Nordic Concertos
Martin Fröst; Various Orchestras
Bis BIS-2123 CD

This disc is a repackaging of previous recordings, made between 1996 and 2003. The four performances feature four different orchestras and conductors. Three of the works are from modern or contemporary Nordic composers, the last from the early Romantic. They all demonstrate Fröst’s mastery of the clarinet.

Fröst plays his strongest card at the outset. Peacock Tales by Anders Hillborg is an exciting work tailored to Fröst’s outrageous abilities (which include dance). After an unaccompanied prologue the orchestra enters to provide the frame and backdrop for the peacock’s haunted cries. A Turkish March, Big Band Battle and Gallop Macabre follow in harrowing sequence. A return to the opening material is accompanied this time by Copland-sweetened harmonies, and after some super-fast pointillist boogie-woogie, the piano and clarinet join in a last melancholic duet.

Concerto No.3, Op.21 by neo-classicist Vagn Holmboe opens with a fanfare followed by a mournful solo (must be a Nordic thing). The exceedingly prolific Holmboe produced over 400 works, including 13 symphonies and 21 string quartets along with more than a dozen concertos for varying instrumental combinations. Op.21 is listenable and satisfying, a clean spare aesthetic. It’s suit and tie music, comfortable and finely cut.

Karin Rehnqvist’s tone poem On A Distant Shore is the dourest of them all. Its five sections are The Dark (another brooding soliloquy!); The Light (blinding rather than illuminating); The Wild  (ferocious, carnivorous music); The Singing (more pavane than song); and The Call (a call for…to…of… siren or seagull?). Understated and masterful writing.

Barging in on the solemn proceedings, like a jolly elder relative drunk at a funeral, Bernard Henrik Crusell’s Introduction, Theme and Variations on a Swedish Air qualifies on account of its Nordic provenance. Why not include Nielsen’s wonderful concerto instead? Perhaps it would have been one too many melancholic flights through madness.

Stravinsky – Concerto for Piano and Winds; Capriccio; Movements; Petrouchka
Jean-Efflam Bavouzet; São Paulo Symphony Orchestra; Yan Pascal Tortelier
Chandos CHSA 5147

In addition to his frequent appearances as a conductor of his own music, the illustrious genius known as Igor Stravinsky composed a number of concertos for his exclusive use as a pianist, ready alternatives to the all-too-familiar requests for yet another performance of the Firebird Suite. A stunning new Stravinsky recording by the esteemed pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet brings together these concertos and then some.

Stravinsky’s 1924 Concerto for piano and wind instruments opens this excellent disc, followed by the Capriccio for piano and orchestra from 1929. Both works are delightful concoctions from the composer’s carefree French epoch, teeming with bonhomie and sparkling wit and recorded in flatteringly crystalline sound. Movements for piano and orchestra (1959) is late Stravinsky and represents the culmination of a growing interest in the serial techniques advocated by his arch-nemesis Arnold Schoenberg after the latter’s death in 1951. This is an intentionally esoteric work that may puzzle some listeners though connoisseurs will recognize here a very fine and scrupulous reading. The disc concludes with a fiery performance of the 1947 version of the ballet score Pétrouchka, a work that was originally conceived as a piano concerto. An audibly grunting Yan Pascal Tortelier elicits an electric response from the excellent São Paulo musicians while Bavouzet delights in playing the prominent piano part from inside the orchestra. The recording of this densely orchestrated work suffers at times from congested orchestral balances (notably so in The Shrove Tide Fair section) that pale in comparison with Stravinsky’s own 1960 recording, brilliantly mixed by the late John McClure and still my personal favourite.

Points of Departure
Nicholas Papador
Centrediscs CMCCD 20715

University of Windsor Associate Professor of Percussion Nicholas Papador is a powerhouse performer with wide-ranging subtleties in his playing as showcased in this new release.

Papador’s own A Very Welcome written for his wife and newborn son employs extended intervals in each hand using four mallets. Subtle dynamic and colour shifts are especially breathtaking in the sections with simultaneous very high and very low pitches. Isabelle Panneton’s Les petites reprises is a harmonically rooted marimba work exploring French and Japanese chromatic expressionism which perhaps requires more intense listening to be fully appreciated. In Nicholas Gilbert’s quasi-programmatic Ariane endormie, an exhausted dreaming Ariane’s fitful sleep is recreated with vibraphone modulating chords, motor and silent or subtle swelling phrase changes.

Inspired by South Indian drumming, François Rose’s Points d’emergence is scored for three each of metals, drums and wood instruments sharing three pitches. Papador’s rhythmic precision avoids a counting train wreck in the tricky opening three minutes where Rose gradually shortens each of the section’s seven phrases to create an impressive accelerando feel. Back to more vibraphone with Linda C. Smith’s lyrical and calming Invisible Cities. Smith’s exploration of the instrument’s sonic textures and capabilities results in a work of lush sonorities and splashes of shifting moods performed with virtuosic attention. Night Chill for marimba and electronics has composer Christien Ledroit drawing on punk and world music influences to evoke the rustling and bareness of autumn.

Papador’s commitment and passion for Canadian solo percussion repertoire drives this exemplary recording. Enjoy!

Tundra Songs – Music by Derek Charke
Kronos Quartet; Tanya Tagaq
Centrediscs CMCCD 21015

The story of the music on this extraordinary album is multi-faceted and interwoven with transcultural skeins. Allow me to tease out a few threads.

On one hand all the music is composed by the JUNO Award-winning Canadian composer Derek Charke (b. 1974). He is also a flutist and a composition and theory professor at Acadia University in Wolfville, Nova Scotia. On the other hand the gifted young storyteller Laakkuluk Willamson Bathory is the only presence on track 7, reciting a gripping Green-landic version of the creation story that exists all across Inuit lands, the Sassuma Arnaa. She remarks that “we don’t so much own this story as we belong to it,” keeping it alive through retelling it today, “despite intensive colonization and religious conversion…”

That story is retold in Clarke’s exhilarating 30-minute opus Tundra Songs (2007) by the third presence on the CD, the Polaris Music Prize-winning Inuk avant-garde vocalist Tanya Tagaq. Her masterful virtuoso vocal presence, at times taking on the multilayered quality of two Inuit women throat gamers and at others the innocence of childhood, domi-nates this work of vast scope.

The fourth element on the album is perhaps the best known to music lovers: the renowned Kronos Quartet. In over four decades, specializing in modernist, post-modernist and wide-ranging world music collaborations, they have been astonishingly productive, commissioning more than 800 works and arrangements. I have seen them several times live and they never fail to engage their audience musically, and also often inter-culturally. They do both in this album.

In Tundra Songs the most substantial work here, the story being told is of the Arctic, its soundscape, animals and peo-ple. The telling accumulates several layers including Charke’s Nunavut field recordings and his polished string quartet score brought to life by Kronos’ brilliant string playing. Also featured in the sweeping mix are studio-produced sounds, a regional origin myth, and a star turn vocal performance by Tagaq who just won a 2015 JUNO Award for her album Animism. As the North becomes more readily accessible – I did my first Arctic Skype sessions last year – so too the world is slowly learning to open its ears and hearts to its remarkable music and musicians.

French Trumpet Concertos
Paul Merkelo; Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal; Kent Nagano
Analekta AN 2 9847

Three challenging French trumpet concertos composed in the 20th century are given pristine, energetic and rollicking performances by soloist Paul Merkelo with the Orchestre symphonique de Montréal under Kent Nagano. Merkelo has been principal trumpet with OSM since 1995. This long working association with his orchestral colleagues is heard in the performances, especially in sections where the soloist and orchestra have tight musical conversations. Conductor Nagano is yet again brilliant in his ability to lead them both while allowing considerable freedom for individual sound statements.

Each concerto is interesting in its compositional attributes. Militarist musical references such as trumpet fanfares and snare drums with jazz-like solo trumpet lines highlight Henri Tomasi’s Concerto pour trumpette et orchestre. Alfred Desenclos’ Incantation, Thrène et Dance pour trompette et orchestre is the most academic of the works here. Rooted in the Romantic harmonic and melodic tradition, Desenclos also sneaks in jazz-rooted ideas, creating a movie music scenario which ends with an appropriate big bang. Even more jazz influences are found in André Jolivet‘s Concerto pour trompette No.2. Described by the composer as “a ballet for trumpet,” 14 different percussion instruments, piano and saxophones lead the rest of the orchestra to groove like a big band. Merkelo shines in the second movement solo with its changing sonic qualities.

These may not be the strongest trumpet concertos ever written but the abounding essence of fun and enthusiasm in performance is uplifting!

Spirit of the American Range
Oregon Symphony; Carlos Kalmar
Pentatone PTC 5186 481

The “American Range” moniker of this album is a tad disingenuous as the three composers represented here all honed their craft in Paris in the 1920s and hailed from the East Coast of America. Boston-based Walter Piston (1894-1976) was an esteemed figure in mid-20th century American music who taught a generation of composers as a professor at Harvard. His most popular work, the masterful and highly entertaining suite from his 1938 ballet The Incredible Flutist opens this fine recording with panache.

George Antheil (1900-1959), the self-described “bad boy of modern music,” was born in Trenton, New Jersey. His 1927 composition, A Jazz Symphony, was first performed at Carnegie Hall by the African-American Harlem Symphonietta directed by W.C. Handy. The orchestra responds to this swaggering score with great gusto, with notable contributions from a very tight brass section.

Brooklyn-born composer Aaron Copland (1900-1990) stressed in his program note for the 1946 Boston premiere of his Third Symphony under Koussevitsky that his work contained “no folk or popular material,” hallmarks of his previous highly successful series of ballet scores. Nevertheless, the triumphalism of this, his most ambitious and extended composition, mirrored the optimism of the Postwar Era and the work was swiftly hailed as the epitome of the longed-for “Great American Symphony.” Kalmar’s interpretation eschews the tub-thumping often brought to this symphony with a highly sensitive and fluid reading which illuminates the complex thematic relationships between the four movements of this mighty work.

Pristinely captured in vivid sonics, these are live performances unmarred by any extraneous noises. This is a recording you’ll surely enjoy listening to repeatedly.

John Korsrud – Crush
John Korsrud’s Hard Rubber Orchestra
rubhard 04 (hardrubber.com)

From note one, it’s clear that composer and bandleader John Korsud studied at the Burning Man school of jazz, forging his wide-ranging musical inspirations into a bubbling hot electric Kool-Aid. Crush is all about oppositions: between big band and chamber music instrumentations; in the mash-up of musical genres; as competing strands within individual textures, and among the pieces, interpolating between the rabid (Crush, Lowest Tide, Slice, Wise Up) and the pensive (Peace for Ross, Mist 1 & 2). While the longer, heavier works symbolize a hydraulic press squeezing divergent energies out the seams, their shorter counterparts are the compacted, focused units at the end of the process.

On first hearing some of the pieces may sound discombobulated, but further listening reveals that even the most frenetic surfaces are unified with careful constraint. In Crush, surrounding the flailing wildness of drummer Dave Robbins, percussionist Jack Duncan and trumpet soloist Brad Turner, Korsrud displays near-tantric restraint with a slow, sustained low-register chorale, generating the tension that defines the piece. For Lowest Tide, among visceral clouds of fast and wiry ascending figures reminiscent of mid-period Ligeti, a Phil Dwyer solo scorches the Earth, Wind & Fire-inspired groove, punctuated with metallic horn shots that turn into a buzzing sax section pulp. In Come to the Dark Side, a serpentine trumpet lead (played by Korsrud) is pitted against a consistently pneumatic, stuttering accompaniment loosely recalling John Adams’ Short Ride in a Fast Machine. Industrial-strength Mahavishnu Orchestra-styled ostinati churn their repetitions alongside guttural baritone saxophone exhortations and Ron Samworth’s warped guitar playing in the final piece, Wise Up. If it seems like an implausible assemblage of ideas and sources, Korsrud and crew’s deft handling will flatten any doubt like a Jumping Jack Tamper™ on the sands of the playa.

Ziggurat
Neal Bennett; Brian Nesselroad
Redshift Records TK433
(redshiftmusic.org)

Matching personality to instruments in the brass section, trumpets are the alphas, French horns are quietly confident team players of generally modest demeanour; near the bottom you find the seeking souls who play trombone. Sensitive by nature, they mask this trait with tough-guy attitudes, fooling nobody. (The tuba runs the show, but nobody wants that to get out).

The last half-century has seen a surprising number of highly gifted sackbut virtuosi, players who turn their unwieldy horns on various dimes to produce striking results. Taking his place among them is Canadian Neal Bennett. His recent release, Ziggurat, offers works for solo trombone as well as a variety of choir sizes. Best known to local fans of new music will be Jocelyn Morlock, who contributed Sequoia for an ensemble of eight trombones and percussion and After the Rain, a solo piece. Scott Good’s Liquid Metal for ten (!) trombones, is a mighty enjoyable evocation of the foundry scene from Terminator 2.

Most of the composers are based in B.C., and his lone collaborator is percussionist Brian Nesselroad. Yes, instead of herding all available and capable practitioners for the multi-bone works (four of the seven tracks), Bennett worked all 34 (THIRTY-FOUR) parts up himself, layering overdub upon overdub. Sink that putt, I ask you.

The material is uneven. I’m nuts about Rob McKenzie’s blues-based Indigo but I feel Roydon Tse’s Continual Awakening, riffing on short-term memory impairment, is more interesting in idea than execution. Theatrics fail to work on a disc as they might on stage in Swedish composer Folke Rabe’s Basta, though the piece serves to highlight Bennett’s virtuosity. Finally there’s Ziggurat, by Farshid Samandari, a gorgeous dialogue with background voices and drums; it evokes the grand structure suggested by the title. A chattering coda ends the disc with a bang.

PEP: Piano and Ehru Project
Nicole Ge Li; Corey Hamm
Redshift Records TK437
(redshiftmusic.org)

The Vancouver duo Piano and Erhu Project (PEP), founded in 2011, is by its very nature a cross-cultural enterprise. It represents the ongoing artistic partnership between pianist and UBC music professor Corey Hamm, a champion of avant-garde music, and the erhu player Nicole Ge Li, the concertmaster of the B.C. Chinese Music Ensemble. She is a virtuoso on that Chinese two-stringed fiddle, the most popular of the huqin family. Moreover, as eloquently evidenced on this album, Li is as much at home in recent Western musical idioms as in Chinese ones.

While the combination of erhu and piano may be novel to most Canadian listeners, it isn’t news in China. There the practice of a pianist accompanying an erhu soloist reaches back into the last century. The compositions which form the backbone of Li and Hamm’s project however, exemplify a more fluid interplay between these two instruments, each an icon of its respective culture. Rather than an inter-cultural vanity project, their collective music-making focuses on polished, musically engaged readings of recently commissioned scores. It’s also a reflection of Vancouver’s rich, ever-evolving, pan-Pacific music scene.

The repertoire on the album all dates from within the last few years. It explores a wide stylistic range, from the alternately sassy, sizzling Blues ’n Grooves (2014) composed by University of Toronto composition student Roydon Tse, to Edward Top’s mysterious, modernist Lamentation (2014), a feast for Li’s expressive mastery in the erhu’s upper range. Top was a recent composer-in-residence with the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra.

A word about the composers; of the ten featured here most are Canadian, including Jocelyn Morlock, John Oliver, Laurie Radford and Mark Armanini. The polished scores they have produced for PEP are all performed with care and élan, and bear repeated listening. With a treasury of over 40 commissioned works by both Canadian and Chinese composers played to high standards, I’m not surprised that Volume 2 of PEP has already been announced.

Nicole Lizée – Bookburners
Various Artists
Centrediscs CMCCD 20514 (CD+DVD)

In 2013, Canada’s government committed what scientists now call libricide, closing seven Department of Fisheries and Oceans libraries. Ostensibly, it was to save by digitizing materials, but that hasn’t happened. Little attempt was made to preserve the materials and precious collections were lost to landfill. It was 21st-century book burning, but without the symbolic theatre.

Milton wrote that anyone who kills a man kills “a reasonable creature, God’s image; but he who destroys a good book kills reason itself.” The striking cover image (by Todd Stewart) of Nicole Lizée’s Bookburners CD/DVD may assert a similar interpretation. Depicting a skeleton holding a smouldering book, the figure may have sought to burn it, but instead self-immolated, consigning her/himself to eternal damnation, rather than squelching the ideas on the pages. Conversely, a dug-up, laughing skeleton having a good read fits in with the rough-hewn and somewhat nostalgic approach to technology and media that permeates the aesthetic of the five works in this collection.

The music and images tease us into dissecting the materials, reference points and tools; a rich exercise with antennae outside European contemporary music and into pop cultural icons that are the shared knowledge of Lizée’s generation. Prog-rock chord progressions, American minimalist repetitions, post-digital glitch techniques, DJ sound gear and uncommon instrumentations are all there, crashing into one another, but listening exclusively that way becomes so fragmented that it prevents the pleasures of listening to the global textures. When identification of materials becomes second to hearing their blended interaction, the music opens up a bright tableau of complex rhythms and timbres, despite the darker undertones of the titles and subject matter.

On the CD, White Label Experiment, for percussion quartet and electronics, is a joyously warped mashup of John Cage and rave culture, with the turntable as the common denominator. Typewriters peck away, combined with stylus/needle drops, noise timbres and omnichord, while metallic percussion takes you higher, in register and experience. Ouijist continues the attraction to sound hacking and an expansive, low-tech electronic palette built on the bent and the broken. On Son of the Man with the Golden Arms, drummer Ben Reimer’s playing stands out with a crisp tone and light touch, relishing in the complexity of notated beats, which are at times reminiscent of Bill Bruford on the Yes Fragile album.

For the DVD, Lizée brings film into the mix. Hitchcock Études (for piano and “glitch”) works with the Lissajou-inspired credits from Psycho, excerpts from The Birds and other middle-period Hitchcock films, looping them and jarring perception of the familiar into the strange and sometimes menacing. Paradoxically, the glitches are a by-product of digital sound techniques, whereas the film sources she’s working with originate from the silver (analog) screen, meaning the glitch element is obtained by imposing new tech on old media. Bookburners is staged footage of turntablist DJ P-Love and cellist Stéphane Tétreault performing in a freight elevator/loading dock. Like the other pieces in this set, it’s a bit longer than the material suggests, yet achieves its goals more tamely. Without exception, these are excellent performances, artfully combined to express a fresh remix of North American musical mannerisms.

Tetraktys – Contemporary music for string quartet by young Mexican composers
Cuarteto Latinoamericano
Urtext Digital Classics JBCC239

A tetractys is a triangular figure in geometry consisting of ten points arranged in four rows. With tracks such as Fibonacci on the Beach and Triple Point, the term tetractys appropriately represents the ten young Mexican composers featured. Further, common threads intersect each piece stylistically as clear references to popular Latin grooves, rhythms and harmonies are heard throughout.

While each work on the disc deserves mention, three of the ten were particularly successful. First, in the piece Chandrian, composer Mateo Nossa makes excellent use of novel bowing techniques to evoke skeletal tiptoeing amid strong rhythmic play. Use of Col legno bowing conjures a rather danse macabre mood. The title seems to reference a group of seven fairly evil chaps created by American author Patrick Rothfuss in his fantasy trilogy, The Kingkiller Chronicle.

Next, in Ciudades Suspendidas by Jean Angelus Pichardo, glissandi and natural harmonics pass around the quartet creating a seamless ethereal cloud. We are quickly swept into punchy groove-oriented sections with angular melodies. This feature of the nebulous taking shape into a crunchy groove-based section seems to permeate each piece on the disc, a stylistic feature the quartet seems to enjoy.

Lastly, in Roberto Sarti’s  Echoes from the Past, we hear a work that is clearly the most adventurous in terms of texture, harmony and form. Sarti’s use of virtuosic explosions makes for a serendipitous shattering of expectations. The strong imaginative palette of this composer leaves a visceral and pleasantly disturbing atmosphere in the mind of the listener.

It is clear that the members of the quartet thoroughly enjoyed the demands each piece had to offer. This joy of the process can be heard in the bright, crisp and confident expressiveness the quartet offers in this recording.

The Transfigured Nightingale – Music for Clarinet and Piano
Jerome Summers; Robert Kortgaard
Blue Griffin Records BGR339
bluegriffin.com

Clarinetist Jerome Summers has completed his “Nightingale” trilogy of recordings, a project he began in 1994. This one, Transfigured Nightingale, comprises mostly works transcribed for clarinet, with the exception of Brahms’ Sonata in E-flat Op.120, No.2. Included on a mere technicality (it was transcribed for viola by the composer), it’s really here because Mr. Summers loves it, and why not? Late Brahms is balm to the soul of those who play the nerdiest of woodwinds, the exploding cigar of the orchestra.

Summers handles the instrument with ease. His tone on most of the material is smooth and velvety. Michael Conway Baker’s Canticle for Ryan (originally for violin) and Marek Norman’s Just Think (originally a setting of a poem by Robert Service) are effective if sugary vehicles for Summers’ fluid cantabile. Two Shostakovich symphonic extracts offer an austere counterpoint to these selections. I particularly like hearing the scherzo from the Ninth presented as a solo piece with piano. Taking it at just under full-on Russian March Hare tempo, Summers sounds like he’d fit in with any orchestra in the country.

Pianist Robert Kortgaard provides agreement, support and bundles of musicality. He and Summers agreed to a stately set of tempi for the Op.120, playing the part of elder gentlemen rather than impersonating the young Richard Mühlfeld, Brahms’ “nightingale.” Also included is Rachmaninov’s cello sonata, in Summers’ own transcription. At a hefty 36-plus minutes, it argues better for the cello than the Brahms does for the viola.

Brian Current – Airline Icarus
Huhtanen; Szabó; Thomson; Dobson; Sirett; Ensemble; Brian Current
Naxos 8.660356

Airline Icarus by composer Brian Current and librettist Anton Piatigorsky was initially commissioned in 2001 and underwent a series of developments in the ensuing decade. This intense, 45-minute chamber opera transports the listener through an emotional journey as it depicts the reactions of passengers and crew on a doomed commercial flight. The work was inspired by the tragic crash of a Korean airliner that was struck by a Soviet missile in 1983 and descended for nearly 15 minutes before impact.

The opera’s award-winning composer, conductor and music director, Brian Current, presents a cohesive vision for this impressive, multi-layered work that incorporates the myth of Icarus, whose wings melted after flying too close to the sun. It serves as a reminder that our technological advances can have devastating results.

Piatigorsky’s insight into human nature exposes a glimpse of humanity at its most vulnerable as the libretto juxtaposes mundane conversations with the characters’ introspective thoughts. This dramatic fluctuation is sustained, quite extraordinarily, by the chamber chorus and soloists Carla Huhtanen (Ad Exec), Krisztina Szabó (Flight Attendant), Graham Thomson (Scholar), Alexander Dobson (Worker/Pilot) and Geoffrey Sirett (Business Man).

Current’s depiction of turbulence is frighteningly realistic until an eerie stillness, beautifully performed by the instrumental ensemble, underscores the Pilot’s aria, providing an impression of suspended time and space. Superbly sung by Dobson, it ironically describes his joy of flying as the plane descends. The disturbing Epilogue closes the opera with a prolonged, final silence.

áltaVoz Composers
JACK Quartet
New Focus Recordings FCR150

In this latest release by the JACK Quartet, four Latin American composers are featured, each of whom are members of the composer consortium known as áltaVoz. Members of áltaVoz see it as their mandate to promote cutting edge contemporary music concerts, workshops, symposia and interdisciplinary projects with the intension of providing a provocative forum for artists, institutions and the community at large.

The four quartets on this recording represent the confluence of its members’ willingness to embrace a wide spectrum of aesthetics and influences. First on the disc, composer Felipe Lara’s Tran(slate) invites us into a world of daring gestures, pops and slides, that charmingly evoke playful otherworldly sonic landscapes. The vast array of extended playing techniques is masterfully orchestrated and elevates the composer’s language. Next, José Luis-Hurtado’s L’ardito e quasi stridente gesto creates an unsettling mood as quiet meandering dissonances explode with jagged interruptions. Throughout Mauricio Pauly’s Every new volition a mercurial swerve, process-driven swells and pulses propel the listener into a swarm of rhythmic activity. An ethereal contrast is created with a luminous harmonic lightness before the blistering climax bombards the ear. In Jorge Villavicencio Grossmann’s String Quartet No. 3 “música fúnebre y nocturna,” the only multi-movement work on the disc, we receive the clearest allusions to the tradition of the string quartet. The influence of Bartók is quite clear and reminiscences of tonal centres are unmistakable. This, matched with lively groove-driven passages, secures this work as the most accessible of the lot.

The JACK Quartet has approached each work with a passionate virtuosity and impressive attention to detail. The punchiness and clarity of gesture throughout is a fine example of the quartet’s expressive capabilities. The JACK Quartet is known for impassioned interpretations of contemporary works, and this recording certainly lives up to that expectation.

Satie Slowly
Philip Corner
Unseen Worlds UW12

I was impressed with the program notes written by Philip Corner in what was really a small book. His writing was extremely entertaining and informative. The written words really gave a sense of the wit and brilliance of Satie. For example: “Satie is not as great as John Cage would have us believe. Who could be? Certainly not Bach or Beethoven.” My favourite quote has to be: “If his piano pieces are so easy why are they so badly played? […They resist all] added expressivity; they make those who indulge sound ridiculous. Yet nothing is lacking in them.” Corner’s written analysis of each piece reflects the personality of Satie’s music. Critics during the time slandered Satie and called him a “petit maître” alongside Debussy and Ravel. He was not revolutionary in a flamboyant way but cloaked his visions in traditional forms reflected in the more obscure repertoire chosen for these CDs.

A medieval theme is reflected in the selections which are the Ogives, The Feast Given By the Norman Knights to Honour a Young Girl, Preludes of the Nazarene, The Gothic Dances, Fanfares of the Rose+Cross, Chorales. These were all played in a very slow tempo but represented the nature of the music. Gnossienne No.1, Gymnopedies (1,2,3) and the Empire’s Diva didn’t fit the rest of the program but were played in the same tempo. I would have liked to hear more swing in the Gnossienne and Gymnopedies and definitely a more up-beat tempo for the Empire’s Diva, who was a stripper in a music hall. However, I could see a Satie wink in this unique double CD.