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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
Books, Chamber Music, Composers, File Under?, Strings, Twentieth Century Composer

A Book on Elliott Carter’s String Quartet No. 1

Elliott Carter’s String Quartet No. 1, by Laura Emmery, Cambridge Elements, Music Since 1945, Cambridge University Press. 

 

Laura Emmery has done a great deal of analytical research on the music of Elliott Carter, and her book on his string quartets is a valuable resource for anyone interested in learning how he composes. Emmery’s latest publication is part of Cambridge University Press’s Elements series, one of several slender and specific books that each deal with a particular topic. Here, it is Elliott Carter’s String Quartet No. 1, which was composed in 1950-’51 and is widely regarded as a watershed work in the composer’s output, as well as a key example of High Modernism. Rather than focus on technical elements of the music, Emmery looks at the genesis and reception history of the piece. Biographical myths that, with the help of sympathetic people in Carter’s circle, have persisted are called into question. The co-opting by American government officials of homegrown modernist music to use as soft power in Europe is also given considerable attention. 

 

A native New Yorker, Carter traveled south to compose the first quartet, staying in the Sonoran Desert in Arizona while on a Guggenheim Fellowship. But, as Emmery notes, it was hardly a monk-like existence, with Carter spending time with other artists, particularly visual artists, He traveled to Mexico to visit with the expat composer Conlon Nancarrow, whose sophisticated proportional deployment of rhythm encouraged Carter’s approach to polyrhythms and metric modulation in his own music. He even used a brief quotation from Nancarrow’s work in the quartet, as a tip of the hat. Emmery points out that this was hardly like the solitary  creation myth that some of Carter’s supporters have portrayed.

 

In the 1950s, the composer Nicolas Nabokov was instrumental in promoting Carter’s music in Europe. At the time, Nabokov was Secretary General of the Congress for Cultural Freedom, or CCF, which was backed by the CIA and aided in the presentation of American concert music. Today many people think of modernist music, if they think of it at all, as confrontational and its presentation, at best, discounting of audience reception. The US government promoted all kinds of American concert music, not just modernism, but composers like Carter were thought to represent the sophistication of Western music in the face of the hypernationalist jingoism of Eastern Bloc creators. For instance Shostakovich came in for particular criticism from Nabokov for caving in to Stalin and altering his compositional approach. Another facet to the European entanglements of Carter’s String Quartet No. 1 is its winning of, and subsequent disqualification from, a string quartet composition competition in Liege, Belgium. It is a knotty tale, and Emmery does an excellent job disentangling its various threads. 

 

How much Carter abetted the soft power stratagems is called into question. Emmery acknowledges that it is likely that the composer had some understanding of the reasons that his music was flourishing in part due to this type of promotion, but he didn’t do anything to prevent it from being used for political ends. That said, she doesn’t suggest that he was an activist for the Cold War cause either. 

 

Carter may have taken until his forties to develop his distinctive mature style, but he  continued to compose until after age 100. The premiere of String Quartet No. 1 proved to be the launchpad for Carter’s career ascent. Having dealt comprehensively with the musical elements of the quartet already, Emmery’s explication of extramusical factors that helped to support both its genesis and reception history is eloquent and clearly rendered. This book will likely be an eye-opener for anyone wanting to learn more about the crafting of Carter’s persona and modern music’s Cold War backstory. 

 

-Christian Carey



by Christian Carey
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
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
Concert review, Contemporary Classical, early music, File Under?, Miller Theater, New York

Stile Antico Returns to St. Mary’s

Photo: Eduardus Lee.

Stile Antico Returns to Sing at St. Mary’s

 

Church of Saint Mary the Virgin

November 9, 2025

Published in Sequenza 21

By Christian Carey

 

NEW YORK – The British choral group Stile Antico has been together for twenty years, and while they have premiered several new works, the ensemble specializes in repertoire from the Renaissance era. Indeed, this past Saturday on Miller Theatre’s Early Music series, at the Church of Saint Mary the Virgin in midtown Manhattan, the theme of their program was “The Golden Renaissance.” At St. Mary’s, Stile Antico presented works by noteworthy composers of the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. They may be lumped together in a historical pigeon hole, but Renaissance composers exemplify a plethora of approaches, and the music often is quite demanding to sing. Stile Antico took a versatile approach in their program, sometimes performing with their full complement of a dozen singers and at others with subgroups thereof. Thus, the concert afforded listeners intimate experiences as well as resounding anthems sung in full voice. 

 

Some of the selections were the usual suspects on choral programs, but there were also a few less familiar pieces that proved worthy companions to the hits of the Renaissance. One of those that might be considered a “deep cut” was  “A un niño llorando,” a villancico by Franciso Guerrero (1528-1599). Its subject was the story of the gifts given to the infant Jesus by the magi. Beginning with a solo by soprano Rebecca Hickey, its compound rhythms provided both the lilt of a cradle song and a framework for hocketing between parts. Two other Spanish composers were represented on the program, with Recessit pastor noster from the Tenebrae Responsories by Tomá Luís De Victoria (1548-1611) performed with dramatic declamation and cascading linear overlaps. Jubilate Deo by Cristóbal De Morales (1500-1553) is peppered with plangent dissonances. Apparently the composer took his jubilation quite seriously. All was well in the end, with the final cadence of both parts of the motet arriving to rest on a major chord. These works, as well as most of the other music on the program, have been recorded by Stile Antico. 

 

A more festive mood was captured in the performances of O clap your hands and Hosanna to the Son of David, both by Orlando Gibbons (1583-1625). Short phrases ricocheted between subsections of the choir, delivered in crisply animated fashion. Ein Kind geborn, by Michael Praetorius (1571-1599), subdivides the choir into various smaller units who engage in a kind of call and response, the resulting antiphony building to a thrilling tutti finale. 

Clemens non Papa (1510-1555) is a composer who is underserved by current ensembles. His best known piece, Ego flos campi, was sung in a luxuriantly legato rendition. Stile Antico’s interpretative approach has been enriched over the years, with more dynamic and articulative shadings and ever greater fluidity of pacing. Hearing them sing something again, such as Ego flos campi, underscores their evolving approach to this repertoire. In Manus Tuas, by Thomas Tallis (1505-1585) is another piece that shows Stile Antico to their best advantage, the ensemble making the most of plangent cross-relations to paint the aspects of devotion and surrender integral to its text. 

 

Included on the program was The Phoenix and The Turtle, commissioned nearly a decade ago from Huw Watkins. A setting of Shakespeare, various explanations of the poem’s meaning have been suggested, from symbolizing various lovers to eulogizing Christian martyrs.Watkins uses a polytonal framework that has a number of added note chords, corruscating motivic entrances, and much antiphony. The result sounded well in the reverberant acoustics of St. Mary’s.

 

This was the 500th anniversary of the birth of Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina (1525-1594), and Stile Antico has recorded an entire album of his music as part of their trio of Golden Renaissance CDs, with the others representing Byrd and Josquin.  All are well worth seeking out. Two pieces by the composer William Byrd were featured in the concert. A recusant Catholic, Byrd vented his anger at the persecution of those of his faith in “Exsurge Domine,” the concert’s fiery opener. His late piece “Retire my soul” was of a mournful cast and sung with plaintive, sinuous legato lines. Josquin’s masterpiece of compositional architecture, Salve Regina, with two borrowed parts to thread between original  lines, was performed with seamless interweaving of its contrapuntal entrances. As for Palestrina, his Laudate Dominum couldn’t be done on the choir’s last visit to St. Mary’s, as baritone Gareth Thomas was too ill to perform, and the piece’s twelve-part divisi would not permit it. For an encore, they performed it here, and the rendition proved well worth the wait.

 

by Christian Carey
Concerts, File Under?, New York

Chris Thile: Bach, Bluegrass and Radiohead at the Y

Photo: Joseph Sinnott

Chris Thile at 92nd Street Y

Kauffmann Concert Hall

October 19, 2025

 

NEW YORK – Chris Thile is one of the best mandolinists around, and he has established himself as a singer, songwriter, and storyteller as well. On Sunday, he performed a solo concert at the 92nd Street Y that brought together these various activities. From 2016 to 2020, Thile hosted Live from Here, a variety show for public radio modeled on its predecessor A Prairie Home Companion. The pandemic made continuing the show impractical but he has since returned to the concept via podcasting, and his performance at the Y was not dissimilar from its format. The audience was regaled with stories as well as songs (and instrumentals), and in between with bits of banter.

 

The program included three substantial works by Bach, the Partitas in E major and

D minor, and the C major Sonata. They are included on Thile’s latest Nonesuch recording, the second volume of his traversal of the solo violin pieces. Interspersing the main movements of these pieces were renditions of songs from Thile’s solo work and groups Punch Brothers and Nickel Creek.

 

Such variety sometimes yielded unusual sequencing. In a brief monologue, Thile shared that he had discovered Bach at a young age and only belatedly learned to read music in order to be able to learn the solo violin pieces on mandolin. Thile reminded the audience that Bach said that music was both “To the glory of God and for the refreshment of the soul,” the mandolinist suggesting that he had started his own music making due to the former and now favored the latter part of the motto. In the early days of Nickel Creek, when Thile was a teenager, Toad the Wet Sprocket’s frontman Glen Phillips toured with them. Awed by his musicianship but concerned for his soul, the mandolinist made an attempt to convert Phillips to Christianity, only to be politely rebuffed. Nickel Creek would later record a song, “Goddamned Saint,” that explored the connotations of this meeting, especially as seen through a vantage point that was more secular and less proselytizing. 

 

The song was followed by the Chaconne from the D minor Partita, a piece that Bach wrote shortly after the death of his first wife. Musicologist Helga Thoene and others have likened it to the funerary violin tradition of the eighteenth century, and Thoene has made a convincing case that chorales traditionally used in Lutheran services for the dead are embedded in the Chaconne. Despite following the considerably less somber Nickel Creek song, it served as the concert’s emotional centerpiece. An extended meditation on a ground bass, it moves through a series of melancholic variations, ever more technically challenging, until a section in D major in which the mood seems more hopeful. When playing this portion of the Chaconne, Thile, in a moving intimate gesture, stepped away from his mandolin’s microphone, playing unplugged at the lip of the stage. The piece eventually returns to minor, with a formidable conclusion that was performed with a gravity one doesn’t often associate with the mandolin.

 

After this, Thile lightened the mood considerably by asking the audience to call a few fiddle tunes that he then fashioned into an improvised medley. His playing knit together the disparate melodies fluidly in an ebulliently virtuosic display. Once again, the mood changed, as Thile shifted to a monologue about his grandmother, a medium with a famous reputation for her seances. This was followed by a performance of the C major Sonata. Between the third and fourth movements, Thile convened a moment of silence, in which he invited the audience to remember people whom they loved who had passed away. The set’s conclusion was the fast finale of the sonata which ended in a flurried flourish of passagework. Even those who might be skeptical of the prospect of Bach translating well to mandolin would be hard pressed to dismiss Thile’s commitment and musicianship out of hand, as the performances at the 92nd Street Y and the Nonesuch recording well attest. 

 

Ever the tightrope walker, Thile offered for the audience to select his encore. Knowing his fondness for Radiohead, a number of songs from their catalog were shouted out. Thile decided to take on the challenge of playing one that he hadn’t done live before, “Weird Fishes/Arpeggi,” from the album In Rainbows. There was one caveat: an audience member had to share a screen-locked phone with the lyrics. With “Weird Fishes’” motoric riff, its tangy suspended harmonies, and a display of muted string percussion, Thile’s rendition resembled the energy of the original, while his voice navigated its sinuous melody, lyrics intact. As he quipped, “This has been a lot of mandolin,” to which the audience roared back in approval.

 

-Christian Carey



by Christian Carey
Composers, Concert review, Concerts, Dance, File Under?, New York, Orchestras

Salonen Conducts New York Philharmonic (Concert Review)

Photo: Chris Lee.

The NY Philharmonic Celebrates Boulez’s Centenary
Works by Bartók, Boulez, Debussy, and Stravinsky
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano
New York Philharmonic, Esa-Pekka Salonen, conductor
Saturday, October 4, 2025
Saturday, October 11, 2025

NEW YORK – In October, Esa-Pekka Salonen conducted the New York Philharmonic for two consecutive weeks. Both programs celebrated the centenary of the composer and conductor Pierre Boulez (1925-2016), who was Music Director of the New York Philharmonic from 1971-1977. Boulez was a key figure of the post-WWII avant-garde and a proponent of serial music, then in its early stages. By the 1970s, Boulez was an internationally renowned conductor of a wide range of repertoire, and his time with the NY Phil was distinguished by a high level of music-making. Still, his advocacy for increasing the number of contemporary works presented was not welcome in all corners. Balancing the programming of repertory staples with that of twentieth and twenty-first century music remains a much-debated topic at the NY Phil, both within the organization and among its listeners. This is true of most American orchestras, and had more than a bit to do with Salonen’s recent decision to end his directorship of the San Francisco Symphony. Thus, it was heartening to see Boulez’s music received so well by the audiences at well-attended concerts on October 4th and 11th.

Claude Debussy (1862-1918) was the other composer on the first concert, and it was a simpatico pairing. Boulez admired Debussy and frequently performed his music. In the concert’s first half, works by the two composers alternated. Debussy was represented by movements from the orchestral version of Images, which shared a point of inception with the programmed Boulez pieces: they are transcriptions of piano pieces. In the 1940s, Boulez wrote twelve piano miniatures called Notations, each twelve measures long but varied in tempo and character to create a group of pieces that helped prove his avant-garde bona fides. In succeeding decades, Boulez returned to some of them and remade them for orchestra. Three of these, in both their original and orchestrated forms, were performed. Pierre-Laurent Aimard played the movements from Notations in authoritative fashion, scrupulously observing the tempos conceived for their solo renditions. Frequently the orchestral version has been written to be played a bit more slowly, for the purposes of resonance and ensemble coordination; the latter at times is formidably challenging. It is to the NY Phil’s credit that their playing took into account the disparate nature of all the music in the first half, rendering each inflection, some quite nuanced, with sensitivity. Salonen abetted this effort with a clear approach that embodied the scores in a manner not dissimilar to Boulez’s conducting style.

Aimard would later be the piano soloist in Fantasie, an infrequently performed early piece by Debussy, started during his Prix de Rome days and only published posthumously. It is not one of Debussy’s finest pieces, and its spate of revisions shows seams in a number of places, sounding like a grand tour of the stylistic evolution throughout his career. The piano part is virtuosic, sometimes stepping into the spotlight and at others blending in with the orchestra in a demonstration of esprit de corps. If anyone can make Fantasie at all compelling it is Aimard, who distinguished himself with fleet-fingered runs and thoughtful turns of phrase.

Debussy’s La Mer, his beloved orchestral work, was the program’s finale. Water’s motion, environs, and the denizens dependent upon it are frequent touchstones for the composer, nowhere more so than here, although the grotto scene from his opera Pelleas et Melisande is a strong contender. The piece has had a somewhat quixotic afterlife as a shorthand trope for the sea in many films, from documentaries to Hollywood blockbusters. The real thing still trumps all of them. The NY Philharmonic played it pristinely under Salonen’s direction.

Photo: Brandon Patoc.

The concert on October 11th featured two more composers in Boulez’s orbit: Béla Bartók (1881-1945) and Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971). The latter was represented by his Octet for Winds, a piece firmly rooted in the neoclassical tradition that pits a woodwind quartet of flute, clarinet, and two bassoons against two trumpets and two trombones. The music is filled with contrapuntal assertions and responses between winds and brass. This heterodox ensemble is difficult to balance and wasn’t perfect in this respect here, and the position of the group didn’t seem to be in an acoustically ideal spot onstage. Still, the interplay between performers was impressive.

Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra is among the masterpieces of the past century. Like the octet, it is filled with counterpoint, including some of the fugal variety. Both Stravinsky and Bartók were able to navigate the delicate balance between music of the past and innovation. In addition to baroque music, Bartók references folk music from Eastern Europe. There is also a jocular trope on a theme by Dmitri Shostakovich (1906-1975), poking fun at his Russian counterpart for toeing the cultural lines drawn by Stalin. Not the first concerto for orchestra, in which each section gets an opportunity to be highlighted, it remains the best yet composed. The NY Phil, especially with the dynamic gestures of Salonen, played it like few other orchestras can dream to match.

In the performance’s second half, a more extensive work than Notations was presented. Rituel in memoriam Bruno Maderna was composed in 1975, while Boulez was still conducting the NY Phil. Maderna was a close associate, and his death from lung cancer at 53 was a difficult loss to contemplate. Although its use of gongs and chorale-like chords in the brass is evocative of ceremony, Rituel does not explicitly reference any religious traditions. Rather, it is a postmodern, secular type of valediction, in which spatial deployment envelops the audience in a solemn, eloquent meditation on grief. With a cohort onstage, other members of the orchestra were arrayed throughout the hall, their parts reverberating in well-coordinated fashion. There is a plethora of percussion instruments, with the players deployed in an additive fashion, with each of Rituel’s eight sections supplying more percussionists. This was also true of the other players in the other sections of the orchestra, supporting a long, powerful crescendo, one that then subsides in a gradual denouement.

The LA Dance Project was on hand for Rituel, performing onstage in front of, and sometimes between, members of the orchestra. It featured six dancers, two principals who wore black and four others in various shades of color. The choreography captured both fluid musical lines and percussive gestures, representing the stages of grief encountered after a loss in a dance that was modern in character and well-executed. Given Maderna’s death after an illness, the physicalization of violence, with both symbolic crucifixion and stabbing, seemed in places more like Sacre du Printemps than the demeanor of Rituel. Still, it added a layer of emotionality to a compelling use of the entirety of Geffen Hall. One hopes that more spatial music is on offer in the future, and that Salonen remains a frequent visitor to New York to perform with the orchestra.

-Christian Carey

by Christian Carey
Composers, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, File Under?, Recording review

Ken Ueno sings Sonic Calligraphies in the Tank (Recording review)

Ken Ueno – Sonic Calligraphies (Off-record)

Composer and vocalist Ken Ueno is a creator and performer of notated composition, sound art, and improvisation. A professor at UC Berkeley, Ueno’s singing  involves extended techniques, with an investigation of throat-singing styles from many traditions being just one facet of them. His explorations have also often included using a megaphone. 

The megaphone is not often thought of in musical contexts, but rather as an amplifier of spoken voices, often strident in demeanor and used for warning of danger, imposition of power, and inducing fear. Ueno’s employment of it in previous contexts turned these aims on their heads, serving as commentary on political subterfuge and decolonization. His latest work for voice and megaphone, Sonic Calligraphies, does this too, but in a more abstract fashion. In order to obtain certain frequencies, he modifies vowels to create expressive, but not directly linguistic, inflections. 

Another partner in this endeavor is the recording venue, The Tank, a disused, large metal cistern in Rangely, Colorado. Converted from water container to performance venue, it has a one second delay and is extremely resonant. The inception of its use for performance was the iconic 1989 LP Deep Listening, made by Pauline Oliveros, Stuart Dempster, and Panaiotis. Oliveros later repurposed the recording’s title as a manifesto for her discipline of sound studies. Like this trio, Ueno employs the resonance of the tank, exploring its high ceiling and spacious interior with detailed attention. His sonic palette is a panoply of overtones, microtones, multiphonics, and glissandos. They are deployed in everything from gentle forays to dramatic sonic maelstroms. 

 

Facilitating this endeavor with a megaphone which, above all, is about messaging and overt declamation, makes its abstraction a virtue. The recording is a poetic rejoinder to the amplified discourse so often found today, emanating from the political talking heads on cable news, doom scrolls of social media, and animated disagreements in public and around the dinner table. Sonic Calligraphies may elude precise translation. However, it is eloquent and engaging in equal measure. 

 

-Christian Carey 



by Christian Carey
CD Review, Chamber Music, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Recording review, Recordings, Twentieth Century Composer

Tobias Picker, NOVA (Recording review)

Tobias Picker

NOVA

Various Artists

Bright Shiny Things

 

Composer Tobias Picker won a Grammy for his 2020 operatic version of The Fantastic Mister Fox, and many pianists have first encountered him through the diatonic piece The Old and Lost Rivers. Picker has another side to his musical persona that is in no small measure reflective of his time as a student of Milton Babbitt, Elliott Carter, and Charles Wuorinen. The Bright Shiny Things recording NOVA includes chamber music that celebrates these high modernist roots, as well as forays into postmodernism. 

 

The title work is the latter, a riff on both the appropriate accompaniment, at least in Manhattan, for a bagel and cream cheese, as well as a send-up of one of Franz Schubert’s most enduring chamber pieces, the Trout Quintet. The result is lively, with tongue in cheek humor giving way to expert writing for the instruments, the composer distinguishing himself as a performer, undertaking the piano part. 

 

The recording sessions for NOVA were completed at various times, and some of the performers are no longer living. The late Lynne Harrell’s performance in Suite for Cello and Piano is memorable. He plays with yearning legato in“Serenade,” its first movement, and puckish pizzicato in “Daylight,” its second. Ann-Marie McDermott, who is still with us, also distinguishes herself, with expressive and assured playing throughout. The third movement, “Lament,” is more dramatic than doleful, and Harrell performs with incendiary phrasing. The suite’s final movement, titled “Alone,” is still a duo, but it is lonesome and solitary in its demeanor. Another departed musician, Peter Serkin, plays Three Pieces for Piano with sensitivity and virtuosity in equal measure, elucidating the complex phrasing of “Svelto,” its first movement, emphasising the dynamic and rhythmic nuances in the second, “Liberamente,” and, performing the assertive gestures of the “Feroce” third movement con brio. 

 

Happily most of the performers are still around to enjoy the fruits of their labors. Pianist Ursula Oppens makes multiple appearances, with Charles Neidich in “Nocturne,” a brief, gentle duet, and solo in the more extensive “Pianorama.” Violinist Young Uck Kim and Emmanuel Ax collaborate well on Invisible Lilacs, a three movement piece with an opener marked “Fast,” which it certainly is here, a pensive “Elegy,”, and a concluding “Moto Perpetuo” movement that is impressively played. 

 

The disc’s final piece, Blue Hula. features Speculum Musicae, a chamber ensemble that boasted some of the best performers of modern classical music. It is a formidable piece that suits them well, with a finely etched gestural profile of corruscating lines. As the piece progresses, its rhythmic drive increases, culminating in the breakneck pace of the third movement, marked “very fast.” 

 

NOVA presents another side of Picker’s music, one that embraces complexity but sacrifices none of the directness of expression that characterizes his more recent music. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey