Tag: @cbcarey

Boston, CD Review, Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Orchestral

Zwilich Recorded by BMOP (CD Review)

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich: Symphony No. 5

Sarah Brady, flute; Gabriela Diaz, violin

Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Gil Rose, Music Director

BMOP/Sound 1098

 

Composer Ellen Taaffe Zwilich turned eighty-five in April, and one of the many celebrations of her life and work is a recording by Boston Modern Orchestra Project. Directed by Gil Rose and featuring flutist Sarah Brady and violinist Gabriela Diaz as concerto soloists, it is a generous program of her music. The centerpiece is Zwilich’s Symphony No. 5 (2008), a powerful four-movement work that combines traditional formal structure with a musical language of a more recent vintage. 

 

Upbeat! (1998) opens the recording with a brief, sprightly overture that resembles its title, with neoclassical string motives and ebullient brass and percussion entrances juxtaposing in comedic fashion. Concerto Elegia for Solo Flute and Strings explores an entirely different emotion, that of mourning. The first movement, “Elegy,” introduces flutist Sarah Brady as its protagonist, with a fluid sound and emotive, but never bathetic, delivery of limpid runs and ardent crescendos. “Soliloquy” features a modal theme against poly-interval chords and another motive on the violin’s g-string. The music proceeds through a variety of melodies and embellishments that have a doleful demeanor. The “Epilogue” begins with diaphanous string verticals, and then a legato main theme that is offset by pizzicatos. Then the music shifts towards early jazz. The pizzicato theme recurs, but this time played arco, with the flute doubling it in octaves. The melodic doublings continue, with the rest of the strings going back and forth between pizzicato and sostenuto chords, and the piece ends in an apotheosis of major harmony. 

 

Still another set of moods, along with historical characters, is explored in Commedia dell’Arte for Solo Violin and Orchestra (2012). Hundreds of years ago, each of the Commedia characters were memorably deployed at the Venice Carnival. They have evolved over the centuries; in England, one can see a resemblance to them in Punch and Judy. Both Stravinsky and Schoenberg revived them in the 1910s for Petroushka and Pierrot Lunaire, and several composers have investigated the characters since. 

 

Zwilich depicts the commedia in four separate movements. Arlecchino (the Harlequin) is propelled by slaps in the percussion and a florid melody, with blue note glissandos, ricocheting back and forth between the soloist and strings. Alongside it are puckish pizzicatos and brawny octave punctuations. Columbina, the romantic interest of both Arlecchino and the Capitano is given appropriately heart-throbbing music and a high-lying solo line. Martial drumming accompanies Capitano as well as a brisk tune that mercurially shifts through various keys. The close of the movement is a long decrescendo of drumming: the captain marches away. Cadenza and Finale begins with bell sonorities, out of which a cadenza that coopts all three previous tunes is played with energetic brilliance. The orchestra rejoins in luminous fashion, bells signaling a final flourish from the violin and the piece’s repeated octaves to conclude. 

 

Symphony No. 5 opens with a Lydian motive and fortissimo brass chords. After the relatively chamber-like ambience of the concertos, tutti strings and tangy brass up the ante. The transition incorporates winds in tropes on the first theme. The second theme is a Beethovenian gesture, an oscillating minor third that recalls a different fifth symphony. Timpani and hand drumming add driving intensity, but it is short-lived, broken up by a brief interruption of soft winds and high violins. Again, the forte brass and Beethoven’s minor third return. This alternation repeats once more, the movement concluding piano.

 

The second movement is a scherzo, with arcing chromatic lines in strings and winds, timpani punctuations, and overlapping trumpet solos. This is succeeded by the theme in mid-register winds and then emphatic repeated octaves, a gesture in common with the concertos. The strings return to the fore with quick ascending lines, played with admirable coordination by BMOP. Winds and brass repeat terse phrases, while soloists ascend too. Vigorous percussion is unleashed, and repeated chords conclude the movement. It is the briefest, but most potent, of the symphony’s sections. 

 

The third movement is slow, alternating rigor and lyricism. It opens with a flute solo, once again in Lydian. Brass takes on a chordal role beneath altissimo register violins, which develop the flute melody into a breathless line, accompanied by downward arpeggios. Brass, snare drums and timpani are added to the proceedings as modal scalar passages are deployed in the strings. A general crescendo is brought to a halt, the texture thinning, punctuated by snippets of the arpeggiated descending line. A shift in pitch center moves the thematic material upward, helping to gather intensity. A sudden hush, and oboe and bassoon get their own solo turns. Sostenuto violins and violas return, as does the arpeggiated motive in solo clarinet and low strings. Softly, low register repetitions of the wind solos and repeated brass chords provide a final thematic utterance, and pizzicatos conclude the movement.

 

The finale begins another Beethoven allusion, the thrice repeated string gesture found in the Eroica Symphony. The bassoon and double flutes are pitted against repeated brass chords and cymbals, while the minor third motif, from previously, is heard again as an accompanying gesture. In the next section, horn stabs and sustained low trombones build the texture, while the violins play a wide-ranging chromatic theme. The strings then hold a long, high note while brass and percussion repeat the rhythmic ostinato that has undergirded so much of the movement, but this time with thunderous attacks. The violins return to their expansive melodic material, but at yet a slower pace, with rearticulations continuing to contrast it. The modal scales come back, descending first in strings and winds, then ascending in high violins. The symphony comes to a powerful conclusion with the repeating verticals and clangorous percussion in a slow ritardando. 

 

Zwilich is well-served throughout, both by soloists and BMOP under Rose. These are benchmark recordings of pieces in her catalog that show both her connection to tradition and eagerness to explore. As she celebrates her eighty-fifth birth year, one hopes that more pieces are forthcoming from Zwilich. Recommended.

 

-Christian Carey


by Christian Carey
CD Review, File Under?, Rock

Guided by Voices – “I Am A Scientist” (30th Anniversary Version)

Photo: Trevor Naud

Video: Guided by Voices: “I Am A Scientist,” 30th Anniversary Version

 

Guided by Voices celebrates the thirtieth anniversary of their album Bee Thousand with a remake of one of their early, most-beloved songs, “I Am A Scientist,” via Rolling Stone.

In an interview with RS, frontman and principal songwriter Robert Pollard describes “I Am A Scientist” and Bee Thousand as follows:“The song and the album opened the door for me and allowed me to play rock music for a living.” Prior to that, he was a science teacher.

Guided by Voices

Strut of Kings

GBV Inc. (2024)

The ever-prolific Pollard and band have released dozens of titles. Their most recent recording, Strut of Kings, streeted late last month. Pollard is joined by guitarists Doug Gillard and Bobby Bare, Jr., bassist Mark Shue, and drummer Kevin March in the current iteration of Guided by Voices, which debuted in 2017 and has proven a durable unit.

The opener, “Show Me the Castle,” has a slow, crunching guitar riff over which Pollard sings the first verse laconically, the second double-tracked with quirky interval relationships. The band double times in the chorus while Pollard’s line remains in the original tempo. A flute synth interlude leads into the third verse, which is adorned with a different vocal harmony, followed by a brief burst of sustained guitar. This moves directly into the next song, “Dear Onion,” which is played in a loping mid-tempo groove of interlocking rhythm guitars. Unlike “Show Me the Castle,” which is built up in multiple sections, “Dear Onion” is typical of Pollard’s more aphoristic song craft, in which an entire narrative can be found in under two minutes and the skin of an onion.

Even by the elliptical standards of Pollard’s titles and lyrics, “Olympus Cock in Radiana,” which includes the phrase “Strut of Kings” in the lyrics, is one of the more unusual ones. Power chords speed up and slow down, with Pollard’s voice serving as the eye in the hurricane. “Caveman Running Naked” is another weird title for a tuneful song, with March’s brusque fills offsetting the guitars’ duet breaks and Pollard’s quick delivery. The coda overlaps open string arpeggiations in a marked contrast to the rest of the song. “Leaving Umbrella” is led by a sinuous vocal, the band punctuating it with emphatic downbeats.

“Timing Voice” embodies the grandeur of seventies prog, incorporating a Romantic chord progression and a guitar solo that channels Steve Howe. “Fictional Environment Dream” is another standout, with duet vocals on a memorable chorus. “Serene King” and “Bicycle Garden” deliver a one-two punch to conclude the album, with its best hooks and most energetic performances from Pollard.

Some artists creatively dry up as they age, others flourish. Pollard is among the latter camp, and Strut of Kings is ample evidence. While Bee Thousand and other earlier albums should still play a part in live set lists, Guided by Voices also has memorable new songs to play.

