The Original New Music Community
Banish the inescapable treacly holiday music with this palette cleanser for Boxing Day. Other Minds has shared this recital of music by “Blue” Gene Tyranny and Robert Ashley, performed by pianists Sarah Cahill and Joseph Kubera on Sunday, September 7, 2025 at Mills College. Much of the programmed music was premiered by the performers.
Mother and Child
The Tallis Scholars, directed by Peter Phillips
Miller Theater Early Music Series, Church of St. Mary the Virgin
December 4, 2025
By Christian Carey
NEW YORK – The choral ensemble The Tallis Scholars, directed by Peter Phillips, are regular visitors to Manhattan, and their December concerts at Church of St. Mary the Virgin have a devoted following (pardon the pun). Often they perform a Marian-themed program appropriate to the space, and their appearance this past Thursday was no exception. In addition to pieces principally drawn from the English Renaissance, a new Salve Regina setting by the composer-organist Matthew Martin, was premiered.
The Tallis Scholars have a membership of ten, with three sopranos, three altos, two tenors, and two basses. Much of the music that they sing, including that of the Tudor composers Thomas Tallis and William Byrd, who were featured on the concert, was written for a setup with quintets at the front of a sanctuary on either side. At St. Mary’s, the voices were more often deployed in sections instead, although some alternate groupings allowed for the ensemble, or parts thereof, to explore the sonorous space in which they were singing.
The group is named after Tallis, who was the preeminent composer for the Tudor monarchs, and the program included movements from his Missa puer natus. William Byrd’s music was also well represented, with five of his motets presented in the framework of a Votive Mass of the Virgin. Alternating the sections of the mass with Byrd’s music highlighted the affinities between the two composers, whose Latin church music incorporates tightly knit imitative passages and, in places, dissonance created by spicy cross-relations.
Martin’s piece was a Miller Theatre commission, and it was both well written for the voices of the group while using crunchy added-note chords and intricate rhythms in keeping with the sound world of contemporary choral music. It was prefaced by the Salve Regina chant, a touching preamble to what was to be a moving work. Vivid text-painting detailed the sorrows and grief of Mary and the exhortations of the faithful, with hushed bass-register chords, the texture gradually evolving to be pierced by trumpet motives in the soprano voices and snug verticals in the rest of the ensemble. The middle section is declamatory, moving to a fevered climax in which suffering is depicted in a yawping tutti. The earlier ambience returns in a brief coda, which settles into sumptuous harmonies depicting the earnest plea for mercy that concludes the text. The Tallis Scholars have performed other contemporary music, notably that of Arvo Pärt, and they were accurate and ardent interpreters here. One hopes that Martin, who was not in attendance, gets to hear their rendition soon.
The program concluded with a Magnificat setting by John Nesbitt, taken from the Eton Choirbook, one of the rare remnants of a beautiful repertory of pieces from the fifteenth century. Most of the manuscripts of this music did not survive the Puritans’ destruction of Catholic liturgical materials during the seventeenth century. The piece alternated verses chanted by the tenors with full polyphony. Like many pieces in the Eton Choirbook, Nesbitt’s contained considerably intricate polyrhythms, with triplets set against duplets. Both chant and tutti passages were sung with dulcet-toned fluidity.
As an encore, Salva nos domine by the French composer Jean Mouton gave the audience a tantalizingly brief hearing of music from continental Europe.
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.
2025 Tanglewood Festival of Contemporary Music
Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra
July 28, 2025
LENOX – This year’s Festival of Contemporary Music was curated by composer Gabriela Ortiz. Born in Mexico City, Ortiz is one of the most prominent Latinx figures in twenty-first century classical music. Among other honors, she is composer-in-residence at Carnegie Hall and the Curtis Institute. Revolucióndiamantina, a recording of her music by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, conducted by Gustavo Dudamel, won three GRAMMY Awards in 2025. This year, FCM has spotlighted music from Mexico, as well as that of women composers. After four chamber ensemble programs, including one consisting entirely of music for percussion, the festival concluded with a concert performed by the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, conducted by Thomas Wilkins and two fellows, Yiran Zhao and Leonard Weiss (Zhao is a former student of mine, so I will limit my remarks to saying that her teacher was proud). TMC is a student orchestra, but their talent and hard work abetted a high level of playing throughout. All of the concert’s music was written in the twenty-first century by living composers.
Bioluminescence Chaconne (2019), by Gabriella Smith (b. 1991), is built around overlapping ostinatos. String tremolandos are prominent in the beginning, and glissandos take on an increasingly important role. The piece has a gradual buildup to a powerful central section with brash tutti and stretches of syncopated percussion, followed by a return to its opening demeanor to conclude. Smith is a violinist, and it shows in the deft deployment of strings here. She has cited Bach’s D minor Chaconne as a touchstone, but its form repeats in a more symmetrical fashion than the shape of Bioluminescence Chaconne. The first word of the title may be more telling, as Smith has suggested that her experiences scuba diving, accompanying a team of researchers, was an inspiration for the piece. The piece works well, so well that next year the Boston Symphony Orchestra is playing it too.
Ellen Reid (b. 1983) won the Pulitzer Prize in 2019, and her piece When the World as You’ve Known It Doesn’t Exist (2019) was commissioned and premiered by the New York Philharmonic. In addition to a large orchestra, it features three sopranos in wide ranging wordless parts encompassing animated and sustained passages. Zoe McCormick, Kerrigan Bigelow, and Sarah Davis sang skilfully, blending well together and with the orchestra. Like Smith, Reid uses ostinatos, and these are contrasted with aching pitch slides and clusters. When the World… is likely her most dissonant piece, with both major and minor seconds featuring prominently in the motivic and harmonic material. Weiss brought out dynamic contrasts and imbued the legato sections with a strong sense of line.
Reid wrote When the World… for the NY Phil’s Project 19, which celebrated a centenary of women’s suffrage in the United States. Her program note suggests that it doesn’t directly reflect this issue, and is instead focused on an emotional artistic journey, delineated in stages not dissimilar to those frequently found in grieving, moving from questioning to anger to acceptance.
Ortiz had two pieces on the program, one concluding the first half and the other played after intermission. Guest flutist Alejandro Escuer was the soloist on Altar de Viento (“Altar of the Wind,” 2015), a concerto specifically written for him. Escuer’s proficiency with extended techniques is comprehensive, and Ortiz makes good use of them in the piece. Escuer’s approach is also attuned to rhythm, and he even moves a bit during interludes where he isn’t playing, underlining the dance rhythms so often present in Altar de Viento. Indeed, the percussion section once again got a workout, playing traditional dances and new music gestures with equal aplomb. The rest of the orchestra was game to groove as well, and Wilkins led them through myriad metric shifts with suavity and clarity.
Hominum, Concerto for Orchestra (2017), is an imposing half-hour long piece. One of Ortiz’s finest, it was premiered in 2017 by another exemplary student ensemble, the Juilliard Orchestra. There’s nothing about the concerto that suggests it was sculpted with emerging artists in mind, as it is quite challenging. Composers who write a concerto for orchestra usually provide each cohort of the ensemble with music that spotlights their capacities and instruments’ essential characteristics. Ortiz revels in exploring the many textures that an orchestra can achieve in the twenty-first century. The virtuosity that talented musicians possess is explored as well. Hominum is at turns vivacious, brash, reflective, and powerful, and served as a rousing closer for FCM.
-Christian Carey
Simone Dinnerstein and Baroklyn Perform Glass at Merkin Hall
Kaufman Music Center
Piano Dialogues
Simone Dinnerstein with Baroklyn
May 12, 2025
Published on Sequenza 21
NEW YORK – Last Monday, the pianist Simone Dinnerstein brought her Baroklyn project to Kaufman Music Center’s Merkin Hall to perform an all Philip Glass program. Baroklyn is a string ensemble, augmented at the concert by harp and celesta, assembled by Dinnerstein from musician friends with an eye towards a mostly, but not exclusively, female group.
The concert opener was The Hours Suite, excerpted from the film score and arranged by Michael Riesman, a longtime musical director for Philip Glass. Unlike many film score segments, which are brief vignettes, the three movements here are substantial, evocative of the film but transcending it to morph into a symphonic triptych. Conducting from the piano, Dinnerstein’s gestures were clear, and Baroklyn’s musicians were responsive and performed in a well-coordinated fashion, even when in the midst of myriad metric shifts at high speed. The group’s keen intonation afforded the harmonies a lustrous quality.
Mad Rush is one of the most abundantly virtuosic of Glass’s piano pieces, and it has become a showcase for Dinnerstein’s superlative chops. The piece contains furious fast runs, with a concomitant sense of blissful austerity in the slower passages. Dinnerstein inhabited both demeanors authoritatively.
The concert concluded with Tirol Concerto, the composer’s first piano concerto. Prior to the performance, I had some misgivings about whether Baroklyn’s lithe approach had the requisite heft for the piece. However, I was won over by the powerful performance they mounted, right-sized for Merkin Hall but resolute and often jubilant. An interpretive challenge in the piece is the shaping of its dramatic arc. The first movement begins with a slow introduction and then picks up steam, and the finale is a brisk moto perpetuo, both straightforward in design. It is the central movement, a sprawling and content-filled quarter of an hour, that can all too easily imbalance the proceedings. Not so here, where the interpretation sliced it into a series of tableaux that would fit right in as passages for a Glass opera.
On May 30th, Baroklyn will release Complicité, a recording of J.S. Bach for the Supertrain imprint. They are joined by guest artists Peggy Pearson, who plays oboe d’amore, and mezzo-soprano Jennifer Johnson Cano. Dinnerstein’s graceful arrangements of Bach arias for piano and ensemble are adroit tropes on cantata movements. The Keyboard Concerto in E major is an excellent vehicle for Dinnerstein, who plays it in period-informed fashion while suiting her touch and tempos to the modern grand. Johnson Cano’s mezzo-soprano voice is the centerpiece of Cantata 170, which is presented in full. She sings with rich tone and judicious use of vibrato, sumptuously phrasing long legato lines and dexterously performing melismatic passages. In the Air, composer Philip Lasser’s reworking of Bach’s Air on a G-string, is replete with tender ornamentations, and a pleasant valediction. Complicité is a recital disc that, even in arrangements and on modern instruments, shows Dinnerstein and Baroklyn to be gifted advocates for Bach.
-Christian Carey
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
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
Crimson Roses: Contemporary American Choral Music
Naxos Music CD
Musica Viva Choir and Orchestra, Alejandro Hernandez-Valdez, conductor
Erin Sensenig, soprano
Frederica von Stade, mezzo-soprano
After a lengthy and illustrious career, the mezzo-soprano Frederica von Stade says farewell on Crimson Roses, an album recorded by Musica Viva that includes three contemporary choral pieces. The title work, And Crimson Roses Once Again Be Fair, composed by Joseph Turrin, features both von Stade and soprano Erin Sensenig. It is a forty-five minute long cantata that commemorates the 100th anniversary of the First World War. Turrin set three poets who were part of the war effort or wrote about those they had lost, Wilfred Owen (also set in Britten’s War Requiem), Vera Brittain, and Siegfried Sassoon. The soloists are both in fine voice, with von Stade making up for a bit less bloom in tone with an expressive, indeed moving, performance of the cantata’s penultimate movement “Perhaps.” Sensenig, who is a member of Musica Viva, demonstrates both musicality and radiant top notes on the seventh movement, “Soliloquy and the Last Meeting.” The orchestra and choir acquit themselves well in Turrin’s neo-romantic score. Kudos to conductor Alejandro Hernandez-Valdez for leading the piece in a well-paced and thoughtful interpretation.
Gilda Lyons’ Monotombo is a five-movement a capella piece in which she sets poems about the volcanic landscape in Nicaragua. Lyons uses overlapping counterpoint, color chords, glissandos, and steaming sound effects to provide vivid renditions of the texts. Richard Einhorn’s The Luminous Ground uses plucked strings and vocalise to depict the eponymous light installation by James Turrell. While economical in material, the pieces is most affecting.
This is the tenth anniversary of Hernandez-Valdez’s tenure with Musica Viva, and the contemporary pieces that were selected for the recording demonstrate both his dedicated curation and the versatility and talent of the group.
-Christian Carey
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė
Aletheia – Choral Works
Latvian Radio Choir, Sigvards Kļava, artistic director and conductor
Ondine
Žibuoklė Martinaitytė (b. 1973) divides her time between her home country, Lithuania, and the United States. Her works have earned her accolades and laurels such as the Guggenheim Fellowship and a residency and commission from Aaron Copland House. She is well known for exquisitely constructed and powerfully scored orchestral music. On Aletheia, a different side of Martinaitytė’s music is shown; her music for a cappella mixed chorus. None of the pieces programmed on the recording use conventional texts, instead exploring a number of wordless approaches to singing.
Martinaitytė may not be using textual narrative, but the sounds she uses are equally communicative. The title work was written shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. Built entirely out of vowels, its stacked harmonies and arcing glissandos suggest a mournful demeanor entirely in keeping with the subject matter. The composer’s harmonies move between cluster chords and deftly tuned overtones, with a gradual development of greater individuation of the parts and faster rhythmic cycling. The piece’s climax is an enormous yawp, followed by a precipitous descent in all of the voices.
