Shostakovich – Complete Symphonies and Concertos
Orchestra and Chorus of the Mariinsky Theatre; Valery Gergiev
ArtHaus Musik/Mariinsky Theatre 107552
(4 Blu-Ray video discs, 100-page Hardcover book, etc.)

These performances took place in the Salle Pleyel, Paris in 2013 and 2014 where they were recorded in concert by a co-production of the Mariinsky Theatre, Mezzo, Euro Media France and France Télévisions.

It seems to me that music of Shostakovich is more popular now than in past decades. I wonder why. Conductor Arturo Toscanini was asked why he didn’t conduct the music of Bruckner. ”It doesn’t beat with my heart,” was his reported answer. I understand that and I wonder if Shostakovich’s popularity now is the corollary. Perhaps the music of Shostakovich is in tune with us more now than in generations gone by. It really doesn’t matter why, but today more people are attracted to the late composer and want to hear more of his music…symphonies, concertos and sonatas.

The above set was released last year and a couple of weeks ago I relented and got myself a copy. I am more than delighted with the whole production, performances, camera work and audio. One thing about the audio: there is a choice of playback, PCM or DTS-HD Master Audio 5.0. The PCM sound is rather disappointingly compressed, clearly for broadcast. The DTS-HD format offers the highest resolution and dynamics, most audible in the percussion. Gergiev prefaces each performance with a short talk on the work. There is also a film A Man of Many Faces, a documentary that explores the composer’s life and work, his triumphs and travails, with much archival footage and an interview with Gergiev.

As for the performances themselves, both symphonies and concertos, there was no “listen to us” impression; they were there for Shostakovich. In the Eighth, my favourite symphony, the earnest perfection of ensemble proves that this orchestra, in this repertoire with this conductor, is probably untouchable. Gergiev was immobilized after the music evaporated. The audience felt it too, as the applause burst out a long 38 seconds after the last note had died away. An extremely moving experience for all. The answer to the usual question about the tempi in the last movement of the Fifth is that he wastes no time.

The exuberant performances of the six concertos are a generous bonus, with Gautier Capuçon and Mario Brunello (cello), Daniil Trifonov and Denis Matsuev (piano), Timur Martynov (trumpet), Vadim Repin and Alena Baeva (violin). The outstanding vocal soloists in the Fourteenth Symphony are Veronika Dzhioeva (soprano) and Mikhail Petrenko (bass).

As a footnote to these performances, there is a synergy between an orchestra working with its resident conductor (unless they hate him or her, as sometimes happens).They are of one mind, so to speak. Audiences try to decode Gergiev’s unusual gestures… the fluttering fingers, for example. The orchestra knows. We have no need to figure it out, although the fluttering fingers is pretty obvious.

Selected Piano Works by Robert Casadesus and Henri Dutilleux
Cicilia Yudha
Navona Records NV6053 (parmarecordings.com)

On this disc young Indonesian pianist Cicilia Yudha, now based in the United States, spotlights the familiar names of Robert Casadesus (1899-1972) and Henri Dutilleux (1916-2013). Best known as a virtuoso pianist, Casadesus was also a prolific composer represented here by the Sonata No.3 Op.44 and the Toccata Op.40. These deft works are somewhat reminiscent of Ravel and Milhaud. The Sonata’s slow movement is both craftsmanly and touching, but in the outer movements as well as in the sparkly perpetual-motion Toccata there is too much piano-exercise and white-note-only writing. Cicilia Yudha certainly demonstrates fleet fingers, variety of articulation and an ear for clarity suited to the French school of Casadesus.

The early Blackbird and Along the Waves: Six Little Pieces of Dutilleux are also finely rendered. Dutilleux’s great Sonata for Piano (1947/48) is a different case, one of mastery of harmony and large-scale form with expressive ideas realized in depth. It seems to me that Yudha is too careful with tempo and accentuation in the opening Allegro con moto. Anne Queffélec’s more robust, occasionally almost frantic version on Virgin Classics is preferable; it is surprising that even at fast tempos Dutilleux’s complex harmonies sound and proceed well. Things improve greatly in the second movement, where Yudha’s command of sonority comes to the fore and she projects a mysterious sense of unseen presence. In the final variations she rises to the occasion with power and virtuosity.

Ginastera One Hundred
Gil Shaham; Yolanda Kondonassis; Jason Vieaux; Orli Shaham; Oberlin Orchestra; Raphael Jiménez
Oberlin Music OC 16-04
(oberlin.edu/oberlinmusic)

This disc’s high-calibre performances and production make it a fitting tribute to Alberto Ginastera (1916-1983) on the 100th anniversary of his birth. Harpist Yolanda Kondonassis’ introductory notes state that his Harp Concerto (1956, rev. 1968) “pushed the harp out of its box and gave us the kind of indelible, substantive composition that makes or breaks a solo career like mine.” In broken-chord dance rhythms of the first movement, resonant glissandi of the second and tuneful melodies of the third, the Argentinean composer consistently finds striking, effective gestures for the instrument. Soloist Kondonassis plays with confidence: her rhythms have bite and liveliness, her flourishes atmosphere and grandeur, all in effective partnership with the Raphael Jiménez-led Oberlin Orchestra.

Pampeana No.1 (1947) for violin and piano dates from a period when Ginastera was influenced by Aaron Copland to integrate folk and modernist elements. Violinist Gil Shaham plays the opening soliloquy with intensity and virtuosity, in alternation with pianist Orli Shaham’s lower-pitched chords emulating guitar strumming; the whole suggests the Argentinean pampas’ wide open spaces. In later exciting dance sections, ensemble between violin and piano is ideal. Shaham is equally effective in the more familiar Danzas Argentinas (1937) for piano. The Sonata for Guitar (1976), the most advanced work included, comes after the composer’s move to Switzerland. Ginastera allows the guitar to resonate with well-chosen tonal material and a variety of percussive effects. Challenging to play yet mastered convincingly by guitarist Jason Vieaux, I enjoyed this work thoroughly.

Morton Subotnick – Music for the Double Life of Amphibians (Landmark Recordings)
Various Artists
Wergo WER 7312 2

For most of his notable career American composer and electronic music pioneer Morton Subotnick (b. 1933) has employed his signature methodology of live electronically processed scored acoustic instrumental and/or vocal parts, and later, interactive computer music systems.

Subotnick has also been an important actor in many of the significant technological milestones in the commercialization of electroacoustic music. A prime example is his early Silver Apples of the Moon (Nonesuch LP 1967). Produced using the Electric Music Box, Don Buchla’s analogue modular voltage-controlled synthesizer and tape-manipulated sounds, it is considered the first electronic work commissioned by a record company. In it, the composer challenged academic avant-gardists by including sections with metric, regular rhythms. More significantly, he aimed to render a musical composition for which the performance was the recording, reflecting the spirit of Marshall McLuhan’s 1964 phrase “the medium is the message.” The album sold very well internationally and was highly influential: it was a touchstone of my own first experiments in tape and electronic music.

Recorded in a studio between 1981 and 1985 the music for Subotnick’s Music for the Double Life of Amphibians continued his fruitful commercial relationship with the Nonesuch label. This skillfully remastered current Wergo CD is part of a series dedicated to Subotnick’s recorded oeuvre. Each of the seven movements form part of a larger symphonic poem, and the resulting dramatically compelling music successfully treads over several genre lines. It seamlessly combines modernist chamber music – superbly performed by cellist Joel Krosnick in the outstanding Axolotl, as well as by the Juilliard Quartet and by the soprano Joan La Barbara – with (1980s) state-of-the-art studio electronics.

The album strongly affirms the composer’s modernist lineage. It also reminds us of his street cred in the development of 20th-century electroacoustic music’s creation, performance, studio recording and commercial release.

Espaces tautologiques
James O’Callaghan
empreintes DIGITALes IMED 16140 (electroCD.com)

On his recent electroacoustic CD Espaces tautologiques, composer James O’Callaghan takes us down the rabbit hole into a visceral, endogenous acousmatic wonderland. Although tautologies can be defined as needless repetitions, for O’Callaghan, they instead may be an ironic unifying premise for his vagabond auditory adventures, or append extra significance to compositional procedures such as varied repetition, imitation and augmentation. The first three pieces form a triptych that “imagine[s] the sounding bodies of instruments as resonant spaces.” They contain crisp, natural and remodelled recordings of passages through remote instrumental spaces, and at times it feels as though the listener is situated inside the instrument. From the rim to the spine of a piano (Objects-Interiors), an acoustic guitar and toy piano (Bodies-Soundings), or the surfaces and recesses of instruments in a string quartet (Empties-Impetus), each piece celebrates the percussions and resonances of a similar, colourful palette of instrumental and digital treatments.

O’Callaghan demonstrates fluency with standard techniques of electroacoustic music, but it’s the impetus of the philosophical aspects that takes the pieces to their most compelling territories. The last piece, Isomorphic, is a particularly captivating jaunt through protractions of carefully ordered squealing, chattering textures. While the work shifts from one archetype to another, it’s coherently driven by consecutive, playful morphological relationships that extend from one sound to the next, despite differences of sound source and context. By virtue of the gesture, contour, pitch and timbral coherence of his materials, O’Callaghan proposes contrasting ways to consider the ornithological chirps, industrial doors and ambient environments. They can be heard as a perpetual flow, in which all sounds are related as one, or as a duality in which the listener simultaneously compares the ongoing profile similarities of the sounds with their wildly differing origins.

Christopher Rouse – Odna Zhizn; Symphonies 3 & 4; Prospero’s Rooms
New York Philharmonic; Alan Gilbert
Dacapo 8.22611 (dacapo-records.dk)

Rouse is the most recent to hold the composer-in-residence position at the New York Philharmonic, and this new disc is his capstone project. It is actually the latest chapter in a decades-long relationship between composer and orchestra; the Phil premiered, along with many other of his works, Rouse’s Pulitzer Prize-winning trombone concerto in 1993. Owing to these years of collaboration, this disc achieves an all-too-uncommon thing: music born from an understanding shared equally by conductor, orchestra and living composer.

Just as these three have found common ground, so has Rouse found common ground between the conceptual and the visceral. The harmonic language of Odna Zhizn, for instance, is tightly controlled and generated using a “code.” If these words conjure up frightening images of angular serialist lines, however, fear not: “code” here refers not to forbidding pre-compositional matrices, but to the age-old tradition of encoding a loved one’s name into the score by way of note names.

“Odna Zhizn” means “life” in Russian and Russian influences loom large here. Symphony No.3 is heavily indebted to Prokofiev’s Symphony No.2, his symphony of “iron and steel.” If Prokofiev’s was the churning foundry, then Rouse’s is its smoldering remains, brooding and charred. As for his Symphony No.4’s “code,” Rouse cites Tchaikovsky: “Asked whether listeners would devise the…meaning of his Pathétique Symphony, Tchaikovsky famously replied, ‘Let them guess.’”

This disc’s grand and unified vision is not to be missed.

György Kurtág – String Quartets
Quatuor Molinari
ATMA ACD2 2706

Traffic Quintet plays Alexandre Desplat
Traffic Quintet
Deutsche Grammophon 4812172

Shutting one’s eyes while listening to the music of Traffic Quintet plays Alexandre Desplat might actually be the best way to approach a collection of Desplat’s celebrated film scores. The act most certainly provides one with the opportunity to enter the dreamscapes for which they were intended. The profound air of these works triggers special journeys to the world of the cameo images from the films for which they were intended. The music is superb with its performers combining Desplat’s unique pictorial-dramatic and reflective approach that always leads to an intensity that has become the hallmark of the composer’s musical signature. Reducing the music’s essence into the quintet format has taken a special ingenuity; one that distills their aural content into the equivalent of a small frame.

For me, the real ace in the hands of Dominique “Solrey” Lemonnier’s Traffic Quintet is the haunting voice of Alexandre Desplat. It is heard most effectively on the more familiar themes: The King’s Speech, Girl With A Pearl Earring and Ang Lee’s Lust, Caution. Most human in their resonance and directness, folk-like in timbre and gesture, classical in lyrical construction, Desplat’s voice and his music defy categorization. Production values – and this is all due to the unique genius of Lemonnier and her Traffic Quintet – are excellent because of her animated, filmic orchestrations. The yearning brooding music of this disc may be somewhat desolate for some, but nevertheless yields rich and seductive soundscapes.

Accomplice
Amy McConnell; William Sperandei
Femme Cachee Productions FCP0002 (mcconnellsperandei.com)

No Filter
Michael Kaeshammer
Independent KA2-CD-5970
(kaeshammer.com)

When Michael Kaeshammer first broke on the scene in the 90s, he was a young boogie-woogie piano phenom. Since then, the British Columbia-based musician has added singing and songwriting to his arsenal of skills, and they’ve been honed over the last several years. All the songs on No Filter have been written or co-written by Kaeshammer (along with, primarily, Nashville-based songwriter John Goodwin) and many, such as the rousing opener Letter from the Road, stay true to his signature, exuberant New Orleans style. But there are other stylistic gems too. Late Night Train, is a poignant lament to a lost love made more gorgeous by the velvety vocals of guest singer, Denzal Sinclaire. Regret is the theme of the ballady/gospel-tinged Back into the Pen while West Coast Spirit is a sprightly little solo piano number that acts as a palate cleanser between meatier pieces. The production on the record is top-notch with the various keyboards, horns (William Sperandei, trumpet; Chris Gale, sax; William Carn, trombone) and percussion (Roger Travassos) subtly enriching the tracks and making No Filter a fine, satisfying listen from beginning to end.

Danses Danzas Dances
Lorraine Desmarais Big Band
Les Disques Scherzo SCHCD-1512 (lorrainedesmarais.com)

A fierce energy leaps out of the opening chords of Lorraine Desmarais’ Ultra Triple Swing. It is an immensely exciting start to Danses Danzas Dances, a recording that has you on the edge of your proverbial seat. Primary colours abound in the orchestral texture, and the fast nature of the piece keeps the music on a tight rein, with angular rhythms and phrasing precise and alert. Of course you should expect nothing less from Desmarais, whose mastery of the big band idiom is quite beyond reproach. Conducting from behind her concert grand piano, Desmarais brings the fabulous orchestrations of her most recent music to life with spectacular effect.

The spirited and finely nuanced readings of these charts that literally sweep the listener off his or her feet, and across the dance floors of the Americas, is articulated by vivid performances by members of this wonderful big band. Adopting a spacious, and a feisty, artful approach to navigate the idiosyncrasies of Desmarais’ luscious arrangements, the musicians display unbridled virtuosity as well as unusual musical instinct as they bring cohesion to the many disparate elements of the music and generate tremendous high-voltage tension and hair-raising orchestral ingenuity to this music from beginning to end of this exquisite disc.

Elevation
Parker Abbott Trio
Independent (parkerabbotttrio.com)

The content of the Parker Abbott Trio concept album on the idea of ascending to a rarefied realm transcends even the image on its package. Somewhere in the swirling ascension of the Alpine Swift in flight lies some very classy piano (and a battery of other keyboards) playing. Indeed both Teri Parker and Simeon Abbott have developed something of an edge-of-the-seat virtuoso risk taking. On Elevation this pays off handsomely. The CD is a selection of short pieces evoking the giddy atmospheric fantasy arising from meditations on odysseys of music and mind. But philosophy aside there is much to enjoy, discover and identify with.

Parker and Abbott’s playing – as well as that of drummer and percussionist Mark Segger – is eloquent indeed. The pianists’ voicing is expertly balanced in the edifying transcription of the title track and their phrasing sings wonderfully in the near-mystical Night Song and the scintillating Zinnia. The otherworldly music of Maybe makes for a fitting, open-ended conclusion. The trio’s enigmatic studies are not the easiest nuts to crack, but Parker, Abbott and Segger’s insightful colours have the measure of their limpid introspection and fantasy.

Remarkably, this music – despite the originating imagery – is not as cerebral as one would imagine, but pre-eminently heart driven. Exchanging the intellectual for the emotional may be what makes this exceptionally polished recording get under the skin as well.

Flux
Quinsin Nachoff; David Binney; Matt Mitchell; Kenny Wollesen
Mythology Records MR0012 (quinsin.com)

Toronto-born tenor saxophonist Quinsin Nachoff has been exploring unusual textures since combining a jazz trio and a string quartet on Magic Numbers, his 2006 debut. The elements in his music have grown more tightly interwoven since then, so it’s difficult to separate out the sources and genres that contribute to his work, music that bears the name “flux” appropriately. Nachoff’s current compositions are alive with subtle underpinnings and a sometimes jarring surface, all of it brilliantly executed, interpreted and extended by his current quartet of prominent New Yorkers.

He’s paired with alto saxophonist Dave Binney, the two supported by the virtually orchestral combination of keyboard player Matt Mitchell (piano, Fender Rhodes, Wurlitzer, Moog Rogue and organ) and drummer Kenny Wollesen (drums, timpani, tubular bells and handcrafted percussion). Together they develop a rare yet consistent combination of complexity and vitality, evident from the opening Tightrope, a tense piece in which Nachoff, the composer, introduces different thematic materials throughout, ranging from short, irregular rhythmic figures that set the initial mood to smooth rapid figures and a ballad, each segment opening to individual solos, until the piece climaxes with a collective improvisation thematically anchored by Mitchell’s forceful left hand.

That combination of distinctive structures and strong group interplay continues throughout, with Wollesen’s loose drumming and Mitchell’s varied approaches continually shaping the music’s flow. It’s particularly apparent on Complimentary Opposites, as the two shift the ground from Binney’s fluid invention to Nachoff’s edgy, broken lines filled with vocalic shifts. Nachoff’s creativity has been evident since his debut, and Flux is his most developed statement to date. 

Flux
Quinsin Nachoff; David Binney; Matt Mitchell; Kenny Wollesen
Mythology Records MR0012 (quinsin.com)

Like a Paralympian who triumphs in a contest despite lacking something usually deemed fundamental, tenor saxophonist Quinsin Nachoff has composed a set of seven well-balanced creations with a quartet missing one jazz necessity: a double bass. But so skillfully are the tunes affiliated and so sophisticated are his musical associates that it’s almost unnoticed.

A former Torontonian, now based in New York, Nachoff, who also composes for big bands and string ensembles in North America and Australia, makes sure Flux’s flow is maintained by relying on three of New York’s nonpareil improvisers: alto saxophonist David Binney; Kenny Wollesen on drums and percussion; and Matt Mitchell who stretches his hands over piano, Fender Rhodes, organ, Wurlitzer and Moog synthesizer, sometimes synchronously. Like a generic drug compared to an original, Mitchell’s bottom notes and Wollesen’s faultless beat remove the need for a bassist. More crucially through the drummer’s animated clatter or hard backbeat plus Mitchell’s harmonic judgment – his crinkly, slurry electric keyboard fills are as arresting as his cultivated romanticism on acoustic piano – fit perfectly jigsaw puzzle piece-like depending on the circumstances. On its own, Binney’s sculpted-out-of-stone tone can be heard at its flinty best on a tune such as Astral Echo Poem. Elsewhere he and Nachoff chew up or caress phrases like conjoined twins. Alternately stinging or smooth, the tenor saxophonist can angle out weighty Coleman Hawkins-like storytelling on Mind’s Ear I then turn around to spit out triplet snorts on Mind’s Ear II backed with thick piano extensions.

Most indicative of Nachoff’s writing and playing is Complimentary Opposites. Built up from a hide-and-seek game between the composer’s Hawkins-like timbres with rococo-like snarls and split tones from the other saxophonist, the harsh interface takes place on top of calliope-like bounces from Mitchell’s Wurlitzer plus silky cymbal swishes and tap-dancing snare taps from Wollesen.

If there’s anything lacking in Flux it’s that this just released CD was recorded in 2012. Imagine how well the quartet must sound today.

Duopoly
Kris Davis
Pyroclastic Records PR 01/02
(krisdavis.net)