"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,

[Todd]

As Wallace Shawn might say, it was inconceivable that I would not listen to Schnittke in this survey.  Indeed, I myself am surprised it took me this long to get to his Requiem. 

The recording starts off with the a capella Concerto for Choir.  This is late Schnittke, from 1990, and it is a straight up conservative work, strictly tonal and melodic, with at times dense vocal harmonies.  The ancient texts are treated very seriously indeed.  Only in a few, fleeting passages can one maybe hear Schnittke's music personality.  I don't know the Russian choral tradition, so if someone were to have claimed that this was penned two or three centuries ago, or maybe even more, I would not have disbelieved such a claim.  It's compactness and attractiveness work quite well. 

The main work sounds more like Schnittke, though not as wild and crazy as his symphonies.  Part of that is because it does sound deadly serious.  The work includes an organ that is present most of the time, occasionally dominating the proceedings with heavy bass notes, and sometimes doubling the low voices nicely.  Angular piano playing makes multiple appearances, as do blatting brass and various bells and other percussion instruments, including a drum kit.  The composer evokes a more modernist soundworld at times, and some almost eerie, more ancient sounding music, and while expressive, it is kept under wraps most of the time.  Overall, this is tamer than I thought it would be going in, but it does work as written. 

All performers do good work, and sound is pretty good, though not at all SOTA.

[Todd]

This here twofer's a gimmick.  German violinist Niklas Liepe, along with his keyboardist brother Nils, teamed up with composer Andreas Tarkmann to record rearranged versions of the opening and closing arias and thirteen variations of Bach's timeless Goldberg Variations.  Interspersed throughout the set are eleven new, small works by eleven composers, with Tarkmann including one of his own.  You know, this is not a bad gimmick.  It's also one Liepe did in his earlier recording for Sony Germany of Paganini's music.  Sony Germany is nearly as adventurous as some French micro-labels and Japanese home market labels.  That's a good thing.

The lengthy collection (95 minute+) starts with a gorgeous as all get out, slow, not at all HIP inspired Aria where both Liepes strut their stuff.  Then the first variation basically sounds like a missing movement from a Brandenburg Concerto.  Indeed, every time rearranged Bach shows up, it very much inhabits a similar sound world, occasionally tipping over into a scaled-up string trio feel, as designed.  The arrangement of the twenty-fifth variation does stand out as more potent than most, and it acts as a perfect bridge between the new pieces that flank it.  As Bach arrangements go, every track sounds quite good.  But that wasn't the main draw for me.  The new stuff was.  And so, here goes:

Rolf Rudin's Dialog With Bach, a Goldberg Reflection sounds like a blend of 19th Century romanticism and Karl Amadeus Hartmann, with some very beautiful high register playing for violin.  Sidney Corbet's Goldberg Hallucination Remix is a stylistically familiar work, where avant garde, nearly shapeless string music gets interrupted by identifiable but distorted quotations from the main work in question.  It's a quasi-pastiche, and it works quite well.  It reminds me of a compact, more abstract, and obviously Bach-inspired work akin to Luciano Berio's Rendering.  Tarkman's Goldberg's Last Summer introduces piano into the mix, sounding very Roremesque when the piano gets played, and it retains some of that feel, as well as acquiring a dramatic movie soundtrack quality as the music sounds unabashedly tuneful and beautiful.  Dominick Dieterle's Sleepless After JS Bach starts with eerie high strings and pizzicato, first from the soloist, and then the low strings, as the energy picks up, before winding down to a slow, quiet conclusion.  Wolf Kerscheck's Goldberg Reflections Aria sounds like a transcription fit for Barry Lyndon to start before turning into something that Mark O'Connor might write, and then morphs into a jazzy soundtrack style sound before returning to the opening material in a mini-cyclic piece.

