Red
Marina Hasselberg
Redshift Records (redshiftrecords.org)

Marina Hasselberg is a Portuguese-born, Vancouver-resident cellist comfortable in Baroque music, contemporary composed music and free improvisation, working in a range that includes Vancouver New Music, Early Music Vancouver, collaborations with other contemporary improvisers like Peggy Lee and Okkyung Lee and gig work with Mariah Carey. Red is her full-length debut, presenting some essential facets of her musical personality, both as soloist and in improvisatory groups.

Red opens with an immediate declaration of independence, Hasselberg spanning centuries as she performs Gabrielli’s Ricercar Primo accompanied by improvising electronic musician Giorgio Magnanensi; they then follow that with S6, a free improvisation. Where the Sand Is Hot will suggest a similarly broad time span. Guitarist Aram Bajakian and drummer Kenton Loewen join in a modal improvisation with Hasselberg plucking intense, shifting, rhythmic patterns that suggest the guembri, a bass lute played for centuries by the Gnawa people of Morocco.

That sometimes playful ability to span genre and time is no deterrent to Hasselberg’s focus. That’s evident in the disc’s most concentrated moment: composer Linda Catlin Smith’s Ricercar, which develops the tone and intensity evident in the earlier Gabrielli in a sustained work. There’s further evidence of the emotional depth of Hasselberg’s playing in the concluding Things Fall Apart, Craig Aalders’ composition for cello and tape. Along the way, Hasselberg finds further opportunities to improvise with Magnanensi, Bajakian, Loewen and violinist Jesse Zubot, in this vivid introduction to a musician as skilful as she is adventurous.

Aspire – Jofre; Piazzolla; Villa-Lobos
Seunghee Lee; JP Jofre; London Symphony Orchestra; Enrico Fagone
Musica Solis MS202208 (musicasolis.com)

Clarinetist Seunghee Lee and Argentian bandeonist/composer/arranger JP Jofre met in New York City where Lee first heard Jofre’s compositions. She was very “intrigued” by the bandoneon which totally makes sense as both their instruments share similar reed sound production. Lee requested something for clarinet and bandoneon. Their resulting collaboration is heard here in eight compositions and arrangements on Lee’s independent label.

Jofre has a perfect, respectful vision of Argentinian music including that for the tango. His Lee commissioned clarinet/orchestra arrangement of Piazzolla’s Tango Étude No.3 is spectacular, remaining true to the Piazzolla sound with lush florid virtuosic clarinet lines and contrasting rhythmic orchestral sounds, performed by the London Symphony Orchestra under Enrico Fagone. Lee’s clarinet (instead of voice) and eight cello arrangement of Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras No.5 Aria (Cantilena) is slower, with colourful low/high pitch contrasts and tight doubled instrumental lines.  

Six Jofre originals are featured. The upbeat Primavera has clear virtuosic interchanges between clarinet, bandoneon and orchestra. The three-movement Lee-commission Double Concerto for Clarinet, Bandoneon and Orchestra draws from tango, popular and classical music. I. Vals Irreal has short gloomy to energetic clarinet and bandoneon solo/duet ideas above the orchestra. Dramatic exciting III. Aboriginal combines rhythmic instrumental fun to its closing percussive blast. Perfect blending of moving lines and held notes in two clarinet/bandoneon duets, Como el Agua and Sweet Dreams. More tango neoclassical sounds in Tangodromo, and the mood-changing Taranguino, each for clarinet, bandoneon and piano (Steven Beck).  

A must-be-heard exploration of styles passionately composed and performed.

Nick Storring – Music from Wéi 成
Nick Storring
Orange Milk Records (orangemilkrecords.bandcamp.com)

Toronto-based Canadian composer/musician Nick Storring was commissioned by his frequent Toronto collaborator/choreographer Yvonne Ng (of tiger princess dance projects) to compose music for her five-dancer piece Wéi (成). Starting in a December 2017 Banff Centre residency, and completed in 2021, Storring takes a single instrument – the piano – and composes, performs and records layered multi-tracks on grand and upright pianos and a Yamaha computer-controlled acoustic Disklavier piano to create sounds ranging from traditional to prepared piano to full orchestral soundscapes and silences. 

A short Wéi 成 YouTube clip with dancers reaffirms Storring’s detailed understanding of creating dance music. It is equally fantastic as listening music. The opening I introduces the listener to Storring’s multi-faceted music. A contemplative held-note gradual crescendo from silence opens. A piano single line widely spaced lyrical melody follows, then gradual introduction of tonal to atonal chords. A fadeout section is followed by a crescendo of repeated notes, effects, loud rumbling sounds like a dramatic full orchestra then back to more quiet atonal electronic keyboard effects, to closing wobbling held notes fading directly to the next track. Other sections build on these, including subtle tastes of jazz, rock low notes, romantic and contemporary sounds in III;  full orchestral sound with wide-pitched electronic effects in V; and funky musical ideas from drum-like rocking cymbal crashes and guitar-like grooves to the closing quiet ending in VI.

Storring’s experimental compositions and performances, ranging from ambient calm to shorter tense qualities, are inspirational.

Parisa Sabet – A Cup of Sins
Various Artists
Redshift Records TK478 (redshiftrecords.org)

Iranian-Canadian composer Parisa Sabet’s six compositions here draw on Iranian traditional music and Western music like minimalism, atonalism and romanticism, perfectly performed by Jacqueline Woodley (soprano), Christina Petrowska Quilico (piano), Laurel Swinden (flute), Peter Stoll (clarinet), Robert Grieve (electric guitar), Matthias McIntire (violin/viola), Dobrochna Zubek (cello), Robert Grieve (electric guitar) and Joshua Tamayo (conductor).

Highlights include the upbeat chamber piece Shurangiz, a well-orchestrated Western/Iranian influenced composition with rhythmic repetitive grooves, lush clarinet and flute lines, and colourful repeated piano notes, inspired by contemporary Iranian Tar player/composer Ali Ghamsari. Woodley and Petrowska Quilico perform the three-movement Dance in your Blood, a setting of an English translation of a Farsi poem by Rumi. It combines classical art song like the Movement I opening piano solo and gentle vocals, and wild free expression Movement II with modern vocal effects like the repeated word “love,” and atonal piano chords. Violin solo Geyrani, inspired by Iranian kamancheh virtuoso/composer Kayhan Kalhor, has colourful held notes, alternating high/low pitched lines and high squeaky notes. McIntire’s amazing performance sounds like more than one violinist playing! 

Set to a text about sexual violence and trauma by poet Simin Behbahani, A Cup of Sin is for soprano, clarinet, viola, piano, electric guitar and cello. The opening contemplative prelude with long held drone and spoken text leads to the longer “not-so-easy listening” dramatic middle movement encompassing sudden surprising loud crashes, vocal squeals and spoken words, concluding with a calm postlude.

Sabet successfully incorporates her life experiences in these unique compositions.

Personal Noise
Sarah Plum
Blue Griffin BGR619 (bluegriffin.com)

This fantastic new release by an ardent proponent of the contemporary violin repertoire, violinist Sarah Plum, is a must-have for everyone who loves meaningful sonic adventures. Personal Noise features works for violin and electronics, delivered via the imagination and composing pen of Kyong Mee Choi, Jeff Herriott, Mari Kimura, Eric Lyon, Eric Moe, Charles Nichols and Mari Takano. 

Works on this album came as a result of a personal connection between Plum and each composer and were either written for or commissioned by her. The exciting mixture of electronically processed sounds and extended contemporary violin techniques is further enhanced by imaginative and dynamic performance by Plum. And if you think there are no beautiful melodies on this album, you are wrong; distinct melodies and elements of beauty are present throughout. Layers upon layers of textures and colours make the music rich, dreamy, sometimes unpredictable, sometimes probing. Each composition features the explorative element of some kind, be it the notion of serendipity in music (Herriot’s after time: a resolution), paraphrasing of the melody from Bach’s Violin Sonata in B-Minor (Choi’s Flowering Dandelion), or articulation of the musical cryptogram spelling Sarah’s name (Lyon’s Personal Noise with Accelerants). Interactive electronics in Kimura’s Sarahal, along with violin trills, pizzicatos, arpeggiatos and harmonics, create colours to die for and a full sonorous sound.

Sarah Plum offers complex yet conceptually clear interpretations of these works. Her distinct style of playing allows for passion and lyricism in one bow stroke, a perfect personal noise.

Calques: Morton Feldman; Karl Naegelen
Quatuor Umlaut; Joris Rüůhl
Umlaut Records UMFR-CD 37 (umlautrecords.com)

Connecting the common threads between French composer Karl Naegelen’s Calques and US composer Morton Feldman’s Clarinet and string quartet, Paris-based Quatuor Umlaut and clarinetist Joris Rühl emphasize indeterminacy but add enough variations to counter shifts towards the soporific. Together violinists Amaryllis Billet and Anna Jalving, violist Fanny Paccoud and cellist Sarah Ledoux project a unison sound. Yet with shaded glissandi plus expanding and compressing textures, their harmonies can crackle like electronics or vibrate like a single long string. This serves as perfect counterpoint to the split tones, near inaudible whistles, hollow puffs and clarion peeps from Rühl, who is equally involved with free improvisation. The resulting shaded drone adds a warmer thrust to Naegelen’s composition, especially when it’s completed with a concentrated pipe-organ-like throb from all five.

Feldman’s piece often cushions woody clarinet tones within luminous coordinated string harmonies for a warmer and gentler exposition. While this gentling motif reappears frequently, other sequences have the layered strings shimmering upwards or the clarinetist moving from mid-range acquiescence to project tongue slaps and higher-pitched trilling arabesques. Sliding among the unison string coordination, these timbral reed variations create a darker interface as low-pitched cello strokes are contrasted with pizzicato plucks from the others’ elevated tones. Return to the initial indeterminate but repeated introductory passage confirms both the underlying malleability of what could be a static form and the urbanity of the musicians’ interpretation and linkage to a more contemporary composition.

Listen to 'Calques: Morton Feldman; Karl Naegelen' Now in the Listening Room

William Bolcom – Trio for Horn; Solo Violin Suite No.2
Steven Gross; Philip Ficsor; Constantine Finehouse
Naxos 8.579102 (naxos.com/catalogue/item.asp?item_code=8.579102)

William Bolcom – The Complete Rags
Marc-André Hamelin
Hyperion CDA68391/2 (hyperion-records.co.uk/dc.asp?dc=D_CDA68391%2F2)

William Bolcom (b.1938) is a renowned American composer whose works are wide-ranging, genre-bending and utterly fascinating. While Bolcom’s compositions from around 1960 employed a modified serial technique, under the influence of Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Luciano Berio whose music he particularly admired, in the 1960s he gradually began to embrace an eclectic use of a wider variety of musical styles. In addition to four large-scale operas and numerous concertos, Bolcom has also written nine symphonies, twelve string quartets, four violin sonatas, numerous piano rags, four volumes of gospel preludes for organ, four volumes of cabaret songs, three musical theatre works and a one-act chamber opera.

Chamber Works features two pieces, the Trio for Horn, Violin and Piano (2017) and the Suite No. 2 for Solo Violin (2011). The Trio showcases each instrument to its fullest in both soloistic and ensemble capacities and, while mostly atonal, the work incorporates brief moments of tonality that reorient the listener’s ears and provide a grounding element, especially in the more tumultuous movements. The Suite, conversely, is exquisitely tuneful and is clearly structured around the dance forms of Baroque solo violin suites, especially those of J.S. Bach. Rhythmic vitality and instrumental virtuosity reign supreme here, and the performance given by violinist Philip Ficsor is both admirable and noteworthy.

The piano rag, (i.e. ragtime), is a musical style that reached its peak popularity between 1895 and 1919. A precursor to the development of jazz, ragtime is characterized by its syncopated or “ragged” rhythm and was popularized during the early 20th century by composer Scott Joplin and his school of classical ragtime. Although it fell out of favour in the 1920s, composers and performers alike have revived the styles and forms of the genre in the decades since, including Bolcom. His collection of rags is among the finest adaptations of ragtime within contemporary music, achieving a blend of stylistic familiarity and artistic creativity that is unique while avoiding appearing derivative or gauche.

And who better to handle Bolcom’s ingenious rags than Marc-André Hamelin, perhaps Canada’s premier interpreter of contemporary music? As someone who successfully handled the seemingly insurmountable piano works of Kaikhosru Sorabji and Charles-Valentin Alkan, Hamelin’s name is synonymous with “unplayable” scores that transcend the conventional understanding of virtuosity. Here, however, he lends his deft touch to material that is considerably less demanding from a technical perspective yet has certain stylistic requirements, the challenges of which he meets with precision and sensitivity.

For those familiar with the music of Bolcom, both of these recordings are guaranteed to be a delight; they also serve as fine starting points for those who are unfamiliar. The Complete Rags adapts an old yet familiar style through a master performer’s touch, while Chamber Works provides a glimpse into Bolcom’s more modern approach, a perfect pairing for anyone interested in this icon of American modernism. 

Derek Bermel – Intonations – Music for Clarinet and Strings
Derek Bermel; Christopher Otto; Wiek Hijmans; JACK Quartet
Naxos 8.559912 (naxos.com/CatalogueDetail/?id=8.559912)

What amazing art evolves from decaying empires! Consider this new release by Derek Bermel. Widely travelled, juxtaposing American styles like twangy folk and wrenching blues, adding elements from farther afield (South American, African, Thracian), Bermel fashions wonderful curiosities from this mittful of influences. Intonations, played with surly strut by the JACK Quartet, is all bending pitches and grinding gears, although the second movement, Hymn/Homily is poignant and sweet. Ritornello is a single-movement work for string quartet and electric guitar (played by Wiek Hijmans). After the ear-stretching dissonance of the prior tracks, this at first sounds pop, even a bit like Classical Gas. Briefly. Then it’s Death and the Maiden meets R2D2, and into the multiverse we go.

Composer turns clarinetist on Thracian Sketches. A deep and mellow low register melody emerges, exploring the world of octave-plus-tritone, and eventually becoming tired of that limited space. As the melody careens upward, Bermel vocalizes while playing, adding a menacing buzz to the line. Sure enough, once the upper register is breached, all heck breaks loose. It’s one of those pieces that will take all the player’s endurance. Doubtless circular breathing is a featured asset, so seldom does the sound actually stop. It’s a brilliant piece for solo clarinet, ending with a fantastic race down and back up the range of the horn, the explorer thrilled with the view.

Five brief Violin Études haunt the ear thanks to excellent renditions by Christopher Otto. To close the disc, Bermel and the JACKs perform A Short History of the Universe. Its second movement, Heart of Space, could be a parody of the theme from Love Story. Balkan dance and Lutheran chorale jockey for position in the good fun of Twistor Scattering, and then refer back to the atonal pointillism of Multiverse, the first movement. 

Excellent liner notes enhance the many pleasures of Bermel’s music.

Victor Herbiet – Airs & Dances
Victor Herbiet; Jean-François Guay; Marc Djokic; Julian Armour; Jean Desmarais
Centrediscs CMCCD 29822 (cmccanada.org/website-search/?q=CMCCD29822)

Looking back to the era when the saxophone was elbowing its blustery way to the front of composers’ to-do lists, Victor Herbiet offers a diet of 20th-century stylings for a variety of chamber settings all featuring his instrument. Airs & Dances is exactly what it says it is, and the writing is every bit as capable as the playing. It seems a good strategy for saxophonists to provide themselves with fresh repertoire, should they feel so inclined. Herbiet does, in a way that is both pleasant and certainly challenging to the player, and fun for the listener. 

The opening track, Troika, purports to reference the more jazzy side of Shostakovich, but I hear a good deal of Milhaud or Poulenc as well. Wherever it hails from, it’s a romp. Much of the disc is lighthearted and fun, veering into uncloaked Romanticism in track seven, Pas de Deux for soprano and alto dance-aphonists. Herbiet is ably abetted on several tracks by fellow saxist Jean-François Guay, and aided ably on others by the very fine pianist Jean Desmarais. The other collaborators are fellow Ottawans Marc Djokic on violin and cellist Julian Armour. 

Herbiet touches down somewhere closer to the current century in Paris Rush, a sparkling duo again featuring Guay, again for soprano and alto saxes. Imagine the Beatles’ tune from Sergeant Pepper’s, A Day in the Life, but mimed out by two saxes in a French accent. Trois Valse-caprices are solo etudes in the style of an early 20th century composer/dentist, Dr. Gilles Amiot. Herbiet’s solid technique is on full display, and perhaps he’ll consider filling (get it?) a whole study book with these types of pieces.

Weill – Symphony No.2; Shostakovich: Symphony No.5
Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra; Lahav Shani
Warner Classics (warnerclassics.com/artist/rotterdam-philharmonic-orchestra)

“Kurt Weill, symphonist” doesn’t jibe with the reputation of the composer from post-WWI Germany. Known more for his theatre work and songs, Weill was discouraged in his early efforts at the large abstract form; unlike his contemporary, Dmitri Shostakovich, his “serious” works remain overlooked. 

Weill’s Second Symphony (1933) is presented in a clever pairing with the well-known Fifth Symphony (1937) by the Russian titan, comparing the work of the older man who was forced from his home by the rising Nazi peril to the younger one who stayed put in Stalinist Russia. It’s a shame Weill’s symphony is sidelined by most orchestras. His was a mature, original voice; early criticism missed the mark, calling him a melodist whose ideas were fit only for the cabaret. Weill wrote tonal but edgy, hyperbolically dramatic music, and this is an excellent rendering. 

Shostakovich wrote his Fifth to keep the wolves at bay, ticking the boxes that Stalinists insisted were proper to good Soviet Art: strife overcome by struggle, a triumphant finale, and no experimental formalisms. Somehow the effort produced a masterpiece of veiled irony.

The Rotterdam Philharmonic under Lahav Shani makes a capable team. The recording favours bombast in the fortissimo passages, so the answering dolce colours are sweet relief. The piano entry and fugue in the Fifth’s first movement sends chills. The edges are sharp, and the tempi barely hold the road around the curves. I’ve heard faster, but not more hair-raising. The fierce delicacy of the scherzo is a total delight, if you appreciate comic terror. The largo will make anyone with a soul weep, an over-the-top, haunting lament. The finale, or “a triumph of idiots” per Rostropovich, was disguised parody.

Shani and company emphasize the darkness and perhaps even the despair Shostakovich must have felt, and the fear he sustained of being “disappeared” for improper artistic ideas. Weill was perhaps the luckier of the two, having escaped Nazi Germany to publish his “degenerate” music without fear of being detained for it, let alone for being Jewish.

British Piano Concertos: Addison; Bush; Maconchy; Searle; Rubbra; Benjamin
Simon Callaghan; BBC NOW; Martyn Brabbins
Lyrita SRCD.407 (wyastone.co.uk/british-piano-concertos-addison-bush-maconchy-searle-rubbra-benjamin.html)

Be forewarned: there aren’t any actual piano concertos here and one composer isn’t British, but don’t let that deter you from this disc’s pleasures.

Oscar-winning film composer John Addison’s 17-minute, five-movement Wellington Suite for two horns, piano, percussion and strings was written for the 1959 centenary of Wellington College, Addison’s alma mater. Occasional “wrong notes” add humour to the jaunty, vaudeville-inflected set of dances.

The non-Brit, Australian Arthur Benjamin, modelled his 15-minute, one-movement Concertino for Piano and Orchestra (1927) after Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. It’s genial and jazzy, featuring prominent parts for trumpet and alto saxophone. In Elizabeth Maconchy’s sharply etched, 12-minute Concertino for Piano and String Orchestra (1949), two syncopated, neoclassical Allegros surround a haunting, reflective Lento. It’s a real gem!

Intended for students, Humphrey Searle’s dodecaphonic Concertante for Piano, Percussion and Strings (1954) packs lots of drama – portentous chords and pounding percussion – into its mere four minutes. Edmund Rubbra’s nine-minute Nature’s Song (1920), subtitled Tone Poem for Orchestra, Organ and Pianoforte, was composed during Rubbra’s studies with Gustav Holst. I found it much more martial than pastoral. Geoffrey Bush’s ten-minute, four-movement A Little Concerto on Themes of Thomas Arne for Pianoforte and Strings (1939) is an affectionate pastiche of charming melodies by the 18th-century composer of Rule, Britannia.

Pianist Simon Callaghan and the BBC National Orchestra of Wales conducted by Martyn Brabbins sparkle in these varied works, all, except for Benjamin’s Concertino, here receiving their first-ever recordings.

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.

Listen to 'Carl Vine – Complete Piano Sonatas' Now in the Listening Room

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.

Listen to 'When Dark Sounds Collide: New Music for Percussion and Piano' Now in the Listening Room

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.