Kodály – Háry János Suite; Summer Evening; Symphony in C Major
Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra; JoAnn Falletta
Naxos 8.574556 (naxos.com/CatalogueDetail/?id=8.574556)

Imagine a typical village scene in 18th-century Hungary. Recruiting army officers come to the village to enlist some strong peasant lads into the army. Free food and drinks, fun and dancing galore and the lads promptly go to sleep. But when they wake up, surprise! They find themselves soldiers in the army. The dance was the Verbunkos, a strong, rhythmic, syncopated dance that forms one of the movements of Kodaly’s Háry János Suite. Háry János is a folk hero who likes telling tall tales like defeating Napoleon’s army singlehandedly and even getting decorated by the Emperor. Kodály wrote a whole singspiel (music drama) and a suite around it beginning with a giant sneeze meaning that the whole thing is a big joke, but the music is a lot of fun.

Some highlights are the lovely glockenspiel of the Viennese Musical Clock, an amusing mock march when Napoleon gets defeated, a peaceful pastoral interlude of a lovely folk song with some simple variations where the cimbalom is featured and of course the famous Verbunkos Intermezzo, probably the best piece in the suite. The singspiel I saw performed in Budapest in the 1950s with Kodály himself present.

Kodály was composer emeritus of Hungary in the latter half of the 20th century, but he was also a tremendous educator who invented the solfege method of teaching with hand signals and to introduce music early to young children with the emphasis on singing together.

This new recording follows an earlier very successful issue of Kodály with JoAnn Falletta conducting (which I reviewed in The WholeNote April 2018). She is now much favoured by Klaus Heymann, the owner of Naxos is with a host of new recordings spreading her and her brilliant orchestra’s name all over the world.

De la lumiere aux étoiles
Aaron Tan
ATMA ACD2 2872 (atmaclassique.com/en)

There are different kinds of organ music recordings, ranging from the silly to the serious and everything in between, but it is rare to find one that is both serious and fun at the same time. Canadian organist Aaron Tan’s De la lumiere aux étoiles is just that, however, presenting serious music that is also great fun to listen to, performed at the highest level. Winner of the 2021 Canadian International Organ Competition, Tan is a multi-faceted individual, holding a PhD. in Materials Science from the University of Michigan and currently pursuing a doctorate in organ performance at the Eastman School of Music. 

Consisting of French (and French-inspired) works, this disc is a wonderful exploration of the organ and its capabilities, with music by Karg-Elert, Demessieux, Canadian composer Rachel Laurin and Louis Vierne, among others. This disc begins with Fernando Germani’s Toccata, Op.12, a joyfully busy piece that erupts into a final ecstatic outburst, and ends with Vierne’s glorious Final from his fifth Organ Symphony, one of the composer’s most joyous and thrilling final movements.

Other highlights include the endlessly quirky Sigfrid Karg-Elert’s Phantasie und Fuge, Op.39b and Laurin’s Poème symphonique pour le temps de l’Avent, each of which displays the organ of the Basilica of Our Lady Immaculate, located in Guelph, at its absolute best. Manufactured by the Casavant Frères firm of St. Hyacinthe, Quebec in 1919, this organ features a French Romantic design, including a French terrace console, as seen at the great organs of France.

The organ is a temperamental instrument; some need a performer to tame them, while others need a kind and nurturing hand. Either way, when the right performer and instrument are matched together, extraordinary music can be made, such as that found on this brilliant recording.

Chamber Works of Robert Muller-Hartmann
ARC Ensemble
Chandos CHAN 20294 (chandos.net/products/catalogue/CHAN%2020294)

Volume seven of the Music in Exile series spotlights German-Jewish composer Robert Müller-Hartmann (1884-1950), whose compositions, prior to being banned by the Nazis, had been conducted by Richard Strauss and Otto Klemperer. The works on this CD, all receiving their first recordings, were composed before 1937, when Müller-Hartmann left Germany and settled in Dorking, England, where his elder daughter had previously found employment. There, he became close friends with another Dorking resident, Ralph Vaughan Williams. Briefly interned as an “enemy alien” in 1940, he was released after Vaughan Williams interceded.

No avant-garde adventurer, Müller-Hartmann looked back to Viennese late-Romanticism for inspiration. Graceful, sentimental gemütlichkeit imbues the CD’s earliest work, the Violin Sonata, Op.5, which premiered in 1923. Similarly, the very Brahmsian Two Pieces for cello and piano – Meditation and Elegy – are warmly, earnestly expressive. Three Intermezzi and Scherzo, Op.22 for piano are affable and appealing, Brahms again invoked in Intermezzo I. Particularly charming is Müller-Hartmann’s Sonata, Op.32 for two violins, four genial, sprightly dance-like movements. While more “serious,” the String Quartet No.2, Op.38 is no less entertaining, a soulful Adagio surrounded by three movements enlivened by repeated tempo-changes and animated rhythms.

Toronto’s ARC Ensemble, under artistic director Simon Wynberg, continues to honour composers suppressed or exiled by dictatorships and war. Wynberg and the ensemble’s core musicians – violinists Erika Raum (in Op.5) and Marie Bérard, violist Steven Dann, cellist Thomas Wiebe and pianist Kevin Ahfat – surely deserved to be honoured as well.

Listen to 'Chamber Works of Robert Muller-Hartmann' Now in the Listening Room

Waves
Bruce Liu
Deutsche Grammophon (deutschegrammophon.com/en/artists/bruce-liu)

Warsaw – October 2021. Final round of the 18th International Chopin Competition. Finalist Bruce Liu totally relaxed, full of youthful exuberance and joy, performs Chopin’s Piano Concerto No.1 in E Minor. I watched this performance and was totally enchanted. It was amazing. As soon as it ended the conductor threw his arms into the air, and almost in tears embraced and kissed Liu warmly and the applause was deafening. He was a clear winner. Liu, Chinese-Canadian, from Montreal is another one of the expanding list of Canadian pianists acquiring world fame.

This is his first recording and a quite unusual one; three French composers representing three consecutive centuries. Rameau’s work is for the harpsicord, so Liu had to study an instrument without dynamics that has a certain dry, bouncy, plucking sound. The Rameau program features a Gavotte with 6 variations of ever increasing difficulty. The pianist was having fun especially with La Poule, later orchestrated by Saint-Saëns and included in his Carnival of the Animals.

Liu explains the album title Waves alluding to the sea that “always changes” refers to his approach to his pianism being fluid, flexible and always open to new ideas. The sea, however, soon manifests itself with Ravel’s Une barque sur l’ocean, a long impressionistic piece where we feel the sea in turmoil, waves splashing, throwing the little boat around. Liu is in his element here and also in Alborada del grazioso, his pièce de resistance, played with lots of charm and gaiety.

The third composer chosen by Liu is Charles-Valentin Alkan, an almost completely neglected Parisian composer/pianist who was a contemporary of Chopin and Liszt. He was a great virtuoso who could compose and play études (studies) that are 20-minutes long! As the final piece of the program Liu plays Alkan’s enormously difficult 12 Etudes in All the Minor Keys, Op.39, for the 12 notes of the chromatic scale, containing 25 variations on a simple theme. An exceptional pianistic achievement.

Linda Catlin Smith – Dark Flower
Thin Edge New Music Collective
Redshift Records TK543 (redshiftmusicsociety.bandcamp.com)

Toronto composer Linda Catlin Smith has enjoyed a long professional career attracting important commissions from soloists, ensembles, orchestras and choirs. Her strongly flavoured music has attracted increased international attention in recent years.

Founded in 2011, Thin Edge New Music Collective is dedicated to commissioning concert music and presenting the work on Toronto and international concert stages.

Dark Flower, TENMC’s freshman six-track CD, is a portrait album of Smith’s works, impeccably produced by contemporary music industry veteran David Jaeger. Seven outstanding Toronto musicians are featured: Cheryl Duvall (piano), Anthony Thompson, (clarinet), Nathan Petitpas (percussion), Ilana Waniuk (violin), Aysel Taghi-Zada (viola) and cellists Amahl Arulanandam and Dobrochna Zubek.

In a recent interview Smith reflected on her compositional process. “I often feel that the work emerges like the development of a photograph. Dark Flower [for piano, violin, viola, cello] for instance: I started with the idea of rolled low register piano arpeggiations in a bed of string chords – that was the starting point, just that one image. And that’s enough for me ….”

At 26 minutes, Dark Flower (2020) is the album’s largest work. Its contained emotion, often expressed through restrained, soft melodies, harmonies, textures and silence, achieves a delicate balance between the old – I hear Renaissance and 20th-century music echoes – and our age’s complexity. TENMC’s dedicated ensemble playing maintains an admirable equilibrium between the various musical threads throughout this masterful work’s substantial arc. 

Remarkably, the entire album sustains a sensuous, intimate mood which sometimes shades into an iciness. That may seem contradictory, yet it’s where Smith’s music ultimately flourishes.

Portrait
Cheng² Duo (cello; piano)
Centrediscs CMCCD 33223 (cmccanada.org/product-category/recordings/centrediscs)

The internationally acclaimed Canadian siblings, cellist Bryan Cheng and pianist Silvie Cheng – the Cheng² Duo – having thrillingly recorded French, Spanish and Russian repertoire, here revisit their Chinese and Canadian roots, including commissions from four composers of Asian ancestry, three of them Canadian Juno-winners and nominees.

Portrait of an Imaginary Sibling, says Dinuk Wijeratne, describes “a young person of precocious and mercurial temperament,” the cello wandering aimlessly before joining the piano in driving rhythmic abandon. Vincent Ho says his music often reflects the Canadian Prairies’ “gusting winds, birds, lakes, even the stillness of winter.” His Horizon Images begins with Prairie Song, the cello lyrically expansive over intermittent piano splashes. In Soleil différé, the cello disturbingly evokes what Ho calls “vocal wails and sighs” over irregular piano punctuations. Windstorm’s aggressive propulsion requires – and receives – extreme rapid virtuosity from both musicians.

Two short pieces by Alexina Louie – Pond Mirrors Bright Sky and Wild Horse Running – feature raucous, abrupt accents, the “horse” bucking continually until finally galloping off. American Paul Wiancko’s 23-minute Cello Sonata No.1 “Shifting Baselines,” by far the CD’s longest work, somewhat outlasts its sparse, repetitive materials.

The CD includes two 20th-century Chinese standards. The Chengs’ arrangement of Hua Yanjun’s lament, Moon’s Reflection upon a Spring, employs bent notes, glissandi and sonorities imitating traditional Chinese instruments, while their breathtaking arrangement of Huang Haihuai’s Racing Horses, replete with headlong hoofbeats and screeching whinnies, should become (if not already) the fabulous duo’s signature encore piece.

Metamorphosis
Saxophilia Saxophone Quartet
Redshift Records TK526 (redshiftrecords.org)

Saxophilia is a Vancouver-based saxophone quartet active since 1996. Metamorphosis is their second album which showcases a diverse selection of works from five Canadian composers. The title piece Metamorphosis (Fred Stride) contains four movements which demonstrate the quartet’s ability to play exciting and complex lines with great clarity and intensity. Violet Archer’s Divertimento, originally written for the Edmonton Saxophone Quartet in 1979, displays the influences of her studies with Bartók and Hindemith. The sonorities are modernist and bracing. Beatrice Ferreira’s five-movement Nightmare Fragments offers quick and delightful trips to the world of dreams. With descriptive titles like Three Witches on My Bedsheets and The Taxidermist’s Hallway, it is not surprising this piece has recently been used as a score for a short film with a burlesque dancer. 

Rodney Sharman’s Homage to Robert Schumann is a meditative piece with long tones and ghosted chord fingerings which uses the first two notes of a Schumann song as an ideé fixe. This piece is an elegant departure from most saxophone quartet works which highlight the players’ dexterity. Finally, David Branter (who plays tenor saxophone in the quartet) wrote Four Stories which conjures up the history of saxophone quartet music and includes quartal harmonies, blues, bebop and microtonal sections.

Folks’ Music
Chamber Choir Ireland; Paul Hillier; Esposito Quartet
Louth Contemporary Music Society (louthcontemporarymusicsociety.bandcamp.com/album/folks-music)

Founded in 2006, the Louth Contemporary Music Society in Dublin is a visionary Irish presenter of contemporary concert music. It’s latest album, Folks’ Music, bookends British composer Laurence Crane’s String Quartet No. 2 with substantial new choral works by Canadian composers Cassandra Miller and Linda Catlin Smith authoritatively performed by the Chamber Choir of Ireland, conducted by Paul Hillier. Then it offers the same works in a binaural mix. 

Crane’s String Quartet, eloquently played by the Esposito Quartet, mostly eschews overt dramatic gesture. Quoting classical-era cadences, he deftly deconstructs them in various ways, not neglecting to add the occasional ironic musical twist. 

In her The City, Full of People Miller uses the concluding Latin refrain from Thomas Tallis’ 16th century choral setting of Lamentations (“Jerusalem, Jerusalem, turn to the Lord your God”) as her sole text, illustrating it with dense sonic textures inspired by Tallis’ score. With the choir positioned around the audience in six groups. the voices appear to swirl around the listener. 

Smith chose numerous epigrammatic poetic fragments by Emily Dickinson, many scribbled on the backs of envelopes, for her masterful choral work Folio. From Dickinson’s deepest feelings – recorded single-mindedly on paper scraps – Smith constructed a fragmented interior monologue with themes ranging from despair to the peaceful acceptance of the final line, “This has been a beautiful day.”

Underneath the contemporary beauty and compositional complexity of Smith’s choral setting of the text, her music has a forthrightness, order and onward motion. It suits Dickinson’s own complex New England character very well.

Azrieli Music Prizes – New Jewish Music Vol.4
Sharon Azrieli;Sepideh Raissadat; Naomi Sato; Zhongxi Wu; Orchestre Metropolitain; Nicolas Ellis
Analekta AN 2 9264 (outhere-music.com/en/labels/analekta)

Prize-winning compositions by 2022 Azrieli Music Prize laureates are firmly placed within the contemporary classical music realm, yet embrace an array of cultural and musical languages. Compositional excellence and innovation are showcased abundantly here but it is a combination of the abstract and visceral elements coupled with meaningful subjects that makes these pieces stand out. 

Shāhīn-nāmeh, the song cycle by Iranian/Canadian composer Iman Habibi, opens the album in a way that is both lyrical and strong, much like its subject. Written for classical Persian soloist and Western orchestra and based on the astonishing poetry of the 14th-century Judeo-Persian poet Shah Shirazi, the composition depicts the tale of Esther and delves on the themes of love, spiritual struggle and devotion. Soloist Sepideh Raissadat’s performance (voice and setar) is enchanting; her voice laments, dances, yearns, commands and pleads, bringing the heart of humanness into focus.

The winner of the Azrieli Prize for Jewish Music, Out of the depths have I cried unto Thee, O Lord by Israeli composer and conductor Aharon Harlap, is dramatic in narrative and grand in execution. This large-scale work for orchestra and soprano uses the settings of five psalms, great musical gestures and dramatic phrasing to underscore trueness, reverence and the intensity of one’s faith. Soprano Sharon Azrieli delivers a powerful performance in collaboration with Orchestre Métropolitain and conductor Nicolas Ellis.

Rita Ueda’s Birds calling… from the Canada in You delivers quite different conceptual and musical language. Here we have a primarily atmospheric and textural piece that incorporates clusters of birdsongs of 450 bird species found in Canada. In this uniquely structured concerto for shō (Naomi Sato), suona/sheng (Zhongxi Wu) and Western orchestra, Ueda utilizes contemporary techniques to create a mesmeric environment, one that is quite distinctive and, at times, surprising.

Lutosławski – Concerto for Orchestra; Partita; Novelette
Christian Tetzlaff; Finnish RSO; Nicholas Collon
Ondine ODE 1444-2 (chandos.net/products/catalogue/OD%201444)

Witold Lutosławski is a composer we tend to forget about: not a candidate for the desert island, perhaps, but unquestionably a creator of excellent music. This disc presents three of his works for orchestra: the well-known Concerto for Orchestra from 1954 along with the Partita for Violin and Orchestra (1988) with Christian Tetzlaff as soloist, and the rarely heard Novelette completed in 1979. 

