Modern and Contemporary

Passages Through Time: The Music of Rain Worthington - Various Artists

Passages Through Time – The Music of Rain Worthington
Various Artists
Navona Records nv6398 (navonarecords.com/catalog/nv6398)

In the May 2019 WholeNote, I reviewed a CD of music by five composers, praising Rain Worthington’s ten-minute In Passages for violin and string orchestra as “a sustained, moody beauty, imbued with Middle Eastern melodic melismas and glissandi.” That recording reappears here along with seven other works, lasting four to 12 minutes, by the New York-based Worthington (b.1949). Composed between 2011 and 2020, mixing “antique” and world-music modes, late-Romanticism and minimalism, they provide lots more “moody beauty.”

Three pieces feature the cello: Resolves for solo cello (expressing, writes Worthington, “a sense of acceptance and inner strength”), Full Circle for cello and small orchestra (“the cycles of emotion that emerge and recede throughout life”) and the ominously perturbed Shadows of the Wind for small orchestra (“an approaching storm…shifting shadow patterns…”). More “shadows”: Balancing on the Edge of Shadows for violin and piano evokes plaintive Judaic or Islamic chants (“quite beautiful, mysterious, with delicate subtlety”).

Intense yearning fills Night Stream for two violins (“reflecting on the flow of life and time, imagined impressionistically as lights streaming across a rain-streaked window”). Brooding, pulsating melodies pervade two works composed during the pandemic: Within Deep Currents for string orchestra and Dreaming Through Fog for small orchestra (“a continuous undercurrent of tragedy and uncertainty, mixed with cycles of waiting and moments of hope”).

Worthington is a rare contemporary composer who unabashedly calls her own music “quite beautiful,” but she’s absolutely justified in doing so!

What is American - PUBLIQuartet

What is American
PUBLIQuartet
Bright Shiny Things (brightshiny.ninja)

What is American is the most recent album by the PUBLIQuartet and purposefully titles the work as either a question or a statement, a summons to rediscover the roots of classical European music that bind to American Indigenous and Black music. But the string quartet doesn’t stop there; though as a group they are found under “contemporary classical” they are known for their boundary-crossing genres, and the compositions are demanding of each performer’s skills in jazz, blues, improvisation, chopping, folk and swing.

Beginning with the inspired re-working of Dvořák’s “American” Quartet, an arrangement retracing the African Indigenous and Black roots of the music giving it a somewhat ironic tone, to Vijay Iyer’s Dig the Say, a rich and rhythmically textured work in four movements dedicated to the music of James Brown and highlighting the group’s finely honed ensemble work. Each interpretation is outstanding. PUBLIQuartet has a knack for keeping to the score while playing freely and with joy.

What is American includes the world premiere recording of Roscoe Mitchell’s 2020 composition Cards, as well as a collection of four original compositions by the quartet from their MIND THE GAP series, further exploring improvisations on compositions by Ornette Coleman, Alice Coltrane, Ida Cox, Betty Davis, Tina Turner and Fats Waller. Rhiannon Giddens’ At the Purchaser’s Option, an emotional exploration of an 1830s newspaper advertisement selling a young Black woman, including her nine-month-old child “at the purchaser’s option” is powerfully arranged by the quartet and is both heartbreaking and dynamic. Take a moment to look up the actual ad to bring that piece home. It is followed by Pavement Pounding Rose exploring Waller’s Honeysuckle Rose as a tribute to Madam C.J. Walker and beautifully narrated by Walker’s great-great-granddaughter A’Lelia Bundles.

The track list for this album numbers 20, and a paragraph could be dedicated to each. The Fifth Verse, based on Oliver Wendell Holmes’ denouncing slavery in his writing of the unofficial fifth verse of the Star-Spangled Banner some 50 years after Key’s original, is then shadowed later in interrupted fragments that took my breath away, keeping the messaging on track like connective tissue to arms and legs. This album is dedicated to reminding us of our current culture, where we came from, and simultaneously hoping and fearing where we could be going.

Impulse - Jordan Bak

Impulse
Jordan Bak
Bright Shiny Things BSTC-0162 (brightshiny.ninja)

Jordan Bak’s debut album, Impulse, transports the listener into a viola dreamland from the very first note. Here is the place we get to hear the viola in all its glory and bask in all its abundant colours. And we hear it through diverse compositional voices of contemporary composers of vastly different backgrounds.

The young Jamaican-American violist pulls out all the stops on this album. Bak is a powerhouse musician, with a strong voice and compelling sound. He is not afraid of occasional grittiness in service of music but generally favours an aesthetic of beauty and refinement in sound. Impressively, and true to the title of the album, Bak’s interpretations and phrases are often flowing and shifting, firmly rooted in one moment and flexible in another, yet always maintaining rhythmical clarity.

The album opens with the lush, impressionistically Romantic Untitled, written by early-20th-century violist and composer Rebecca Clarke, and closes with the monumental A String Around Autumn by Toru Takemitsu arranged by Toshio Hosokawa. Pianist Ji Yung Lee is an astute collaborator on these pieces, well attuned to Bak’s style of playing. In between, there are five compositions for solo viola. Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti’s ko‘u inoa and In Memory by Quinn Mason create meditative worlds, one from constant movement, the other from stillness. This album also features the world premiere of Tableau XII for Solo Viola by Tyson Gholston Davis, an expressive monologue that continues with Joan Tower’s Wild Purple and Jeffrey Mumford’s wending.

Impulse would make a great addition to the music libraries of contemporary music aficionados.

Ben Duinker; Architek Percussion – 6 Changes - Architek Percussion

Ben Duinker; Architek Percussion – 6 Changes
Architek Percussion
Independent (architekpercussion.com)

The Montreal-based quartet Architek Percussion, founded in 2012 by McGill University music graduates, has established itself along the lines set in the last century by other classical music-based percussion groups such as NEXUS. They are equally comfortable in the 20th-century percussion ensemble repertoire now considered “classic,” as well as in new works generated via commissions and collaborations. Consisting of Noam Bierstone, Ben Duinker, Alexander Haupt and Alessandro Valiante, Architek Percussion has toured Canada multiple times and commissioned works by composers from some 11 countries.

Six Changes, an extended collaboration between Duinker and his bandmates, takes the group in a novel direction. In six parts, the album charts a stylistic path referencing electronica, percolating pulse-based minimalism and the experimental fringes of rock, all snapped to attention by a closely miked drum kit. Stock keyboard percussion instruments also make an appearance, as do airy synth chord pads, which drift in and out, occasionally interrupted by growling bass synth melodic lines.

Yet another element here is the transformation of rhythms the inventive Duinker has encountered in daily life. For example, his transcribed rhythms from an MRI machine feature in On Sitting the Next Few Plays Out, layered into a multi-pulse mesh. And he first heard the ostinato in Dark Horse Fan in a malfunctioning ceiling fan.

It took much of the album to get fully into Six Changes, but in the end the superimposition of clever rhythms, vernacular harmonic modulations, kicked in the pants by an assertive groove, won me over.

Night Light - Lara Deutsch; Phil Chiu

Night Light
Lara Deutsch; Phil Chiu
Leaf Music LM249 (leaf-music.ca)

Kudos to Leaf Music of Halifax for its confidence in these young musicians, flutist Lara Deutsch and pianist Philip Chiu. The program is built around the theme of dreams, which opens such possibilities, for example, including a work by Franz Schubert – Introduction and Variations on Trockne Blumen – in a program of music by contemporary composers.

The disc opens with Takashi Yoshimatsu’s Digital Bird Suite, Op.15, the opening movement of which, Bird-phobia, described by Deutsch as “fiendishly challenging,” is at the nightmare end of the dream spectrum, but shows both consummate command of her instrument and her partner’s uncanny ability, despite the formidable challenges of his own part, always to be in sync with her. In the contrasting lyrical second movement, A Bird in the Twilight, their exquisite phrasing and consistent sensitivity to each other lift the notes off the page.

The dreamlike atmosphere is perhaps most eloquently expressed in the first movement of Jocelyn Morlock’s I Conversed with You in a Dream, which traverses the gamut from lyrical reverie to reality-defying pyrotechnics.

In the Schubert, Chiu reveals himself as a lieder collaborative pianist of stature, convincingly telling the story and revealing the atmosphere of the music. For example, his playing of the repeated quarter and two eighth note motif at the very beginning is full of eerie foreboding; you know at once that this is not going to end well!

Individually and as a duo Deutsch and Chiu are consummate interpreters, who move with the music, so to speak, and reveal the meaning behind the notes.

Listen to 'Night Light' Now in the Listening Room

Michael Oesterle: Quatuors / Tom Johnson: Combinations - Quatuor Bozzini

Michael Oesterle – Quatuors
Quatuor Bozzini
Collection Quatuor Bozzini CQB2229 (actuellecd.com)

Tom Johnson – Combinations
Quatuor Bozzini
Collection Quatuor Bozzini CQB 2230 (actuellecd.com)

Quatuor Bozzini has energetically championed the newest in classical music since 1999 in their Montreal hometown, on tour and on outstanding albums. Their mission is to cultivate risk-taking music, evident in the creation of an impressive commissioning program of over 400 pieces. Frequent collaborations with other musicians and cross-disciplinary projects have been another career feature. An example of an unusual collaboration, one that I took part in, happened in 2012 with the development of new concert repertoire with Toronto’s Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan, performed live and subsequently released on the album Higgs’ Ocean. The title track, scored for string quartet and gamelan degung, was by prolific mid-career Canadian composer Michael Oesterle.

Oesterle’s mature compositional style balances two late-20th- and early-21st-century streams: American minimalism and European postmodernism. The latter comes through in his exploitation of sonorities, formal, timbral and harmonic sophistication, allusions to historical Euro musics and an identifiable Oesterlean lyricism. This album’s four substantial string quartets offer an appealing balance between musical straightforwardness and complexity. Oesterle often generates drama from the friction between the idiomatic and the completely unexpected.

Daydream Mechanics (2001), which evokes the “awkward adventures of childhood when the backyard seemed as full of disturbing possibilities as any uncharted territory,” offers an example of Oesterle’s use of extra-musical inspiration. On the other hand the composer describes his Three Pieces for String Quartet as “three short pieces [composed with] modules drawn from a system of triangular numerical sequences….” I however hear surprisingly Renaissance- and Baroque-infused character homages to the three animals Oesterle titles each movement after: kingfisher, orangutan and orb weaver.

American-born composer and longtime French resident, Tom Johnson (b.1939), served as The Village Voice’s influential music critic from 1971 to 1983 covering the era’s exciting new classical music scene. The first to apply the term “minimalist music,” Johnson’s personal compositional style leans toward minimalist formalism. Quatuor Bozzini has collected his complete works for string quartet covering four compositions from 1994 to 2009 on this album.

Dwelling on mathematic sequences and permutations of a limited core musical material, in Johnson’s hands the musical whole emerges satisfyingly greater than the sum of its lean components and intellectual procedures. Each relatively brief movement vibrates like a sonic poem. For example, the opening six-note motif of Johnson’s Tilework for String Quartet (2003) is transformed through his exploration of the myriad ways in which lines are “tiled using six-note rhythms,” relying on a computerized list of rhythmic canons. The composer helpfully adds, “Of course, composers, performers, and listeners don’t have to know all of this, just as we don’t need to master counterpoint to appreciate a Bach fugue… [because] music allows us to directly perceive things that we could never grasp intellectually.”

Performed senza vibrato, Quatuor Bozzini renders these scores with virtuoso precision along with warmth and a subtle lyricism, a winning combination I grew to appreciate after repeated listening.