Canada, Chamber Music, Classical Music, Composers, Concerts, Contemporary Classical, New York

Preview: Pianists Adam Sherkin and Anthony de Mare: “Composers in Play XV”

Pianists Adam Sherkin and Anthony de Mare (courtesy of the artists)

The Canadian pianist/composer Adam Sherkin shares music from his home country on an extensive program at Merkin Hall in New York on March 15, 2025. “Composers in Play XV” is presented by Piano Lunaire, an organization launched by Sherkin and his colleagues in 2018. On this occasion he joins forces with the American pianist Anthony de Mare.

Together the two perform music by (mostly) living Canadian composers for one and two pianos.

Each of the performers has connections with some of the creators. In Sherkin’s case it is himself as the composer of Ink from the Shield for two pianos, which has its world premiere performance this program. De Mare has a 30+ year friendship with Rodney Sharman, and was one of the people who encouraged the composer to write a series of “Opera Transcriptions,” three of which are on this program.

The composers represent a geographical cross section of Canada: Vivian Fung hails from Edmonton; Ann Southam (the sole non-living composer on this program) was from Winnipeg; Kelly Marie-Murphy from Calgary, and Linda Catlin Smith and Sherkin from Toronto.

by Gail Wein
CDs, File Under?, Premieres, Video

New Single: Khruangbin remixes Arooj Aftab

Khruangbin remixes Arooj Aftab

Arooj Aftab’s Night Reign was one of my favorite recordings of 2024. Released today, the Thai funk by way of Texas artists Khruangbin have made a remix of one of the album’s most memorable tracks, “raat ki rani.”

 

As a bonus, here is another favorite from Aftab, live in London playing with Anoushka Shankar:

 

 

____

 

Aftab’s Night Reign Tour 2025 begins late March in North America, Brazil and UK/EU: 

  

NORTH & SOUTH AMERICAN TOUR DATES

3.27.25 | Union Stage | Washington, D.C

3.29.25 | Big Ears Festival 2025 | Knoxville, TN

5.22.25 | C6 Festival | São Paulo, Brazil

5.29.25 | Spoleto Festival 2025 | Charleston, SC

6.15.25 | Bonnaroo | Manchester, TN

6.21.25 | Fine Line | Minneapolis, MN

6.22.25 | Old Town School of Folk Music | Chicago, IL **2nd show added**

6.24.25 | Toronto Jazz Festival | Toronto, Canada

6.25.25 | Ottawa Jazz Festival | Ottawa, Canada

6.26.25 | Festival International De Jazz De Montreal 2025 | Montreal, Canada

 

UK/EU TOUR DATES

4.4.25 | House of Music | Budapest, Hungary

4.5.25 | Rewire Festival | Den Haag, Netherlands

4.7.25 | WOW Festival | Kallithea, Greece

4.12.25 | Sogodbe X Kino Šiška | Ljubljana, Slovenia

4.14.25 | Auditorium Parco Della Musica | Roma, Italy

4.15.25 | Teatro Della Triennale | Milan, Italy

 

5.2.25 | Polygon Live 360º | London, United Kingdom

5.5.25 | Cathedral Quarter Arts Festival | Belfast, United Kingdom

5.7.25 | Brighton Music Festival 2025 | Brighton, United Kingdom

5.9.25 | Norfolk & Norwich Festival | Norwich, UK

5.11.25 | Jazz à Liège 2025 | Liège, Belgium

7.6.25 | Love Supreme Festival | East Sussex, United Kingdom

7.9.25 | Ravenna Festival | Cervia, Italy

7.31.25 | Midzomer Festival Openair | Leuven, Belgium

8.2.25 | All Together Now 2025 | Waterford, Ireland

 

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Composers, File Under?

Satie (CD Review)

Satie

Alain Planès, Pleyel piano (1928)

François Pinel, piano duets, Marc Mauillon, baritone

Harmonia Mundi

 

In 2025, substantial attention is being paid to the 150th anniversary of Maurice Ravel’s birth. Pianist Alain Planès has instead decided to celebrate the centenary of Erik Satie’s passing with a recording of music from the various stylistic periods of the eclectic composer’s oeuvre. Most of the music are works originally for piano and transcriptions, but there is a set of four-hands pieces and another of songs. 

