"New" Music Log

[Todd]

Yuja Wang playing bespoke music.  Both the great Michael Tilson Thomas and his protégé Teddy Abrams wrote a piece for Wang to play and record for DG to fulfill contractual obligations.  One work travels better than the other.  I'll start there.  MTT's You Come Here Often? is a light, bright, breezy, jazzy good time of an encore.  Filled with ample notes and virtuosic passages, it allows Wang to strut her formidable stuff.  I suspect she'll use it as an encore for quite some time.  She should.

Wang's pal Teddy Abrams, director of the Louisville Orchestra which he conducts here, penned the eleven-movement, nearly forty-minute Piano Concerto to showcase his writing and her playing.  The piece opens with a big and beefy and very big band sounding intro before moving on to the first of four cadenzas.  The piece mostly sounds like an abstracted pastiche.  Some musical quotations can be heard, but mostly it's jazz, show tunes, movie soundtracks, rock and pop music, and generic classical forms and periods that move in and out of earshot.  Abrams has an ear for orchestration, but the music doesn't really work for me.  Except for those cadenzas.  The big one is the second one, which is the fifth movement, and which serves as the literal center of the piece.  It's a showstopper, with Wang blazing away in grand and grandiose fashion, with old-fashioned romantic playing that smacks a bit of Rachmaninoff in a few places.  As Wang dispatches everything with seeming ease, one hears just why she can and does deliver such kick-ass Prokofiev.  She can make gnarly and dissonant sound dead simple and attractive, and she can dispatch notes as fast and nimbly as anyone, ever.  The subsequent cadenzas also work exceptionally well, too.  Which makes sense. 

Playing and sound and such are all fine, but it's hard to see paying for a barely over forty-minute recording just to pick up a worthwhile encore.  Streaming will suffice.

Now, hopefully, Ms Wang returns to more satisfying fare for her next recording.

[Bachtoven]

 I was hugely disappointed and liked it even less than you did! How she can go from Magnus Lindberg's 3rd Piano Concerto (also written for her and I attended the world premiere) to this trite piece is beyond me. I hope she was well compensated.

[Todd]

How she can go from Magnus Lindberg's 3rd Piano Concerto (also written for her and I attended the world premiere) to this trite piece is beyond me.

My understanding is that it was a vanity piece written by a friend. 

[Bachtoven]

My understanding is that it was a vanity piece written by a friend.

I gathered that, too. Doesn't make it any better! It's crappy enough to be a huge hit. 

[Todd]

I gathered that, too. Doesn't make it any better! It's crappy enough to be a huge hit. 

I guess I don't see the problem.  The Abrams piece is a mediocrity, like a fair number of new compositions.  It will likely put butts in seats and sell some recordings, perhaps attract a few new fans, and then disappear into the ether.  I'd prefer to hear nothing but new masterpieces, but that won't happen.

[Todd]

Nancy Galbraith is entirely new to me, something I feel just a tad embarrassed about.  An American composer, and the Chair of Composition at Carnegie Mellon, she has been cranking out hits since the days when Elton John and John Denver ruled the airwaves.  Somewhat like Haskell Small, she is a regional artist, which on evidence of this recording is something of a shame.  But then, there are multiple recordings of her works, so that is a plus.   

Jumping in, Galbraith's Requiem expertly blends the bold and the beautiful.  Nary a rough edge is to be heard most of the time.  Certainly, the Requiem Aeternam sounds softly beautiful start to finish, with the percussion adding color and not bite.  The Dies Irae offers a contrast.  Rhythmically snappy, with what sounds like hints of Revueltas thrown in (!), Galbraith employs emphatic, insistent, repetitive chant in the opening, with the intensity appropriate to the context, but then she has the music fade away to something more beautiful.  The Tuba Mirum comes off as theatrical and almost movie soundtracky, but in a less derivative way than prior entries in this survey.  Were it to show up in a film, a Darren Aronofsky film would not be out of the question.  The work sort of bubbles along, never sounding harsh, and sometimes, as in the Ingemisco, the combo of strings, voices, and discreetly deployed winds really tickles the ear.  And the Lacrimosa really soothes in its gentler than Faure beauty.  I will admit to some misgivings with the Offertorium, with its Coplandesque use of percussion, but that seems a tradeoff worth making.  Galbraith ends with a Libera Me that sounds tender, gentle, and ethereally beautiful.  This Requiem is not hard-hitting and intense and captivating like some of the others in this survey, and it does not rise to the level of Faure or Durufle when it comes to overall gentler takes, and it does not need to, but it displays disparate influences and styles and sounds fresh and modern, but also accessible.  Nice.

The Mendelssohn Choir of Pittsburgh and Academy Chamber Orchestra do the do well enough, and conductor Robert Page leads his commission for his final performance as music director of choir nicely.  Recorded sound is efficient rather than resplendent.  I should like it if bigger names and labels and engineers took up the cause of the work.  I will also throw in one piece of criticism: Ms Galbraith's webpage needs some serious work.

[Brian]

I don't know how Chandos dreamed up the concept of Icelandic incidental music as an album, but I am glad they did, because this disc is a lot of fun. The two composers bookend each other: first we get a short concert opener by Jorunn Vidar (a woman), then two incidental music scores by Pall Isolfsson, then a big 28-minute ballet by Vidar. (My keyboard can't do that funky d.)

It's all lovely. It brings to mind some miniatures by Tveitt but especially the youthful, cheery, neoclassical music of Dag Wiren. Everything is pleasantly tuneful, clearly scored, and unpretentious. The second Isolfsson piece is for strings only, while the first includes a movement that quotes various bigger European countries' national anthems. (This is not as witty as it would be in the hands of, say, Poulenc.) Vidar's big ballet, Olafur Liljuros, is the pick of the bunch. None of this is as boldly original or ingenious as Jon Leifs (the Vidar piece "Fire" doesn't sound like the bombastic infernos Leifs would have conjured) but it is all very folksy and pleasant.

The orchestra sounds mostly good, and the sound is fine; there's a wee bit of scruffiness in a big climax in Olafur, but totally forgiveable given the obscurity of the music. A very nice surprise.

[Todd]

Revisiting the Quatour Diotima's Second Viennese School recordings prompted me to hear them in lesser known fare.  For no particular reason, Conrado del Campo got selected.   Campo is one of those super-obscure composers who wrote a goodly amount, taught, and then vanished, at least from a distant recording consumer's standpoint.  Among his output is either thirteen, fourteen, or fifteen string quartets, depending on internet source.  This recording purports to be the beginning of a complete cycle.

The recording opens with the Fifth, titled Caprichos Románticos, and the title most assuredly fits.  The work, from 1908, possesses a sort of fin de siècle groove I associate with Zemlinksy or early Schoenberg.  All six movements are slow, all gorgeous, with nary an ugly note to be heard.  The music is not tuneful in the Dvořákian manner, but everything here falls easily, seductively, languidly on the ears.  One can hear a variety of influences from the late romantic era, but Campo does sound unique in his ability to deliver so much beautiful slowness up until the more animated ending of the nearly thirteen minute final movement.  The only other quartets I am readily familiar with that pull off this feat are Haydn's Seven Last Words and DSCH 15, and those works are very different, indeed.  The two minute Third, titled Cuarteto castellano and also from 1908, also sounds mostly slow, but it is more unabashedly romantic, with long phrases, rich harmonics, dramatic dynamic swells.  The first movement nearly tips into over-the-top syrupy excess, and it hits the spot while doing so.  Forget academic rigor and ideological composition, this is straight for the heart stuff.  Yeah.  The second movement backs off a bit, but not much.  One could never describe this work as being classical or Apollonian in demeanor.  I had no expectations going in, and this recording really delivers the goods.   

The Diotima acquit themselves beautifully, some audible effort notwithstanding.  The fact that these are live performances may contribute to that.  Hopefully, all the quartets get recorded, and hopefully the Diotima get to do the honors.  An unexpected delight.

[ritter]

Revisiting the Quatour Diotima's Second Viennese School recordings prompted me to hear them in lesser known fare.  For no particular reason, Conrado del Campo got selected.  Campo is one of those super-obscure composers who wrote a goodly amount, taught, and then vanished, at least from a distant recording consumer's standpoint.  Among his output is either thirteen, fourteen, or fifteen string quartets, depending on internet source.  This recording purports to be the beginning of a complete cycle.

The recording opens with the Fifth, titled Caprichos Románticos, and the title most assuredly fits.  The work, from 1908, possesses a sort of fin de siècle groove I associate with Zemlinksy or early Schoenberg.  All six movements are slow, all gorgeous, with nary an ugly note to be heard.  The music is not tuneful in the Dvořákian manner, but everything here falls easily, seductively, languidly on the ears.  One can hear a variety of influences from the late romantic era, but Campo does sound unique in his ability to deliver so much beautiful slowness up until the more animated ending of the nearly thirteen minute final movement.  The only other quartets I am readily familiar with that pull off this feat are Haydn's Seven Last Words and DSCH 15, and those works are very different, indeed.  The two minute Third, titled Cuarteto castellano and also from 1908, also sounds mostly slow, but it is more unabashedly romantic, with long phrases, rich harmonics, dramatic dynamic swells.  The first movement nearly tips into over-the-top syrupy excess, and it hits the spot while doing so.  Forget academic rigor and ideological composition, this is straight for the heart stuff.  Yeah.  The second movement backs off a bit, but not much.  One could never describe this work as being classical or Apollonian in demeanor.  I had no expectations going in, and this recording really delivers the goods.   

The Diotima acquit themselves beautifully, some audible effort notwithstanding.  The fact that these are live performances may contribute to that.  Hopefully, all the quartets get recorded, and hopefully the Diotima get to do the honors.  An unexpected delight.

Very interesting, Todd.

I must admit I am completely unfamiliar with del Campo's work (much to my shame, he having been a relevant --but now almost forgotten-- figure in 20yh century Spanish music).

A friend of mine mentioned this recording some time ago, and piqued my interest (as you, he highlighted the audible influences in the [b]Fifth SQ[/b] --he also interestingly mentioned "tristanesque sounds"-- that blend into a personal idiom).

And the Diotima SQ is practically a guarantee of a top-notch performance.

I should watch out for any future concerts at the Juan March Foundation of Campo's quarters (admission is free, but getting hold of tickets isn't that easy), and the CD you posted is a must-buy for me

Regards,