-Christian Carey

by Christian Carey
CD Review, File Under?, Piano, Twentieth Century Composer

Donald Berman plays Ives (CD Review)

Donald Berman

Ives

Avie, 2024

 

Pianist and scholar Donald Berman has made a special inquiry into the music of American hyper-modernist composers, Charles Ives chief among them. This year marks the sesquicentenary of Ives’s birth, and Berman celebrates the occasion with an Avie CD of the original piano version of St. Guadens (“The Black March”), best known as one of the movements of the orchestra piece Three Places in New England, and his own scholarly edition of the totemic Piano Sonata No. 2, Concord Mass., 1840-1860, usually known by its nickname, the “Concord Sonata.”

 

One of the challenges of these pieces is the importance of spatiality in Ives’s approach to composition. In the liner notes, Berman acknowledges this, stating the goal of creating “three-dimensional” versions of the programmed works. In a two-channel stereo recording of a stationary piano, one cannot hope to mirror the spatiality of the orchestral version of Three Places in New England, where voices move through the orchestra and are bent in a simulacrum of the doppler effect. The piano score for St. Gaudens attempts this through shifts of register, texture, tempo, and dynamic that provide impressive contrasts. Civil War era songs and one by Stephen Foster are quoted. St. Gaudens is named after the statue on Boston Common of the 54th Massachusetts Regiment, the first of all African-American soldiers. Their history was a bloody one, and, in a moving performance, Berman leans into the bellicose sections and allows for the softer ones, particularly the diaphanous coda, to emerge as wisps of sound.

 

St. Gaudens is a fine introduction to Ives’s approach at the piano, but the Concord Sonata presents his aesthetic writ large. Each of the four movements is dedicated to American transcendentalists: Emerson, Hawthorne, the Alcotts, and Thoreau. Transcendentalism was an important philosophical trend that shaped the thought of many Americans: philosophers, poets, novelists, artists, and, especially in Ives’s case, musicians. His concept of transcendentalism in music involves the aforementioned soundworld, as well as liberal quotation of sacred and secular tunes, often overlapping. At three quarters of an hour long, the stamina required by the piece is most formidable. 

 

Berman possesses both the virtuosity and interpretative acumen to give the sonata one of its most compelling recordings to date. “Emerson,” the sprawling eighteen-minute long first movement, could easily sound amorphous, but the pianist finds the formal boundaries and grounding lines in its diverse material. Some performers of Ives, perhaps giving recourse to the cranky elements of his biography, don’t understand the musicality that can be brought to bear instead of stentorian caricature. Indeed, Berman’s performance of “Emerson” captures dynamic nuances that few others adopt. In “Hawthorne,” Berman prioritizes bold rhythmic cross-accentuations and dramatic shifts from impressionist-tinged solos to a dissonant passage from one of Ives’s favorite songs, “They Are There.” There is a fair bit of proto ragtime in the latter part of the movement, as well a march filled with multiple quotes shifting kaleidoscopically. It ends with a bold, ascending chromatic scale.

 

“The Alcotts” is the briefest of the four movements, balancing hymnody, parlor piano of a Scottish cast, and a reharmonized rendition of the motive from Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. There is also a melody often used by Ives, “the Human Faith” theme. The final movement, “Thoreau,” begins with the diaphanous music that Ives often uses to depict walking in nature, in this case, likely Thoreau’s beloved Walden Pond. In a gradual buildup, whole tone scales vie against chromaticism, and the Beethoven 5th Symphony motive returns to announce the final section. The coda brings the piece back to the Walden Pond music, as if a ruminative walk has found Thoreau returning to his cabin. Berman’s keen sense of molding frequent contrasts into a narrative concludes the piece with a thoughtful portrait of the most emblematic transcendentalist.

 

Berman’s Ives CD is one of my favorites thus far in 2024. Highly recommended.

 

  • Christian Carey  

 

  



by Christian Carey
CD Review, File Under?, Orchestras, Twentieth Century Composer

Falletta Conducts Foss on Naxos (CD review)

Lukas Foss – Symphony 1

Amy Porter, Flute; Nikki Chooi, Violin

Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra, JoAnn Falletta, conductor

Naxos American Classics

 

Lukas Foss (1922-2009) was an omnivorous composer who, over the course of his career,  went through multiple style periods. When he was a teenager, he studied with Hindemith at Yale and then made close contacts at the Berkshire Music Center (now Tanglewood) with Serge Koussivitzky, Aaron Copland, and Leonard Bernstein (a lifelong friend and supporter). In the 1940s, his music resembled the Americana and neoclassical styles being pursued by a plethora of American composers. In Ode (1944, revised 1958) Foss clearly adopted Americana’s signatures, with thunderous brass and timpani, and intricate string and wind lines. There are tonal centers, but ones elaborated by polytonal chords. While one could imagine this kind of material sounding triumphal, there is instead a portentous atmosphere, and with good reason. Foss was inspired to write Ode to lament the loss of Allied soldiers during the Second World War. On this Naxos CD, JoAnn Fallatta leads the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra in a muscular performance with brilliant tone and clear balancing of the various sections.