Moritz Eggert's Four Variations from Goldberg Spielt, with the 2000 work revised in 2019 for this project, starts off achingly beautiful and old-fashioned, but then morphs into unabashedly modern music before shifting to something more akin to post-war writing.  Hartmann again pops up as a useful analog.  Daniel Sundy gets four tracks to cover some New Goldberg Variations, and all have a jazzy, swing influence and sound.  Tobias Rokahr's Sleepless (Goldberg Goes Crazy) lives up to its title.  Frenetic, tense, fast, edgy, tetchy, it blends in the most fleeting moments of beauty and the main theme with in-your-face chaos – and that's just the first minute.  It then slows, gets all eerie, with horror movie mishmash in the mix, and the music turns basically silent, before popping back to life, with unnervingly peppy harpsichord playing leading the way.  It's quite possibly the best of the new pieces here.  Friedrich Heinrich Kern's Reflections on a Dream combines strings with the Verrophone, which makes its first appearance in my collection or listening experience.  Basically, it's just an updated glass harmonica, and the novelty wears off about three notes in.  Fortunately, Kern does something with the instrument compositionally.  (He also does something with it musically since he plays it.)  While not the best work here, it does create a sort of, well, dreamy soundworld which works nicely enough.  Stephen Koncz's GoldBergHain, based on Kraut und Rüben, comes off as a playful, light, folk music inspired dance piece with Bach woven in just so.  It delights far more than it should.  Finally, Konstantia Gourzi gets three tracks for her Lullabies for Three Flowers to end the recording.  I last heard Ms Gourzi played by the great William Youn and the equally great Nils Mönkemeyer.  These three pieces have no attachment to Bach, so the fact that they are lullabies serves as the connection.  More or less gentle, some flittering pizzicato aside, these brief, beautiful, pieces sound folk inspired  and sound more pleasing than the disc of her music I listened to previously.  It makes a fine, slightly incongruous end.

Overall, the collection works as intended, and Corbet, Eggert, and Rokahr emerge as names I should probably investigate some more.  Sound and playing are beyond reproach, which I expect from this source.

[Todd]

Big name composer.  Big name (and great) conductor.  That's what I needed.  So Krzysztof Penderecki's massive Polish Requiem conducted by Antoni Wit demanded to be heard.  With a Lacrimosa dedicated to Lech Wałęsa, some heavy-duty politics merge into the serious material.

And serious it is.  Right from the get-go, with ominous strings and hushed chorus in the Introitus, which expands in short order, one senses a proper dark and potent Requiem will unfold over the next hour and half.  Penderecki doesn't really hold back, marshalling the massive forces to dramatic effect, and get to the Tuba mirum, and the soloist sings in a manner almost as dramatic as something out of Mussorgsky, while the strings and brass layer on thick 'n' heavy music.  The work moves forward with several slower, less dramatic sections making one very aware of the length and scale of the work, but then along comes the Ingemisco tanquam reus, with machine gun timps and other percussion, and violent musical undulations, joined by the soloists teaming up in hyper-expressive mode, and one barely notices the time go by.  The piece follows a similar dramatic pattern until the haunting and ethereal Lux aeterna, which has an extended, quiet opening in the strings and with the choir, only gradually building up.  It's arguably the most compelling minute-and-a-half of the piece.  The work then follows more or less the same type of path, made more impressive by the compositional timeline, and then ends up with a dramatic Libera animas. 

Rather expectedly, Pendercki's work sort of typifies what I expected to hear from a post-war Requiem: serious, big, (maybe a little too) long, striking, astringent, and at times beautiful.  It does not emerge as top five Requiem, but I will listen again.

Wit, band, and all singers do excellent work.

[Todd]

Over the years, Leonardo Balada has been a reliable source of new music that I dig.  As such, I have amassed fifteen recordings of his output, making him the best represented living composer in my collection.  There are certain traits which appear in most of his best work of the last few decades, with the mix of older inspirations and modern techniques the main draws.  He does it time and again, and it was time I tried a couple more recordings, starting with this one.

The disc opens with Caprichos No. 1 for Guitar and String Orchestra, an Homage to Federico García Lorca, from 2003.  Originally scored for guitar and string quartet on commission from the Austin Classical Guitar Society, this scaled up version adds additional compositional techniques, detailed by the composer himself in the liner notes.  Broadly, the music varies quite a bit, from austere, quiet, and transparent, with tunes predominating, to gnarly avant garde music with dissonant and atonal clumps o' music tossed the listener's way.  I'm not familiar with Lorca's original arrangements, but these seven miniatures belie their folk roots in a post-Bartokian, which is to say, Baladaian way, creating an extensive suite for guitar and string orchestra.  It fits right into his oeuvre. 

The Caprichos No. 5 for Cello and String Orchestra: Homage to Isaac Albéniz, from 2008, basically riffs on four pieces from Iberia (Triana, Corpus Christi en Sevilla, Evocación, El Albaicín) as well as Seville from Suite Española No. 1.  One needn't strain to hear the famous melodies played by the cellist or the band, but they are transformed, with most of the writing a delightful modernist concoction that takes small musical inspirations in new directions.  How much one likes this music may depend greatly on how one likes music built on others' works.  Given the highly original output, it works very well.  It is worth noting that the cellist and band are the dedicatees of the work.

A couple smaller works follow, starting with A Little Night Music in Harlem for String Orchestra, from 2006.  It blends Eine kleine Nachtmusik, jazz, and a plethora of Balada's normal compositional techniques.  If that sounds like pastiche, it is, but this is high end pastiche, pastiche as high art, along the lines of BAZ or Berio.  The Reflejos, for Strings and Flute is a two-movement work, with the opening movement slower and more somber, and the latter more vibrant and colorful.  It's not really a flute concerto so much as an orchestral score with flute obbligato, and it blends everything together nicely.  Once one is accustomed to Balada's style, this is more or less a light and easy piece. 

Playing, conducting, and sonics are all spiffy.  Another fine addition to my Balada collection.

[Todd]

Saving the most radical for last, Helga Pogatschar's Mars: Requiem ends things with a buzzsaw.  Ms Pogatschar was around thirty when she wrote this and she purposely set out to write a piece commemorating the dead of WWII, and to do so in a manner that stood against the male music tradition.  All well and good, though I'm not convinced that setting ancient liturgical texts is the best way to achieve that end.  That written, such intense iconoclasm can lead to striking, original, vital, visceral works.  (I'd write "shocking", but art does not shock me.)  So, what does a bad girl have to say about the Requiem?  Well . . .

The work opens with Mars, an obvious addition to the standard text, and it stands in for the Dies Irae.  Filled to the brim with synthesizers and electronic drums, along with caterwauling as opposed to singing, and all manner of crushing intensity that would make Trent Reznor perk up, it's as non-classical a start to a Requiem as exists.  The Introitus follows, and an electronically augmented bass bellows out the text, surrounded by female singers, and then the electronic bass thunders, and the (presumably) electronic music meant to evoke Byzantine chant arrives, as does a tenor.  It swirls and grinds forward.  The Kyrie opens with recorded German text, and then movies into more of the grinding, industrial rock meets tradition vibe.  Pogatschar blends styles and voices, sometimes pairing the two high parts expertly, and she even incorporates straight-up Renaissance a capella polyphony briefly, before reintroducing thudding electronic bass.  The piece then constantly weaves all these widely disparate sounds and styles, arriving at a Sanctus that includes extended droning passages that sound like hyper-aggressive minimalism.  The effect is quite something, and truly unique.  The Agnus Dei falls just short of the effect, as the soprano soars above everything else, with the other soloists adding color, while electronic music hums in the background and synthesized instruments approximate some type of pseudo-folk music.  The concluding Qohelet blends modernized takes on ancient music with the soloist very obviously recorded in an isolated booth and then mixed in.  The minimalist support compels.

This work is entirely unlike all the others, standing apart and away from any tradition.  It blasts past conservative avant garde writing into something new in my experience, showing what can be done with the Requiem, and opening infinite paths forward.  It blends so many influences, some separated by millennia, and keeps moving forward with almost unyielding intensity, and does so with very little concern for sounding beautiful, that it ends up a modern music drama with liturgical texts.  In some ways it's like a post-post-modern Hildegard von Bingen, taking full advantage of everything to convey a message.  There's a sense of exploration, purpose, anger, sorrow, and the composer seems to give zero fucks about how it might be received.  It is bold.  It is original.  It is striking.  It is absorbing.  Now, that written, there may very well be dozens or hundreds of similar works I've never heard because I've never sought to explore this artistic nook of the contemporary world.  I kinda want to look a bit more.  And Ms Pogatschar deserves some more listening.  To be clear, I suspect many people may hate this often outright ugly work.  That's fine.  It works for me.  Fantastically well. 

I could not find this recording to stream on any paid service I have access to, so I went the YouTube route.  Sound is therefore a bit compromised, though I get the sense it doesn't matter.  I also made it a point to listen in my 2.1 home theater the first time around, with the .1 adding to the sonic, even physical experience.  The second time around I went with earbuds, and this work seems quite well suited to that delivery mechanism.  It lacks weight, but it sounds claustrophobic, and the isolation allows the music to burrow into one's ears, mind, and soul. 

I must give thanks to Kees van der Vloed at the Requiem Survery website (http://www.requiemsurvey.org/), which is devoted to listing all sorts of requiems, recorded and not.  The site lists over 5000 different pieces.  More listening remains.

