A Tribute to Telemann
La Spagna; Alejandro Marias
Lukos Records 5451CRE80843 (laspagna.es)

Describing Georg Philipp Telemann’s achievements as prolific is a gross understatement: his compositions numbered over 3,000. La Spagna selects five from this enormous output, aiming to restore Telemann to the highest ranks of composers.

The first Ouverture-Suite for viola da gamba, strings and continuo is quintessentially French, comprising several traditional French Baroque movements. Telemann had access to pieces by the French composer Lully, as well as a great love for the viola da gamba (for which he composed frequently). The enthusiasm of the solo violinists who play on period, if anonymous, violins is key to this opening piece, especially the Gigue.

The Concerto for recorder, viola da gamba, strings and continuo which follows is inspired by Telemann’s scoring for recorder, in this case copying an instrument by the renowned Thomas Stanesby. Listen in particular to the Dolce and Allegro as interpreted by Alvaro Marías. Though the recorder was under pressure as an instrument from the transverse flute at the time, Telemann continued to believe in its rich, sonorous sound.

In the essentially Italian Concerto grosso, La Spagna takes the liberty of writing an additional part for the second tutti (non-solo) violins. Here once again the demands of two literally lively (Vivace) movements are met cheerfully – the two solo violins absolutely sparkle.

And so to the Ouverture-Suite Burlesque de Quixotte. Telemann composes a day of events inspired by Cervantes’ masterpiece, from Quixote’s waking, his assault on the windmills, his advances on Princess Dulcinea and retiring for the night. The assault comprises a vigorous twirling of violins personifying Quixote’s bravado; the advance’s somewhat languid string-playing indicates another failure for Quixote. You begin to feel sorry for him – but invigorated by La Spagna’s tribute to Telemann.

Beethoven – Symphonies 5 & 7
New York Philharmonic; Jaap van Zweden
Decca Gold B0027956-02 (deccagold.com)

What better way of celebrating a new partnership between a record label and a renowned American orchestra than music by Beethoven? The label in question – Decca Gold, Universal’s new classical music label – recently joined forces with the esteemed New York Philharmonic to present a series of live recordings under the direction of Jaap van Zweden, who assumes the official role of music director in September 2018. This recording is the first in the projected series and features Beethoven’s Symphonies Five and Seven, recorded in 2014 and 2015.

The two symphonies were indeed excellent choices for this premiere recording. As clichéd as the opening measure of the Fifth Symphony has become (“fate knocking at the door”), the work’s theme of tragedy to triumph still has the power to move the most impartial listener, and the NYP delivers a polished and compelling performance. Tempos – particularly in the first movement and the finale – are brisk (perhaps brisker than we’re accustomed to), but the third movement is all lyricism before the exuberant finale.

Wagner once described the Symphony No.7 as “the apotheosis of the dance” and under van Zweden’s baton, this performance is a joyful dance indeed. The warmth of the NYP strings is particularly evident in the second-movement Allegretto while the finale – a true tour de force – is treated with great bravado.

While both these symphonies have long been considered standard repertoire, van Zweden and the NYP breathe new life into them, approaching each with a particular freshness and vitality. These performances easily hold their place alongside more established recordings and if they are any indication, the soon-to-be pairing of van Zweden and the NYP will be a formidable one indeed. Highly recommended.

Flute Passion: Schubert
Nadia Labrie; Mathieu Gaudet
Analekta AN 2 8787 (analekta.com)

Flutist Nadia Labrie and pianist Mathieu Gaudet’s all-Schubert CD begins with a transcription of the intensely and ominously dramatic Arpeggione Sonata. The quiet simplicity and dignity of Gaudet’s solo opening of the first movement is carried forward by Labrie’s velvet sound, exquisite phrasing and moments of rubato, which convey a brooding feeling of inevitably encroaching doom. She plays the hymn-like second movement with a simplicity and directness which is both heartrending and deeply satisfying.

The second part of the program consists of lieder transcriptions, mostly from Die Schöne Müllerin. There are some wonderful moments in these eight miniature masterpieces, most notably the meshing of the artists’ vision in the counterpoint of Ständchen (from Schwanengesang). However, there is also the unfortunate intrusion at times of that “flutistic” mannerism of changing tone colour in the middle of a note for no good reason and the missed opportunity to use contrasting colours for the two characters in Der Müller und der Bach.

The third and final component is the Introduction and Variations on Trockne Blumen, composed for flute and piano by Schubert himself. While both artists are brilliant here, the poignant darkness of the song (“...the flowers...she gave me...shall be laid with me in the grave.”) could have been more effectively brought to life by greater contrast in tempo and a less dance-like interpretation of the melody. Nevertheless, this CD has a lot going for it. Gaudet and Labrie are both virtuosos who work well together. I’m sure we will hear more from them.

Brahms – Symphony No.2
Stavanger Symphony Orchestra; Thomas Zehetmair
SSO Recordings 3816-2 (www.sso.no)

This disc arrived in a simple but elegant package, but without any program notes or promo blurb, save basic info and credits. Listening to it, however, with an open mind and ear, it made me fall in love with the piece all over again and made me wonder how this very familiar work could have been played to death in concerts so much that once a friend said to me at intermission:” Janos, do you really expect me to sit through another Brahms Second?!” and left.

Sometimes dubbed the Pastoral, in sunny D Major, this most congenial of Brahms’ four symphonies is found here in the hands of Thomas Zehetmair. A noted Austrian concert-violinist-turned-conductor, Zehetmair’s background becomes immediately apparent in the delicately handled, caressing string tone right at the beginning of the symphony when the main theme first insinuates itself, and in how lovingly and expressively he handles the strings throughout the symphony. But he is also a gifted conductor with great musical insight, imagination and intuition, plus an ability to get into the composer’s mind, making sure that everything written down is heard. I was discovering passages I haven’t heard before or hearing them differently, like the flute playing merrily over the famous string tune second subject in the first movement. We rediscover Brahms’ masterly skill at counterpoint that came from his years of studying Bach. And experience the thrill of that magisterial fourth movement as it simply explodes from mysterious, whispering strings and is driven joyfully to a triumphant ending.

The Stavenger Symphony of Norway is a dedicated group of superb instrumentalists who have an intuitive chemistry with their conductor. Previously they recorded on the Swedish BIS label famous for its demonstration quality sound, but with this stellar CD they launched their own SSO Recordings and we wish them continued success.

Prokofiev – Romeo and Juliet
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra; Marin Alsop
Naxos 8.573534-35 (naxos.com)

The Soviet composer Sergei Prokofiev’s ambitious and beautiful ballet Romeo and Juliet continues to be loved by audiences the world over, not only for its musical beauty and scope of ambition, but for the universality of its original narrative theme, taken from William Shakespeare’s play of the same name. Love – unrequited, tragic, desired, mutual, romantic – is a topic that clearly has not been exhausted by the creative commentators among us, and audiences seem to have an unquenchable thirst for works that tackle this subject.

Naxos Records is a Hong Kong-based company that, while championing digital distribution, continues to release high quality classical music in physical form, somehow managing to stave off the demise of physical product that has so impacted most other record labels. And good for us. This 2018 CD release of an October 2015 performance in the acoustically rich Meyerhoff Hall captures the very fine Baltimore Symphony under the direction and leadership of conductor Marin Alsop. Having led the Symphony since 2007, and recently given a contract extension until 2021, Alsop is a dynamic conductor whose intentional and forceful style once again brings out an exhilarating and striking performance from this ensemble.

The highlights from Prokofiev’s original ballet are many and the world most certainly has enough piecemeal assemblages of these greatest hits. With this recording, however, we have another fine complete capture of this most beautiful work that successfully balances the effervescent and playful bounce of dance with the drama, passion and ultimately Act IV darkness of Shakespeare’s original text. Recommended.

Maria de Alvear: De puro amor & En amor duro
Eve Egoyan, piano
World Edition 0033 (world-edition.com)

It’s been over 20 years since Canadian pianist Eve Egoyan gave the North American premieres of De puro amor (Of Pure Love) and En amor duro (In Hard Love) by Maria de Alvear. After hearing those performances, de Alvear, an innovative Spanish composer, performer and multimedia artist, composed three works for Egoyan. In 2001 Egoyan recorded one of those, Asking. Now, on this stunning new two-disc set, come De puro amor and En amor duro.

In her scores, de Alvear likes to give performers the freedom to make decisions about elements as fundamental as rhythm, metre and dynamics. With her fearless imagination, boundless sense of adventure and brilliant technique, Egoyan pushes beyond what seems possible on the piano. Floating melodies, expressive rhythmic shapes and ringing intervals plucked from the harmonic series weave a contemplative mood in both works, though disruptive undercurrents do intermittently surface.

De Alvear is a charismatic figure in the world of experimental music, especially in Germany, where she now lives. But her music is so personal that it either speaks to you or it doesn’t. For me, it does. I love the honesty, the passion and the openness, which lead her to colourful titles like Sexo and Vagina to evoke the more intimate aspects of love.

This set features drawings by de Alvear’s sister and frequent performance partner, Ana de Alvear, and booklet notes by Tim Rutherford-Smith, who has just published a groundbreaking book on contemporary music, Music After the Fall.

Gyula Csapó: Déjà? Kojâ?
Quatuor Bozzini
Collection QB CQB 1821 (actuellecd.com)

Founded in 1999, Quatuor Bozzini are distinguished interpreters of contemporary repertoire, including fine recordings of John Cage, James Tenney and Steve Reich. Here they present a particularly challenging work, a three-part, 73-minute piece composed between 2011 and 2016 by Gyula Csapó, a Hungarian composer currently teaching at the University of Saskatchewan. His music suggests the influences (including scale and depth) of Morton Feldman and Arvo Pärt. Csapó’s brief note about this work is dauntingly abstract (“event-fossils,” “fractals”), but the core is in the title, Déjà? Kojâ? part French, part Persian: “Already?” is easy. “Kojâ?” comes with a poem that suggests “Threshold” as the crucial sense, and that this world is a threshold, the beginning of another experience or existence, a step both inevitable yet deferred.

The work is monumental, developing thick, often dissonant textures. Its long first section is anchored to a repeating oscillation, brief but slow, between low-register cello and viola and high, reedy violins. Seconda Parte is more varied, adding other sonic devices, including moving the contrast of registers to pizzicato lows and whistling harmonic glissandi from the violins. Terza Parte eventually expands the oscillating figures into a still minimalist, but gradually evolving melodic shape.

It’s a demanding work, a dark reverie that suggests anticipation while dramatizing its delay, a sombre meditation shot through with bright highs that are themselves dissonant. At once static and tumultuous, this is depth experience, rewarding all the attention one can give it.

Dmitri Tymoczko – Rube Goldberg Variations
Flexible Music; Atlantic Brass Quintet; Amernet String Quartet
Bridge Records 9492 (bridgerecords.com)

Mid-career American composer and music theorist Dmitri Tymoczko’s music exhibits an attractive blend of jazz, Romanticism and rock, as well as influences from film and cartoon soundtracks. Demonstrating sonic imagination and frequent nods to past composers, his work appears to be equally at home in the American concert hall modernist and popular music streams, a compositional style which has been dubbed polystylistic.

Rube Goldberg Variations, the central work on this album, refers both to a certain J.S. Bach keyboard work, and to the American cartoonist known for his illustrations of machines designed to perform simple tasks in baroque, convoluted ways. The four-movement, 19-minute Variations is scored for brass quintet and prepared piano. In its movement titles Tymoczko refers to his musical ancestor Igor Stravinsky, to kinetic sculpture and to his experiences of fatherhood. Rhythmically and sonically engaging, the prepared piano part in the first movement, To a Leaf, refers to its inventor John Cage. The brass quintet flutters along with idiomatic fanfare-like wind polyphony contrasted by contrapuntal brassy sustained chords. Stravinsky Fountain is another effective movement, with its shards of jazz in a syncopated early-20th-century style, and references to the dedicatee composer’s adoption of it in his concert works. This single movement is a satisfying complete musical statement.

The other album works, S Sensation Something (string quartet and piano) and I cannot follow… (chamber ensemble), are more conventional in instrumentation and form. They are not however without the melodic invention and easygoing charm with which Tymoczko brands his mature scores.

Morton Feldman – For John Cage
Erik Carlson; Aleck Karis
Bridge Records 9498 (bridgerecords.com)

For John Cage (1982) scored for piano and violin is late-period Morton Feldman (1926-1987). That typically means a very lengthy work in a single continuous movement – more than 71 minutes in this recording – that explores a glacially paced musical development and very quiet sound levels.

In a 1982 lecture Feldman asked, “Do we have anything in music … that just cleans everything away?” For John Cage offers his answer. A tribute to one of Feldman’s most enduring personal and professional relationships, it’s a platform for his musical concerns at the time. These include translating meaningful visual and textural effects he found in Turkish regional carpets into musical patterns and sonic gestures. The two musicians, violinist Erik Carlson and pianist Aleck Karis, render the composer’s ideas with precision and delicacy in equal measure.

Feldman was a frequent visitor to Toronto during the 1970s when he taught at the University of Buffalo. Later he married his Canadian composition student Barbara Monk, who established a home in midtown Toronto where she held soirees after her husband’s death. While attending two of these soirees, I was particularly fascinated by the walls covered with kilim carpets, a physical reminder of a source of Feldman’s late period inspiration.

Leaning toward a minimalistic aesthetic in its use of subtly varied melodic phases and a restrained abstract formalism, don’t expect tunes you can hum along with, or grooves to tap your toes to here. While this music will be challenging for some listeners, I personally find it a searching, engaging and rewarding listen.

Wind Concertos: Ticheli; Warnaar; Ranjbaran
James Zimmermann; Leslie Norton; Érik Gratton; Nashville Symphony; Giancarlo Guerrero
Naxos 8.559818 (naxos.com)

Three very different, recent (2010-2015), ear-catching concertos in the traditional fast-slow-fast three movements, by three composers born in the 1950s, each referencing earlier music, receive vibrant performances from Nashville Symphony principals James Zimmermann (clarinet), Leslie Norton (horn) and Érik Gratton (flute).

In his Clarinet Concerto, Frank Ticheli, who teaches at the University of Southern California, pays homage to American composers in movements titled Rhapsody for George, Song for Aaron and Riffs for Lenny, adding some recognizable quotations and paraphrases to flavour his original, engaging takes on his illustrious predecessors. It’s a pops concert natural!

Michigan native Brad Warnaar wrote his Horn Concerto for the instrument he played in the Toronto Symphony and other Ontario orchestras in the 1970s, before relocating to play in the Los Angeles Philharmonic and, he claims, “over a thousand film scores.” Warnaar says his concerto embraces everything from rock to atonality, but I hear only very accessible, enjoyable, tonal mainstream music in the minimalist-energized Tintinnabulations, the ruminative Elegies, Lamentations and the jaunty Tarantella, including subtle quotations from Mozart, Brahms and Richard Strauss.

Juilliard faculty member Behzad Ranjbaran, born and raised in Iran, emulates what he calls the “mystic, melancholic” tone of the ney (Persian end-blown reed flute), enhancing the exoticism of his hybrid Iranian-Western Flute Concerto. Extended meditative passages (the Adagio cantabile is a real beauty) are offset by the sparkling finale.

These world-premiere recordings should help all three very entertaining concertos become, deservedly, part of today’s active repertoire.

Lézardes et zébrures
Bernard Falaise
Ambiances Magnétiques AM 237 (actuellecd.com)

Guitarist Bernard Falaise is a significant contributor to Montreal’s musique actuelle movement, a member of the expansive Ensemble SuperMusique as well as the trio Klaxon Gueule and Quartetski, a group that regularly re-imagines high modernist composers like Bartók and Stravinsky. Lézardes et zébrures is a solo record, but one without solos, a series of pieces constructed from minimal materials. Each begins with short figures, intervals and arpeggios played on an acoustic guitar in open tunings to emphasize steel string resonance and ringing harmonics; these are then looped, with Falaise adding layers of other instruments, among them electric guitar, glockenspiel and melodica.

The opening Au zoo sets both a pattern for the music and an intermittent theme, one that’s reflected in titles like Langue de girafe and Mémoire d’éléphant, and even in the CD title – literally “cracks and welts” but with the bi-lingual suggestion in this context of lizards and zebras. These notions of other species’ consciousness are matched with alternative substances and spaces – Marcher sur la glace or Stalactites et stalagmites – all of them implicit in sounds that repeat and reconfigure. All of Falaise’s works here are at once immediate, luminous and strangely dream-like.

The oscillating figure of Le compas dans l’œil suggests Steve Reich’s minimalism, while the clicks and suspensions of Distillations reference the turntablist’s art, but it’s all part of Falaise’s bright, immediate, sonic universe, developed at greatest length in the imagination of another materiality in Porcelaine 360°.

Plus One
Dan Pugach Nonet
Unit Records UTR 4816 (unitrecords.com)

Israeli-born, Berklee-educated drummer Dan Pugach’s debut bandleader album, Plus One, recorded in Brooklyn and released on the Swiss label Unity Records, is a compelling offering that functions both as a celebration of diverse influences and as a unified statement of artistic intent. Plus One is a nonet record, and Pugach arranged (or co-arranged, with vocalist Nicole Zuraitis) all of the album’s nine tracks, the majority of which – with the exception of Jolene, Crystal Silence and Love Dance – are original compositions.

Brooklyn Blues, the opening track, is a fitting beginning for the album, as it showcases Pugach’s confluent interests: while the harmonic and textural choices may be Brooklyn, the song is anchored by a classic New Orleans second-line rhythmic feel. The influence of modern large-ensemble composers such as Maria Schneider is evident on the 7/4 Coming Here, a driving, lyrical Pugach original, which features a powerful trumpet solo from frequent Schneider collaborator Ingrid Jensen, as well as great solo work from tenor saxophonist Jeremy Powell and, in the song’s final section, from Pugach himself. Our Blues, an original 12/8 blues that recalls Bonnie Raitt as much as it does Charles Mingus, is a tongue-in-cheek piece that features Zuraitis’ strong vocals. The exciting, medium-up Discourse This! ends the album, with great solos from alto saxophonist Andrew Gould, trumpeter David Smith and Pugach. Plus One is a robust, intelligent debut, and is as notable for its arrangements as it is for its top-tier playing.

Listen to 'Plus One' Now in the Listening Room

Dance Hall
Jerry Granelli
Justin Time JTR 8606-2 (justin-time.com)

Listening to this marvellous recording by drummer Jerry Granelli, one cannot help but be seduced by the mood and atmosphere – sometimes genuinely spooky – and with the drummer’s sublime ability to coordinate shade and structure to a rare degree. Every one of the eight pieces here is played by Granelli with languid ease, each rhythmic variation following the other inexorably, from the bluesy brilliance of Boogie Stop Shuffle to the sinister elegance of Driva Man.

As if things could not get any more perfect, guitarists Bill Frisell and Robben Ford team up with Granelli and his son and bassist J. Anthony Granelli to sculpt and shape the sustained inventions of The Great Pretender, Caldonia and other pieces with endless craftsmanship, beguiling variety and sensuousness.

The power and stylishness of this music makes this a champagne disc, full of fizz and finesse. It is also music of enormous drama, full of glinting lights, mysterious depths, expectations, frustrations, hopes and doubts, like the shattered shadows of a sinister quasi-existential soundtrack to life glimpsed by moonlight in a forest. There’s an unhurried quality to this approach, a lived-in character to the rhythmic phrase-making that is endlessly engaging, as the fire and brimstone of youth is melded with the well-honed values of experience.

In sheer colour and variety, in the exceptional refinement of its musicianship, Granelli here imparts a monumental stature to the eternal blues, seemingly played in the shadows of the Dance Hall.

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Gord Mowat’s Skeleton Crew
Gordon Mowat; Chris Gale; Rececca Hennessy; Jeff Halischuk; Tom Richards
Independent (gordonmowat.com)

Gord Mowat’s Skeleton Crew is, as the title suggests, the debut album from bandleader Gord Mowat’s band Skeleton Crew, which includes trumpeter Rebecca Hennessy, tenor saxophonist Chris Gale, trombonist Tom Richards, drummer Jeff Halischuk, and Mowat, who, in addition to playing upright bass, is the sole composer and arranger of the album’s six tunes. The group is notable for its lack of piano, guitar, or other traditional chord-playing instrument, aligning itself with a rich lineage of “chordless” small ensembles that hearkens back to the Gerry Mulligan/Chet Baker recordings of the early 1950s.

For Skeleton Crew, the choice of instrumentation is a winning one, as it foregrounds both Mowat’s compositional prowess and the individual voices of each band member, resulting in an engaging, nuanced approach to music-making that places the emphasis on communication and group interplay, rather than on individual heroism. Nomads, the album’s first track, begins with a rubato section in which all five band members gradually enter, exploring the space and bringing things to a small climax before Mowat plays a propulsive figure and Gale comes in with the melody, effectively setting the tone for the rest of the album. The through-composed Spinnaker is both the album’s longest song and one of its highlights: it features a beautiful melodic treatment by Mowat and Hennessy, strong solos from Gale, Hennessy and Halischuk, and is structured much like a suite. Skeleton Crew is a confident, well-executed album with a clear concept, ably realized by accomplished players.

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More Songs About Error and Shame
Peripheral Vision
Independent STEP3-007 (peripheralvisionmusic.com)

More Songs About Error and Shame is the fourth CD release from Peripheral Vision. Group leaders, guitarist Don Scott and bassist Michael Herring, wrote all seven tracks and are joined by Trevor Hogg on tenor saxophone and Nick Fraser on drums. They state the title is a reference to an “iconic album by famously neurotic band, Talking Heads” and it illustrates their desire to mix genres and themes along with different types of jazz and popular music.

The tunes are as inventive as their titles (e.g. The Blunder, Syntax Error, Click Bait) and each track evolves through melodic statements, repeated riffs, solos, duets and solid ensemble playing. The music sounds like elaborate conversations which ebb and flow, growing heated and then reflexive. For example, Mycelium Running begins with a lyric sax melody, develops into a lively interchange among sax, guitar and drums, followed by a long, lilting guitar solo and a pensive solo saxophone; then the rest of the band enters and it builds to a loud and majestic ending.

Scott’s guitar mixes inventive lines, chord melody and even some grunge/fuzz tones. Fraser’s drumming is always inventive and here he provides an engaging and shifting background to the mix of ensemble and solo playing. Hogg’s playing is clean, focused and versatile while Herring’s bass work is subtle, grooving and complex. More Songs is an inventive album with unique performances and a sense of humour.