Tag: @sequenza21

CD Review, Choral Music, Contemporary Classical, File Under?

Choral Arts Initiative – Jeffrey Derus – From Wilderness (CD Review)

Jeffrey Derus

From Wilderness – A Meditation on the Pacific Coast Trail

Choral Arts Initiative, Brandon Elliott, conductor; Kevin Mills, cello

Navona CD/DL

 

With From Wilderness, Jeffrey Derus has written a soaring and eclectic full length work for Choral Arts Initiative, an ensemble committed to new music with nearly twenty commissions and seventy premieres under their belts. Their previous recording, music of Dale Trumbore, supplied significant exposure for her laudable choral works. One imagines that From the Wilderness will do the same for Derus.

 

Derus has an intimate connection with the environs of the Pacific Coast Trail. He takes the listener on a musical journey that includes choral movements with cluster chord modal harmonies, meditative crystal singing bowl interludes associated with the chakras, solo turns as spirit animals by soprano Anna Kietzman, alto Genie Hossain, tenor Taylor Jacobs, baritone Kirk Averitt, and bass Timothy Cervenka, and powerful cello solos from Kevin Mills. Many composers juggling this many elements might make a less than compelling mashup of them. Derus instead highlights the pathway along his spiritual journey in a keen synthesis of these various elements. 

 

The composer doesn’t try to programmatically depict nature along the trail. His impressions and, more importantly, the cathartic response Derus has to journeying are the main topics of From Wilderness. The use of singing bowls is quite beautiful, creating clusters of harmony that presage the use of similar harmony in the voices. “Cajon Pass” is a case in point, with rich verticals and cascades of vocal overlap. Choral Arts Initiative performs with a powerful sound, strongly resonant from top to bottom. Mills plays a poignantly lyrical solo on “Sierras 1,” soon augmented by upper voices creating glinting shards of sound. There is then much interplay between cello and the upper and lower voices ricocheting back and forth. When all come together, with the cello playing in the altissimo register, it is a glorious sound. 

 

-Christian Carey



by Christian Carey
CD Review, File Under?, Piano

Hamelin plays Bolcom’s Rags

William Bolcom – The Complete Rags

Marc-André Hamelin

Hyperion Records

 

William Bolcom has been an important exponent of the ragtime revival. He helped to mount Scott Joplin’s ragtime opera Treemonisha, has performed Joplin and much of the ragtime repertoire. Bolcom may have had a hand in Joshua Rifkin’s famed Joplin recordings, which were used in the movie The Sting. As Bolcom tells it, he played Rifkin rags by Joplin at a party before the recording was made. Bolcom also encouraged contemporary American composers to return to ragtime, trading many rags with composer William Albright (one of the pieces on this recording is a collaboration between them), and performing the rags written by a number of others, mainly during the 1970s. His own catalog of rags is considerable, and considerably varied. 

 

Joplin’s sheet music often included the admonition, “do not play fast,” instead urging a deliberate pace. Bolcom takes this to heart, and pianist Marc-André Hamelin, the interpreter on this recording, pays studious attention to the details of tempo and phrasing that define ragtime. Like most classic rags, Bolcom uses titles that hearken back to ragtime progenitors past (“Eubie’s Luckey Day,” “Seabiscuit’s Rag”), give a sense of character and gesture  (“Tabby Cat Walk,” “Rag-Tango”), or are punnish (“Brooklyn Dodge”).

 

Many of Bolcom’s rags are suavely stylish, such as the well-titled “Contentment” and “Tabby Cat Walk.” Of course, not fast is not ubiquitous. In a set of rags titled “Eden,” the third, “The Serpent’s Kiss,” is rollicking, “girl on the railroad tracks” music with a taste of silent film accompaniment. The Allbright-Bolcoe collaboration, “Brass Knuckles,” avails itself of splashes of dissonance, recalling Nancarrow and Monk through a Joplin lens. In “Rag-Tango” and “Estela – Rag Latino,” other genres are successfully amalgamated into ragtime. It is difficult to pick favorites, but I’m partial to “Three Ghost Rags,” in which music of times past is echoed. Hamelin plays this group with particular sensitivity.

 

Like Joplin’s rags in the 1970s, Bolcom’s in the 2020’s deserve wider currency. Some are quite difficult, requiring the chops of a pianist of Hamelin’s caliber. Others would be excellent pieces for competitions or study. The liner notes, with an essay by Bolcom, give an erudite, encapsulated view of classical rags and contemporary contributions. Highly recommended.

 

-Christian Carey



by Christian Carey
CD Review, File Under?, jazz, Piano

Vadim Neselovskyi – Odesa (CD Review)

Vadim Neselovskyi 

Odesa

Sunnyside Records

 

Jazz pianist Vadim Neselovskyi was born in Ukraine. He moved to the US to study at Berklee and has since joined its faculty, splitting his time between New York, Boston, and as a touring musician. His latest recording for Sunnyside, Odesa (the Ukrainian spelling of the city’s name) is a memory book of Neselovskyi’s childhood in Ukraine, with various places and experiences recounted as programmatic elements of the music. Another layer of the recording’s organization is the use of Pictures at an Exhibition, by Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky, its character as a suite of images that one encounters walking through a museum, as a kind of touchstone for the scenes Neselovskyi has depicted. Accordingly, he subtitles Odesa, “A musical walk through a legendary city.” There are several places where Neselovskyi slyly interpolates brief flashes of Mussorgsky’s music; one will hear a particularly vivid quote at the end of track two, “Odesa Railway Station.”

 

Classical music frequently informs Neselovskyi’s playing. He is a double-threat pianist, one able to channel and play concert music while at the same time possessing sturdy jazz chops and improvisational acumen. On “Potemkin Stairs,” there are flurries of ostinatos, calling to mind both minimalism and the passagework of Romantic concertos. These are interspersed with plummy chordal passages that halt the piece’s momentum to savor a rich harmonic language. Where “Potemkin Stairs” is virtuosic, “Winter in Odesa” seems based on Eastern European folk music, with a concomitant Impressionist cast. Here Neselovskyi builds a moving piece out of a simple modal tune and countermelodies. Over time, elaborate ornaments are added to the middle section, only to return to the modal tune with a fourths and fifths harmonic accompaniment: another signature of folk music. 

 

Neselovskyi had distinguished studies and an early acceptance at Odesa Conservatory. This is celebrated by “Waltz of Odesa Conservatory,” which depicts a mischievous youth playing with humorous, showy, and then jazzy gestures. One can imagine young Neselovskyi far away from his teachers when playing in this manner. The waltz is great fun: one could imagine a notated version serving as a competition piece. “My First Rock Concert” is the only composition on Odesa that isn’t an original. It is based on the rock song “Blood Type” by Viktor Tsoy. The voicings remind one of how barre chords are played on the electric guitar, with lots of parallelisms. Playing this alongside the vocal melody, bass part, and inflections of the percussion is no mean feat, and it stretches out with proggy soloistic sections to eight minutes in duration (now I want to check out some Viktor Tsoy: Neselovskyi makes him sound compelling). 

 

Two interludes serve as etudes for modern jazz styles, the first atmospheric and the second angular. “Acacia Trees” inhabits a hushed wayward melody and aching, poignant harmonies. The opening line of “Odesa 1941” delicate too, but it is accompanied by a thrumming, sustained bass pedal and succeeded shortly by dissonance verticals and a polymetric dance and a thunderous middle cadence. It is like a tempestuous amalgam of works by Bartôk and Shostakovich. At the piece’s conclusion, the gentle opening melody returns, basically unaccompanied. Thus, the entire dynamic and rhetorical spectrum is accommodated in just under six minutes. Supplied with a brief Phrygian introduction filled with open fourths/fifths, “Jewish Dance” depicts another aspect of Neselovskyi’s background. The dance proper has a soprano register tune that glides downward through a minor scale with a flat second, a feature of both Jewish and Eastern European music. The tune reverses direction, rising against countermelodies and thick quartal/quintal bass register chords. The two melodies, now in soprano and alto registers, are juxtaposed and one is augmented, creating a long, pedal-supported cadenza. The last section of the piece brings its register down about an octave, thickening the accompaniment and adding a slice of swing to the polymeter. It moves into half-time, then double-time, and ends with another descending cadenza and a pedaled splash of color. 

 

“The Renaissance of Odesa” concludes the recording.  A haunting midrange melody against harmonically intricate arpeggiations, that lead the tune through a number of key areas, occupies a registration previously unheard on the recording. But two flourishes at the end once again evoke Mussorgsky: low bass fifths and octaves and an altissimo register modal duet. It is as if Neselovskyi is saying goodbye, for now, to his past and to all its treasured reference points. Odesa is imaginative, superlatively well performed, and enthusiastically recommended. 

(All proceeds from the recording go to humanitarian efforts in Ukraine).

-Christian Carey



by Christian Carey
CD Review, early music, File Under?

Sandrine Piau – Handel Enchantresses (CD Review_

 

Handel: Enchantresses

Sandrine Piau, soprano

Les Paladins, Jérôme Correas, director

Alpha Classics

 

Soprano Sandrine Piau is a versatile artist who has compellingly performed a wide range of repertoire. Handel has remained a touchstone for Piau, and on Handel:Enchantresses, she explores a different subset of characters than the heroines and ingenues that were her bread and butter as a young singer. Handel is one of the great composers at illustrating grief, despair, and tempestuousness. The characters who inhabit these traits are given a showcase on this Alpha Classics CD. 

 

Piau’s theatrical and expressive capabilities are on full display here. Rinaldo’s “Il Vostro Maggio,” a lament that is most touching, is delivered with considerable poignancy. Another lament, “Piangeró la Sorte Mia,” from Giulio Cesare in Egitto, alternates between aching appoggiaturas and a slow tempo in the outer sections and a middle section with fiery sixteenths. “Alla Salma Infedel,” from Lucrezia, is filled with closely spaced chromaticism, and Piau navigates her upper register with superlative control. 

 

The soprano’s runs are fleet and clear, as evidenced on “Da Tempeste,” also from  Guilio Cesare in Egitto, in which Cleopatra’s exults over her union with Julius Caesar. Sung with wide-ranging cadenzas and quickly rendered coloratura, this is tailor-made for Piau. “Scherza in mar la navicella,” from Lotario, is another showcase for fast-paced and wide-ranging singing that is as exciting as it is exactingly performed. “Ah! Mio cori,” from Alcina, is a riveting twelve-minute scena that features Piau’s singing at its most richly hued and dramatic.

 

Jérôme Correas leads Les Paladins with considerable flexibility, the ensemble turning on a dime to match Piau’s use of rubato. The instrumental pieces they present as interludes, excerpts from Concerto Grossos and the overture to Amadigi Di Gaulo, display Les Paladins to excellent advantage, playing nimble French overture rhythms in the overture and plangent dissonances in the G-minor concerto movement. They have a well balanced sound that is lustrous while being period-informed. 

 

Some aria collections are grab bags or greatest hits recordings. Thoughtful curation is a welcome alternative that, happily, seems to have become more frequent. Handel: Enchantresses is ideal in this regard, in that it explores a different facet of Piau’s artistry while presenting arias that are, in many cases, underserved treasures. Highly recommended. 

 

-Christian Carey



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

Wolfgang Rihm – Jagden und Formen (CD Review)

Wolfgang Rihm

Jagden und Formen

Bavarian Radio Orchestra, Franck Ollu, conductor

BR-Klassik CD

 

Wolfgang Rihm’s hour long orchestra work Jagden und Formen (2008) has its roots in an earlier work, some fifteen minutes long, from 1996, dedicated to Helmut Lachenmann on his sixtieth birthday. The piece ultimately morphed and expanded into the version recorded here. There is precedence for this in postwar Europe, particularly in several of the works of Pierre Boulez, which remained in progress and perpetually expanding throughout his lifetime. In his program note, Rihm says that the piece will henceforth likely remain in its current form.

 

While it is dedicated to Lachenmann, the piece remains solidly in Rihm’s language. The music is muscular, post-tonal, and replete with strongly articulated gestures. At the same time, there are guideposts that afford the listener a sense of groundedness: returning sections, repeated pitches that provide momentary centers, and phrase boundaries that include landing points akin to cadences.

