Tag: @sequenza21

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
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
CD Review, early music, File Under?

C.P.E. Bach Symphonies on Harmonia Mundi

Carl Philip Emanuel Bach

Symphonies from Berlin to Hamburg

Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin

Mayumi Hirasaki and Georg Kallweit, concertmasters

Harmonia Mundi

 

Carl Philip Emanuel Bach (1714-1788) was the middle of Johann Sebastian Bach’s three surviving sons. His music occupies the period between the baroque and classical, often called the galant or rococo style. It truly is a transitional era, with the development of the orchestra, symphony, and a move toward more homophonic textures. Several recordings of his works have recently been issued, and it is nice to see this talented composer having a moment. 

 

Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin is a conductor-less ensemble led, as was the custom then as well, by its concertmasters Mayumi Hirasaki and Georg Kallweit. Their latest recording for Harmonia Mundi is a program of seven of C.P.E. Bach’s symphonies, Symphonies from Berlin to Hamburg, written for strings and continuo. Three date to early in his career (from 1738-1768), when he was in Berlin writing for the court, and the rest from the period of 1768 onwards, when he was Kapellmeister in Hamburg. 

 

All of them are cast in three movements – fast-slow-fast – and, as one can gather from the number of them on a single disc, are significantly shorter than those of the classical era. Their first movements are kinds of proto-sonatas, in which thematic development is truncated and themes are presented quickly and succinctly. 

 

That doesn’t mean that C.P.E.’s orchestral works are lacking in invention or surprises. There are also a number of harmonic shifts where a quick transition – in the C major H.649 symphony with just a single bass note – turns the music sideways. One trick that I particularly admire is the foreshadowing in the second movement of material that is reimagined for the last one. 

 

Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin recorded the program over a significant time period, with younger players, such as concertmaster Mayumi Hirasaki, joining part way through the process. This has led to a well-considered and exquisitely well-prepared recording. Symphonies from Berlin to Hamburg is not only an excellent introduction to the symphonic approach of the galant style, it is a compelling document suggesting that C.P.E. is a worthy successor to his famous father and precursor to the classicism of Haydn and Mozart. Recommended.

 

Christian Carey

 

 

by Christian Carey
Concerts, Contemporary Classical, Downtown, File Under?, New York, Songs, Violin

Saturday, March 30th: Kafka Fragments at Tenri

Saturday, March 30th: Kafka Fragments at Tenri

On Saturday at 8 PM, Kafka-Fragmente by  György Kurtág will be performed at Tenri Cultural Institute (43A West 13th Street,New York NY), by soprano Susan Narucki and violinist Curtis Macomber (tickets). Earlier this week, they performed it at another venue also abundantly supportive of contemporary classical music, Buffalo University.

 

Kafka-Fragmente is based on aphoristic texts by Franz Kafka from his diaries and correspondence. As is his practice, Kurtág brought the composition together gradually, collecting fragments over time and completing the piece in 1985. At seventy minutes in duration, until his opera Fin de Partie (2018), it was the composer’s longest piece. Not only are the forty movements based on brief texts, they are also miniature in design. The text-setting is exquisitely detailed, and the musical language is frequently dissonant and angular, drawing both from postwar modernism and Eastern European folk traditions of declamation and string performance.

Narucki and Macomber are both new music specialists. I have remembered a number of their performances with great pleasure, especially Narucki’s creation of the role of Mama in Elliott Carter’s opera What Next? and Macomber’s authoritative rendition of Mario Davidovsky’s Synchronism No. 9 for violin and tape.

To get acquainted with this distinctive music, listen below to excerpts from the soprano’s Avie CD The Edge of Silence, consisting entirely of vocal chamber works by Kurtág. It received a Grammy nomination in 2019, and demonstrates her command of the composer’s individual and demanding work.

 

 

Here is Macomber’s recording of the Davidovsky.

 

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

Kinds of ~Nois (CD Review)

Kinds of ~Nois

~Nois, Kinds of Kings

Bright Shiny Things

 

The Bright Shiny Things recording Kinds of ~Nois is the result of a six-year long collaboration between the saxophone quartet ~Nois (Julian Velasco, soprano; Hunter Bockes, alto; Jordan Lulloff, tenor; János Csontos, baritone) and the composer collective Kinds of Kings (Shelley Washington, Maria Kaoutzani, and Gemma Peacocke). The recorded works are generally in a complexly post-minimal style, but each composer has their own distinctive voice. ~Nois’s rich ensemble tone and dexterous rhythms serve the music quite well. One can readily hear that a lot of preparation was put into Kinds of ~Nois, as the performances are note-perfect and assuredly interpreted. 

 

Peacocke’s Hazel begins the recording. A slow introduction of polychords is succeeded by mercurial ostinatos that ricochet between parts. The harmonies are equally quixotic, with shifting tonalities and glissandos distressing their framework. Chordal passages, culminating in quickly repeating verticals, descending glissandos, and a boisterous bass-line. This is ultimately offset by a new theme in the alto and soprano saxophones. A smoky slow section creates a mysterious interlude, only to have the fast-paced ostinatos from earlier return and morph into a syncopated groove. 

 

Eternal Present, by Washington, is cast in two movements: I. Now; II. Always. The first movement has a mournful cast, with a plaintive melody and repeating sections of equally doleful verticals. The second movement is sprightly, with short phrases of minor key ostinatos and duets alternating between the upper and lower cohorts of the saxophone quartet. The ostinatos gradually build into a spiderweb of overlapping lines. This is cut into swaths of material interrupted by rests with soft oscillating thirds in the upper voices and a bellicose bass melody. A chorale of repeated chords, followed by the opening passagework, gradually builds into a mass of overlapping gestures played forte, with surprising harmonic shifts interrupted by several pregnant pauses.  

 

Kaoutzani’s Count Me In is a vigorous workout for the quartet that begins with stentorian repetitions that are then replaced by a softer section of the same. Angular duets appear, only to be supplanted by a martial headlong passage of staccato rhythms. Octaves and overtones arrive in a slower tempo, placed in the foreground, but are soon rejected by a speedy agitato rejoinder. The slow music returns with a wispy melody winding its way through various registers, creating a supple denouement.  

 

Watson is not only an accomplished composer, she is also a baritone saxophonist. Csontos is joined by Watson on her baritone saxophone duo piece BIG TALK, a work excoriating rape culture. It begins with a spoken word “Opening Poem,” followed by growling overtones, squalling high notes, and dissonant counterpoint in a fast groove. Octave oscillations, rough low notes, and brawny repetitions are added to the mix. There, there is an interlude with slowly dovetailing lines and a microtonal devolvement of a unison. Howling ascents create a visceral effect, as do altissimo shrieks. This is succeeded by a quick polyrhythmic duet in the low register, aggressive in demeanor. Repeated unisons are gradually replaced by complex overlaps of imitative lines. The duo adds noise to inexorable repetitions. Once again, there is a set of polyrhythms, this time a heterophonic unison melody. Two-voice counterpoint speeds towards repeated notes, unisons that are then distressed with dissonant seconds. A melody is overlaid in the top voice and a new ostinato, wide-ranging with sepulchral bass notes, articulates the phrase structure. An abrupt close slams the door on this violent piece that provides commentary that even eloquent texts about rape culture might not.

 

Shore to Shore by Kaoutzani is the most adventurous piece, with multiphonics and fluttering trills adorning the first section’s slow-moving, lyrical ambience. Stacked canons are then unfurled to create an animated, contrapuntal coda. Peacocke’s Dwalm ends the recording with a polytempo excursion in which slow drones and chords are juxtaposed against repeated notes and quickly moving ostinatos. As these elapse, the quartet drops into synced motoric passages. The coda brings in an attractive new melody that once again is deconstructed in overlapping fashion, followed by repeating octaves that pulse until a sudden final vertical. Dwalm’s digressive character is a fetching approach to retaining minimal elements while still featuring an element of surprise. An excellent closer to Kinds of ~Nois: a recording that is highly recommended. 

 

-Christian Carey


by Christian Carey
CD Review, Contemporary Classical, Electro-Acoustic, File Under?, Film Music

Skjálfti on Sono Luminus (Recording review)

Skjálfti 

Páll Ragnar Pálsson and Eðvarð Egilsson

Sono Luminus SLE-70031

 

Today, where the list of practitioners frequently overlap, how does film music translate to concert music adaptation? On the Sono Luminus release Skjálfti (translated: Quake), the Icelandic composers Páll Ragnar Pálsson and Eðvarð Egilsson present a compelling album length suite that is more ambitious than the clip show often heard on soundtrack recordings. 

 

The cello concerto Quake is Pálsson’s best known piece, but Skjálfti doesn’t feature music from it. Instead, it is from Tinna Hrafnsdóttir’s film of the same name, for which Pálsson and Egilsson composed the soundtrack. The album isn’t merely excerpts, but fully developed pieces based on the themes and mood of the film. Electronics, piano, strings, and subtle use of voices populate the music with a hybrid ensemble. It’s not dissimilar from the makeup of totalist ensembles such as Bang on a Can and Icebreaker, but the vibe is far more ambient than the prevailing one for these groups. 

 

“Saga” is one of the best movements of the work. It is like a mini-symphony, developing an ambitious amount of material in three minutes. “Safavél” and “Miklabraut” are other favorites, the former starting with a string and keyboard ostinato until, partway through, a pause, and then guitars and drums join. The accumulation of material and long crescendo is reminiscent of post-rock. Tortoise watch out. 

 

“Gleyma” is listed on the streamers as the hit tune. It begins with mysterious drones and pentatonic shimmering, to which is added an undulating guitar pattern, pattering percussion, and string synth pads. Ostinatos are a time-honored tradition, but they get bogged down in lots of film scores. Pálsson and Egilsson avoid this by creating asymmetric shifts in the texture. Here, a melody and counter melody wend their way around the chord progression in a pleasingly asymmetric fashion.

 

Skjálfti is an intriguing and enjoyable project: one hopes for further collaborations by the duo, both for film and concert music adaptation. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

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

The Tallis Scholars at St. Mary the Virgin (Concert Review)

Photo: Rodrigo Pérez

 

Tallis Scholars, Peter Phillips, director

Church of St. Mary the Virgin

December 9, 2023

 

NEW YORK – It is the fiftieth anniversary of the renaissance ensemble the Tallis Scholars, directed during that entire time by Peter Phillips. Their annual December visit to St. Mary the Virgin Church in midtown often consists of a predominantly Marian program, both to suit that setting and church calendar. This year, there were two large pieces devoted to Mary – settings of Salve Regina by Jacob Obrecht (1457-1505) and Peter Philips (1560-1628; the early baroque composer, not the eponymous conductor of the Tallis Scholars). The bulk of the music was instead devoted to a different theme, “While Shepherds Watched,” with its centerpiece being Missa Pastoris quidnam vidistis by Jacobus Clemens Non Papa (c. 1510-1556; “not the pope” – Pope Clement – was thought to be an affectionate nickname). This parody mass, based on the motet Pastoris quidnam vidistis by Clemens, was recorded in 1987 by the Tallis Scholars. Its reappearance at the concert at St. Mary’s was a welcome return. 

 

The concert began with Clemens’s motet, a dramatic setting depicting the visitation of  angels to a group of shepherds, announcing the birth of the messiah and urging them to go and find him. The composer comes from the post-Josquin generation, the mid-period of the renaissance in which elaborate counterpoint often took precedence over clarity of text, but with considerable expressiveness achieved by musical atmosphere. 

 

The mass incorporates a number of aspects of the motet, its opening figure treated in a number of passages, sometimes the entire tune, and at others, its rising head motto. The Kyrie bustles with activity, free counterpoint encircled by imitation. The Gloria has a canon in the lower voices and an elaborated melody in the high soprano. As it is often performed, the final section, “qui tollis,” speeds up. Here, because of the prevalence of syncopation, the effect was thrilling. The jubilation of the shepherds at the motet’s close is mirrored in the exuberance of the Sanctus’ “Alleluia.” An extra bass part was added to the Agnus Dei, reinforcing the sonority of the close of the mass.

 

Three motets on the “While Shepherds Watched” theme ensued. One of the greatest Christmas motets from the renaissance in Iberia is the six-voice Quem vidistis, pastores by Tomás de Luis Victoria (1548-1611). The sopranos begin in canon, accompanied by a free part in the alto, suggesting, as compared with the text Clemens set, an early appearance of the angels. The three lower parts respond in an analogous configuration. The two trios then break out of mirrored deployments, speeding up in a nimble section that ends with a major cadence. The second part of the motet continues the mirroring effect, with the lower voices starting a new canon first, followed by the upper trio. After a spirited Alleluia section, the choir settled into a final set of phrases taking the text, “go and tell them,” finally arriving at another major cadence.

 

Two settings of Quaeramus cum pastoribus followed. It is a text in which an angel exhorts the shepherds to find the Messiah, followed by a refrain of Noés (noëls). Portuguese composer Pedro de Cristo (1545-1618) created a four-voice setting consisting of tightly spaced canons with the refrain moving to a sprightly triple meter. The Tallis Scholars reveled in its joyousness, but I can also imagine this motet being a good introduction to Renaissance Christmas music for an ambitious American church choir. Italian composer Giovanni de Croce (1557-1609), on the other hand,  sets the text in the Venetian style, with two quartets and much antiphony. The contrasting settings of the same text were a canny programming choice, and the singers thrived in this deployment.

 

Obrecht’s Salve Regina alternates chant and polyphony. It was performed with eloquent solemnity, providing a marked shift of demeanor. The Salve Regina by Philips, on the other hand, is a vibrant affair. Composed nearly a century after the Obrecht, it focuses on antiphonal polyphony rather than chant. Philips was a Catholic exile from England, and his Salve Regina setting has much in common with the Venetian polychoral style. 

 

After sustained applause, the Tallis Scholars performed a brief but pleasing encore, Salva Nos by French composer Jean Mouton (1459-1522). The piece gave the group’s lower voices considerable attention, its final chord richly sepulchral. Fifty years into their tenure, the Tallis Scholars and Phillips remain an energetic and authoritative presence. 

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey