Quiver
loadbang
New Focus Recordings FCR342 (newfocusrecordings.com)

The fourth release by this New York City-based ensemble features an eclectic collection of works commissioned from composers friendly to the group, Quinn Mason, Heather Stebbins, Chaya Czernowin and ZongYun We, and three ensemble members, Jeffrey Gavett, Carlos Cordeiro and Andy Kozar. 

The first track, titled Aging and composed by Mason, is a miniature featuring baritone voice in a decidedly lyrical style – a suitable palate cleanser to begin what unfolds to be an album of dynamic works and pristine performances. Stebbins’ Quiver is clever and punchy. Undulating bass clarinet pulses lurk beneath nocturnal jibs and quirks projected as vocalizations from the ensemble members. This music is highly creative – the bare nature of the orchestration illuminates the highly effective doublings of noise and sustained colour. Distorted honks and rhythmic bloops permeate Disquiet composed by Cordeiro, a work that recalls a Stravinskian sensibility with its lilting and unrelenting vocal part layered over various pattern-play. The dusty soundscapes of ZongYun We’s Flower evoke mysterious sonic corridors through which the listener is taken into dark psychological murkiness. This music lays bare a rugged beauty with highly novel and unusual sonorities. Providing two works for the release, Proverbial and  quis det ut, Gavett offers contrasting moods: grating sonic bursts in the former and meditative sustained expanses in the latter. Set in two movements, Kozar’s To Keep My Loneliness Warm perfectly captures the character of the subtitles: in the first movement the trombone constantly interrupting the text is an unsettling representation of Insomnia, and the manner in which the ensemble parts hover around the text is certainly a place for Odd Behaviour. 

Lastly, Czernowin’s IRRATIONAL produces gestures that eliminate the artifice between the separate parts of the ensemble: this work embodies a brilliant frenetic energy and dazzles the ear with groove-based alchemy, bombastic jerks, a splendid use of silence and hypnotic stasis. loadbang once again shines in their virtuosic ability to make the unusual soar with world-class bravura.

Listen to 'Quiver' Now in the Listening Room

Houses of the Wind
John Luther Adams
Cold Blue Music CB0063 (coldbluemusic.com)

The eerie vibrations created by Aeolian (wind) harps provide the central source of inspiration and sonic material for John Luther Adams’ latest release, Houses of the Wind. The album is a meditative journey in five wind-swept movements that transfix and bend all sense of the present moment. Using a series of layered field recordings of his own Aeolian harp, Adams creates slowly unfolding and otherworldly shimmerings as if slowly floating through a cave of gypsum. Low rumbles form as glacial resonances that crystalize into mountainous radiant spectra. The gentle ambiance of this sound world is at once distant hopelessness and point blank serenity. 

This duality of despair and transcendence permeates throughout, creating a liminal experience for the listener. As one who advocates for the health of the earth, Adams provides a reminder of nature’s fragile and yet tremendous force. But rather than a didactic offering, Adams invites us to pause and think about the space we inhabit. A convergence of music, emotion and nature, this release provides a sense of longing but also peace.

John Adams
Tonhalle Orchester Zürich; Paavo Järvi
Alpha ALPHA874 (outhere-music.com/en/labels/alpha-classics)

John Adams (b.1947) has long been considered among today’s leading American composers, particularly after the success of his operas Nixon in China (1987) and the controversial The Death of Klinghoffer (1991). This album of four orchestral works was the fruit of his 2021-22 Residency with the Tonhalle-Orchester Zürich directed by Paavo Järvi.

Having discovered musical minimalism in the 1970s, Adams’ works characteristic of that style include the fanfare-like Tromba Lontana (1985/86). Adams’ compositional style has since continuously evolved, incorporating musical influences including numerous Western classical as well as vernacular American styles: jazz, pop and rock.

In the 1990s Adams produced the brilliantly orchestrated, effervescent Slonimsky’s Earbox, in part drawing on early-period Stravinsky stylistic cues. Adams retroactively observed that the work points “toward a successful integration of the older minimalist techniques (repetitive motifs, steady background pulse and stable harmonic areas) and the more complex, more actively contrapuntal language of the post-Klinghoffer pieces.” Järvi demonstrates a sure command of the work’s web of stylistic allusions. 

The rollicking Lollapalooza was also composed in 1995. Today the American word “lollapalooza” means something oversized and perhaps outlandish, features reflected in Adam’s exuberant music. 

Adams considers his three-part tone poem My father Knew Charles Ives his “Proustian madeleine, although one with a Yankee flavor.” In this complex mature orchestral work,, Adams draws on his New England heritage, specifically reflecting the Connecticut composer Ives’ pervading musical influence.

This outstanding portrait of Adams’ orchestral oeuvre is a fine way to celebrate the composer’s 75th birthday.

Lou Harrison – Sonata for Unaccompanied  Violin
Kate Stenberg
Other Minds Records OM 1036-2 (otherminds.org)

With roots back to Bach’s Sonatas and Partitas, Paganini’s Caprices and Eugene Ysaÿe’s Sonatas, the continuous stream of solo violin composition is among Western classical music’s highlights. This premiere recording of American composer Lou Harrison’s concise early-career Sonata for Unaccompanied Violin (1936) makes a convincing case for a niche in that rich canon. Composed when Harrison was a precocious teenaged composition student, it’s tempting to locate this adventurous modernist work within the genre’s lineage. It’s interesting to note that Bartók’s iconic Sonata for Solo Violin was composed some eight years later. 

In three tightly-knit movements Harrison’s Sonata employs aspects of the 12-tone compositional technique he was studying at the time with Henry Cowell, which Harrison characteristically modified. Aggressively dissonant fanfare-like chords open the work, which segue to angular melodies. The score also introduces glissandi, alluding to a microtonal musical landscape which Harrison extensively explored in his later work to influential effect.

The second movement maintains the texture of angular chromaticism spiked with glissandi,  enlivened however with dance-friendly rhythms. (It’s relevant to mention that Harrison was an avid dancer.)

My favourite movement is the soft and mysterious-sounding finale which introduces pizzicati and returns to previously stated motifs. The work eloquently evaporates into silence with an interval of a falling major third. 

New music violin-specialist Kate Stenberg’s committed and assured performance sets the bar high for this work. Is Harrison’s seven-minute Sonata too short to merit the jewel-box CD treatment it gets here?  I’d say it’s just the right, satisfying length.

Weather Systems I – A Hard Rain
Steven Schick
Islandia Music Records IMR011 (islandiamusicshop.com)

The 2CD Weather Systems I: A Hard Rain features outstanding solo performances by Steven Schick (b.1954), a Percussion Hall of Famer who has long championed contemporary percussion music. The genesis of the album arose during the COVID-19 pandemic. During the lockdown Schick revisited “the foundational works for solo percussion, many of which I have played for nearly 50 years.” This became the starting point for A Hard Rain. 

It opens with a vivid recording of John Cage’s 27’10.554” for a percussionist, a work Schick describes as “a rainforest of sounds: of water, earth, and air; of rip-sawn wood and ancient metal.”

Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Zyklus‘ use of the cycle motif appears in the spatial layout of the instruments: in a circle around the solo percussionist. I hear echoes of Cold War tensions in Schick’s nervous rendition. Morton Feldman’s The King of Denmark on the other hand is a world removed aesthetically from Stockhausen’s Euro angst, inviting the musician to approach the work with soft, spare, almost meditative gestures.

For his final track Schick uses only his voice to give a dramatic 32-minute performance of Ursonate (1922-32), Kurt Schwitters’ four-movement “sonata in primal sounds.” Schick collaborated with electronic musician Shahrokh Yadegari to present this milestone sound poem with the aid of effective interactive loops, layerings and treatments of his voice.

Schick writes that the non-sense of Schwtters’ Ursonate “is actually the language of crisis,” echoing the destruction of war, as well as serving as a post-Dadaist provocation. Coming after a program of signature solo percussion works, this tour-de-force version of Ursonate challenges listeners to expand their notions of what percussion music is – and can be.

Perspectives
Third Coast Percussion
Cedille CDR 90000 210 (cedillerecords.org)

Perspectives takes listeners on a stylistically wide-ranging, musically rewarding, journey. The opening four-movement Percussion Quartet by prolific film composer Danny Elfman effectively juxtaposes the warm wooden sound of the marimba with the sharp sounds of pitched metal pipes and tubular bells, the work very effectively rendered by Chicago’s Third Coast Percussion.

Philip Glass’ Metamorphosis No.1, originally for piano solo is here arranged for TCP. Beginning darkly with repeated low marimba eight-note chords, the arrangement blooms to include electronic organ, vibraphone, tubular bells, decorated with glockenspiel and crotales sparkles. A wistful major key melodica melody floats over the bubbling percussion along the way. 

Rubix is a playful three-movement collaboration between TCP and flutists Nathalie Joachim and Allison Loggins-Hull, collectively known as Flutronix. Rubix imaginatively overlaps the short sonic envelopes of keyboard percussion with the sustained melodies of the duo flutes.

Electronic music producer Jlin’s impressive seven-part Perspective highlights TCP’s conceptual, arranging and performing strengths. The work draws on a style of electronic music and dance known as footwork. Born in Chicago’s underground dance competitions and house parties it’s marked by hyper-fast tempos.

Perspective originated as a series of electronic tracks produced by Jlin. Collaborating with the composer, TCP arranged an imaginative performing score from that material scored for an acoustic batterie of over 30 (mostly) percussion instruments. The result is not only a feast for the ears and mind but sections with intense grooves are guaranteed to get you off the couch.

Sarah Bernstein – Veer Quartet
Sarah Bernstein; Sana Nagano; Leonor Falcon; Nick Jozwiak
New Focus Recordings Pan 26 (newfocusrecordings.com)

Sarah Bernstein is a violinist and composer exploring the boundaries of genres, mixing elements of jazz, the avant-garde, electronica and improvisation. On this album, she explores the more traditional sounds of a string quartet but not with a result that is at all traditional. Her six compositions range from the hectic and angular News Cycle Progression to the more lyrical Clay Myth with its broad, elegiac head, to Hidden where she flirts with minimalist arpeggiation and an unpredictable ending. 

My favourite track is the first one, Frames No.1: clear jazz references with a walking bass in the cello, solid grooves, and a simple form that gives soloing time to each of the four players. The string playing throughout is excellent though particular improv kudos go to Bernstein and cellist Nick Jozwiak who throws some surprisingly dense material into his solos. Bernstein often has the group accompany the solos with pizzicato: a nice device that sounds great. 

Four string players of this quality have to be classically trained so you won’t hear the sort of language you might expect from jazzers. What you do hear is a group of excellent musicians searching for something new. Bravo to that.

Listen to 'Sarah Bernstein – Veer Quartet' Now in the Listening Room

Andy Akiho – Oculus
Various Artists
Aki Rhythm Productions ARP-R008 (akirhythmproductions.bandcamp.com/album/oculus-2)

Andy Akiho is a rising star on the American new music scene. He’s a virtuoso player of steel pan drums, who, as a composer, has been nominated for big prizes like the Pulitzer and Grammy Awards. One can hear why: good ideas abound, and no section overstays its welcome. Akiho uses grooves not as a gimmick but as a way to drive you from one intriguing idea to another. 

Much of this tree-themed disc is taken up with his five-part LigNEous Suite for string quartet and marimba, played brilliantly by the Dover Quartet with Ian Rosenbaum. Akiho finds all kinds of ways to vary the marimba’s timbre, using bundles of sticks, wooden mallets, even an elastic band. The strings, too, are given effects like crunches, snaps, body knocks and glissandi, but even without all this colour the compositions are compelling: caffeinated, driving grooves, unpredictable codas, dark and brooding slow movements. 

Also included on the disc are Speaking Tree for string quintet, brass quintet and percussion, and Deciduous for violin and steel pan. The former features wonderful ensemble playing with more of Akiho’s groove-oriented but complex writing, including a delightful section with toy piano. At just over 15 minutes, Deciduous is the longest work on the disc and gives ample scope to Akiho’s spectacular pan playing, paired with Kristin Lee’s equally masterful violin performance in a duet filled with surprising colour and dash. The disc cover includes textural and evocative artwork by American photographer Stuart Rome.

enfolding
String Orchestra of Brooklyn
New Focus Recordings FCR331 (thesob.org)

True to its title, the music on this album creates an encompassing sonic space for the listener, encouraging inwardness and introspection. SOB’s innovative new release features two composers that dive into the exploration of sound in its pure form and experiment with extended string techniques and grainy, undiluted textures. Both compositions are premiere recordings and both are beaming with originality. The orchestra never gets in the way of the music but rather supports it with subtle interpretative choices. 

Outside Only Sound by Scott Wollschleger was commissioned by SOB at the time when concerts in outside spaces were becoming a new normal due to the pandemic restrictions. Recorded live at Fort Greene Park in Brooklyn, this piece cleverly juxtaposes outside spaces and internal experiences. The immediate sounds of everyday life, such as voices, footsteps, traffic and wind are an organic part of the composition; and strings mix, match, colour and interact with them. The changes in volume and spatiality add richness to the listening experience.

with eyes the colour of time, composed by Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2022. Made of movements and interludes, with poetic titles referring to works of art in the Contemporary Museum in Honolulu at the time of its opening in 1980, it presents a flowing, ever-changing sound that is visceral and elemental. The most delightful manipulation of sonic density by Lanzilotti incorporates a peaceful motif in the strings among explorations of raw textures. The last movement on the album, enfolding, leaves the listener in a harmonious state of contemplation.

Listen to 'enfolding' Now in the Listening Room

Guy Sacre – Oeuvres pour piano
Billy Eidi
Le Palais des Dégustateurs PDD 028 (lepalaisdesdegustateurs.com)

There is, perhaps, no better way to become familiar with an individual composer’s ideas and performance practice than to hear them (or someone close to them) perform their works. Consider, for example, Olivier Messiaen’s recordings of his own organ music, or Yvonne Loriod-Messiaen performing her husband’s piano compositions, and how these aural experiences can augment – and sometimes overcome – the murky clarity present in printed music.

Such is the case with Billy Eidi’s interpretation of Guy Sacre’s piano works. Eidi and Sacre (b.1948) worked together in the 1990s to create the association Contrechants, intended to rediscover unknown French repertoire. Equal parts scholar and composer, Sacre’s greatest contribution to musicology is perhaps La Musique de Piano, a critical census of a large part of the piano repertoire, dealing with 4,000 works by 272 composers. 

Given his broad knowledge of piano repertoire, especially from French composers, it is no surprise that Sacre’s own compositions contain a wide range of influences and techniques. Many of his works utilize classical forms and structures over which are draped the harmonies and melodies of the early 20th century, inspired by Fauré, Debussy and Milhaud. This is, at its core, beautiful music and it traverses a range of affects and depth of expression without ever losing its levity, which is a remarkable compositional achievement.

While Sacre certainly writes stunning material, it is up to the interpreter to make it so, and Eidi brings a lightness of touch that, even in the most solemn and profound moments, provides much-needed clarity and transparency. This disc is a magnificent example of how an ideal combination of performer and composer can produce music of transcendent and sublime beauty.

Big Things
Icarus Quartet
Furious Artisans FACD6829 (icarusquartet.org)

There are those who call out “somebody should do [a thing]” and there are those like the Icarus Quartet who just do them. In this case, the thing to do is find a jam where interesting, exploratory music is buoyed by popular or (gasp) commercial music. Big Things is the title track of a three-work disc from this double-duo: two pianos, two percussion. Big sounds and big gestures are what they bring to the party, or perhaps the brunch table. A running gag in the liner notes is the American pancake, in all its fluffy glory. Not sure how it ties to the actual music, but a gimmick’s a gimmick, and they go with it, including the track running times expressed as dollar-and-cent prices on a diner-style menu. 

Fortunately, there’s no gimmick in the performance, for truly, these lads play the s#!+ out of the material. I like track 1 and tracks 3-10 most. That leaves Brad Lubman’s Tangents, track 2, and at over twenty dollars (cough, minutes), you’d want to like it the most. Alas. Michael Laurello’s title track is just over half that price, but beautifully poses two one-word questions in shifty ways: isitorisitnotanostinato? And whenisanostinatonotanostinato? Forgiveme. Buy the disc, you’ll get the answers, or a fun trip towards them. 

Performances of these first two works are just the bomb, as the kids used to say, at some point. Favourite item of all, a bunch of small sides that add up to the second half of this one-hour disc (30 bucks), Paul Lansky’s Textures. Each short section of eight develops a synaesthetic depiction: Striations, Soft Substrate, Granite, just some of the textures conjured in sound; and then Slither, wherein one is reminded that sometimes very LARGE things can slither.

A Series of Indecipherable Glyphs
NakedEye Ensemble
New Focus Recordings FCR338 (newfocusrecordings.com)

Were I to throw a large party, I’d set this new release on random shuffle until enough guests noticed that the tracks were beginning to sound familiar. The selections are alternately stimulating and mesmerizing. NakedEye Ensemble, out of Pittsburgh, have hitched their axes to Frank Zappa’s star, and his legacy. He left so much music still to be explored, it’s high time more groups put together arrangements like track 11, Zappa’s Sinister Footwear II. With the recent agreement between the Zappa family trust and Universal Music, we’ll likely hear more renditions of his extraordinary work.

Rhythmically exacting and full of rapid, jagged melodic passages, shared by multiple unison voices, Footwear is just the right follow-up to a more mysterious and occasionally tiresome work of AI meets improv, Nick Didkovsky’s Amalia’s Secret. I’m allowing some oldster grump when it comes to art that’s in part generated by algorithms. Some of it is pretty cool, but some of it just sounds… mechanical? I imagine my party guests won’t much care about how the ten brief segments were generated. I’ll just go open more wine.

Following are five more tracks, two that drop clocks (yet MORE automatism!!) into the mix. [These Hands] Hold Nothing by Whitney George ticks and tocks, and Dum Spectas Fugio by Rusty Banks clunks and clonks; both beat more or less at 60 per minute, and then Less is More by Molly Joyce (in performance accompanied by a light show) raises the pulse while easing into meditation. They’re all much better pieces than I’m making them sound, and the playing is gorgeous.

Rounding out the disc, Aaron Jay Myers’ Strabimus and Richard Belcastro’s Nepetalactone take up the Zappa-ista torch. The latter title is the psychoactive ingredient in catnip. Fun stuff, well played.

Listen to 'A Series of Indecipherable Glyphs' Now in the Listening Room

Shawn Crouch – Chaos Theory
Various Artists
Acis APL56620 (acisproductions.com)

Hats off to Shawn Crouch. The tracks on his recent release, Chaos Theory, enchant the ear and engage the mind. Liner notes sometimes muddy the waters, but these (apparently written by Crouch himself) are brief and informative. He’s fond of circles, canons, variations, and games and puzzles too. 

Get right to listening, and give it a twice-over before coming to any conclusions. There are brilliant performances on each track, and there’s a bit of everything in the variety. My favourite is probably the easiest to get inside of: 95 South, a woodwind trio that covers the U.S. Eastern Seaboard in three large leaps. Lake Road; Dublin, NH recalls the scene of a music festival he attended in his youth. 74th and Third; New York, NY must mean he lived in Manhattan for some of his early adulthood. It varies from frenetic to meditative. Bay Drive; Miami Beach, FL is the finale of the piece and the place where parenthood overtakes other concerns. Dedicated to his son, it stands in sharp and welcome contrast to the more angular writing elsewhere.

Not that there’s any problem with the buzzing zigzags of the other pieces on the disc. A lengthy and cerebrally conceived solo sonata for cello is convincingly rendered by Craig Hultgren. A pictogram in the liner notes, probably Crouch’s own work, helps explain the tonic gravitational energy that propels Orbital Variations. This one needs more time to tell its story. I look forward to hearing it again.

It’s so good to hear music that explores new sonic worldscapes while remaining idiomatic, such that the instrumentalist makes use of their strongest technical ability bringing the work to life. Crouch is old school in that regard, proving that solid compositional technique still makes for the most listenable avant-garde music.

Ivanovs – Symphonies Nos. 17 & 18
Latvian National Symphony Orchestra; Guntis Kuzma
LMIC SKANI 141 (skani.lv)

In the March-April 2022 WholeNote, I described Jānis Ivanovs’ Symphonies Nos.15 and 16 as “filled with dark sonorities, propulsive energy and clamorous dissonances,” qualities that reappeared, though less explosively, in his next two symphonies.

The Moderato. Allegro of Ivanovs’ 32-minute Symphony No.17 in C Major (1976) begins slowly, with sombre, portentous music leading to tormented struggle and anguished outbursts, in their wake a haunting, “surviving” solo clarinet. The Allegro turns mysterious, its hollow, black-and-gold sonorities recalling Sibelius’ enigmatic Fourth. The Adagio suggests, to me, an incense-heavy church service, building to a hymn-like climax, followed by a muted recessional. The closing Allegro moderato seems to be marching off to yet another battle, but this time Ivanovs eschewed further violence, the symphony ending in peaceful serenity. 

The 35-minute Symphony No.18 in E Minor (1977) opens with the Moderato. Tranquillo referencing the first bars of Rachmaninoff’s Symphony No.2, also in E Minor. Unsurprisingly, the Tranquillo is soon negated by sinister turbulence, foreboding reinforced in the restless Allegro. Ivanovs, when interviewed about this work, referred to “the young men” who fought in World War II. An extended elegy for those “young men,” Andante. Tenebroso, moves from gloom to nobility, pride and reverence. The martial anthems of the Allegro moderato end the symphony in a burst of patriotic fervour.

Conductor Guntis Kuzma and the Latvian National Symphony Orchestra brilliantly convey the dramatic and emotional extremes of their countryman’s extremely dramatic, emotion-laden music.

MoonStrike – Jennifer Higdon; Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate; Pierre Jalbert
Apollo Chamber Players
Azica ACD-71352 (apollochamberplayers.org/media)

This CD presents three recent works for string quartet commissioned and enthusiastically performed by the Houston-based Apollo Chamber Players.

Jennifer Higdon says she grew up “in the shadow of the Great Smoky Mountains,” the setting of her opera Cold Mountain. Music from the opera appears in her 16-minute In the Shadow of the Mountain (2020), both works reflecting, she writes, “The struggles of survival in Appalachia, the majesty of its natural features and the sonorities of the mountains’ music.” In affecting American-pastoral style, it evoked for me a day’s passage – uncertain dawn leading to resolute, animated engagement with the day’s demands, midday rest and reflection, resumption of busily rhythmic work, ending serenely with the coming of night and sleep.

Chickasaw composer Jerod Impichchaachaaha’ Tate’s 18-minute MoonStrike (2019) commemorates the 50th anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing. Chickasaw astronaut John Herrington engagingly narrates three Indigenous myths about the moon; combined with picture-painting music drawing from traditional songs, this is a winning contribution to the children’s concert repertoire. 

New Hampshire-born Pierre Jalbert drew upon three folk songs of his French-Canadian ancestors for his three-movement, 16-minute L’esprit du Nord (2019). It begins with energized variations on Chanson de Lisette. The slow Cantique includes Les Pélerins and what Jalbert calls “a Passion song,” plus snippets from a 1940s field recording of a chanting woman. The vigorous Fiddle Dance, “inspired,” writes Jalbert, “by the French-Canadian fiddling tradition,” cheerfully ends the work and the CD.