Martin Arnold – Stain Ballads
Apartment House
Another Timbre at166 (anothertimbre.com)

Canadian composer Martin Arnold’s illustrious compositions over the decades are so very much his own sound. Here UK-based ensemble Apartment House perform four works in which Arnold strives to combine lyricism with formlessness in his self-described “stain ballads.” As Arnold explains on the Another Timbre label’s website, “Stains are … always stain-shaped but don’t present a form… form and content are the same thing.” 

Opening track Lutra (2017) for cello and humming is given a slow and reflective performance by Apartment House founder and director, Anton Lukoszevieze. The high-pitched cello opening leads to a lower-range bowed melody, with alternating high and low pitches united by humming and delicate cello lyricism. Stain Ballad (2016), for seven-piece orchestra, also encompasses the contrasting ideas of held string notes, here versus detached piano lines and percussion throbs, as all the instruments are musically balanced and blended in Arnold’s expert “story-telling” orchestration.

Arnold’s understanding of held string capabilities makes the cello/violin duet Trousers (2017) sound like a full orchestra. A more fragmented work with minimalistic touches, quiet breaks between phrases, bowed strings, pitch slides and mid-piece dissonant lines are just a few sounds Lukoszevieze and violinist Mira Benjamin play, sparking listening interest! Great inclusion is Arnold’s earlier career quartet Slip (1999), a jig-like dance with opening bass clarinet/violin/cello uneven phrases until the accented piano chordal entry adds percussive flavours.

Arnold’s tightly interwoven “formless” lyricism, combined with these dedicated performances, create captivating colourful music.

Linda Catlin Smith – Meadow
Mia Cooper; Joachim Roewer; William Butt
Louth Contemporary Music Society LCMS20201 (louthcms.org/recordings)

The enchanting stillness and hypnotic beauty of sprawling mossy fields has been captured ever so deeply by Linda Catlin Smith in her new work, Meadow, for string trio. This gentle music paints an endless moment amid the green-lit swaying turf. Sonorous pulsating chords and brief melodic offerings envelop the ears much like cascading grassy plains wrapping around bark and stone. Smith’s unparalleled command over the fusion of colour and harmony is immediately captivating. This sound world is a tapestry woven with delicate care and personal magic. At times, the distinctly fragmentary material forms echoes in the mind’s eye: glimpses of forgotten images begin to surface and radiate throughout the heath. The trio’s performance (Mia Cooper, violin; Joachim Roewer, viola; William Butt, cello) on this release was accomplished with extraordinary intimacy. The pureness of tone and capacity for expression result in a profoundly successful interpretation of Smith’s poetic intention. 

This recording comes as the first release in an initiative from the Louth Contemporary Music Society, titled out of silence, to produce meaningful recordings under the exceptional conditions of the pandemic. While the pandemic continues to be a struggle for many, we thank artists for their commitment toward creation and for reminding us why we need art in our lives. When listening to the striking grace of Smith’s Meadow, many things come to mind and many emotions are felt throughout – I suppose this can all be summarized with the phrase “Thank you.”

Happiness in a Troubled World
Frank Horvat
Independent (frankhorvat.com)

Written as an offering to a world in need of healing, Happiness in the Troubled World is a potent mixture of ambient sounds and well-thought-out musical ideas. This music has the potential to shift your energy, calm your mind and expand your awareness. 

Frank Horvat’s latest album is inspired by the Dalai Lama’s book The Art of Happiness in a Troubled World. Six compositions bear the titles of the final six chapters of the book and each is inspired by a quote from that book. Choosing an ambient electronic genre allowed Horvat to create a perfect musical vessel for expressing the noble ideas of empathy and compassion, hope and optimism. The building and ever-changing layers of sound generate the feeling of being in the womb of the world that is mending and healing. The textures throughout are smooth, unperturbed. In each of the compositions Horvat creates the safe space for a listener to expand their own aspirations for the world we share. 

The album opens with peacefully neutral Coping with a Troubled World. It then continues with pulsing sounds and bright piano in Hope, Optimism and Resilience. The lightness and joyfulness increase with each composition until the final number, Empathy, Compassion and Finding Happiness in the Troubled World, brings an incredible sense of peace.

If you are looking for a meditative, calm sonic space that induces happiness and optimism, this album is perfect for you.

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MC Maguire – Saturation Velocity
MC Maguire; Keith Kirchoff; Bryan Holt
Albany Records TROY1843 (albanyrecords.com)

Toronto composer/producer M.C. Maguire is a music alchemist, making sophisticated post-modern musical hybrids combining Western classical, pop, jazz and electroacoustic elements. His works often transform electronics, samples and acoustic instrument soloists into an intense wall of sound, accumulating up to 300 tracks.

Maguire’s fourth album, Saturation Velocity, is no exception, though it’s important to observe that his compositions are centred on carefully notated sheet scores, for the solo acoustic instruments at least. 

According to the composer’s notes, the first track A Teenage Dream for piano & CPU (“ for the less-computer-savvy like me) is based on four songs by pop singer/songwriter Katy Perry. Other source material used – to contrast the pop elements – are bits of Thomas Tallis (“for religiosity,” comments the composer), plus two passages from Wagner’s Das Rheingold. The structure of the work consists of four large murals each inside an Alban Berg-ian “forward/retrograde ordering,” that formally connects the murals. But what I hear is essentially a complex, nearly 29-minute piano concerto with CPU accompaniment, featuring four solo piano cadenzas which Maguire cheekily calls, “Bill Evans plays Schoenberg.” American experimental music virtuoso, pianist Keith Kirchoff, turns in a spectacular performance here, though some of his pianism gets lost among the dense sonic jungle overgrowth. 

Sade auf Kashmir, another concerto – this for cello with CPU – is based on the sonic intertwining of singer Sade’s No Ordinary Love and rock band Led Zeppelin’s Kashmir. Toronto cellist Brian Holt lifts his technically demanding part off the page with accuracy and panache. 

Will this music be your cup of tea? I don’t know, but now it is mine.

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Bruits
Imani Winds
Bright Shiny Things (brightshiny.ninja/imani)

The American quintet Imani Winds present Bruits, the title work on their new release. Vijay Iyer’s title references medical terminology for sounds caused by arterial blockages. The theme of the disc is social/racial injustice. The ensemble playing is superb; individually and collectively the group is strong; the material they champion is compelling. Four of the five members of the group are people of colour, whose own writing in the accompanying notes underlines how they are affected by their country’s ingrained injustices. 

Polemics that entertain are rare, but Bruits bridges the divide: the first movement, Gulf, is exhilarating writing brilliantly covered by the quintet and pianist Cory Smythe. In the second movement, Force, ensemble members recite the U.S. “Stand Your Ground” law over a percussive ostinato, performed by the members of the quintet. Iyer wrote the work during the period of the murder trial of George Zimmerman, killer of Trayvon Martin. Thus the meaning of the piece comes into focus: Bruits as a blockage, not of the circulatory system but of justice in the U.S. It’s shocking, and riveting. The five movements carry tremendous emotional power.

The Light Is The Same (2016) by Reena Esmail, is a single-movement work reflecting unease felt in the wake of the U.S. presidential election that year. The material, two distinct ragas, attempts to depict reconciliation between them. In Sometimes, Frederic Rzewski makes various affecting uses of a deconstructed melody: Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child.

Songs of Insurrection by Frederic Rzewski
Thomas Kotcheff
Coviello Contemporary COV92021 (covielloclassics.de/en)

Veteran American composer and virtuoso pianist Frederic Rzewski (b. 1938)It’s still true that most Americans care more about the price of meat than they do about the exploitation of Bolivian miners.” 

Already 45 years ago Rzewski set the bar high in his 1975 The People United Will Never Be Defeated, an hour-long piano tour de force of 36 variations on a Chilean workers’ song. It has received over 15 commercial recordings to date, the first of which garnered a 1979 Grammy nomination. His even more epic Songs of Insurrection (2016) is Rzewski’s eloquent sequel to his 1975 masterwork. Presented here in its first recording by brilliant early-career American pianist Thomas Kotcheff, the composition reaches to the music of the world’s peoples for inspiration. Each of the seven movements is inspired by a song from a different country. 

For example Die Moorsoldaten (The Song of the Deported) was written by prisoners of the Börgermoor concentration camp, Ain’t Gonna Let Nobody Turn Me Around is an American civil rights hymn and Oh Bird, Oh Bird, Oh Roller dates from the Korean Peasant Rebellion of Donghak. 

On one level Songs of Insurrection takes us on a global journey through social uprising. On a musical level the work is a sophisticated compendium of multiple piano idioms. They range from 19th-century romanticism, modalism, to pantonality, serialism and haunting experimental sounds coaxed from inside the piano.

Rzewski hailed this performance as “magnificent.” I too was swept away by the emotion in this work brought to life by Kotcheff’s passion and authoritative command of his instrument.

E Pluribus Unum
Liza Stepanova
Navona Records nv6300 (navonarecords.com/catalog/nv6300)

Although COVID is first and foremost a global health issue (and a crisis), it is also a political one. Without a doubt, there has been, and will continue to be, robust artistic responses to the virus, the mounting death toll and the ongoing lockdown. While the dissemination of artistic expressions are suffering at the moment – given furloughed touring and venue closure – the coalescing of political commentary and artistic expression has birthed a renaissance of music of all genres whose practitioners try and make sense of the current state of affairs in sound. 

While 2021 may go down in history as achieving a high-water mark of politically inspired music-making practices, pianist Liza Stepanova was ahead of the curve when she looked somewhat earlier to the turbulent American political landscape of 2017 when then-President Trump’s isolationist immigration policies were demonizing foreigners and breaking cross-border families apart. In response, Stepanova programmed a sprawling and challenging, but always musical, set of solo piano pieces composed by American composers of immigrant backgrounds. In part, her effort here was an attempt to shine a light on the contributions that immigrants make to the fabric of American musical life. But what is achieved is far greater than a political statement. As the album title (E Pluribus Unum – “Out of many, one”) suggests, Stepanova has taken a diverse range of composers with no other connection than a shared immigrant past and created a singularly unified, coherent and beautiful statement that stands up not just politically, but musically and artistically.

American Dream
Amstel (saxophone) Quartet
Amstel Quartet AR018 (amstelquartet.nl)

The Amstel Quartet is based in the Netherlands and describes itself as “the world’s most colourful saxophone quartet.” They have an active concert schedule (currently employing livestreaming) and have released over ten albums of music in many genres including classical, contemporary and popular music. American Dream is their survey of selected American composers who represent different aspects of musical culture which (the quartet writes) include the influence of jazz, working from modernism to post-modernism and employing unique rhythms. 

Paul Creston (1906-1985) is well known to saxophone players for his Sonata for Alto Saxophone and Piano which is a mainstay of the repertoire. His Suite for Saxophone Quartet, Op.111 was written towards the end of his career and illustrates his craftsmanship in the opening fugue, the rhythmic elements and the Pastorale written, strangely, in 15/12. Michael Torke’s May, June and July combine to demonstrate the “rhythmic dynamism” of his writing. May is sprightly and leaping with lush and melodic interplay; June is more sombre and July returns to a lighter form. John Cage’s Four5 is a series of instructions that can be played by almost any four instruments and includes percussive and tonal parts. The YouTube video the quartet produced playing this piece is well worth enjoying: it is the perfect COVID-era work combining Cage’s structure with the quartet’s own musical proficiency, isolated performances and sense of humour. American Dream is rounded out by Marc Mellits’ Tapas and Christian Lauba’s Mambo. 

The Amstel Quartet plays precisely and warmly and this collection of American saxophone quartet music is thoughtfully assembled.

Personal Demons
Lowell Liebermann
Steinway & Sons STNS 30172 (steinway.com/music-and-artists/label)

Composer-pianist Lowell Liebermann has just released a two-disc testament, expertly curated and impressively executed. It is a witness statement to five decades of life in music – a glimpse into an artistic practice that consistently hits its creative stride, fuelled by flames that still burn bright. The album has been adroitly produced, edited and mastered by Sergei Kvitko of Blue Griffin Recordings (featured in the November 2020 issue of The WholeNote.)  

Three of Liebermann’s own works are included in his debut solo recording as a complement to music by Liszt, Busoni, Schubert and little-known Czech composer, Miloslav Kabeláč. Each composer has galvanized – even haunted – Liebermann throughout his career. Such “demons” are presumably specters of the inspirational sort and Disc One opens with Liebermann’s most popular piano work, Gargoyles, Op.28. He swiftly introduces us to a forthright and individual brand of pianism, one with roughcast textures and crystal-clear melodic lines, obliging our ears toward resonant, robust and irresistible soundscapes. We perceive a virtuosic abandon, underpinned with an urgent, restless vitality. 

Such forthright modes of expression carry into the next tracks: the Eight Preludes, Op.30 by Kabeláč. These pieces are especially significant for Liebermann and he unveils them to us consummately. Finely etched, bearing echoes of Benjamin Britten, these evocative miniatures have absorbed Liebermann for decades and are here bestowed like building blocks: compositional models at which to marvel. The final work on Disc One is Liszt’s stalwart Totentanz, S525, a vivid, dazzling pianistic essay. The music’s economy of means – characteristic of Liszt’s best writing – remains of discernable influence for Liebermann hinting at the American composer-pianist’s own Lisztian lineage.

Disc Two’s Four Apparitions, Op.17 are followed by the extemporaneously tender Variations on a Theme of Hüttenbrenner, D576 by Franz Schubert. This unfamiliar set proves an ideal platform for Liebermann’s lyrical abilities at the keyboard. Next is Busoni’s Fantasia Contrappuntistica, BV256. Likening it to a “Mount Everest that he wanted to climb – a challenge in a way,” Liebermann’s affinity for Busoni is striking, with an audible reverence for the Italian master’s intellect and formalism on full display. 

Finally, the intimately benevolent Nocturne No.10, Op.99 ushers in a denouement. Highly personal for Liebermann, this music hums and swells, waxing poetic like a lucid conversation between lovers, revealing truths of a lifetime. Shades of Samuel Barber and Carl Vine drift in a dusky, sonic bloom as Liebermann’s piano now quietly sings this album to a whispered, nocturnal close. And so, what might the morrow bring, we wonder?

True Stories & Rational Numbers
Chris P. Thompson
Independent (chrispthompson.com)

New York-based percussionist Chris P. Thompson is a longtime member of Alarm Will Sound, the American Contemporary Music Ensemble and other groups. His album True Stories & Rational Numbers a nine-movement 43-minute work, however showcases him as composer and pianist. 

True Stories & Rational Numbers reflects Thompson’s large-scale exploration of piano music in just intonation, the tuning system based on tuning notes to simple mathematical ratios of the natural harmonic series. He also employs whole-number rhythmic and harmonic relationships in his score. Taken together, he likens listening to this music to having his “eyes re-opened to music and seeing it in colour for the first time.” was composed and programmed in modern piano roll notation, an extension of how 20th-century commercial piano rolls were made. Thompson’s main inspiration here was American composer Conlon Nancarrow’s boundary-pushing experimental player-piano compositions. Other influences were German scientist and philosopher Hermann von Helmholtz, the author of the landmark book, On the Sensations of Tone, and the music of Aphex Twin and modern drumline. The chamber music of Ben Johnston, which liberally employs unorthodox tunings, is cited as another important influence, as is Johnston’s elegant notations of just intonation.

Thompson states his goal in True Stories… was “to marry the machine with the warmth of human emotion…” Listening to it not only gradually reveals an unorthodox musical mind, but also what “in tune” in music is.

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Firefly Songs
Melia Watras
Planet M Records (meliawatras.com)

While we continue to endure the extended shutdowns and performance cancellations, there was a particular joy in discovering Melia Watras’ Firefly Songs. Listening to what feels like a personal diary of her inner thoughts, one could almost call this an album of accompanied poetry, yet it is so much more. At times deceivingly simple, more often there are complex musical pairings to thoughts, poems, literary references, inspirations and memories. American violist and composer Watras wrote these 13 individual pieces between 2015 and 2018 for combinations of violin, viola, cello and voices, and the flow of the album is both unique and comforting. 

Full of surprises, from the charming Mozart Doesn’t Live in Seattle to the trancelike tones and rhythms of overlapping voices in Seeing Cypresses with Catherine C, this is an album of singular gems as well as a complete collection. A work belying its complexity, Firefly Songs also stands strongly, piece by piece as beautifully expressed miniatures, each feeling free and spontaneous. Watras’ solo viola work, Lament, written for the passing of her father, expresses a delicate nuance of emotion delivered with depth and presence. In William Wilson, the complexities hidden between the lines of Edgar Allan Poe are beautifully unveiled both with voice and on the violin by Michael Jinsoo Lim. Lim also stands out in the operatic (one). It would be hard to pick a favourite from this box of gems, but Vetur öngum lánar liō (Winter aids no one) was the perfect accompaniment to my icy walks on the beach.

This collection would be enjoyable either in the suggested order or as random treats that would slip easily into any playlist.

Against Method
counter)induction
New Focus Recordings FCR278 (newfocusrecordings.com/catalogue)

The New York new music collective counter)induction celebrates 20 years of committed contemporary musical performance with the release of Against Method. The five players, augmented by guests, playing music composed by members and other guests, perform six fascinating pieces: all challenging, all worth the time and effort. As one reviewer has already commented, writing anything useful about the disc is beyond challenging; best just take the thing and hear for yourself.

Clarinetist Benjamin Fingland and Caleb van der Swaagh, on cello, split the greater part of the playing. In the opening track, The Hunt by Night by Douglas Boyce, they are joined by pianist Ning Yu in a rollicking fun exploration of rhythmic, unison pointillist melody. “Ransack” describes the method: the three characters turn over every note with happy frantic energy, perhaps looking for Messiaen. The closing unisons between cello and clarinet are breathtaking.

Fingland performs a solo piece for bass clarinet and loop pedal, written by his life partner Jessica Meyer. Intimate and mysterious, the repeated breath effects sound like nothing so much as sobbing. The title is a giveaway: Forgiveness. 

Each piece is my favourite. I love Ein Kleines Volkslied, the piano quartet by Alvin Singleton. Born in 1940, he’s three decades older than the rest, but his piece kicks it like it’s 1966. They close with the brilliant Scherzo by Argentine composer Diego Tedesco. Plucks, slaps, pitch-bends, melodic fragments, col legno… all in an ABA format. Great fun, fantastic disc.

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Imaginary Landscape
Stefan Hussong; Rumi Ogawa; Yumiko Meguri
Thorofon CTH2664 (bella-musica.de/?s=imaginary+landscape)

The illustrious German accordionist Stefan Hussong’s audio catalogue was launched with his audacious 1987 recording of Bach’s Goldberg Variations and has since grown to an impressive discography of some 40 albums, many of which feature his mastery of the most challenging contemporary works. This latest album opens with Magnus Lindberg’s Metal Work (1984) for percussion and accordion, originally commissioned by the pioneering Finnish accordionist Matti Rantanen. This dazzling and virtuosic work features a swiftly evolving kaleidoscopic duel to the death between the accordion and an arsenal of ten metal instruments, effortlessly dispatched by percussionist Rumi Ogawa. 

Among the subsequent solo works expressly written for Stefan Hussong, one finds Elena Mendoza’s Découpé (2017), an essay derived from the Dadaist tradition of the random cutting and mashing up of fragments of text, or in this case, a random jumble of hackneyed clichés that, for my taste, went on a bit too long. Much more compelling is Martin Smolka’s intimate Lamento metodico (2000), in which strongly contrasting melodic elements are paired against each other in an expressively memorable composition. Two Canadian works are featured from the husband-and-wife team of composers Hope Lee and David Eagle. Lee’s work, Imaginary Garden V (2016), scored for accordion with Yumiko Meguri on piano, is part of an ongoing series of works under that title; this instalment features seven contrasting scenarios demonstrating an admirable stylistic diversity that kept this listener thoroughly engaged. Eagle’s innovative Refracted Tones (2016) for solo accordion involves replacing the normal reed ranks of the accordion with inserted sets of quarter-tone tuned reeds, creating an exotic, hallucinatory 24-tone octave guaranteed to bend your ears. Betwixt these two we find Heera Kim’s finely crafted The Art of Shading II (2019), which adroitly exploits the deepest registers of the accordion interspersed with percussive assaults on the instrument. 

Hats off to Herr Hussong for yet another well-balanced and compellingly performed album.

Songs for the End of Time Volume 1
Founders
Independent (foundersmusic.org)

What might a purist think of this reimagining of one of the 20th century’s most totemic works of chamber music? Fortunately for me, I’ll never have to answer that question, and instead can allow myself to take delight in the creativity of the young gang who call themselves Founders. 

Olivier Messiaen wrote his Quatuor pour la fin du Temps while languishing in a Nazi prison camp. The work has taken on a mystique beyond what is usually accorded musical works that remain in the repertoire, owing especially to that circumstance. So what brazen chutzpah this quintet has shown (!) by introducing implied harmonies into originally unison lines, or playing call and echo in the Abîme des oiseaux, which turns into a bluesy duet for clarinet and trumpet. Not only do they not have a pianist on board, they all put aside their instruments (add violin, cello and bass to the other two) to sing quotes from the Apocalypse and the Dies Irae. And wait a goshdarned second, did they just introduce humour into the whole thing with that wacky Interlude? SMH. Millennials!

They offer the work in homage to Messiaen, and I’ll allow it shows us a way to hear the original piece with fresh ears. It is also cheeky and, while never disrespectful, playfully affectionate. The writing is smart and the playing skillful. The quintet ranges easily back and forth between “popular” and “classical” idioms. You’ll be forgiven if you find suddenly you’re hearing something by Miles Davis, or for that matter, Darius Milhaud, or Guillaume de Machaut.

Louis Karchin – Five Compositions (2009-2019)
Various Artists
Bridge Records 9543 (bridgerecords.com)

American composer/conductor/professor Louis Karchin has composed for such musical genres as orchestra, chamber music, vocal and opera. Here, five contrasting instrumental works written from 2009 to 2019 are performed.

Karchin conducts The Washington Square Ensemble in his three-movement Chamber Symphony (2009). He writes he was able to explore a range of colours and fluidity in this group of “approximately one of each instrument.” Sparkling opening arpeggiated tonal flourishes and tempo and instrumental contrasts lead to a march-like section with intermittent horn lines building tension. The slower second movement, scored for smaller ensemble, has calming tonally diverse pitches and piano-pedalled note vibrations. Karchin’s accurately self-described “rambunctious” third movement is in modified rondo form with energetic instrumental chordal interplays, flourishes and dramatic low-pitch held notes. 

Rochester Celebration (2017) is a solo piano commission celebrating Karchin’s undergraduate Eastman piano professor, Barry Synder. A “must listen to” virtuosic Romantic-feel composition for all pianists, as Karchin’s thorough piano high/low pitch sounds and effects knowledge are captured in Margaret Kampmeier’s exquisite performance.

Postlude (2019) has Sam Jones on trumpet with bucket mute play beautiful slower melodic lines with resonating high-pitch held notes to pianist Han Chen’s accompaniment. Love Alice Teyssier’s flute trills emulating Ashley Jackson’s harp rolls in Quest (2014). Violinist Renée Jolles and harpist Susan Jolles drive the exciting closing track Barcarole Variations (2015) forward with their sensitive instrumental effects.

Louis Karchin is a fabulous contemporary composer with thorough instrumental knowledge.

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