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 The only composer residing in Canada on the CD is Toronto’s Linda Catlin Smith, the recipient of the prestigious 2005 Jules Léger Prize for New Chamber Music. Her contribution to this CD is Diagonal Forms, which sparkles with pointillist vibraphone, glockenspiel and piano ascending and descending melodic passages, contrasted against sustained broken chords by the winds and double bass. Then at other places, the tables are turned, the winds providing the ‘diagonal’ movement. Much of the time the music is thin and delicate in texture and unpredictable in form. Diagonal Forms repays repeated listening.  
 
“Array Live” is not by any means ‘easy listening’, but music which demands attention and thoughtful and even detailed listening. Try it some evening with your best headphones on and a bountiful glass of your best red wine.
 
Andrew Timar

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For There and Then Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan Artifact Music ART 034

 
Following two CDs (in 2002 and 2004) of more traditional music from the Sunda region of West Java, the Evergreen Club has once again returned to its more familiar, original territory of contemporary Western compositions for gamelan, bolstered by the addition of occasional non-gamelan instruments for added variety and textural enrichment.
 
“For There and Then” comprises five pieces from the last fifteen years or so by Canadian composers, including two, Kissed and the title track For There and Then by Evergreen Club member Bill Parsons. Unfortunately the otherwise very informative liner notes give us little insight into the ideas behind these two pieces. The latter features the composer on electric guitar, an interesting sonic contrast to the gamelan instruments in the thick of repetitive and insistent additive rhythms driving the piece along. Rain Cycles by Ronald Bruce Smith also includes two guitars (nylon stringed) and on Main Road by Daniel Janke, the composer plays the kora, a West African harp-lute.
 
For this reviewer, the highlight of the CD is The Eleusinian Mysteries by Andrew P. MacDonald, with Erica Goodman on harp. It feels something like a harp concerto, with two louder percussive outer movements cushioning a gentler, mysterious middle section. The creative use of the harp, its glissandi, plucked chords, and melodic lines that weave in and out of the gamelan’s pentatonic scale make for an engaging and full musical texture. One can certainly imagine the harpist as mystic high priest of the ancient Greek ritual on which this piece is based.
 
As always, the Evergreen Club gamelan gives marvelous performances in all the music on this CD.
 
Annette Sanger

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Chatman - Vancouver Visions Various artists Centrediscs CMCCD 11105

 
This recording is a retrospective of Stephen Chatman’s chamber music and a document of his collegial relationships at the University of British Columbia, where he is the head of the composition department. The earliest composition on the disc was written in 1971 – the playful Wild Cat for solo flute – and the most recent is the Varley Suite for Solo Violin, commissioned last year for the farewell recital of Andrew Dawes.
 
The Black and White Fantasy (1981) is played with great gusto by pianist Jane Coop. Five settings of Miriam Waddington’s poems (1995) are well written but given an underwhelming performance by soprano Robyn Diedger-Klassen and pianist Karen Lee-Morlang. The Lawren Harris Suite for Piano Quintet (2003) is a strong, well-crafted piece, wonderfully performed by Sara Davis-Buechner and the Borealis String Quartet.
 
A highlight of the disc is In Memoriam Harry Adaskin, a short one-movement piece for violin and gamelan-like prepared piano. Evocative, searching motives in the violin are accompanied by repetitive fragments in the piano, all of which lead smoothly but unexpectedly to a brief quotation from the slow movement of Beethoven’s A major violin and piano sonata, op. 30. As the quotation fades into the ether, like a distant memory, the seemingly random violin and piano fragments take up where they left off. Violinist Andrew Dawes and pianist Jane Coop give an understated, but stunning performance.
 
The only slight disappointment is a complicated, uninspired set of variations on “Home on the Range” for string quartet that goes on and on. The program note suggests the piece is heavily influenced by Chatman’s composition teacher William Bolcom, which may be the case, but here Chatman needed to be reminded that brevity is the soul of wit.
 
Larry Beckwith

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Davies - The Big Top Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra; Earl Stafford Water Lily Records WLCD 5905

 
If you had a chance to catch The Big Top on television or saw the ballet on that 1988 Canadian tour, this CD will please you immensely. And for those of you hearing this music for the first time, a treat is in store.
 
Victor Davies is one man who has demonstrably devoted his life to music, in a variety of idioms, and we expect much from the creator of the Mennonite Piano Concerto and Anerca. Here he shows himself master of the score, from first to last. The CD presents the ballet to us over 16 tracks. Perhaps, back in the days of vinyl, they might have made a segue of several of the episodes. Throughout, the large instrumental ensemble performs to perfection. The Pranksters/Lion and The Great Ravi are particularly effective as orchestral pieces, and the Winnipeg wind section deserves special praise.
 
Recorded quality is excellent, and studio creativity with instrumental spread is tastefully done. You even get two endings, the Finale proper on track 15, plus a reprise that would have been prepared for curtain calls, later adaptable for television credits as they rolled. The booklet consists of a simple single fold with a colour photo (from the original Winnipeg production?) on the cover. The interior notes are easy on the eyes, in French and English. Recommended.
 
John S. Gray

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Gobeil - Trilogie d’ondes Gilles Gobeil Empreintes Digitales IMED 0576

Normandeau - Puzzles Robert Normandeau Empreintes Digitales IMED 0575

 
Empreintes Digitales here presents the DVD-Audio format debut of two Canadian composers whose electroacoustic works have won awards the world over. Always looking forward, their music is as challenging as it is rewarding.
 
Gilles Gobeil hits the mark with his “Trilogie d’ondes”. The trilogy is made up of three distinct works featuring the ondes Martenot, played by Suzanne Binet-Audet. Voix blanche [White voice] deals with an excruciating slow build-up to a crescendo that really never occurs. This is a piece where the ondes reigns supreme. Its rich timbral qualities, its unmistakable glitchy, percolating sound and its fantastic ability to blend in with the tape are riveting. With its unnerving climax that comes and goes over and over again, this is without a doubt the most unsettling piece in the trilogy. By the time we get to Là où vont les nuages… [Where the Clouds Go…] the mood that is fashioned leaves much guesswork at the forefront of the listener’s mind. Climaxes come in series of bursts and we are left wondering what will Gobeil do next? In the final movement, the longest piece in the trilogy, La Perle et l’oubli [Pearl and Oblivion] the ondes is disguised as the soul in a journey on its way to incarnation and when the shimmering sampling of scream-like voices breaks through, you know the composer has hit a nerve. With perfect precision and undying sense of drama, “Trilogie d’ondes” is a major work in Gobeil’s catalogue of masterpieces.
 
Robert Normandeau has a much denser overall approach to his own work.  His pieces seem to be bathed in a thick soup which is as tasty as it is sometimes difficult to digest. “Puzzles” begins with the title composition, which is made up of various audio elements that fit together like pieces of a puzzle. Do they really fit though? Over the course of about 6 minutes, we’re confronted with various vocal samples, creaking doors, hammer blows. All of these pieces are entrenched with a drilling, mechanical beat.
 
Perfectly suited to the composer’s acousmatic diffusion techniques, the 5.1 Audio Surround mix makes all the difference. Sound percolates from every corner of the room, making your head spin at break-neck speeds. Starting off Eden is a lovely, serene Vietnamese vocal, which then is replaced by loops of music, stretching into eternity. While an angry voice repeats demands on Hamlet Machine with Actors, the piece is further coloured by drill presses, screams of agony and bubbling, gurgled noise formations. Momentous and densely populated with new, brave ideas, “Puzzles” is a journey that should be reserved for only the truly adventurous explorers of new sound worlds.
 
Tom Sekowski

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Still - Piano Music: Africa, Seven Traceries, A Deserted Plantation Mark Boozer Naxos 8.559210

 
The Naxos American Classics 2005 release of piano music by William Grant Still is an important anthology, the pioneering work of this Black American composer. Still’s lifetime spanned over eighty years, his most prolific writing was during and immediately following World War Two. He would have been to the Americans what Nathaniel Dett (the namesake of Toronto’s own, Nathaniel Dett Chorale) was to the Canadians – in fact, these two prolific and courageous musicians were contemporaries, and shared many of the same honorifics for their works.
 
I fell in love with the unpretentious beauty of Still’s more abstract works: Three Visions and Seven Traceries, and even the piano arrangement of Africa by Arvey. Together these works evoke images that travel through time from Africa, the cradle of civilization, through slavery and emancipation, to the heavenly life beyond this world.
 
The Blues – from his ballet work, Lenox Avenue, seems to me like an academic composer trying too hard to sound “hip.” American pianist, identifiably from the African Diaspora himself, Mark Boozer’s interpretation is flawless, and it’s not without a strong emotive edge – I just think Still’s work shines the brightest when he’s not trying to fit into the mould of an established idiom.
 
Heidi McKenzie
 
Concert Note: The Nathaniel Dett Chorale presents a program entitled “Voices of the Diaspora – Verses in Song” as its contribution to Black History Month at the George Weston Recital Hall on February 22.  
 
Editor’s Note: For other “Black History Month-themed discs, see “Discs of the Month”.