Modern and Contemporary

When Dark Sounds Collide: New Music for Percussion and Piano - Pathos Trio

When Dark Sounds Collide: New Music for Percussion and Piano
Pathos Trio
Panoramic Recordings PAN24 (newfocusrecordings.com)

These specially commissioned works are so unusual and remarkable that they demand an equal share in the limelight of this debut album, When Dark Sounds Collide by the Pathos Trio. The stunning music expertly interlaces a wide world of time and space, and musical traditions, into extraordinary repertoire for percussion and piano.

In each work, the Pathos Trio have closely collaborated with the composers – Alyssa Weinberg, Alison Yun-Fei Jiang, Finola Merivale, Evan Chapman and Alan Hankers, who is, of course, also the pianist of the trio.

This has resulted in some truly inspired performances by the members of the trio, who demonstrate – in soli as well as in ensemble – each composer’s heightened skill at conjuring a spectrum of sonic worlds. The collision of metallic, wooden and electronic percussion instruments – performed by Felix Reyas and Marcelina Suchocka – alternate, blend and often enter into outright battle with the plucked, strummed strings stretched taut across the brass frame of the concert grand piano, which is also softly hammered and variously pedalled by Hankers.

The music veers from delicate washes of sound in Jiang’s Prayer Variations and Hankers’ Distance Between Places to somewhat cataclysmic eruptions such as those that inform the mysterious strains of Merivale’s oblivious/oblivion, often punctuated by prescient and even foreboding silences. Meanwhile, the musicians also revel in the passagework – both delicate and fierce – of Chapman’s fiction of light and Weinberg’s Delirious Phenomena.

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

Allison Cameron: Somatic Refrain - Apartment House

Allison Cameron – Somatic Refrain
Apartment House
Another Timbre at196 (anothertimbre.com)

Somatic Refrain is another in the English label Another Timbre’s extensive series of recordings of contemporary Canadian composers’ works performed by Apartment House, a distinguished British ensemble dedicated to performing contemporary music. The works here, composed between 1996 and 2008, spring from different creative impulses but share a certain probing calm, a deliberated tone of sensitive inquiry, as if the pieces were already there and Cameron was examining why and revealing their graces.

Somatic Refrain (1996) is a solo piece for bass clarinet. Originally commissioned by Torontonian Ronda Rindone it’s played here by Heather Roche of Apartment House. The instrument’s extraordinary timbral possibilities have been more extensively examined in improvised music than in composition, and the intrepid Cameron explores the range of Rindone’s mastery of multiphonics, creating a piece that demonstrates the instrument’s richly expressive possibilities. H (2008) comes from a period when Cameron was exploring folk music and assembled an Alison Cameron Band in Toronto for those ends. Here she plays banjo, bass harmonica and toy piano with Eric Chenaux and Stephen Parkinson, on acoustic and electric guitars respectively, forging a folk-like lament that’s at once somber, resilient and distinctly homespun.

Similar qualities infuse the longer works performed by Apartment House. Pliny (2005) and the three-movement Retablo (1998) reflect a sensibility as much formed by the deliberated calm of medieval music as by contemporary works. The former, inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ tale Funes, the Memorius, initially invokes a serene clarity that is gradually permeated by a spreading dissonance; the latter suggests both order and mystery in a three-movement work inspired in part by Tarot cards.

An interview with Cameron discussing these pieces on Another Timbre’s website provides enriching insights into her work and the playful dimension of her creativity.

Finola Merivale: Tús - Desdemona

Finola Merivale – Tús
Desdemona
New Focus Recordings FCR327 (newfocusrecordings.com)

Finola Merivale is an Irish composer currently living in New York. Her works have been performed around the world including at the Bang on a Can festival in NYC and Vox Feminae in Tel Aviv by groups as diverse as Talea Ensemble, PRISM Saxophone Quartet and Bearthoven. Tús, which is the Irish word for “start” and the album’s five works represent ten years of Merivale’s compositions. They are performed with rigour and compassion by the Desdemona ensemble.

My favourite piece is the opening Do You Hear Me Now? The liner notes describe this as «a direct riposte to the entrenched malaise of academic music institutions.» I love the aggressive opening: with its loud and looping lines it possesses an electric and frenetic exuberance. The 17-minute work goes through many phases, is always intense and ends with a fearless finish. In contrast, The Silent Sweep as You Stand Still was composed just prior to the COVID lockdown and contains softly dissonant sections that are almost silent and louder sections that are more angular and provocative. It builds a tonal landscape which walks the listener through spaces of anxiety and unease. Merivale is an innovative composer who continues to work on her craft and Tús is an engaging collection of her work.