[Todd]

Before picking up the Pražák Quartet big box, I had never even seen the name Jindřich Feld.  A Czech composer born just about a century ago, he was born to a violin professor father and a violinist mother, studied music for decades and composed and taught.  Given his parentage, it's not entirely surprising that he wrote six string quartets.  And given when and where he was born, it's not entirely surprising that two names pop into mind when listening to the Fourth and Sixth String Quartets here: DSCH and Bartok.  It's not that Feld rips them off, it's just that both of those composers' styles influence Feld.  There's nothing wrong with that.  For instance, Krzysztof Meyer's writing is obviously heavily influenced by DSCH, yet Meyer writes his own music, which rises to the level of his influence.  Feld does something quite similar.  I'm not quite ready to write that he rises to quite the same level, but as one listens to the Fourth Quartet, hears the hints of night music, the harsh but irresistible dissonance, the at times rockin' rhythm and the at times strikingly beautiful melodies, one can't help but enjoy what's on offer.  The Sixth, which has some deep, rich cello playing that threatens to overwhelm the listener (yes!) and some audience noise (meh) has a drama and energy and flair that is hard to resist.  Combing pizzicato with vibrato, sour singing lines, great contrasts in tempo, and some rhythmic snap, and, well, there's more than a little to like.  The Clarinet Quintet offers more string writing along the lines of what came before, and for the clarinet it sort of melds the Bartok of Contrasts with a Schoenbergian vision of Brahms, so it's all very, very good.  Since this work is still fairly new, it may yet become a repertoire staple.

Feld kind of got lucky in that the Pražák took up his case.  One is assured of world class playing.  Sound is close and immediate.  Maybe a little too much.  Overall, a superb recording of some very fine music. 

[DavidW]

Boy Todd I feel like you're getting close to exhausting the Prazak box and I've just started.  I didn't even know about these Feld discs!

[Brian]

Isn't there also a Feld piece with saxophone on their live album? (I might be completely wrong.)

[Todd]

Isn't there also a Feld piece with saxophone on their live album? (I might be completely wrong.)

Yes, a Saxophone Quintet.

[Todd]

It's been a good long while since I last listened to something by Tan Dun, and I figured it was about time that I try some of his solo piano music. 

The recording opens with Eight Memories in Watercolor, in its 2002 revision.  The short piece, clocking in at just over fifteen minutes, is made up of eight miniatures.  The opening notes of Missing Moon immediately evoke two names: Claude Debussy and Federico Mompou.  Not only is there nothing wrong with that, there's a lot right with it.  Since this is the revised version, I don't know what changes were made to the 1978 score, but simplicity and creative harmonic writing pervade the work, and Dun adds his own voice and what sound like abstracted Chinese musical elements.  The apogee of the set is Floating Clouds, which takes all the traits to their highest level of refinement.  (There's commentary from Dun available online about how much he admired a performance of this piece by Lang Lang.)  While Raat plays very nicely, the piano sounds a bit bright and brittle, so I must dream of a Bohzhanov or Volodos or Kosuge performance.  And I suppose Lang Lang.

While the opening work sounds quite nice and certainly has pieces that can and should provide encores for contemporary pianists, C-A-G-E (In Memory of John Cage) offers more.  At just shy of thirteen minutes, this work evokes John Cage's work for prepared piano, with plucking and strumming and preparation aplenty, generating at times entirely unpianistic sounds verging on true gamelan music.  It sounds unambiguously Chinese in places, and unabashedly modernist in others.  It has real musical meat on the bone.  Film Music Sonata, from 2016, reworks the score for the film The Banquet.  I've not seen the film, so I don't know the music, but this work combines more formal rigor and what seems like it could be modernist programmatic music into a suite-sonata hybrid.  The short Traces, which contains as much silence and sustain as musical notes, sounds like a Mompou-Ligeti hybrid, which means it's most excellent. 

The last two works date all the way back to 2020.  The first, The Fire, written for Raat, starts off slow and hazy, with the pianist plinking out notes while keeping the sustain busy.  It very quickly morphs into harsh, staccato heavy modernism to rival nearly any composition.  Hazy beauty returns near the middle, but sounds musically distorted, to excellent effect.  The music then veers to powerful, note-laden writing before morphing again into zippy note spinning, with a delightful bass ostinato for a brief period.  It's quite a fine piece.  The brief Blue Orchid closes things out, and it's a variation of Beethoven's Diabellis.  Slow and somber, it's hard to readily identify any link to the main work, but that's OK, it works as a nice closer.

I didn't really have any expectations going in, so I am happy to report that C-A-G-E (In Memory of John Cage) and Traces emerge as modern piano works worthy of more attention and recordings, and The Fire as well.  Playing is fine and sound is fine, too. 

[Brian]

The past month has seen high-profile premiere recordings for not one but two 90-minute monster orchestral pieces based on literary epics/myths and composed by guys named Tom.

Thomas Adès wrote a musical version of Dante - Inferno, Purgatorio, Paradiso - recorded by Dudamel in LA. And then there's this:



I puzzled over this when it was in the "future releases" bin, but all was explained when the NY Times ran an extensive feature about it. Thomas Bangalter is one of the guys from Daft Punk.

His "Mythologies" is 88 minutes in 23 movements, depicting things like the Amazons, the Gorgons, Zeus, the Garden of Eden (which is 14th, because this is more a collection than a chronology), and (for a finale) "The War."

The work starts with soft tremolo strings, leading you to wonder if it will be more like a Ravel ballet (which is what I expected from the cover art, classical setting, and Bangalter's French heritage) or a Bruckner symphony. The answer is neither, of course. The initial impression is that Bangalter is hemmed in by his rhythms, with everything placed neatly right where it should be in the bars, as if composed by robots. This is supported by the sparse orchestration, clearly the work of a first-timer, which lets you see through to the rhythmic support structure he uses to get by. There is lots of doubling of parts by various instruments, especially in the bass—which unfortunately is a good thing because Erato's recording is very bass shy. I thought I heard a really nice bit of counterpoint in the basses at one point, but had to double-check that they were audible, and it wasn't just my brain filling in what my brain wanted to hear.

However, when Bangalter lets his melodic and coloristic skills kick in, the results significantly improve. "II. Le Catch," for example, starts off sounding like a Philip Glass bit for bassoon and strings, before he creates a melody that really takes wing and finally liberates the music from its measured beginning. Something similar happens in the very next scene, when the strings seem to take off in flight from the rest of the orchestra. I also dug the choice to make "XIII. Le minotaure" all about contrabassoons, double basses, and bass trombone (at least until what can only be described as a trio section, with a loud, overmiked violin solo).

And if techno is ever going to be snuck into the orchestral setting, it should be in guises like "Les Amazones," one of the coolest pieces here, probably because it is the most like Glass/Adams(/Dukas) and includes slipping rhythms that subtly change and create a feeling of thrilling unsteadiness. (It is possible that the players are just not keeping it together fully.) Bangalter also finally fulfills his potential here by overlaying different motifs on top of each other and engaging all the orchestral sections, though he still clearly sees them as parts of one big color-producing apparatus rather than a collection of individual colors.

"IX. Zeus" is perhaps the most surprising work in the collection, because we already have a portrait of Zeus from Gustav Holst, in the Planets suite, and it's regal and pompous and triumphant. This new piece must reflect Zeus's seductive side, because it's just the same four-note motif played by solo flute with a few accompanying string instruments. Over and over. For four minutes.

Besides that repetition, there are more ways that the music wears out its welcome over the course of 88 minutes. Bangalter's orchestral ear hardly ever changes, in the sense that he always sees the orchestra as one instrument rather than dozens, with his ear focused on the combined sound rather than individual or cumulative effects. His rhythmic chugga-chugga returns frequently, and the album is recorded like a pop album, with very limited dynamic range (see: that very loud violin solo). There aren't a lot of crescendos or climaxes or quiet secretive bits; just more stuff happening. With 30 minutes to go, I seriously considered bailing and returning to the rest later. Surely this is not meant to hear in one sitting? But it was premiered as such, in concert as one big piece, under the eminent conductor Marc Minkowski.

I think for people who say they enjoy listening to movie soundtracks, this might go over well. Bangalter may well find himself being asked to score action/fantasy films in the future, and if this is the way he gets practice for the next Game of Thrones spinoff, good for him. However, I doubt I'll return to it. I also wonder what Daft Punk fans will think of this. Maybe they'll all love it and come join GMG and we can tell them about stuff like Prokofiev's Romeo and Juliet and Adams' Harmonielehre and Shaw's Partita and Andrew Norman's Play. More likely they will go through, find 3-4 tracks they enjoy, and stick them on Spotify playlists rather than listen to the whole 88-minute compendium through. That seems about right.