 

The piece’s scoring is somewhat unusual. Winds are doubled, but strings are one to a part, the result being a kind of sinfonietta with bolstered textures. The choice for solo strings is canny, in that Rihm frequently deploys them like a chamber quintet within the whole ensemble. The extraordinary tone of the Bavarian Radio Orchestra’s strings undoubtedly abets this impression. This is equally true of the rest of the ensemble, which frequently creates glistening textures and just as often fluid counterpoint that ricochets between instrumental cohorts. 

 

The recording is broken up into tracks, but these do not demarcate movements. They connote sections with particular tempos and scoring, and so suggest the overall formal trajectory of the piece. Adding to the aforementioned concertino impression are a number of solo turns. Particularly impressive are the blindingly fast runs by pitched percussion and the equally fast angular solos taken by the oboe and bassoon. Jagden und Formen traverses a number of tempos, and it is to Franck Ollu’s credit that transitions are seamlessly negotiated and even the most breathless passages are well-coordinated. The piece’s abundant variety and compelling sound world make it a solid addition to Rihm’s compendious catalog. Jagden und Formen will likely see more performances, but this recording will long remain a benchmark.

 

-Christian Carey



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

Aleksandra Gryka on Kairos (CD Review)

Interialcell

Aleksandra Gryka

Florian Müller, harpsichord; Klangforum Wien, Joseph Kalitzke, conductor

Kairos CD

 

Klangforum Wien is undertaking a series of portrait recordings on Kairos of Polish composers. The first solo CD of music by Aleksandra Gyrka (b. 1977), Interialcell, is an impressive introduction to this composer. Consisting of ensemble pieces  written from 2003 to 2015, Interialcell provides a sense of the maturation of an already talented composer in her late twenties to work that takes on successively more intricate materials and formal designs in her thirties. 

 

Regarding the impetus for her music, Gryka is fairly secretive. The hard sciences, particularly quantum physics, are mentioned frequently as a reference point, as are cosmology and sci-fi. A number of her works deal with uncomfortable emotions in extremis, notably the theatre works Scream You! and Our Hell and incidental music for several plays. The instrumental pieces on Interialcell may not have a narrative component that is specifically locatable, but they clearly are wrought from the same combination of scientific, theatrical, and fantastical elements, melding together a panoply of musical elements to provide a sense of this inspirational diversity. 

 

Youmec is a work for harpsichord and ensemble. Florian Müller is frequently called upon to play clustered verticals as well as enigmatic ostinatos. These are accompanied by undulating glissandos in the ensemble. In a sense, the texture is an inversion of the usual concertino. The soloist plays chords while the group is afforded gestural writing. At the piece’s climax, the ensemble begins to ricochet its own vertical off of the solo’s repeated chords.

 

Interialcell opens with thrumming timpani and angular melodic cells in the strings alongside fast chromatic runs in the piano and pitched percussion. The accents of the cells become a grid for rhythmic transformations in a number of scorings and dynamic levels; a deft structural design. Emtyloop begins with furious, corruscating, overlapping strings. This idea of overlapping ostinatos is explored throughout the piece, with hairpin dynamics creating swooning contrasts. Particularly affecting is the later overlap in the upper “dolphin call” register, supplanted by cello glissandos. einerjedeneither juxtaposes percussion pulsations with chromatic wind lines, spectral verticals, and frequent silences. Instruments blown through, aphoristic piano gestures, and microtonal bends complete a haunting, gradually unfolding environment.

 

Mutedisorder closes out the album with furtive, hushed gestures in a portentous ambience. It is somewhat reminiscent of Mark André’s recent works exploring pianissimo. Gryka demonstrates command over the wide range of materials she selects and a special ear for timbre. Recommended. 

 

-Christian Carey 



by Christian Carey
CD Review, File Under?, jazz

Vermillion: Kit Downes on ECM (CD Review)

Kit Downes

Vermillion

Kit Downes, piano; Petter Eldh, double bass; James Maddren, drums

ECM Records

 

After listening to Obsidian, Kit Downes’s debut as a leader for ECM, one might justifiably think from his considerable prowess as an organist that it was his sole specialty. Not so, as is eminently demonstrated on Vermillion, a piano trio album in a modern jazz idiom for ECM. On a set of originals by Downes and bassist Petter Eldh, along with a rendition of  “Castles of Sand” by Jimi Hendrix, these two musicians along with drummer James Maddren demonstrate a simpatico collaboration, filled with rich harmonic progressions and a well-coordinated sense of swing. 

 

“Minus Monks” is an homage to Thelonious Monk, with slender voicings and an angular melody adorning a circuitous set of changes. Downes plays with a silvery, legato touch, frequently locking in on polychords with Eldh playing rock solid roots. Maddren is resourceful, using the entire kit yet never overwhelming the proceedings. “Sister, Sister” has an intro that could be translated from a Debussy Prelude, and the impressionist timbres continue once he is joined by Eldh and Maddren, the bassist playing fleet countermelodies and the drummer shading the tune with cymbals shimmering. “Seceda” is a loosely articulated ballad with post-bop filigrees followed by a pastoral progression inflected with blue notes. 

 

Eldh’s composition “Plus Puls” begins with a brief solo that sets a buoyant groove. The melody is frequently doubled in octaves by Eldh and Downes. The bassist’s tune “Sandiland” sets a walking line against syncopated piano chords and a wandering keyboard solo. “Math Amager ” is a showcase for Eldh’s fleet soloing. Maddren’s drums are featured on “Class Fails,” and the change in ensemble relationship provides welcome contrast. 

 

The most intriguing piece on Vermillion is Downes’s “Rolling Thunder,’ in which dissonant arpeggios put the trio outside the pocket. Eldh fills in some of the chromatic verticals which Maddren again punctuates with cymbals and gentle syncopated fills. “Bobbi’s Song” also focuses on intricate chord progressions thickly voiced with a tenor register countermelody from Eldh. “Castles Made of Sand” closes the album with Hendrix’s song given bitonal treatment with parallel voicings and harp-like arpeggiations. 

 

Whichever instrument Downes choses to play, piano or organ, he is a formidable and imaginative musician. One hopes he keeps the trio assembled here together: they collaborate with considerable skill and sensitivity.

 

-Christian Carey

 

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

Barbara Monk Feldman on Another Timbre (CD Review)

 

Barbara Monk Feldman

Verses

GBSR Duo with Mira Benjamin

Another Timbre CD

 

Given her association with Morton Feldman, both personal and professional – he was both her spouse and her instructor at Buffalo University – it is tempting to look for comparisons between their compositions. Tempting but unrewarding. Yes, Monk Feldman creates slow, quiet pieces, but so do many composers since Morton Feldman who have greatly departed from his legacy. A fundamental distinction one hears on Verses, Another Timbre’s Monk Feldman recital disc, is that the composer has a cogent sense of form; the longest piece is thirty-one minutes and there are even two five minute pieces, all of which have distinct sectionalization. 

 

The harmonic sensibility of Duo for Piano and Percussion (1988) and piano solo The I and Thou (1988) rely upon an extended sense of triadic post-tonality, with a great fluctuation of the deployment of pitches to create asymmetrical phrases. A distinct gesture that is found in most of the pieces on the recording is a grace note leading into or out of a rest, with this punctuation creating phrase-based boundaries within the pieces. The title work, for solo vibraphone, uses microphrases, short splashes of arpeggios with the pedal down that are followed by rests. Throughout the piece these expand and contract, thicken to wide-spaced chords and reduce to intervals, creating a miniature full of information and surprises. 

 

The recording’s centerpiece, The Northern Shore (1997) is inspired by a place where Monk Feldman, a Canadian, goes to every summer in Quebec. Like a number of the composer’s pieces, nature as a touchstone, rather than as a programme, serves as a wellspring of inspiration. There is something of a ritualistic quality to the way that each player interprets the same intervals and then passes them off to the next, in a kind of call and response. In addition to nature, Monk Feldman has long been interested in theater, particularly Noh, with her most recent opera, or “non-opera” as she prefers to designate them, finished just before the beginning of the pandemic. Color is an important consideration in The Northern Shore, with different verticals and arpeggiations having distinctly scored accumulations of pitch. Like much of her work, the use of triads that never quite resolve provides an achingly beautiful ambience. GBSR Duo – percussionist George Barton and pianist Siwan Rhys – joined by violinist Mira Benjamin, are sympathetic and compelling interpreters of the music. 

 

One question: when will her operas be recorded?

 

-Christian Carey

 

by Christian Carey