 

At age seventy-seven, Planès has maintained his technique and interpretive skill, accommodating the varying demeanors – lyrical, enigmatic, bumptious, and virtuosic – of Satie’s music. Historically informed performance has extended into the twentieth century, and the pianist observes this by using a 1928 Pleyel, a piano similar to those Satie would have played upon. 

 

There are pieces that recall Satie’s work in cafes and theaters, such as the Valse-ballet, which opens the recording. Even in idiomatic genre pieces, there is a quirkiness to the dynamics and phrasing. Two song transcriptions, La Diva de L’Empire, and Satie’s “hit tune” Je te Veux, close the recording in a similarly light-hearted vein. The Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes, some of the composer’s well known and best-loved works, figure prominently in the program. Planès plays them with delicacy and small touches of rubato and dynamic inflections, exactly where the score indicates these fluctuations in phrasing. 

 

Avant-dernières pensées (“Penultimate Thoughts”), Chapitres tournés en tous sens (“Chapters Turned Every Which Way”), and Embryons desséchés (“Dessicated embryos”) are three humorous piano suites from the 1910s. The earlier Pièces froides (“Cold pieces”) exhibit similar jocularity. Even when going for musical jokes – quotations, weird juxtapositions, and sudden dynamic shifts – Satie always creates music that is well wrought for the instrument and its player. Planès presents the humor wryly, never overdoing it to go for a cheap laugh.

 

Trois morceaux en forme de poire (“Three pieces in the shape of a pear”) is for piano four-hands. The first resembles a Gymnopedie with a jaunty flourish at the end, the second has digressive flurries of runs punctuated with staccato chords and an emphatic bass line, and the third juxtaposes a lilting duple time dance with stentorian cadences. François Pinel is an amicable duet partner. Baritone Marc Mauillon joins Planès for Trois Mélodies, his voice easily navigating the high tessitura of the music with expressive nuance. The first, “La Statue de Bronze” (“The Bronze Statue”) recalls the oom-pah ostinato of popular Parisian fare. “Daphénéo” is more impressionist in tone but still peculiar, with some of its text not easily translatable. “Le chapelier” (“The hatter”) is in a lilting compound time until its forte climax, which is followed by a delicate coda.

 

Satie is worth yet more anniversary commemorations, but if the only one were to be this excellent recording, it would still provide a significant homage for his influential music. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
Classical Music, Concert review, Conductors, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Lincoln Center, New York, Orchestras, Twentieth Century Composer, Vocals

Remaking a Rug Concert: Boulez at 100

David Robertson conducts NY Phil
Photo: Brandon Patoc

Sound On: A Tribute to Boulez

The New York Philharmonic, Conducted by David Robertson

Jane McIntyre, Soprano

David Geffen Hall, January 25, 2025

By Christian Carey – Sequenza 21

 

NEW YORK – If you think that audience development is a relatively new practice, then you may not have heard of Rug Concerts. In the 1970s, during Pierre Boulez’s tenure as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic, these were an experiment to attempt to attract young people and downtown artsy types to try a concert at Avery Fisher Hall. Instead of rows of seating, rugs were strewn about the hall, inviting audience members to lounge in informal fashion while hearing a concert. Revisiting the first of these concerts, its program was presented in its entirety, albeit to audience members in the conventional seating setup of David Geffen Hall: no rugs rolled out. 

 

The first half of the concert featured repertory works. J.S. Bach’s Brandenburg Concerto No. 3 in G major was given a period-informed performance by a small ensemble. Sheryl Staples, the concertmaster for the evening, providing the aphoristic solo part with suave elegance, and bassist Timothy Cobb and harpsichordist Paolo Bordignon were an incisive continuo pairing. 

 

Franz Schubert’s Symphony No. 2 in B-flat is an impressively beautiful piece, especially considering that it was completed when the composer was just eighteen. I have heard three different conductors lead this symphony with the NY Phil, a proto-romantic and broadly lyrical rendition from Kurt Masur, a breakneck-pace version informed by early music practice given by Alan Gilbert, and Robertson’s, which deployed a chamber-sized orchestra and emphasized the classical elements in Schubert’s early instrumental music. One hesitates to make a Goldilocks comparison, but Robertson’s interpretation felt just right. 

 

The second half of the program consisted of music from the twentieth century. Anton Webern’s Symphony, completed in 1928, was a totemic work for the postwar avant-garde, notably Boulez. It is a set of variations that uses the 12-tone method in a way that points toward the systematic organization of serialism, and is also filled with canons, reflective of Webern’s dissertation on the Renaissance composer Heinrich Isaac. The piece is aphoristic with a thin texture, but deceptively challenging to perform, to connect the web of its lines in convincing fashion. The NY Phil navigated these demands under Robertson’s detailed direction with an ease of delivery that one seldom hears in the performance of Webern. Principal clarinetist Anthony McGill, who was given particularly disjunct lines to play, demonstrated a keen awareness of the importance of legato in the piece, even when leaping through dissonances.

Photo: Brandon Patoc

Boulez’s Pli selon pli: Portrait de Mallarmé, composed in 1957, was one of the pieces that put him on the map as an important creator. Its vocalist is tasked with significant interpretative challenges and a detailed and rangy score. Jana McIntyre performed commandingly, rendering the surrealist poetry with a wondrous exuberance for its strangeness, singing clarion top notes and plummy ones below the staff. A singer to watch for. The percussion section, which channels more than a bit of gamelan influence, played superlatively. Robertson was a close colleague of Boulez, and is a former director of Ensemble Intercontemporain. His conducting of Pli selon pli is the most authoritative that we have left since the composer’s passing. 

 

The concert concluded with Igor Stravinsky’s concert suite version of L’Histoire du Soldat. Composed in 1918, it is for a septet of musicians and includes eight sections from the larger piece. One of the last pieces in Stravinsky’s Russian period of composition, it mixes folk tunes with prescient shadings of the neoclassicism that was to follow in his music. Three dances, a tango, waltz, and ragtime, were particularly well-played, with Staples animating the characteristic rhythms of each. Trumpeter Christopher Martin and trombonist Colin Williams played with crackling energy, McGill and bassoonist Judith LeClair navigated dissonant intervals with laser beam tuning, and Cobb and percussionist Chris Lamb imbued the march movements with propulsive kineticism. 

 

It is fortunate for the New York Phil that Robertson works in the neighborhood, just across the street as Director of Orchestral Studies at the Juilliard School. One hopes that they continue to avail themselves of his considerable talent and warm presence on the podium.

Photo: Brandon Patoc

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Lisa Illean Debut on NMC (CD Review)

Lisa Illean
Arcing, stilling, bending, gathering
NMC Records, 2024

Composer Lisa Illean (b. 1983) is from Australia and has been based in recent years in the UK. Her work encompasses a variety of techniques, including alternate tunings and sampled electronics. These are means to consummately expressive ends, and Illean’s music maintains an organic sensibility irrespective of how the sounds are formed.

The title piece, performed by the Australian Academy of Music, is split into various constellations of sound: small groups of strings, solo piano, and pre-recorded sound. Illean uses detuned pitch collections to make a supple harmonic language. Like much of the composer’s music, the primarily soft dynamics are belied by an underlying intensity.
This intensity comes to the fore in Tiding 2 (Silentium), recorded by the GBSR Duo (percussionist George Barton and pianist Siwan Rhys) and soprano saxophonist David Zucchi. Although much of the music remains hushed, there is a sense of unease in the interwoven counterpoint of the music. Gongs, piano chords, string samples, and sustained saxophone are broken up by sudden emphatic attacks, only to subside into another ominous, overlapping sequence. It culminates with several swells into coloristic chords with shimmering percussion.

The soprano Juliet Fraser has been a champion of Illean’s music, and she appears here in a group of settings of the poet Gerard Manley Hopkins. Fraser and the Explore Ensemble are accompanied by electronics – samples of detuned zithers – which provides a haunting ambience that surrounds the soprano’s emotive singing and ensemble’s own microtonal excursions. Few composers whom I have heard set Hopkins have tapped into the essential melancholia and isolation he often expressed. Illean creates a slowly moving atmosphere that channels the doleful aspects of Hopkins eloquently.

David Robertson conducts the Sydney Orchestra in Land’s End, the final piece on the recording. Illean’s penchant for piano dynamics is made all the more poignant by the held-back quality of the ensemble. Robertson takes care to balance the various textures, a web of sliding tones and piquant verticals alongside occasional brass interjections. The landscape drawings of Latvian artist Vija Celmins were a point of inspiration, and these spare, deserted pictures correspond well to the gradual movement of Land’s End. An ascending harp pattern and sustained solo violin send the piece into a slightly more animated section, as if the patterns of the wind have shifted, and a piano solo that adds arpeggiations doubling the melodic material follows. Wispy descending lines that offset one another gradually crescendo into a smearing of dissonance. A darkly hued cloud of low register harmonies provides a portentous moment, only to have strings and winds return playing pianissimo counterpoint, with single trumpet notes, drums, and soft gongs punctuating the passage. Instruments begin to slide towards the same pitch in octaves, only to have a mysterious and harmonically ambiguous close take over, with ascending piano scales and solo violin bringing the piece to a stratospheric close.