Chant des Voyelles (2018) has an interesting genesis. Initially, Martinaitytė selected disparate texts to set, then decided to use just vowels from the text. At this point, she realized that she needn’t be so proscriptive, and decided to construct the piece based on vowels of her own choosing. An intricate web of harmonies and sustained lines, sung with pristine tuning by the Latvian Radio Choir, conducted by Sigvards Kļava, Chant des Voyelles is a luscious work that doesn’t require a program in order to make a strong emotional impression. Ululations (2023) uses the title technique to create a piece filled with varying speeds and types of keening. Rather than a specific topic, Ululations expresses grief for the violence, suffering, and separation occurring throughout the world in current times.
The recording concludes with The Blue of Distance (2010). The title is taken from a quote in Rebecca Solnit’s book A Field Guide to Getting Lost. Martinaitytė’s first textless piece, it is composed entirely of phonemes, whose variety engenders a number of vowel spaces that score the voices with a host of colors. So too the gestures found here, which range from held overtones to strongly punctuated utterances. Partway through, minor second oscillations in the soprano pile up into a blur, a reminiscence of Solnit’s “blue of distance,” but in the audible rather than visual domain.
Martinaitytė is moving into mid-career with a number of durable pieces in her oeuvre. Given the theatricality she can bring to textless vocal music, one wonders what she might do with a fresh libretto; her only stage work, to date, Steppenwolf, is over twenty years old. Regardless, her next compositions are eagerly awaited. Aletheia is one of my favorite recordings of 2024.
Christian Carey
Splinter Reeds – Dark Currents (Cantaloupe)
Splinter Reeds, the West Coast’s first wind quintet, has distinguished themselves as advocates for living composers. Dark Currents, their latest recording for Cantaloupe, features two twenty-ish minute long pieces, Tall Grass (2022) by the totalist composer and Bang on a Can member Michael Gordon, and Antenna Studies (2018) by Paula Matthusen, a professor at Wesleyan who is one of the finest experimental electronic composers of her generation; both works were written for Splinter Reeds.
Gordon has steadily developed an eclectic musical language that exhibits fluency and variety in large scale forms. The entire first section of Tall Grass is about ascent, with overlaid ostinatos in polyrhythms reaching for the skies. Alongside the melodic material are held notes that accompany and intersperse them, as well as periodic rests. The lines drop out for a long held altissimo note, then resume, the bass clarinet joining with a microtonal scale. The brakes are put on the section by a held low note, followed by an effects-filled solo from the bass clarinet. In the next section, the material slows, creating triadic arpeggiations that both ascend and descend, with octave leaps in the bass. It is like the aural equivalent of a close-up. A chorale-like passage ensues, and the section cadences in mid-register octaves and trills. The fast tempo returns with the melody ghosted in pairs and passages of hemiola that gradually unravel into their constituent elements and then knit back together, punctuated by multiphonics. The slow tempo returns in a soft, mysterious section. A galloping fortissimo passage announces the piece’s climax, rife with repeated notes. A denouement provides a slender version of the piece’s original ascent, and Tall Grass ends with an inconclusive single note.
Matthusen’s Antenna Studies starts pianissimo with half tuned-in radio blasts and held sine tones, and sampled percussion, followed by non-pitched wind sounds, such as breath and pops. Sustained single tones in the winds enter on the same pitch as the electronics and accompanied by flashes of radio static. Brief canonic passages are introduced, with secundal intervals and deliberate detuning used to create beats. Sustained bass clarinet arrives two octaves lower, working its way up harmonic partials, soon followed up an octave and then haloed by electronics. The entire group soon engages in holding notes and hocketing in various registers. An interlude contains repeating patterns, warm synth chords, a held altissimo note and, once again, a plethora of non-pitched wind sounds. Overlapping mixed interval scales, the winds re-enter as the electronics recede to an upper register drone. A general crescendo is sculpted from repeated notes in the winds and another secundal tune, this time in the electronics. Uptempo ostinatos, interspersed by a tart chord, continue alongside a wide registral swath of electronics. There is a long decrescendo in which a sampled voice joins sustained winds, closing with the electronics and acoustic instruments finally on equal footing
The two pieces that are on Dark Currents contrast well. Both are strong additions to their respective composers’ catalogs that benefit from skillful playing and artful musicality by Splinter Reeds. Recommended.