Tag: File Under ? blog

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
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?, 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
CD Review, CDs, Contemporary Classical, Experimental Music, File Under?, London, Twentieth Century Composer

Music for Trumpets, Bass Clarinets, and Saxophones (CD Review)

Music for Trumpets, Bass Clarinets, and Saxophones

Aural Terrains

 

Rebecca Toal, Katie Lodge, Bradley Jones, trumpets

Raymond Brien, Michelle Hromin, Eb and bass clarinets

Chris Cundy, Yoni Silver, bass clarinets

Robert Burton, soprano saxophone

Julie Kjaer, alto saxophone, Tim Hodgkinson, alto saxophone and conducting

Jason Alder, baritone saxophone, contrabass clarinet

William Cole, conducting

 

A live recording made in England’s Cafe Oto, Music for Trumpets, Bass Clarinets, and Saxophones includes both brand new compositions for the assembled musicians and important pieces from the contemporary canon. An example of the latter is John Cage’s Five (1988) which is performed by trumpeter Rebecca Toal, Robert Burton, playing soprano saxophone, Chris Cundy and Raymond Brien playing bass clarinets, and Jason Adler playing baritone saxophone. Cage’s late number pieces are known for their slow, soft character. Written a year after Morton Feldman’s death, Five can sound like a valediction to a recently departed friend. This is particularly true in the supple and well-coordinated performance here. 

 

The spectral composer Gérard Grisey’s Anubis (1983) is performed by Adler, here on contrabass clarinet. Thrumming mixed scalar passages offset short tritone based tunes in a sepulchral register. Adler also plays Giacinto Scelsi’s Maknongan (1976). Webs of conjunct melodies appear in the bottom octave, and there are several wide leaps. Scelsi uses what was then a forbidden interval in the avant-garde, the octave. The piece is tremendously challenging, and Adler performs it with intense commitment. 

 

Julie Kjaer  plays her solo alto saxophone piece Grain (2022). Single notes with gliding endings open the work, interrupted by plosive pops, the irregularities implied by the title. Grain gradually gains intensity, Kjaer building a motive out of the beginning tune that evoles into one with fast notes and altissimo glissandos. The piece’s climax is filled with rapid, wide ranging, howling lines reminiscent of free jazz. The coda disassembles the material until Grain concludes with a brief flourish. Kjaer is both a talented composer and a formidable saxophonist. 

 

Theatrum Mundi (2022) by Thanos Chrysakis is an imposing piece. Its seventeen and a half minute duration is filled with waves of angular lines, microtones, and glissandos. The harmony initially is built from clangorous verticals, with the climax adding overtone chords in intense crescendos. After its crest, a denouement counters, with repeated notes and multiphonics played pianissimo. Chrysakis’ Doe of Stars (2014) is played by Toal and Adler, who switches back to baritone saxophone. Microtones and multiphonics serrate the edges of post-tonal melodies and reconstruct dyads into shadowy shapes. The music morphs into rapid re-articulations of single pitches. A rollicking saxophone solo is followed by a winding unison melody, with a widely spaced dyad to close. 

 

Tim Hodgkinson stepped out of the saxophone section to conduct his work Spelaion (2022), and one can readily hear why. The piece has myriad contrapuntal entrances and complexly accumulating passages. The pile-up of corruscating lines and repeated pitches creates slowly evolving and fascinatingly distressed textures. The whole ensemble participates in Spelaion to close this extraordinary evening that revelled in intricate music and superlative music-making.

 

-Christian Carey

 

 

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

Musica Sacra at Carnegie Hall (Concert Review)

Photo: Tanya Branganti.

Music Sacra

Classics for Christmas: Mozart, Bach, and Beethoven

Musica Sacra Chorus and Orchestra

Kent Tritle, conductor

Simone Dinnerstein, piano

Susanna Phillips, soprano

Carnegie Hall

December 18, 2024

 

NEW YORK – Musica Sacra, directed by Kent Tritle, gave a concert of Christmas music on Thursday, but you didn’t hear caroling. The group presented choral pieces with Christmas texts, and topped things off with the Beethoven Choral Fantasy, a piece premiered in December 1822 but having little to do with the holiday. Still, the work, which is part piano concerto and part choral cantata, is festive and was jubilantly performed. 