Illean’s music is distinctively compelling, and one expects that more orchestras and ensembles will be clamoring for new pieces from her.

Christian Carey

by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical

Seattle Symphony performs Fauré, Ravel and Attahir

It was a valiant effort, and one that might work better in the studio than onstage, but there’s a reason why the coupling of harp and piano, especially with an orchestra behind them, is a rare one: barring extraordinary measures (e.g., amplification, spatial separation or having the instruments play alternately instead of together), the piano will always overpower the harp. This was the unfortunate case in Seattle Symphony’s premiere of Hanoï Songs by Benjamin Attahir, a young composer who’s shown more invention in works like Adh Dhohr (a concerto for the Renaissance-era serpent and orchestra) and Al’ Asr (just given its premiere recording by Quatuor Arod), both of which offer a more subtly-drawn extension of the Dutilleux/Dalbavie strain of post-Messiaen French orchestral writing. His new double concerto—ostensibly a sound portrait of Vietnam that vacillates between antiquity and the colonial war era—does have attractive details, including an array of percussion colors that features nine tuned gongs (four are visible in the photo below). But beyond the balance issues, its essential neoclassicism often slides into Hollywood-esque grandiloquence, a domain where the John Williams of the world will, like the piano in Hanoï Songs, inevitably overshadow the strivers.

Valerie Muzzolini and Ludovic Morlot after Ravel: Introduction and Allegro (photo by Brandon Patoc/Seattle Symphony)

Regardless, the Ravel and Fauré offerings in this all-French program (composers and soloists!) sounded wonderful on Saturday night. Particularly enlightening was the juxtaposition of Charles Koechlin’s competent but straightforward orchestration of his teacher Fauré’s Pelléas et Mélisande suite with Ravel’s virtuosic deployment of instrumental color in Ma mère l’Oye. His Introduction and Allegro provided an additional vehicle for the Symphony‘s longstanding and much-admired principal harpist Valerie Muzzolini (this time without competition from Jean-Yves Thibaudet’s piano). And it’s been comforting to have Ludovic Morlot back in town leading both these concerts and Seattle Opera‘s Les Troyens following the tumult of early 2025, including Trump 2.0, the sacking of the Symphony’s executive leadership, and the Southern California fires that destroyed thousands of homes, including Morlot’s. Here’s to Western art music as a soothing social unguent.

Attahir’s Adh Dhohr and Al’ Asr were featured in this concert preview from KBCS-FM’s Flotation Device program.

by Michael Schell
Classical Music, Concert review, Contemporary Classical, Festivals, New York, Opera, Vocals

Compelling and Visceral: “In a Grove” and Arooj Aftab at Prototype

In a Grove at Prototype Festival 2025 (credit Maria Baranova)

PROTOTYPE – OPERA | THEATRE | NOW defines itself as a “festival of visionary opera-theatre and music-theatre works”. Its presentation of In a Grove (January 16 – 19, 2025) was as close as Prototype comes to conventional opera in the context of eschewing tradition. It was also one of the most compelling productions I’ve seen in a long time. The intimate setting at La MaMa’s Ellen Stewart Theater augmented the visceral impact.

The story unfolded in four sections, each expressing a different character’s point of view of a murder in the woods. If that description sounds like the Kurosawa film Rashomon, it’s because that film was based on the same book: In a Grove, a century-old short story by Ryūnosuke Akutagawa.

The four singers: John Brancy, Chuanyuan Liu, Paul Appleby, and Mikaela Bennett, all excellent vocalists and actors, played multiple roles. Surtitles were projected above the stage, but for the most part they were not necessary to decipher Stephanie Fleishman’s effective libretto.

Christopher Cerrone’s melodic material was memorable without being trite. As I left the theatre after the performance, the haunting lament of the last scene continued to ring in my ears. Director Mary Birnbaum’s concept was exceptionally powerful in its simplicity, with no props and no set, save for a large pane of glass that glided in to bisect the stage at certain points. The glass panel also served as a mirror in some scenes.

Cerrone’s vocal score was accompanied by ten instrumentalists of the Metropolis Ensemble, led by Luke Poeppel (standing in for music director Raquel Acevedo Klein on the day I attended). The orchestration included some appropriately eerie effects, such as drawing a violin bow across the edge of a xylophone.

I was very much captivated by this powerful drama and its excellent performance.

The Pakistani-American singer and composer Arooj Aftab’s performance couldn’t be classified as an opera at all, though one can think of her concept album Night Reigns as a dramatic song cycle in the guise of pop culture. She appeared with her band for a one-hour set at HERE’s Dorothy B. Williams Theatre January 15 – 17.

Aftab’s style bridges world music and jazz with an ethereal aesthetic. Her presentation was casual and unusual – she distributed shots of whiskey to the audience in mid-show. It was also transporting; an atmosphere and music that took me out of the real world, and her clear lilting voice had an emotional impact. Never mind that most of the words were in Urdu. The meaning came across easily.

In this intimate space, seeing Arooj and her band – harpist Maeve Gilchrist, bass player Zwelakhe-Duma Bell Le Pere and Engin Kaan Gunaydin on percussion – was a visceral, and, enhanced by whisps of smoke created by dry ice, often ethereal experience.

by Gail Wein
Ambient, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, Experimental Music, File Under?

Canyons compilation benefits LA Firefighters

Nick Norton.

 

Canyons compilation

Sequenza 21 friend Nick Norton has speedily put together a digital compilation called “Canyons” to benefit LA firefighters. It is a loaded setlist, with contributions from India Galley, Dustin Wong, Molly Pease, Isaac Schankler, Nicholas Deyoe, Warp Trio, and more. The release is pay what you like on Bandcamp (embed below), but don’t be stingy; the firefighters can use all the help they can get.

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Composers, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Strings

Kalevi Aho’s String Quartets (CD Review)

Kalevi Aho

String Quartets 1-3

Stenhammar Quartet

BIS

 

Kalevi Aho (1949-) is a prominent Finnish composer whose oeuvre includes a number of orchestral and chamber works and a smaller body of vocal music. His string quartets are from relatively early in his career, the first from quite early, written when he was only eighteen. All three are included on a BIS recording made by the Stenhammar Quartet, a group from Sweden. 

 

The pieces are presented out of order, beginning with the second quartet, which was written in 1970, during his studies with Einojuhani Rautavaara at the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki. It was created just a couple years after his conservatively tonal first quartet (discussed below), but it’s clear that Rautavaara had given Aho a grounding in twentieth century music. After a sinuous opening Adagio movement is a Presto that begins with a chromatic fugue soon surrounded by flurries of dissonance, a welter of sound. The fugue speeds up alongside ascending glissandos, ending on slashing verticals and prestissimo lines moving in contrary motion. The last movement returns to an Adagio tempo, with yearning counterpoint and a diaphanous texture, closing with an open-spaced quartal harmony.

 

Best known of Aho’s quartets is his Third (1971), which is programmed frequently and considered one of the pieces that first garnered him significant attention. With most of the movements continuing attacca, it begins Vivace with a mischievous Bartôkian tune that is eventually offset by long legato phrases. The movement ends with a cello ostinato and altissimo register violin surrounding bustling inner parts. The second movement, marked Andante, builds up from the lower register in a fugue with a long legato subject. This condenses into tightly constructed vertical presentations of the subject, and concludes with held chords and pizzicato bass notes. The aphoristic Presto third movement features clarion violin lines against repeated notes in the viola and cello. It is succeeded by a fourth movement with shades of Shostakovich. It has a somewhat wayward theme that Aho once again treats fugally against acerbic harmonies. Swooping crescendos are succeeded by a Presto with quick filigrees in the violin countered by a duet texture in the lower strings and fragmented accompaniment from the second violin. In the sixth movement, clusters in the violins and lower strings, first in pairs then combined, take over, while the seventh is a relatively brief Adagio that returns to minor-inflected imitative writing. The finale begins with a triplet-filled melody in the violin while seconds in the other instruments provide a bitter underpinning. A countermelody in the second violin and repeated notes in the cello elaborate the proceedings, while secundal violin lines descend from the uppermost register. A midrange duet imitates the previous passage to conclude enigmatically. 

 

While it is juvenalia, the inclusion of the First Quartet demonstrates that even early on Aho possessed a fine musical ear and sense of formal design. At the time, the composer was playing the violin and he used the standard repertoire he had been assigned as models for the quartet. It is a mix of Baroque sequences and Romantic harmony. The first movement, marked moderato, is a set of variations built on a circle-of-fifths progression. The second, marked Andante-Vivace, is considerably charming, with a wending mixed meter folk dance at its beginning that is replaced by a brusque scherzo section. The dance returns, more emphatic this time. The Presto third movement is a moto perpetuo in 6/8, and the finale returns to an Andante tempo, with a Brahmsian principal theme that is, appropriately, supplied with a series of developing variations, including a minor key variant that is interesting both harmonically and in its rhythmic patterning. The return to major is given a stately rendition by the Stenhammar players, concluding the piece with a foreshadowing of Aho’s future talent.

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, Composers, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Flute, Strings

Persist – Ethel and Loggins-Hull (CD Review)

Persist

Ethel and Allison Loggins-Hull

Sono Luminus

 

The string quartet Ethel presents a characteristically diverse program of contemporary music on Persist, their first recording for Sono Luminus. They are joined by composer/flutist Allison Loggins-Hull and the resulting quintet are strong advocates for the emerging composers featured here.

 

The title work is by Loggins-Hull, currently a composer fellow with the Cleveland Orchestra. Her work is gracefully written and appealing. Persist begins with an ambling section with an angular flute melody, pizzicato strings and percussion instruments. This is varied throughout, juxtaposed with presto passages featuring quickfire flute lines accompanied by circling countermelodies in the strings and pulsating drumming. In 2024, the title’s meaning is self-explanatory and timely, and Loggins-Hull’s piece aptly depicts both the current exhaustion and perennial indomitability of the progressive movement. 

 

PillowTalk by Xavier Muzik opens slowly, with oscillating thirds in the flute and impressionist harmonies in the strings. Languorous in demeanor and gradual in its unfolding, the color chords are eventually augmented by a pentatonic tune in octaves and a more elaborate flute solo that dovetails with pizzicato cello. The violin then takes a turn duetting with the flute. A fast passage with sliding tones and birdsong affords some much-belated energy, indeed making up for lost time in its latter half. A return to slow music reminiscent of the opening brings the piece full circle. 

 

Migiwa Miyajima presents a stylistically varied four-movement piece with her Reconciliation Suite. The first movement, “The Unknowns” is rhythmically vibrant and hews close to the cinematic. The second, “Never Be the Same,” features a flute solo that explores the low register of the instrument with gradual accelerations and slowdowns. Partway through, the cello adds a drone to accompany it. The flute moves higher, and the rest of the strings join with lush harmonies. “Mr. Rubber Sole from the Digital World” has fun with ostinatos á la rock ‘n roll. The suite concludes with “The Blooming Season,” a lushly attired pastorale.

 

Sam Wu’s Terraria features the flute imitating shakuhachi and the strings using sliding tone and other traditional gestures from Chinese music. It also has passages of neo-romantic arpeggiations. Particularly affecting are the central passages in which high flute and midrange strings double a folk-like melody above a low drone. The second appearance of the arpeggiations is accompanied by energetic flute runs. Harmonics and brief melodies in the flute create an evocative denouement, after which the flute returns to the shakuhachi manner of the opening to close. 

 

Leilehua Lanzilotti is likely the best known of the programmed composers; she was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in Music. The final work on Persist is her We Began This Quilt There. It is about Lili‘uokalani, the first and only Hawaiian queen and last sovereign of the islands before their annexation by the US. She made artworks, including the Queen’s Quilt, while she was imprisoned. Kaona, hidden meanings, is a concept Lanzilotti feels is suggestive of the queen’s artwork. The three movements include quotations of prison songs and folk music. Lanzilotti allows these materials space to breathe, with the flute playing melodies over gentle strumming from the strings in the first movement. The second is brief but haunting with flute harmonics and pitch bends over a sustained midrange piece. The final movement, “Ku‘u pua i Paoakalani” is based on a musical composition by Lili‘uokalani, an ode for her supporters. Lanzilotti veils the ode with its musical surroundings. A buildup of triadic repeated notes in the strings is joined by the flute playing the song with the addition of repeated notes: a musical Kaona that concludes a beautiful and meaningful work. 

 

With Persist, Ethel and Loggins-Hull demonstrate their continuing commitment to compositional voices from a variety of geographies and backgrounds. The programmed works are diverse in terms of their impetuses and styles, but uniformly of high quality. Recommended.

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey