. The generous sound of the large VC orchestra here is lush, controlled and pleasant. The sound and structure of the piece at this point is fairly conventional; engaging but not outsize. As the piece proceeds, a tutti crescendo slowly rises up in a moment of power, with a strong finishing phrase in the brass. The piece slowly winds down to a stately hymn-like passage in the strings. The music here is elegant and broad as if fades to the finish. Tumaini is both familiar and pleasing, suggesting the influence of the movie music of the time.

Danzón No. 2 (1994), by Arturo Márquez was next. The composer was a close friend of Robert Lawson, director of the orchestra in the 1980s. The program notes state that Danzón was inspired by “…the elegant Cuban dance form that found a vibrant second life in Mexico’s Veracruz region.” Danzón opens with a bright clarinet solo accompanied by piano and percussion. The bouncy syncopation and lively tempo deliver a wonderfully Latin flavor. The oboe joins in and then all the woodwinds take up the theme. The strings have the melody next, adding an accelerando that magnifies the rapid, dance-like feeling. The brass finally join in with strong sounds, assisted by loud percussion.

Danzón slows, although still in dance mode, it has now acquired a more refined and elegant sensibility. This is supported by sensuous passages in the strings and some strong counterpoint from the trombones. Soon, strident sounds from the percussion and brass herald a return to a more muscular texture, topped off by a dramatic trumpet solo. This escalates into a loud and raucous dynamic, joined by the strings, reaching a final powerful crescendo before settling back at the finish. The VC orchestra played all of this with the style and flash that the piece deserves. Danzón is an infectious and accessible piece that clearly pleased the audience.

After a short intermission, the world premiere of Old Havana – La Habana Viejo, by Yalil Guerra, was performed. Yalil Guerra is another VC faculty member teaching classical guitar and composition. He is from Cuba and Old Havana is a sentimental look at the “…colorful streets, colonial architecture, and the rhythmic pulse of everyday life in Havana, the piece captures the city’s unique blend of nostalgia, resilience and joy,”

Old Havana opens with the bracing phrases of sturdy classical music, acknowledging the old world foundations at the heart of the city. This rather formal beginning is followed a slow- moving melody in the strings, creating a more relaxed and tropical feeling. Sumptuous string passages build in a crescendo that are then dramatically taken up by the brass. A repeat of the classical opening phrases is heard, followed by a lively dance rhythm that projects a solid Latin groove. After a final return to the classical, a luxuriant romantic melody drifts up from the tutti strings that fades to the finish. The many conventional musical materials present in this piece are artistically arranged and were appreciated by the audience with their applause. The transitions in and out of the different styles in Old Havana were navigated by the big VC orchestra with precision and grace.

The final work on the program was Rhapsody in Blue, by George Gershwin. Invariably popular with audiences, if something of an over-exposed war horse after many years of United Airline commercials, I must admit I heartily dislike this piece. Solo pianist Felix Eisenhaur, however, took the stage to give a short talk on the history of Rhapsody in Blue which did much to lightened my spirits. In January 1924 Gershwin was handed a copy of the New York Tribune, which reported that he was working on a new ‘jazz concerto for band leader Paul Whiteman. It was to be premiered on Lincoln’s birthday – just five weeks hence. Gershwin had never agreed to this, but decided to get busy composing anyway. With the help of orchestrator Ferde Grofé, the parts for orchestra were completed in time, but the solo piano score had yet to be written down. The show must go on, so Gershwin, a talented pianist, decided he would perform the piece himself and improvise the piano solos on the spot.

Armed with this historical background, listening to Rhapsody in Blue became, for me, a new experience. The structure of the piece is immediately transparent: the orchestra plays for a bit, then goes silent while an extended piano solo is heard. The conductor, meanwhile, stands with hands folded as if waiting for the finish of a long cadenza. With a nod from the pianist, the orchestra again plays its part as the piano remains in silence. This back-and-forth goes on throughout the piece and it is absolutely seamless. You never notice that there is virtually no overlap where the piano and orchestra are playing together.

The VC orchestra managed all this very well, playing with power and control throughout. Soloist Felix Eisenhaur performed the piano solos with precision and a studied enthusiasm. The communication between pianist and conductor was flawless and the old war horse was made to dance again to the great delight of the audience. A sustained ovation followed as all took their bows. A great finish to a great concert.

“Celebration!” was a long and complex concert program and the conducting style of Ashley Walters continues to demonstrate that it needs no improvement. Her motions at the podium are precise, efficient and exactly what the players need to get the most out of their performance. More than that, Walters’ ability to network with top contemporary musicians and composers will make the Ventura College music program a distinguished cultural landmark in Southern California.

by Paul Muller