 

Three movements from Bach’s Christmas oratorio started the concert by displaying the group’s radiant sound, from impressive high sopranos to sepulchral second basses. 

The orchestra acquitted themselves well, with bright trumpets and thrumming timpani drums creating a joyous atmosphere in Jauchzet, frohlocket, aur, preiser die Tage.

 

Francis Poulenc’s motet Hodie Christus natus est resembles the  language of his larger work, Gloria; both give tenors high melodic lines and the whole choir unorthodox, at times jazzy, harmonies to sing. Morten Lauridsen’s O magnum mysterium is now thirty years old, and has become a staple of choirs, especially at Christmastime. It was one of a few color chord pieces, with stacks of seconds added to triads, that were performed by the choir. Tritle takes it slightly faster than I am accustomed to hearing it, which better accommodates the chamber character of his choir. I liked that it had a sense of momentum.

 

Susanna Phillips sang the soprano solo in Mozart’s Exultate, jubilate with a warm tone and impressive coloratura. She returned to sing one of the soprano solo parts in the Beethoven Choral Fantasy. Two more a cappella works were shared. James Bassi, a talented choral composer, was in attendance for the performance of his Quem pastores laudavere, volubly applauding along with the enthusiastic acclamation that greeted his work, a mix of humming and singing with supple harmonies. Franz Biebl’s Ave Maria is another popular offering, with a similar, though more restrained, use of added-note chords to the preceding two contemporary works. It is the memorable and tuneful melodic writing, however, that makes it a special piece.

 

The piano soloist in Beethoven’s Choral Fantasy, Simone Dinnerstein, kept in mind that Beethoven had improvised the solo in the first performance, and played with supple rubato and surprising dynamic shifts. When the orchestra joined, her soaring melody lines and virtuosic scales and arpeggios accompanied the singing, carrying brilliantly to be heard over both the chorus and orchestra. The tune given to the singers is originally from a Beethoven lieder, and sounds close to the one used in the composer’s Ninth Symphony. Indeed the piece feels in many ways like a sketch for the larger work. It was a rousing way to end the concert, and one felt suitably ushered into the season.

 

-Christian Carey

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

Frederica von Stade bids farewell on Naxos Recording (CD Review)

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

 

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

Piano Music by Kenneth Hesketh (CD Review)

Kenneth Hesketh

Hände – Music for Piano

Clare Hammond, Paladino Music

 

Composer Kenneth Hesketh has written several works for piano, and Clare Hammond has for years been their most dedicated advocate. Hände is a collection of her detailed performances of seven pieces, ranging from miniatures to two substantial works. The first of the latter is Poetic Conceits (2006), a six movement suite of character pieces. “Epigram,” “Epigraph,” “Epitaph,” and “Mad Pursuits” demonstrate colorful post-tonal harmony and angular gestures, while “Of Silence and Slow Time” and “Cold Pastoral” proceed gradually with aching lyricism.

 

Pour Henri (2013) is dedicated to the composer Henri Dutilleux, with whom Hesketh studied at Tanglewood. It employs several quotations, including the French song Bonne Anniversaire, the composer’s second piano prelude, and his iconic string quartet Ainsi la nuit; all of this in a compact minute and a quarter. It is a moving elegy. Lullaby of the Land Beyond (2018) is another valedictory piece, dedicated to Oliver Knussen. Similarly, it includes a number of Knussen quotations, as well as one from Boris Gudunov, a favorite of the late composer. Higglety Pigglety Pop, Knussen’s second opera, which concludes with the portrait of a dog’s afterlife, provides a receding, misty ambience for this poignant goodbye to a great figure in English music.

 

Heu, Heu, Heu… Eine kleine ausschweifende (Hey, hey, hey… a little riotous celebration) (2012) is as advertised and requires staggering virtuosity, which Hammond has here and throughout in abundance. Chorales and Kolam (2019) is less boisterous but also makes a powerful impression all its own. A kolam is a geometric pattern drawn on the ground by women and girls in India and Southeast Asia for luck. The piece is built from reconstituted material from Hesketh’s piano concerto. The chorales are refracted in a series of variations that gradually unthread the verticals into stratified lines, only to have them gradually reassemble into arpeggiations in a shadowy coda.

 

Hände, Das leben und die Liebe eines zärtlichen Geschlechts (Hands: the life and love of the fairer sex) (2015) was commissioned for Hammond. When one views it live, the pianist plays along with an eponymous 1928 film that uses the play of hands nearly throughout (there are excerpts in the video below).  Correspondingly, the musical work is based on the shape of hands. Not only is Hammond called upon to play repeated notes, chordal ostinatos, diaphanous rolls, and fleet gestures, she also plays inside the piano, uses knitting needles to strike the strings, and clangs six small bells set to the side of the instrument. Like the film, elements of surrealism abound. Hände is a major piece, tailor-made for Hammond’s imaginative and risk-taking approach to performing. The recording as a whole is an excellent showcase for both composer and pianist, and is one of my favorite CDs of 2024.

 

  • Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey
CD Review, File Under?, jazz

Jason Anick and Jason Yeager – Sanctuary (Recording Review)

Jason Anick and Jason Yeager – Sanctuary (Sunnyside)

 

Violinist Jason Anick and pianist Jason Yeager last recorded together in 2017, and their album Unite revealed a simpatico pairing. Just as it was thematically constructed around its title, Sanctuary, their 2024 Sunnyside release, seeks to emphasize the need for recovery and renewal in these challenging times. 

 

They are joined by estimable collaborators, who are ceded space for their own contributions; this never feels like the Jasons dominate the proceedings. Trumpeters Jason Palmer and Billy Buss, tenor saxophonist Edmar Colón, cellist Naseem Alatrash, bassist Greg Loughman, and drummer Mike Connors form a biggish band provided with deftly arranged charts. 

 

“Futures Past” begins the recording with Anick and Yeager playing the tune’s first section, syncopated and in modal jazz style, and they are soon joined by the rest of the group for an energetic second part of the head. Yeager’s solo recalls the stacked fourths-fifths chord melodies of McCoy Tyner. Palmer’s turn builds a gradual ascent before softly overlapping counterpoint from the brass is contrasted by Connors providing emphatic fills. The second section with the whole band is followed by a thinned out conclusion, led by Anick. The violinist, trilling in the introduction of “The Nearness of Now,” has a fleet duet with the trumpet, and Yeager contributes a bluesy solo with Loughman’s bass ebulliently walking alongside. 

 

Of course, what does the concept of sanctuary require as a foil: the circumstances that require refuge. “Persecution” is an uptempo example with a high dissonance quotient and great intensity. “AI Apocalypse” is quick too and has a sinuous bass line that undergirds ominous interplay from brass and strings. A funk-inflected piano solo, back and forth from trumpet and violin, and rollicking playing from the rhythm section gives a stern rebuttal to the oppressors found in the music of the beginning. But they are not to be denied, and an even more cacophonous tutti ensues before the outro provides a long decrescendo. Wayne Shorter’s “Lost” is a natural for the theme of sanctuary sought, if not yet found. Unison melodic playing from violin, saxophone, and trumpets creates a fascinating, colorful rendition. Given their shared instrument, Colón is a natural for the performance’s spotlight soloist, and his solo ranges widely but is phrased exquisitely. Anick takes a turn, winding filigrees around the tune’s contours. Yeager counters with a pot-boiler, and the group engages in some free play in the conclusion. 

‘Ephemary” has a mysterious opening, a contrasting, emphatic trumpet duet, and a swinging solo from Anick. “Colorado” provides a chance to hear the Jasons play in brilliant fashion, suggesting that a future duo album would be welcome. 

 

“Farewell” is actually the penultimate piece, juxtaposing doubled treble lines and bass/piano with a line down low. Stacked harmonies and a trumpet glissando conclude the first section, after which the rhythm section engages in a group passage, with Yeager supplying one of his best solos. The return alternates treble and bass components and is finished with held notes and staccato piano. The concluding title tune, “Sanctuary” is quite beautiful and could be a new standard in its own right, its performance contrasting an offbeat ostinato from the rhythm section with a sustained melody played by the rest of the group. Anick’s solo features glissandos and swift scalar passages. It is followed by an equally swift trumpet solo with an altissimo climax. The head returns, with triplets and violin ornaments decorating it before a denouement leaves the piano playing alone, dissolving the ostinato and ending the album with a sense of repose.  

 

In addition to the Shorter and a number of originals, Sanctuary includes an affecting version of Chopin’s famous “Raindrop” Prelude in D-flat major. It opens with a delicate solo from Alatrash, and the middle section in minor builds to a roar of brass chords. After presenting a relatively faithful transcription of the score, piano and trumpet solos move romantic music into the ambit of postmodern jazz. A return to the middle section is followed by Yeager playing the last section faithfully. How about more? A mazurka next? 

 

While I mentioned a desire for more duets, the assembled musicians are an abundantly talented band, and a follow-up from them would be equally welcome. Sanctuary is one of my favorite albums of 2024.

 

-Christian Carey

by Christian Carey
BAM, CD Review, Contemporary Classical, Criticism, File Under?, Fundraising, jazz, Piano, Video

Two Favorite of 2024 Recordings from Ethan Iverson (CD Review)

 

Ethan Iverson – Technically Acceptable (Blue Note CD, 2024)

Ethan Iverson – Playfair Sonatas (Urlicht Audiovisual 2xCD, 2024)

 

Ethan Iverson is one of the foremost jazz pianists of his generation. An alumnus of the Bad Plus, he has since appeared with a number of artists, both live and on record. He currently teaches at New England Conservatory of Music. Iverson revels in researching all the eras of jazz, from its inception to the most recent innovations, and is also an advocate for American concert music composers of the twentieth century. His Substack, offers a bevy of information about both subjects.

 

Technically Acceptable is primarily a piano trio album. The two rhythm sections that join Iverson are bassist Thomas Morgan and drummer Kush Abadey, who play on a group of new originals. Bassist Simón Willson and drummer Vinnie Sperazza are on hand for two standards, “Killing Me Softly,” first a hit for Roberta Flack in the seventies and later recorded by the Fugees, and “‘Round Midnight,” a Thelonious Monk signature. The former is given a lush reading with elegant pop harmonies, while the latter features Rob Schwimmer playing theremin in a simulacrum of Annie Ross’s soprano delivery. 

 

“Conundrum” opens the recording with a 90 second brisk introduction, a foreshadowing of the “Overture” and “Recessional” found on Playfair Sonatas. “Victory is Assured (Alla breve)” is undergirded with a cut time groove emphasized by Iverson’s left hand and the rhythm section. The pianist’s right hand is occupied with a circle of fifths sequence and emphatic glissandos. The title tune is a bluesy swing with an upward yearning culmination. Then there is a solo from Iverson that features abundant ornamentation and planing chords. 

 

“Who are You Really” begins with a chordal treatment of its sinuous, scalar tune. Iverson’s solo provides puckish elaborations while Morgan supplies repeated notes in a countermelody and Abadey punctuates the proceeding with cymbal splashes and tom rolls. A double time coda concludes it. “Chicago Style” is a wayward ballad adorned with a wispy piano solo. 

 

Technically Acceptable concludes with Iverson’s Piano Sonata. The program note relates Iverson’s fully notated approach to music from the 1930s: swing, blues, and the classical music of Copland and Gershwin. It also has an Ivesian cast, the first movement cutting among several propulsive motives, including a hard bop section, another that recalls the stride piano of James P. Johnson, and “the first four notes” theme of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. After the second theme’s appearance, there is a brief misterioso interlude, and an elated version of the hard bop theme reappears, with a brusque glissando finishing off the movement. This is followed by an Andante movement with a wandering tune that alternates with dissonant arpeggios. As it progresses, the proceedings are enriched with polychords and decorative chromaticism. The finale is a rondo movement with thick dissonant verticals inserted between short phrases, each time followed by a puckish renewal of the form’s succession of motifs. 

 

Playfair Sonatas shares chamber pieces that are the continuation of Iverson’s interest in notated composition, each in its a way an homage to predecessors in the jazz idiom. It contains both a short Fanfare and Postlude for all of the players, the former with a jaunty tune, the latter with solemn brass followed by a hymn-like piano postlude. 

 

Trombone Sonata features Mike Lormand, whose sound can be clarion like a trumpet or sonorous in its depths. At its outset, against a sustained melody for the trombone, Iverson adds still rhythmic wrinkles by playing hemiola patterns. Partway through, in a slow, rubato passage the trombonist is exhorted to “tell your story.” This is succeeded by a return to the opening material, abetted by a rangy, syncopated melody in the trombone. A long glissando is countered with a sustained bass note to close. The second movement is dedicated to the avant-jazz trombonist Roswell Rudd, with a hat tip to the dedicatee given by the copious microtones for the soloist. The finale is another rondo, this one with a main theme in mixed meter of an anthemic quality, and a corresponding quick motive filled with blues thirds and glissandos.  Lormand demonstrates facility in fast tempos, doubling Iverson’s right hand in places, concluding with the main melody embellished with thunderous pedal tones and then a deathless sustained final pitch.

 

Makoto Nakamura is the soloist in the Marimba Sonata. Some of the piece explores a bucolic environment that accentuates gently humorous material. The second movement evokes the legacy of Dolphy’s “wild modernism,” and the frequency of mallet percussion player Bobby Hutcherson in the reed player’s lineups. Unique to this sonata is a solo cadenza movement, with a slow tempo undergirding a multi-mallet excursion with fetching accumulated harmonies. 

 

Clarinetist Carol McGonnell has an exquisite sound in every register of her instrument, which makes her an ideal interpreter of Iverson’s Clarinet Sonata, which recalls both jazz idioms and modern classical music. The first movement features memorable themes, mixed meters, and cascading arpeggios in both instruments. The second movement, “Music Hall,”  is dedicated to the great jazz composer Carla Bley, its oom-pah rhythm imitating the accompaniment of many of her pieces. In a spooky twist, Bley passed away on the very day that Iverson finished the movement .A third movement is neoclassical in design, with a backwards ordering of scherzo, minuet, and an allegro return that includes a soaring valediction for the clarinet. The finale moves the sonata out of the minor mode into a triumphant major, including one of Iverson’s most memorable melodies on Playfair Sonatas. 

Who could be a better dedicatee for an Alto Saxophone Sonata than Paul Desmond? The second movement, titled “Melody (For Paul Desmond) is a suavely lyrical ballad in which Iverson effectively channels West Coast Jazz of the 1950s. The other two movements put saxophonist Taimur Sullivan through his paces, the first including fast scalar passages and altissimo held notes in the part, all set against a syncopated shuffle and a middle section in fugato counterpoint. The movement’s melody by itself is appealing, and could easily be given treatment as a new standard. The third movement is an Allegro in which the duo swings with abandon, Sullivan playing a breathless stream of swinging eighths and triplets against a rollicking groove, forceful ostinatos, and quick melodic doublings in the piano. A cadenza provides a dazzling interlude, followed by a radiant coda.. 

 

The Trumpet Sonata is imbued with the qualities of early jazz juxtaposed with early modernism á la Hindemith. The middle movement, “Theme (For Joe Wilder),” celebrates a trumpeter who was an exponent of early modernism and one of the first black musicians to play on Broadway and in symphony orchestras. Wilder premiered a number of compositions, notably by Alec Wilder, a classically trained composer who was probably best known for his popular songs, film scores, and musicals. There is a charming suavity to the theme that recalls some of Alec Wilder’s music for movies. 

 

Miranda Cuckson is a go-to violinist for contemporary concert music. The Violin Sonata employs Cuckson’s well-established facility with modern music. The first movement features an Andante theme that is chromatic, nearly post-tonal in conception. This is succeeded by an Allegro section with angular, dovetailing flurries. The sonata also tempts her into the world of modern jazz with a second movement titled “Blues (For Ornette Coleman).” Coleman was known for using microtones and a rough hewn playing style, and Cuckson obliges with abundant amounts of sliding tone and notes between the cracks of the keys. The finale, again in rondo form, begins with pizzicato open strings against a treble register moto perpetuo in the piano. The violin duets with the piano in an effervescent contrasting theme, with sequential material offset by double-stops. The melodic focus alternates between solo and duet, with the mischievous opening section with its combination of pizzicato and the treble staccato undulations in the piano, serving as refrain. After a third tune with ascending scalar passages in the violin accompanied by arpeggiated sixteenths in the piano, the pizzicatos return a final time, topped off with a fingered glissando ascent. This piece could easily appear in either a classical recital or in a jazz concert, being both versatile and engaging throughout.

 

Technically Acceptable and Playfair Sonatas are significant recordings in Iverson’s catalog, the former demonstrating his finesse as a writer of jazz originals and the latter combining a cornucopia of traditions into eminently successful notated works. One hopes that both approaches remain part of his prolific creativity. Two favorite recordings from 2024.

 

Christian Carey

 

 

by Christian Carey