The playing under Nicholas Collon, the first non-Finn to be named music director of the Finnish Radio Symphony, brims with energy and commitment. The sound quality is outstanding: every section of the orchestra is vividly portrayed and the overall sound is balanced and warm without losing the smallest detail. Lutosławski’s mastery of drama is evident throughout, from the gripping opening of the Concerto to its Hitchcock-like finale and even in the lesser-known works on this disc. 

The Partita was written first for violin and piano in 1984 and works very well for orchestra, giving Tetzlaff ample opportunity for virtuosity with many colourful moments for the orchestra. The Novelette is a fascinating series of miniature, highly dramatic episodes placed between brutalist bookends. 

Throughout, Lutosławski shows his gift for inventive combinations and surprising turns of phrase, portrayed in complex language without ever crossing into the incomprehensible. This is dark and serious music, beautifully performed.

Olli Mustonen – Symphonies 2 & 3
Ian Bostridge; Turku Philharmonic; Olli Mustonen
Ondine ODE 1422-2 (ondine.net)

As a pianist, Olli Mustonen performed several times with the Toronto Symphony under Jukka-Pekka Saraste, always bringing a fresh and creative approach (I remember a particularly bracing version of Beethoven’s Emperor Concerto). On this disc, he displays his impressive abilities as a composer and conductor. After beginning his composition studies with Einojuhani Rautavaara at the age of eight, he has developed a style that is eclectic but quite conventional and expressive: think of a blend, perhaps, of Jean Sibelius and Benjamin Britten. It’s the sort of music that performers can really sink their teeth into and when his works are championed by the likes of Steven Isserlis and Ian Bostridge, one can rest assured that he knows what he is doing. 

The disc opens with Symphony No.3, written in 2020 featuring the lustrous and sensitive voice of Bostridge. It portrays a legend, Taivaanvalot (“Heavenly Lights”) from the epic Finnish folk tale Kalevala and is sung in English except for a brief passage in the last movement. Symphony No.2, written in 2013, is subtitled “Johannes Angelos” and is based on the 1952 novel of that name by Mika Waltari which depicts the fall of Constantinople. Both works are compact in length (about 30 minutes) and both are full of picturesque and expressive  music. Orchestrations are expert, the recording quality is superb and the players of the Turku Philharmonic are clearly enjoying themselves.

Violeta Dinescu – Solo Violin Works
Irina Muresanu
Metier mex 77106 (divineartrecords.com)

Romanian composer Violeta Dinescu’s works for solo violin are one of the biggest discoveries for me in terms of contemporary repertoire for this instrument. Her music is deeply meaningful and closely connected to literary works and philosophical concepts. It is precisely how Dinescu experiences, translates and depicts the inner musings that makes her music so captivating. The performer is seen as a storyteller and directs the flow of the pieces much like a storyteller would do – by making choices that enhance a particular phrase, action or emotion. 

Violinist Irina Muresanu shares a special rapport with Dinescu’s music, one that is perhaps based on the fact that they share a Romanian heritage and understand the musical language that is strongly tied to their homeland. Dinescu’s music, influenced by folkloric melodies, particularly the melos of traditional Gypsy music, also includes contemporary violin techniques and an array of unorthodox sounds. The space between the notes is of particular importance to both composer and performer. 

Muresanu seduces, mesmerizes and probes with her violin. Her deep, sonorous sound never lets the intensity lessen and never gives way to the technical challenges. That is particularly obvious in the opening piece Aretusa. In this composition, Arethusa, a nymph from Greek mythology (as described in Ovid’s Metamorphosis) is chased by the river God Alpheus. There is an ethereal beauty to this piece, the transcendent emerging amidst the passion, which becomes a signature mark of Muresanu’s performance on this album.

Chris Fisher-Lochhead – Wake Up the Dead
JACK Quartet; Quince Ensemble; Ben Roidl-Ward
New Focus Recordings FRC 385 (newfocusrecordings.com)

Vermont-based composer/performer Chris Fisher-Lochhead’s album Wake Up the Dead assembles six pieces of wide variety and instrumentation, including two works each for string quartet and female vocal quartet, one for mixed instrumental ensemble, and one extended work for solo bassoon.  

The album opens with stutter-step the concept, a commission by the Ensemble Dal Niente in 2016. This is a meaty introduction to Lochhead’s style of composition, and the ensemble interprets the score with commanding familiarity. An overall multi-phonic richness leaves space for irregular string solos, false harmonics and rich lower string resonances that are distributed evenly throughout the instrumentation giving a cohesiveness that sets up the rest of the album. The track Precarity Songs is a gorgeous piece for four high vocals performed by the Quince Ensemble, who also return on track five with Four Until L8, a more humourous piece with text. Track three, titled Funktionslust is performed by the JACK Quartet, and is a tightly wound collection of long tones, pizzicatos and expressive outbursts often layered simultaneously and at times stretched apart and then reduced again. The quartet takes the work in stride and makes the difficult score sound easy. 

The fourth track in the collection, Grandfather, a work for solo bassoon written for contemporary specialist Ben Roidl-Ward, is a commanding piece of extended technique bringing up the phrase New Complexity. It was illuminating to find the score online; it helped to appreciate the writing, the incredible execution of the overtones, key clicks, and vocal outburst as well as the creative and detailed notation. The final track After Bessie Smith returns with the JACK Quartet, to close the collection with an extension of Fisher-Lochhead’s signature stretching and reducing of thematic material. A very interesting album for new music and deep dissonance lovers.

Watch Over Us – Works for solo violin and electronics
Yvonne Lam
Blue Griffin BGR647 (bluegriffin.com)

The music on this album plays as if it is written by the cool composers on the block. Add to that a notion of electronic tapes as an equal musical partner and we get an album that is beaming with fresh ideas, concepts and expressions that have an edge of contemporary life. 

Missy Mazzoli, Katherine Balch, Nathalie Joachim, Anna Clyne, Eve Beglarian and Kate Moore bring a certain sort of energy and vigour to this album, one that is perhaps best described as creative confluence. These composers do not rely on traditional structure, preferring instead to forge their own, but certainly pay homage to masters of the past in various ways. Violinist Yvonne Lam is a thread that connects them all with the spirit of her performance. Lam is attuned to the intricacies of each compositional language and her interpretations have a mixture of sensibility and boldness that is rare. Above all, she brings forward the sonorousness that envelops and nurtures all the compositions.

From Rest These Hands (Clyne) that is beyond gorgeous in its sonority and melodies to Synaesthesia Suite (Moore), a concerto with a sci-fi edge for violin and synthesized violin, to Watch Over Us (Joachim), a piece that explores physical and symbolic aspects of water, the compositions here are innovative, edgy and immediate.

Yotam Haber – Bloodsnow
Talea Ensemble; Taylor Ward; Don-Paul Kahl; American Wild Ensemble
Sideband Records 11 (sidebandrecords.com)

The music of Yotam Haber impresses and shows that he is an innovative composer who seems to inhabit a space where notation meets, then crosses over into, improvisation. The music of Bloodsnow indicates that Haber is not one to shy away from subject matter that can be rather visceral in nature, such as that which is contained in two poems – one by Tahel Frosh, the other by Dorit Weisman. That may be just as well as Haber’s supple philosophical distinction between music and noise enables him to superbly articulate the sentiments and emotions of both poems that he sets to music. 

Frosh’s Oh My Bank is a polemical broadside against capitalism and Haber uses instrumentation cleverly to accentuate dramatic tensions: winds against strings with Taylor Ward’s baritone top delivering the broadside. Through it all Haber harvests mint-fresh timbres to convey the sense of the anger of Frosh’s fiery work. 

Haber’s music can also be charming in the face of tragedy as is the case with his music for. Weisman’s poem, They Say You Are My Disaster. In describing the character’s descent into the horrors of cancer he uses a wide range of sonorities to create music – both to mirror her stoicism as well as the face of raw tragedy. Bloodsnow – the song – is a modernist masterpiece. 

And while the album suggests Haber excels in music of adversity, he also shows that he is a master of songfulness.