Modern and Contemporary

Carl Vine – Complete Piano Sonatas
Xiaoya Liu
Dynamic CDS7931 (xiaoyaliupiano.com/press)

Australian Carl Vine (b.1954) has written at least eight symphonies, nine concertos, six string quartets and 40 scores for dance, theatre, film and TV, but “only” four piano sonatas, ranging from 15 to 19 minutes in duration.

Vine’s two-movement Piano Sonata No.1 (1990) was commissioned and choreographed by the Sydney Dance Company, where Vine was resident composer and pianist. Beginning gloomily, it soon erupts with driving, irregular rhythms, repeated rapid phrases over syncopated thumping, glittering sonorities, headlong accelerandos and booming climaxes.

Distant echoes of Debussy and Rachmaninoff inhabit the first movement of No.2 (1997). Propulsive, jazzy syncopations fill the concluding second movement until a slow, suspenseful interlude leads to an enraged plunge to the sonata’s final, brutal explosion. No.3 (2007) is in four movements: Fantasia opens with slow drips over dark chords, followed by distorted Chopinesque melodies; in Rondo, meditative passages separate surging, percussive rhythms; Variation presents elaborations of Fantasia’s drips and chords; Presto begins and ends violently, interrupted by a gentle, disquieted ambulation.

The three-movement No.4 (2019) starts with Aphorisms, its slow, aimless melody wandering over burbling arpeggios. In Reflection, delicate droplets over low rumbles bookend a restless, yearning central section. Pummelling barrages surround plaintive lyricism in Fury, expressing, says Vine, “relentless and unfocused anger,” ending in a ferocious prestissimo-fortissimo.

Pianist Xiaoya Liu, top-prize-winner of several major piano competitions, brilliantly surmounts all the extreme virtuosic challenges of these intense, turbulent works – gripping music that definitely deserves your attention.

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Trios from Contemporary Chicago
Lincoln Trio
Cedille CDR 90000 211 (cedillerecords.org)

My November 2021 WholeNote review of a CD containing trios by two Chicago composers praised “the vivid colours, dramatic expressivity and sensational virtuosity” of the Lincoln Trio, here returning with compositions by five living Chicagoans.

Sensual passion fills Shulamit Ran’s eight-minute Soliloquy, derived from an aria in her opera Between Two Worlds, in which the tenor (here, the violin), yearns for his beloved. Less satisfying is Augusta Read Thomas’ …a circle around the sun…, five minutes of enigmatic fragmentation.

Three works written for the ensemble receive their first recordings. Shawn E. Okpebholo’s 11-minute city beautiful celebrates three Chicago architectural icons. Dribbling, undulating melodies evoke the 82-storey Aqua Tower’s wave-like exterior. Long-lined, pastoral lyricism reflects the horizontal planes of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie House. Okpebholo calls Union Station “an amalgam of neoclassicism and modernism;” his similarly styled music expresses, he says, the terminal’s “century-old hustle and bustle.”

Mischa Zupko’s three-minute Fanfare 80, honouring the Music Institute of Chicago’s 80th year, exists in versions for orchestra, woodwind quintet and the Lincoln Trio. Rambunctious seven-and-11-beat measures create, writes Zupko, “a savage celebration.” One wonders why.

The best comes last. Sanctuary is Stacy Garrop’s two-movement, 23-minute, emotion-wrenching memorial to her father. In Without, brooding anguish, urgent desperation and a “pseudo-Jewish folksong” describe, she writes, a girl “searching for her lost parent.” Within’s hymn-like solemnity and gentle piano wind-chiming represent the girl (violin) finally reuniting with her father (cello) “within the sanctuary of her own heart.”

When Dark Sounds Collide: New Music for Percussion and Piano
Pathos Trio
Panoramic Recordings PAN24 (newfocusrecordings.com)

These specially commissioned works are so unusual and remarkable that they demand an equal share in the limelight of this debut album, When Dark Sounds Collide by the Pathos Trio. The stunning music expertly interlaces a wide world of time and space, and musical traditions, into extraordinary repertoire for percussion and piano. 

In each work, the Pathos Trio have closely collaborated with the composers – Alyssa Weinberg, Alison Yun-Fei Jiang, Finola Merivale, Evan Chapman and Alan Hankers, who is, of course, also the pianist of the trio. 

This has resulted in some truly inspired performances by the members of the trio, who demonstrate – in soli as well as in ensemble – each composer’s heightened skill at conjuring a spectrum of sonic worlds. The collision of metallic, wooden and electronic percussion instruments – performed by Felix Reyas and Marcelina Suchocka – alternate, blend and often enter into outright battle with the plucked, strummed strings stretched taut across the brass frame of the concert grand piano, which is also softly hammered and variously pedalled by Hankers. 

The music veers from delicate washes of sound in Jiang’s Prayer Variations and Hankers’ Distance Between Places to somewhat cataclysmic eruptions such as those that inform the mysterious strains of Merivale’s oblivious/oblivion, often punctuated by prescient and even foreboding silences. Meanwhile, the musicians also revel in the passagework – both delicate and fierce – of Chapman’s fiction of light and Weinberg’s Delirious Phenomena.

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Allison Cameron – Somatic Refrain
Apartment House
Another Timbre at196 (anothertimbre.com)

Somatic Refrain is another in the English label Another Timbre’s extensive series of recordings of contemporary Canadian composers’ works performed by Apartment House, a distinguished British ensemble dedicated to performing contemporary music. The works here, composed between 1996 and 2008, spring from different creative impulses but share a certain probing calm, a deliberated tone of sensitive inquiry, as if the pieces were already there and Cameron was examining why and revealing their graces.

Somatic Refrain (1996) is a solo piece for bass clarinet. Originally commissioned by Torontonian Ronda Rindone it’s played here by Heather Roche of Apartment House. The instrument’s extraordinary timbral possibilities have been more extensively examined in improvised music than in composition, and the intrepid Cameron explores the range of Rindone’s mastery of multiphonics, creating a piece that demonstrates the instrument’s richly expressive possibilities. H (2008) comes from a period when Cameron was exploring folk music and assembled an Alison Cameron Band in Toronto for those ends. Here she plays banjo, bass harmonica and toy piano with Eric Chenaux and Stephen Parkinson, on acoustic and electric guitars respectively, forging a folk-like lament that’s at once somber, resilient and distinctly homespun.  

Similar qualities infuse the longer works performed by Apartment House. Pliny (2005) and the three-movement Retablo (1998) reflect a sensibility as much formed by the deliberated calm of medieval music as by contemporary works. The former, inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ tale Funes, the Memorius, initially invokes a serene clarity that is gradually permeated by a spreading dissonance; the latter suggests both order and mystery in a three-movement work inspired in part by Tarot cards.    

An interview with Cameron discussing these pieces on Another Timbre’s website provides enriching insights into her work and the playful dimension of her creativity.