CANADIAN COMPOSERS

John Estacio – Frenergy Edmonton Symphony Orchestra; Mario Bernardi CBC Records SMCD 5232

It’s about time John Estacio had a CD all to himself. The Ontario-born master orchestrator and tone-painter blossomed into a major composer after moving to Edmonton in the early 1990’s, landing the Edmonton Symphony’s composer-in-residence position in the process.
 
On this CD Mario Bernardi and the ESO have packed 73 minutes of Estacio’s orchestral oeuvre, and it is a delight from start to finish. Frenergy, from 1998, works as a brisk overture, whether for this recording or a concert. The 1994 A Farmer’s Symphony is a broad three-movement work, with fascinating neo-impressionistic touches in the first movements, ending in a blaze of brass and percussion. The Bootlegger’s Tarantella is another overture in Estacio’s bravura style, with much percussion. Incidentally, that subsequently served as the opening for Estacio’s opera Filumena. The recent Such Sweet Sorrow gives us a glimpse of the composer’s more reflective side, scored for strings alone. Borealis and Wondrous Light, well known from performances and broadcasts, are here as well.
 
The Edmonton Symphony is in top form, with an iridescent sheen over the top strings. A team of CBC producers and engineers have in the process managed to coax an unusual amount of warmth and breadth from the Winspear Centre. CBC records apparently have some rule that abstract artworks must grace record covers. In this instance it is a work by Suzette Edmond.
 
John S. Gray
 
Concert Note: The Toronto Symphony Orchestra presents two Young Peoples concerts entitled “The Twins and the Monster” with music by John Estacio January 29.

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Peter Breiner …there must be something… Trio Animae Slovak State Philharmonic Orchestra, Kosice Cascavelle VEL 3079

Peter Breiner, a Czech-born composer and musician, has lived in Toronto since 1992. Toronto is, for a very good reason, called the most multicultural of cities. The influences of different languages, cultures, music and history mix here with apparent ease, making it a great environment for a composer as eclectic as Breiner. He speaks seven languages, is a writer and a broadcaster, multinstrumentalist, conductor and a creator of music for stage, concert hall and TV. His influences run a gamut from classical to popular to folklore and beyond. Does a comprehensive thread emerge from this cacophony? Not immediately. Sonata Ostinata (1984) and To Dear Mr. Bach On His Birthday (1985) unfold more as pieces of salon music, a semi-minimalist take on the tango, further augmented by Trio Animae’s fascination with Piazzolla.
 
The title composition for piano, violin, cello and orchestra, from 2001 and recorded live in the Slovak town of Kosice, turns the tide.
 
Maybe it’s the weight of the orchestra, joining in and augmenting the musical lines, but …there must be something… is an impressive piece. Bold, unapologetic and inspired, but not derivative, it has in this superb live recording a potential to stir a longing and desire by the right means - the means of a composition confident in its strength and direction, unafraid to startle the listener, and sure in its grip. I’m happy to report that there is indeed “something” to Peter Breiner’s music.
 
Robert Tomas

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Remember Your Power, Music of John Burke Ensemble; John Celona Lafayette String Quartet Centrediscs CMCCD 10104

 
Remember Your Power is an hour-long septet (three winds, three strings, piano) whose three movements are separately titled “The Call,” “Remember Your Power,” and “Return.” In a program essay, the composer acknowledges the influence of a collaborating music therapist as well as a mythologist and recent experts in “the relationship of sound and consciousness.” Researching one therapeutic method, Burke says he formed a “notion of developing music expressly for this purpose, which otherwise uses recorded classics that unfold in conventional ways.”  Though experienced by its first audience on yoga mats, Remember Your Power has little in common with the therapists’ soothing or feel-good repertoire. Its contemplative continuity is fresh and challenging: the composer pursues his intentions with deep seriousness. Morton Feldman’s music for the Rothko Chapel in Houston comes to mind, as does Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Stimmung (in the long crystal-gong coda). 
 
Listening while sitting up (rather than, as recommended, prone), you can approach the piece as you might almost any fully developed instrumental music in the modern tradition. Permutations of a four-note chord knit the stray strands of the first movement; in the second, a piano gesture, like the wave of a wand, punctuates a series of slow statements by subsections of the ensemble; in the third, quasi-vocal fragments suggestive of yearning evolve into a long stretch of cluster tremolos, changing colour imperceptibly. The extraordinary five-minute coda, based solely on overtones of that gong, may work better if you’re prone on a mat. 
 
The performing ensemble is first-rate. Jane Hayes, in the crucial piano role, is especially persuasive.
 
Burke’s Quartet, 1995 winner of the Jules Léger Prize, is a short one-movement work whose intensity and energy seem to develop naturally from the instruments’ open strings. Burke mostly treats the players as contributors to a sound-mass rather than as individuals.
 
John Beckwith

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Selected Works, 1961-1969  James Tenney New World Records 80570

James Tenney – Postal Pieces The Barton Workshop; James Fulkerson, director New World Records 80612-2

“When John Cage, who studied with Schoenberg, was asked in 1989 who he would study with if he were young today, he replied: ‘James Tenney’.” The quote is from Kyle Gann’s seminal book on twentieth century American music. It’s a fine index of where Tenney’s innovations rank in contemporary composition. It was Canada’s very good fortune that Tenney spent 1976-2000 teaching at York University. 
 
Recorded music by “America’s most famous unknown composer”, to borrow Larry Polansky’s apt phrase, has been shamefully sparse. New World Records has closed an important part of the gap. “Selected Works” covers the electronic compositions of Tenney’s early years at Bell Laboratories. He was the first composer to systematically employ Max Mathews’ pioneering music software. “Postal Pieces” focuses on instrumental music composed during Tenney’s first year teaching at CalArts, 1970-71. The transition from digital composing on mainframes to twirling knobs on the university’s analogue synthesizers was not attractive and so Tenney turned his attention to extracting mainframe sounds from acoustic instruments. The resultant sonorities are a marvel.
 
The tracks on “Selected Works” were originally issued on LP by the Frog Peak composers’ collective. You will want to spin this disk on the best available sound system to catch all that Tenney conjures from a mainframe. Here Tenney begins the unfolding stochastic structures, percussive pulses, microtonalities and attention to psychoacoustics that are his hallmark. My favourite track is the acoustic Music for Player Piano (1963), which anticipates symbiosis between Tenney’s reigning expertise on Conlon Nancarrow and his own vocabulary. 
 
The place to start on “Postal Pieces” is a composition for solo contrabass, Beast. The intense range of wholly new contrabass sounds, rhythmic drive and the riveting attention that Tenney attracts within a gradually flowering structure are beyond imagination until one first hears them. Performing Tenney’s music is no walk in the park. The musicians of the Barton Workshop rise to the challenge with great aplomb. “Postal Pieces” is important, provocative and altogether a sheer pleasure.
 
Phil Ehrensaft