Mahler – Symphony No.4
Sabine Devieilhe; Les Siecles; Francois-Xavier Roth
Harmonia Mundi HMM905357 (store.harmoniamundi.com)

The French conductor François-Xavier Roth is in great demand these days, and for good reason. Recently appointed music director of the peerless Gürzenich-Orchester in Cologne and principal guest conductor of the London Symphony Orchestra, among his notable accomplishments was his founding of the Les Siècles orchestra in 2003, featuring instruments appropriate to the period of composition of a given era. Their 2013 rendition of the original version of Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring garnered immense praise. 

They now turn their attention for the second time to the music of Mahler. The excellent program notes include an interview with Roth, an overview of the work, and a scrupulous listing of the exact models of the wind instruments employed. The piercing sound of the wind instruments and the beefy sound of the period Viennese horns are particularly impressive, much more assertive and biting than our homogenized contemporary models. The string section employs gut strings and plays without vibrato, bringing an unaccustomed serenity to the slow third movement. Combined with Roth’s Apollonian interpretation, the complex counterpoint of the work benefits greatly. The mixing of the album is superb and Sabine Devieilhe’s interpretation of the vocal finale is admirable. 

My only reservation about this performance concerns an occasional lack of nuance, noticeably so in the uncanny second movement scherzo, which struck me as more of a generic waltz as opposed to the idiomatic micro-adjustments of the authentic Ländler tempo George Szell imparts in his classic 1967 recording. This symphony is the most compact and classical in Mahler’s oeuvre and remains the most accessible entry point for Mahler neophytes. Not to be missed!

Bruckner – Symphony No.4
London Symphony Orchestra; Sir Simon Rattle
LSO Live LSO0875 (lso.co.uk)

I’ve seen Sir Simon Rattle conduct many times thanks to my subscription to the Berlin Philharmonic’s Digital Concert Hall and always admired his energy jumping to the podium full of excitement, eager anticipation and love for the music to come. In 2018 Rattle retired from his post in Berlin and now is back in England as the head of the London Symphony, arguably the finest of the five London orchestras.

The “Romantic” Symphony No.4 is obviously his favorite Bruckner and as I listen to this new super audio recording I must confess that I’d love to have been present at the concert at the Barbican Hall resounding with the genuine bloom of his Bruckner. “The entire evening was a Brucknerian labour of love” says The Guardian.  

Rattle has a no-nonsense approach as if he would say: let’s get on with it! He is totally relaxed, lets the music flow naturally at a brisk tempo, entirely logical with the architectonic structure always kept in mind. There are sections when the music becomes nearly inaudible from which the melody slowly emerges. The following crescendo is masterfully handled. It builds in stages with minor climaxes along the way, deliberately holding back at key moments so the ending becomes truly majestic. There is an overarching epic sweep this symphony needs. 

I must give a big credit to the first (solo) horn. At the beginning, its beautifully sustained pianissimo over an underlying tremolo in the strings produces a magical effect. The horns also feature heavily in the third movement, the Hunt Scherzo, as they start out barely audible from a primeval mist with a gradual crescendo; and when the trumpets join in the sound becomes crystal clear fortissimo and simply gorgeous. In Rattle’s hand the symphony becomes truly Romantic!

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Two Sides
Barokkbandið Brák
Sono Luminus SLE-70026/2 (sonoluminus.com)

It is not uncommon to find obvious and straightforward album titles within the classical music genre, leaving no doubt as to what a listener can and should expect. If one tallied up all the releases titled Beethoven: The Nine Symphonies, these recordings would make up an entire collection of their own. While it is only an entry point to the contents contained therein, a creatively titled recording can engage and entice a prospective listener, drawing them in with the promise of a unique artistic experience.

Such is the case with Icelandic period-instrument ensemble Barokkbandið Brák and their debut album Two Sides, a title which, at first glance, most clearly refers to its two discs of music. Upon reviewing its contents however, it becomes clear that Two Sides reflects the diverse nature of this extraordinary group, which has achieved renown in the interpretation of Renaissance and Baroque music but also as a commissioner of new music for period instruments.

This sense of discovery in music old and new permeates every selection on this recording, notably through the world premiere recording of the Violin Concerto in G by Swedish Baroque composer Johan Joachim Agrell and new commissions from Icelandic composers Þráinn Hjálmarsson, Bergrún Snæbjörnsdóttir, and Kristinn Kristinsson.

What is most remarkable about this entire double album is the way in which every piece of music is treated individually, performed at the highest level with convincing interpretations. Whether the Agrell Concerto premiere, Vivaldi’s enthralling Concerto for 2 Violins & Cello in D Minor, or any one of the commissioned works, nothing seems unfamiliar or out of place.

Two Sides is a magnificent debut from Barokkbandið Brák that will be a valuable addition to any collection, especially for those who appreciate broad and diverse repertoire within the realm of period performance.

The Americanist
Elizabeth Newkirk
Bright Shiny Things BSTC-0166 (brightshiny.ninja)

This new release of orchestral scores reduced for solo piano by Elizabeth Newkirk stakes out grounds for how American music must maintain its connection to the vernacular. Per Newkirk’s lengthy treatise in the liner notes, the mythos of America demands inclusion and recognition of popular musical idioms in the making of “serious” music. She especially points to the styles and forms developed in the African-American culture that energizes so much of today’s music. To that end, Newkirk provides three intra-bellum works that illustrate her point, all reductions of orchestral scores made by the composers themselves, and all infused with jazz and blues. 

Maurice Ravel’s reduction in some ways satisfies the way the full version can’t. In La Valse Newkirk proves herself a fine stylist, giving a more flexible version in terms of rhythm and dynamics than a conductor might ask of a full orchestra. These waltzes swoop into dips and pirouettes. (I leave it to pianists to tell me if I’m wrong about the heavy use of the sustain pedal). Gershwin’s An American in Paris is also entirely about movement. Newkirk notes that three distinct metres are assigned respectively to the American, French and British gait. (It’s so hard to believe the piece wasn’t written with Gene Kelly in mind). More than in the Ravel, I miss orchestral colours; maybe it’s just that Gershwin’s lightness needs the weight of the band, but to my mind, there’s no replacing the trumpet, the violins, the rhythm section. Their language is integral to the musical ideas.

William Grant Still’s Africa provides the substantial finale to the disc. Still’s music follows a similar aesthetic to Gershwin’s, blending Romantic tropes with blues influences. Materially, and in terms of length, it’s more substantial than the Gershwin, and more listenable, in fact. As has been noted elsewhere, there are not nearly enough recordings of his music, which makes this release so attractive. 

Newkirk’s treatise is most interesting when she leaves the rarified discussion of myth and philosophy in order to discuss how these three works fit so neatly into her thesis.

Cantius
Gail Archer
Swan Studios MM22051 (meyer-media.com)

The pipe organ has been a vital part of musical history for centuries, and there are a small number of countries that have made tremendously impactful contributions to its physical construction and musical lineage, including the German Baroque composers (culminating in the works of J.S. Bach) and the 19th- and 20th-century French school, which led to the development of the organ symphony. With a heritage dominated by musical monoliths, it is easy to forget that there is worthwhile organ music written by composers in other countries not immediately considered synonymous with the pipe organ, including the Baltic States, Russia and Poland. 

It is this latter country that receives organist Gail Archer’s full focus on Cantius, a recording which presents highlights from two centuries of Polish composers and their works, ranging from Romantic symphonies to avant-garde masterpieces. Highlights include Felix Nowowiejski’s Symphony No.8 which, although written in one movement, is in three distinct sections, including a solemn funeral march, and Henryk Górecki’s Kantata. Górecki is perhaps Poland’s most famous 20th-century composer, whose Third Symphony – “Symphony of Sorrowful Songs” achieved international recognition and established his place as one of the most important contemporary composers of the time.

Although many consider the pipe organ to be an old instrument that plays old music, there is still new material being written today, and it is wonderful to encounter a variety of 20th- and 21st-century composers and their works on Cantius, expertly interpreted by Archer. It is not an easy feat to achieve convincing performances of high-density modern scores, but she does so with apparent ease and undeniable success.

Scenes in Tin Can Alley – Piano Music of Florence Price
Josh Tatsuo Cullen
Blue Griffin BGR615 (bluegriffin.com)

American pianist Josh Tatsuo Cullen performs a respectful tribute to African-American composer Florence Price (1887-1953) in seven of her solo piano works. Price, educated at the New England Conservatory, combined European classical music with American traditions including ragtime and boogie woogie in her over 300 compositions for various instrumentations from symphonies to vocal music. Her music is currently enjoying a renaissance.

The three-movement Scenes in Tin Can Alley (1928) opens with the energetic ragtime-influenced The Huckster. Price wrote program notes for the following movement, Children at Play. Kids play to energetic sounds until a slower melodic classical/pop sound has them stop to stare at an old woman looking for food. After a short silence, she leaves and the kids play again, to fun and fast piano. Price’s notes for Night include “the scene is sordid” with slow low-pitched, faster lines and swells featuring Cullen’s beautifully articulated calming phrase endings. Cullen’s amazing performance of the most virtuosic work here, Cotton Dance (Presto) (ca.1940s), is fast fast fast with boogie woogie sounds, chromatic lines/harmonies, high pitches and classical undertones making for fun dancing and listening. In the recently discovered five short Preludes (1926-1932) Price uniquely did not use descriptive titles. Many compositional techniques here, like No.3’s Allegro molto’s faster almost songlike quality to No.4’s Wistful. Allegretto con tenerezzaI’s slower classical sound featuring Cullen’s conversational solo playing between hands.

Price’s stylistically varied compositions are accessible listening, made all the more fantastic by Cullen’s inspired and detailed piano interpretations.

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Présences Lointaines Vol. 2
Andrew Zhou
Solstice FY SOCD 394 (andrew-zhou.com)

Vladimir Jankélévitch, who lived from 1903 to 1985, was a French philosopher and musician who enjoyed a long academic career both in Prague and in Paris. He had definite ideas concerning music, among them that the art form was the only path to eternal life. Présences Lointaines – Distant Presences pays him a worthy tribute with a program of French piano music spanning a 300-year period performed by American Andrew Zhou. Zhou was a second-prize winner at the Concours International de Piano d’ Orleans and is currently a visiting lecturer at Cornell University.

Elisabeth-Claude Jacquet de la Guerre was a cousin of François Couperin and also an accomplished musician in her own right. Her seven-movement Suite in D Minor from the Pièces de Clavecin of 1707 is strong evidence of her skill as a composer and Zhou delivers an elegant and precise performance, at all times carefully nuanced.

Ravel is the only familiar composer on the disc, and his Prelude from 1913 – his shortest piece, lasting a mere minute and 13 seconds – is a languorous essay, while the Étude en blanc No.2 Élégie (Hommage à Ravel) by Didier Rotella (born in 1982) for prepared piano is hauntingly atmospheric.

Born in 1875, Antoine Mariotte spent the early part of his life as both sailor and musician. He later earned a reputation as both an operatic composer and administrator. His Piano Sonata from 1905 is very much in the French late Romantic tradition requiring formidable dexterity on the part of the performer, but Zhou handles the challenges with an uncompromising technique, bringing the disc to a rousing conclusion.

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Ludwig : vol. 3
b9 orchestra
fony (pfony.bandcamp.com)

As is heard in all his creations, John Oswald’s musical vision is remarkably original. Here, in his latest Rascali Klepitoire release, Oswald’s knowledgeable artistic creativity conquers, quotes, mimics and refigures from all nine Beethoven symphonies into a 30-minute four-movement compilation with the intent to surprise. He guides and produces his self-described  “artificial-intelligence infused” synthetic orchestra,  including winds, strings, horns, percussion and vocals, using the NotePerformer engine, produced by Wallander Instruments of Stockholm. It “includes its own sounds encompassing a large-scale modern symphonic orchestra” based on “technologies bridging the gap between samples and synthesis.”

The opening vantage is tonal, technically detailed, with strict tempos and not much volume variation except for sudden loud crashing sections. In the shortest section bade, Oswald’s bits-and-pieces collection of loud percussion, slow sections and moving string lines is an interesting cross section of his and Beethoven’s writing. Love the contrasting instrumental lines in though. In venerable, Beethoven fans will love how Oswald juxtaposes familiar fragments to make a new sound, especially from Beethoven’s famous vocals.  

Three bonus items are also included. A bootleg recording of a live b9 performance is a welcome addition with the to-be-expected real instrument subtleties also illuminating how well the synthetic orchestra version works. Concentrated following of the 44-page full musical score, prepared by John Abram, (not including an updated final page), aids listening to the whirlwind music. Oswald’s 2000-word interview discusses his creative process here.

Throughout, Oswald’s quotes and juxtapositions of his own and Beethoven’s music are incredibly smart and well produced, and they sound better and better with each repeated listening!

Landmarks
Katelyn Clark; Isaiah Ceccarelli
Another Timbre at192 (anothertimbre.com)

After reflecting on some recorded improvisations, Katelyn Clark and Isaiah Ceccarelli release an album of jointly composed works for organ and percussion. The eight tracks on the recording unfold as dreamy sonic apparitions that hypnotize and enrapture. This immersive listening experience begins with the opening track Bells – an ominous ten-minute journey of undulating sonora and distant rumbles, providing a haunting and beautiful sonic mass below relentless mid-range organ fields. 

In tracks such as Landmarks, Landforms and Chaparral, the wonderful patience and restraint in the music urges the listener to remove themselves from the immediate and to allow the sounds to untangle in the mind that hasn’t been examined or confronted. One finds sombre reprieve in Improvisation on Kyrie Eleison and Improvisation on a quarter where blurry polyphonic relics live among the hazy ashes of drone debris. The towering 20-minute Five Distances is arresting in its glacial insistence to live in a space where observable sensation lives more in imagination than in reality. 

With their sensitive and delicate playing, Clark and Ceccarelli carefully unravel a path of feral resonances where listening begins when listening ends. All in all, this release is a deeply meaningful ambient odyssey capturing slowly falling auditory masses strewn in veins of afferent emissions that circle and deliberate in the basin of the most transcendent of listening experiences.  

Visions
Pierre-Laurent Aimard; Tamara Stefanovich
Pentatone PTC5186957 (pentatonemusic.com/product/visions/)

Released on Pentatone, long-time collaborators Pierre-Laurent Aimard and Tamara Stefanovich release Visions, an album of music for two pianos centred around Messiaen’s intoxicating Visions de l’amen. With each work using the sound of bells as thematic material, a sound that often produces a mesmerizing effect, the duo certainly deliver an alluring sonic experience throughout the entirety of the release. 

Messiaen’s masterpiece is accompanied by Enescu’s Carillon Nocturne, Knussen’s Prayer Bell Sketch and a selection from Birtwistle’s massive Harrison’s Clocks. With both soloists captivating audiences around the world, this release is a treat for listeners who appreciate large works with a pianistic virtuosity. While the selected works certainly have their obvious comparisons with respect to towering vertical chords and striking timbre, each piece creates interesting and unexpected contrasts and connections – one work mapping new meaning onto another as filtered through breathtaking pianism. With each work presenting mighty musical edifices often remaining in emotional distress or ecstasy (or both), the high level of performance perfectionism reveals the importance of the overall structures without allowing the heavy emotional content to blur the composers’ poetic intentions. 

If Messiaen’s work is meant to represent hope in dark times, one can certainly use this recording as a temporary respite from the gloomy state of current affairs – the two pianists deliver with extraordinary bravura making even Messiaen’s joyful and ecstatic offerings shine with new light. 

Quiver
loadbang
New Focus Recordings FCR342 (newfocusrecordings.com)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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