Photo: David A. Beloff

Three Early American Pieces (1944-1945, orchestrated in 1989) finds Foss returning to early material, three pieces for violin and piano. Rather than score the work in his late style, Foss returned to the sound world of his early music. No. 1 Early Song: Andante is reminiscent of the neo-classicism of Hindemith, with paired flutes playing an introduction followed by a supple violin solo accompanied by modal writing in winds and strings that concludes with a propulsive dance section. No. 2 Dedication: Lento has a pastoral quality. Vaughan Williams is not a composer usually associated with Foss, but there is more than a whiff of The Lark Ascending in Early Song. No. 3, Composer’s Holiday: Allegro, in an obvious nod to Copland’s Rodeo (1942), is an ebullient hoe-down. In all three, violinist Nikki Chooi plays the violin solo part with artful phrasing and ebullient demeanor.

 

The First Symphony (1944) was written (as was Ode) during a residency at the MacDowell Colony. It is the apotheosis of Foss’s Americana and neoclassical period. The piece is conservatively made, with four movements that correspond to those expected in a symphony by Mozart or Beethoven: The first movement has an andantino introduction followed by an allegretto sonata form, the second is an adagio, the third a scherzo, and the finale mirrors and recalls the first movement, with an andante introduction followed by an allegro finale. Many American neoclassicists employed tried and true formal designs, but the harmonies and rhythms that caught their ear were decidedly from the twentieth century. There is an interesting dichotomy in Foss’s First Symphony, between Hindemith’s sense of balance and Stravinsky’s zest for innovation. Adding a bit of Americana á la Copland, and Foss provides a comprehensive picture of his influences in the mid 1940s. The symphony is a stalwart addition to the mid-century  repertoire. Falletta leads the Buffalo Philharmonic in an ideal rendition of the piece.

 

Renaissance Concerto comes from the 1980s, when Foss had moved through two decades of experimentation at UCLA and Buffalo and begun to write works in a postmodern style that channeled early music. The composer likened it to a “handshake across the centuries.” The soloist, flutist Amy Porter, is a marvel, providing the microtonal inflections, frequent trills, and liquescent phrasing that this piece requires. She has an extraordinarily beautiful tone as well. The first movement, Intrada, begins with a long cadenza followed by a dancing section based on the English song The Carman’s Whistle, which was arranged for harpsichord by William Byrd. The cadenza returns and then dance and flute solo are juxtaposed, with the rest of the orchestra first shadowing and then boisterously accompanying the soloist. It ends with a delicate and slow passage for the soloist alone. The second movement, Baroque Interlude, is based on L’Enharmonique, a harpsichord piece by Rameau. The flutist plays a set of variations on the tune that twist and turn through a series of harmonic shifts and embellishments, while the orchestra provides a puckish accompaniment. The third movement, Recitative, is based on the lament aria from Monteverdi’s Orfeo. Rife with pitch bends and chromaticism, it replicates the keening of Orpheo in the opera, when he has realized that Eurydice has died. Porter and the orchestra provide a captivating rendition of the section. The finale, Jouissance, is based on a bawdy round from early seventeenth century composer David Melvill. Percussive extended techniques are added to the flute’s kit bag of extensions, and feisty lines from Porter contend with a web of counterpoint from the orchestra. A fugue rife with syncopation supplies the piece’s climax, after which the flute and tambourine provide a boisterous duet. The piece concludes with tightly overlapping melodies in the ensemble while the flute, with a bevy of ornaments, deconstructs the tune.

 

Like many of the chameleon-like identities Foss adopted, the concerto provides a window into his perspective on music of the past. In most of his late music (apart from a few pieces, like Solo Observed, that dally with minimalism), he approaches earlier composers’ music with curiosity, interested in mining their works’s capabilities and putting his unique stamp on the results. One hopes that Falletta revisits Foss on recording – often.

 

-Christian Carey

by Christian Carey
Concert review, File Under?, Opera, Orchestras, Twentieth Century Composer

The Met Opera Orchestra at Carnegie Hall (Concert Review)

Credit: Evan Zimmerman / Met Opera

The Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, Music Director

Carnegie Hall

June 14, 2024

By Christian Carey for Sequenza 21

 

NEW YORK – In their last concert appearance this season at Carnegie Hall, the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, conducted by their Music Director, Yannick Nézet-Séguin, presented a program of music from two early twentieth century operas that both explore French folktales alongside one of the most famous nineteenth century opera overtures, based on a legend first promulgated by mariners in the eighteenth century. 

 

The latter, Richard Wagner’s Overture to the Flying Dutchman (1843), opened the concert. It has a memorable and bellicose main theme, one that particularly will delight brass fans. Aside from a couple of phlegmatic entrances at the very beginning, the Met’s brass section played admirably, with brilliant, powerful tone and incisive rhythm. Nézet-Séguin’s interpretation emphasized a strong and questing demeanor. The accentuation of leitmotifs associated with the ship’s captain and the sea’s rollicking waves suggested a character ready to break free from the curse inflicted upon him. 

Credit: Evan Zimmerman / Met Opera

Claude Debussy’s opera Pélleas et Mélisande (1902) is one of the composer’s crowning achievements. He never made a suite from the opera, and conductor Eric Leinsdorf decided to craft one, assembling a bit more than twenty minutes of its instrumental music. The piece received its Carnegie Hall premiere at the concert. 

 

Keeping with the Dutchman’s aquatic theme, Leinsdorf’s selections from Pélleas et Mélisande often involve water inspired passages, including music from the incomparable grotto scene. The music is frequently subdued, primarily operating in a dynamic spectrum between pianissimo and piano. There is forte music in Pélleas, but much of it involves the vocalists, particularly the role of Golaud and the penultimate scene that goes from love to murder. Thus, apart from a few portentous passages, Leinsdorf crafted a suite with more than a passing resemblance to the composer’s tone poem La Mer (1905). The Met orchestra played exceedingly beautifully, with a luminous sound that seamlessly blended winds and strings. Nézet-Séguin gave the piece a detailed and delicate reading, with well-paced phrasing providing continued vitality in a work  that, in the wrong hands, could be treated to an overly sentimental and languid rendition.

Credit: Evan Zimmerman / Met Opera

The Met’s orchestra concerts usually feature at least one piece for vocalists. Concluding the evening was an unstaged one-act opera, Bluebeard’s Castle (1918) by Béla Bartók. Even by the standards of early modernist opera, the story is exceedingly morbid (“creeptacular,” opined a concertgoer near my seat). Bluebeard brings Judith, his latest wife, to his castle. She is both fearful of his reputation and smitten with him. There are seven doors in the home, which include a torture chamber, armory, treasury, garden, et al. Judith is insistent that all of the doors be opened, that light be let into the gloomy castle. Behind the last door is a room that contains three of Bluebeard’s previous wives, all murdered. He describes this room as “a space on the border of life and death.” Judith is sent to join the other wives, never to depart. 

 

Why Judith doesn’t run the other direction when she sees the bloody implements in the torture chamber behind door one I’ll never know, but the progression from door to door isn’t just a realistic depiction of a castle. Maeterlinck was an important Symbolist writer, and the play and, by extension, the libretto for Bluebeard’s Castle, is rife with archetypal imagery. Bartók leaned into this understanding of the story, creating music that clearly delineates both of the characters and the progression through a castle that is equal parts nightmare dwelling and the inner life of Bluebeard. 

 

Mezzo-soprano Elina Garanča played Judith and Christian Van Horn took the role of Bluebeard. Garanča’s voice is a high, lyric mezzo, which served the challenging tessitura of the role well. In addition, she embodied the character’s mixture of feelings with eloquent expression, affording Judith successively greater curiosity and dread as more is revealed. Van Horn has a darkly sonorous instrument which he used to diabolical effect. The contrast between the two characters, one vulnerable and the other villainous, was well interpreted, Garanča singing with excitement and insistence, Van Horn sepulchrally forceful. Not for the faint of heart, but as Bartók’s only opera, it makes one yearn for him to have composed more for the stage.

 

There is an interesting connection between Pélleas et Mélisande and Bluebeard’s Castle. Maeterlinck, whose plays were the basis of their librettos, depicts Mélisande as a wife who escaped Bluebeard’s predations. Perhaps this explains her dissociative and even perplexing behavior in the opera. 

 

The concert’s program contained vivid contrasts as well as intriguing commonalities. The orchestra and Nézet-Séguin proved as compelling in concert as they are in the pit. 



by Christian Carey
Brooklyn, Concerts, Events, Experimental Music, Festivals, File Under?, jazz

William Parker Celebrated at Vision Fest

Vision Fest 2024 – William Parker Receives a Lifetime of Achievement Award

On June 18th, luminary bassist, bandleader, poet, and composer William Parker will receive a Lifetime of Achievement Award at Vision Fest 2024. The Brooklyn series for ecstatic jazz and improvised music has often featured Parker in a variety of ensemble configurations and in memorable solo performances. 

He will be celebrated on Tuesday, June 18th, with a plethora of events (below)  and performances that will also be livestreamed (tickets).

There is more to celebrate. On Friday, June 21st, AUM Fidelity is releasing two recordings featuring Parker. 

William Parker and Ellen Christi – Cereal Music (AUM Fidelity)

 

This is William Parker’s first spoken word album. Themes that he has long addressed in writing  –  racial justice, spirituality, peace, and healing – are explored in the eloquent selections shared here. Parker also plays flutes and bass. His collaborator, vocalist and sound artist Ellen Christi creates an elegant sound design for the recording and contributes her rich, sonorous voice as well. Birdsong features alongside conventional instruments and subtle electronic drones. Parker’s word-play contains fantastical imagery grounded in gritty experiences from the urban landscape. His declamation drifts easily, occasionally punctuating a particular concept like an arrival point in an improvisation.

Heart Trio – William Parker, Cooper-Moore, Hamid Drake – Heart Music (AUM Fidelity)

 

William Parker is joined by two long-time collaborators – Cooper-Moore and Hamid Drake –  in a new ensemble called Heart Trio. On their debut recording Heart Music, the musicians play a number of instruments, many Non-Western in background. Parker plays doson ngoni, shakuhachi, bass dudek, Serbian flute in F#, and Ney flute; Cooper-Moore plays ashimba and hoe-handle harp; Hamid Drake performs on frame drum and drum kit. The music they create simultaneously celebrates and transcends the traditions from which these instruments emanate. It combines polyrhythms identified with various cultures as well as passages, especially those featuring drum kit, that are palpably influenced by jazz. In spite of all of these elements, the trio’s interactions are seamless. 

 

The theme of Heart Music is sound healing. Theraputic use of music is a practice that has its own academic discipline. One can also look to Pauline Oliveros’s Deep Listening practice for another way to approach healing with sound. Heart Trio’s mission to heal takes on a different guise. Their music accesses the shamanic, the power of dance as ritual, and the jubilation of three lifelong companions finding a new way to interrelate. 

 

JUNE 18, 2024 WILLIAM PARKER LIFETIME OF ACHIEVEMENT 

ROULETTE INTERMEDIUM 509 Atlantic Ave Brooklyn NY

6:00 PM Invocation Lisa Sokolov

6:30 PM  ROOTS AND RITUALS
William Parker / Josh Abrams  / Joe Morris  / Mixashawn Rozie / Hamid Drake  / Jackson Krall /Juma Sultan / Michael Wimberly 

7:15 PM  Trail Of Tears Excerpts, The Blue Sky” Vanished Horizon”
Annemarie Sandy, Andrea Wolper, Raina Sokolov-Gonzalez / Mara Rosenbloom / James Brandon Lewis / Mixashawn Rozie / Isaiah Parker / Hamid Drake 

8:30 PM  Raining On The Moon
William Parker / Rob Brown / Steve Swell / Eri Yamamoto / Leena Conquest / Hamid Drake

9:15 PM The Ancients
Isaiah Collier / Dave Burrell / William Hooker / Miriam Parker / William Parker

10:00 PM William Parker & Huey’s Pocket Watch

Rob Brown, Aakash Mittal /Isaiah barr / Alfredo Colon / Dave Sewelson / Steve Swel / Colin Babcock / Taylor Ho Bynum / Diego Hernandez / Colson Jimenez / Hans Young Binter / Juan Pablo Carletti / Ellen Christi / Kyoko Kitamura / Patricia Nicholson / Art by William Parker

 

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

Caroline Shaw & Sō Percussion – Sing On (Video)

Photo: Adam Sliwinski

Composer, vocalist, and instrumentalist Caroline Shaw rejoins Sō Percussion for Rectangles and Circumstance, a new full length recording out today on Nonesuch. To celebrate the release, a video for the lead-off single, “Sing On,” has been released on YouTube today.

Rectangles and Circumstance combines imaginative percussion writing with abundant electronics and Shaw’s pop-adjacent singing. Shaw takes on an assured and distinctive role. Her voice is sometimes treated to make it nearly unrecognizable. Elsewhere, her singing is presented in its natural, fetchingly lyrical guise. Sō has developed a sound world that befits Shaw’s heterogeneous compositions, using a plethora of pitched percussion, drums, and electronics. Whether the music leans towards pop, classicism, or totalism, it is uniformly engaging. Recommended

-Christian Carey

 

 

 

by Christian Carey
Choral Music, Concert review, File Under?

The Manhattan Choral Ensemble Sings Victoria (Concert review)

The Manhattan Choral Ensemble, Thomas Cunningham, Director

The Victoria Requiem

Church of the Blessed Sacrament

May 18, 2024

By Christian Carey for Sequenza 21

 

NEW YORK – The Manhattan Choral Ensemble is an auditioned forty-voice group. Among them are enthusiastic amateurs, professional singers who want to work with Director Thomas Cunningham, who is a dynamic musician and imaginative programmer, and singers from music-adjacent pursuits, notably musical theater. A diverse group to be sure, but they sing beautifully together. 

 

The main offering on their May concert program was by Tomas Luis de Victoria (1548-1611), his Requiem Mass, published in 1605. Victoria was chaplain in Madrid to Empress Maria, and the piece was written for her funeral in 1603. It is one of the most highly regarded works of the late Renaissance. 

 

MCE performed both the chant and polyphonic portions of the mass, impressively tuned in unison passages and counterpoint alike. Cunningham took tempos realistic for a forty-voice group. At the same time, he urged them to sing in animated fashion, crafting a rendition of the Requiem that retained a sense of period practice. 

 

Recognizing that his audience came to the concert with varying levels of background, Cunningham introduced the Requiem with a brief overview. Between sections, he discussed the piece, pointing out aspects of the music to listen for and features of its text. It was an excellent way to help attendees listen to a piece in liturgical Latin, and in a style that may have been foreign to some of them.

 

The program included a few other pieces interspersed with movements of the Requiem. While including texts that were appropriate additions, this afforded listeners a pause from Victoria’s musical language. Beati quorum via, by Charles Villiers Stanford (1852-1924), is broken into sections of women and men in canon that then come together in sumptuous harmonies. The piece affords the sopranos an opportunity to sing in soaring upper lines, and the other parts each to access their best respective registers, the conclusion saving and savoring the low basses.

 

Abendlied by Josef Gabriel Rheinberger (1839-1901) is a gently lyrical piece using short imitative exchanges that alternate with homophonic passages and cadences redolent of late Romanticism. The concert concluded with In Paradisum, by Z. Randall Stroope (b. 1953), which is dedicated, “In honor of the victims of the coronavirus pandemic, and the thousands of families left behind.” A touching composition in a colorful pantonal language with rich dynamic contrasts, including swelling crescendos and gently reflective pianissimo passages. This was followed by a brief Responsorium in plainchant. The additions to the program demonstrated the versatility of MCE, capable of performing early music, emotive Romantic fare, and a challenging twenty-first century piece. 

 

Visual art is often featured as part of the group’s presentations. Allison Walker created beautiful, abstract prints that were placed around the performance space, illuminating each of the movements of the Requiem. Art, music, and an interspersed lecture all served to support a memorable performance by the Manhattan Choral Ensemble. 

 

by Christian Carey
Chamber Music, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, Experimental Music, File Under?

Kyle Bruckmann: of rivers (Recording review)

 

Kyle Bruckmann

of rivers

New Focus Recordings

 

Oboist, composer, and electronic musician Kyle Bruckmann is a dedicated advocate for contemporary concert music. One of the founding members of Splinter Reeds, he currently plays in a number of ensembles in the San Francisco Bay area, including sfSound, San Francisco Contemporary Players, and the Stockton Symphony. Bruckann teaches oboe and contemporary music at University of the Pacific. 

 

On his latest recording, Bruckmann programs a number of pieces that incorporate wildly challenging extended techniques and, in some, electronics. Bruckmann’s own Proximity, Affect features the latter, as well as deconstructed instruments. Thrumming bass and harmonics derived from it, succeeded by scraps of bleeps, bespoke instrumental interjections, and white noise open the work. Gradually, a bass passage an octave higher is introduced, along with a steady stream of repetitions. It is distressed by snippets of the middle’s material. The big bass returns only to have its ostinato hijacked by a percussive variant.

 

Jessie Cox’s AT(ou)M is a festival of multiphonics, microtones, and altissimo register playing. Its concept is the exploration of resonant spaces. The reverb imparted to the oboe attacks makes a point of this. Its concomitant idea is the exploration of the silences between attacks as they decay. This is an important component, as it invites the listener to hear the piece as more than its sounds, to experience slices of time with minimal transitions. Cox is a thoughtful composer, and AT(ou)M is a signature example of this. Here, as elsewhere, Bruckmann displays consummate technical skill, even in the most challenging elements of the score.

 

Hannah A. Barnes samples the oboe, put through a vocoder, and uses this material for the electronics part of Dis/inte/gration. The title is a good clue, as the piece begins with the foundational gesture of the tuning pitch, gradually moving away from it in sinuous scalar passages and angular leaps. The electronics arrive and begin to augment the proceedings with sounds that range from low octave grumbles to a choir of oboe glissandos. Its conclusion is described by Barnes as, “exacting change, and forcing the material to collapse in on itself, a ‘bacteria of voices.’”

 

Helen Grime used to be an oboist herself, and Arachne (spider) displays her familiarity with the instrument, particularly in her awareness of how note choices and the use of various fingerings abet artful lines. The piece has an incantatory quality, with beguiling ascending runs and cascades of trills – all seeming to weave a web of modernist counterpoint. An insistent upper note becomes an idée fixe, only to dissolve in the piece’s denouement. 

 

Drop by Linda Bouchard, for solo improviser and electronics, starts off with howling high notes, soon to be followed by water sounds: droplets, waves, and ice breaking, which are juxtaposed with terse rejoinders from the oboe. In one of the best moments, fleet runs directly respond to the flurries of rainwater in the electronics. Drop is an example of an organic use of sampling, and Bruckmann’s response to the recorded sounds is well-considered and abundantly chops-laden. 

 

Christopher Burns prefers to work closely with the interpreters’ of his music, creating a personal, collaborative experience as part of a composition’s gestation. The Mutiny of Rivers is written for EKG, Bruckmann’s duo with electronics musician Ernst Karel. Karel usually employs analog electronics, while Burns works in the digital domain. The composer combines both of these, and Bruckmann plays English horn, playing both composed and improvisatory passages. This agglomeration of elements proves to be the best of all worlds, with Karel’s analog instruments, typifying EKG’s “slowly unfolding textures and timbral nuances,” and Burns’s digital “spiky and multi-layered aesthetic,” combine in an intricate sound palette of microtones, timbral variety, and glissandos. Bruckmann, in turn, uses an instrument with additional low notes, yet plays in the altissimo register with aplomb. 

 

Burns also intends The Mutiny of Rivers to contain puzzles and even traps. One is that he gives Karel six tracks of sampled audio to use, some of which may be chopped or suppressed in performance. With versatile approaches and abundant aleatory, one can readily hear this as a playfully earnest way to provide a measure of trapeze walk to the piece. Burns cites Luigi Nono’s La Lontananza Nostalgica Utopica Futura as a totem work and although The Mutiny of Rivers contains its own panoply of sounds, the shared intent is manifest. 

 

Bruckmann’s of rivers is a formidable and satisfying recording, one of my favorites thus far in 2024. 

 

-Christian Carey


by Christian Carey
Contemporary Classical, File Under?, Premieres

Candice Hopes releases new single: “In the Upper Room”

One of Sequenza 21’s friends  is the “Diasporic Soprano” Candice Hoyes. A versatile vocalist and songwriter, she sings everything from opera to jazz to pop adjacent new music.

Her new single, “In the Upper Room (For Mary Winnifred)” for soprano, piano, and bass is out today and available on Bandcamp. Mary Winnifred was Hoyes’s grandmother and a mentor figure for her.

 

The song is part of the inaugural Lincoln Center Social Sculpture Projects “Sadah Espii Proctor’s adrift: the bayou project, curated by the incredible Joyous Pierce,” which can be viewed April 26 – May 8, 2024 at Hearst Plaza. It is Hoyes’s Lincoln Center debut as a composer.

by Christian Carey