Daniel Janke: Body in Motion - Various Artists

Daniel Janke – Body in Motion
Various Artists
Centrediscs CMCCD 29522 (cmccanada.org/shop/cd-cmccd-29522)

Canadian composer/musician/filmmaker/media artist Daniel Janke is a respected musical creator in various artistic environs/genres. Edmonton-born, he grew up in Ontario and is now based in Whitehorse, Yukon spending time in Montreal and Berlin. Some compositions from his dancers/choreographer collaborations are featured here.

Janke perfectly balances rhythms and musical sounds in his storytelling dance works. Opening Martha Black’s Reel (1996), commissioned by Dancers With Latitude, is a fast Celtic-influenced work featuring violinist Adele Armin’s exciting legato “fiddle” lines, jumping intervals, string plucks and slight atonalities above Janke’s grounding, at times low drone, prepared piano. The four-movement String Quartet No. 2 “River” (2011) is ambiently performed by violinists Mark Fewer and Aaron Schwebel, violist Rory McLeod and cellist Amahl Arulanandam. Part 1 low- and high-pitched held notes create a meditative sound. Part 2 has tension building slightly melancholic atonal sounds and plucks. Part 3 features fast legato turning lines reminiscent of a river current. Part 4, which accompanies the short film River, is slow, dark and moody yet comforting with simultaneous low and high strings, and subtle grooves. In the Badu Dance commission Yaa Asantewaa -- Part 1 (1995), Adele and cellist brother Richard Armin play dancer friendly close, at times fragmented, conversational lines against Alan Hetherington’s ringing percussion, in another memorable recording by the late violinist, who died in June 2022 after a long battle with cancer. Virtuosic The Bells (1987) has Janke playing solo piano wide-pitched melodies/effects to closing ringing bell-like pitches.

It’s wonderful listening to dance music from Janke’s decades-long illustrious output.

Seen - Joseph Petric

Seen
Joseph Petric
Redshift Records TK519 (redshiftrecords.org)

Internationally renowned Canadian accordionist Joseph Petric is a respected solo/chamber performer. In his first full-length release since 2010, Petric performs his five commissions spanning his decades-long career, and one other work. It is illuminating to hear him here play solo accordion, and also accordion paired with electroacoustic sounds.

Petric shares compositional credit with composer David Jaeger in the opening track Spirit Cloud (2021) for accordion and electronics, a reworking of an earlier Jaeger solo cello work. An energetic wide-pitched full-reed, solo accordion beginning with fast trills and lines leads to the addition of electroacoustic soundscape effects like echoing, held tones and washes, in an equal-partner duet.

Composer Norbert Palej writes with precise instrumental understanding and purpose in the spiritually themed three-movement title work SEEN (2019). Petric’s amazing bellows control shines in legato single-note melodies, and challenging high/low pitched contrasts. Robert May’s Fadensonnen (1994) is another exploration of varying accordion colour and meditative dynamics. Peter Hatch’s Pneuma (1986) is an interesting blend of accordion and electronics, from faint electronic high tones, rock-groove-like accents and held tones matching the acoustic accordion sound. There’s more traditional electronic washes, rumbles and echoing with driving accordion repeated detached chords in Erik Ross’ Leviathan (2008).

The closer, Torbjörn Lundquist’s Metamorphoses (1964), is the only work not commissioned by Petric. A classic virtuosic solo accordion piece from the past, Petric plays many fast runs, accented chords, accelerando and short, almost-film-music sections with colourful ease.

All in all, great accordion sounds!

David Tudor: Rainforest IV - Composers Inside Electronics

David Tudor – Rainforest IV
Composers Inside Electronics
Neuma 158 (neumarecords.org)

American avant-garde pianist turned electronic composer, David Tudor’s masterwork Rainforest had a long gestation. Beginning in 1968 Tudor created four distinct versions culminating in 1974 when he gathered a group of eager young composers, musicians, circuit benders and maverick solderers to form a “family” of collaborators. They called themselves Composers Inside Electronics (CIE).

Tudor’s initial concept was deceptively simple: a collection of mostly everyday objects are suspended in space and set into audible vibration by small electromagnetic transducers. Each object responds to input audio signals in idiosyncratically non-linear, unpredictable, changing ways. Serving as acoustic filters, the objects modify the sounds electronically fed into them.

As a visitor to Rainforest IV‘s Canadian premiere at York University in February 1975, I recall walking into the installation. The exhibition space was populated by transformed sculptural loudspeakers, the acoustic environment eerily evoking Tudor’s descriptive title.

The CIE performance of Rainforest IV on this album was taped in 1977 at the Center for Music Experiment in San Diego. We’re greeted by a dense aural ecosystem of twittering, squawking and chattering sounds reminiscent perhaps of nighttime insects, amphibians, bird calls and choruses. Clanging, clicking, whistling, sustained underwater and alien sounds slowly crossfade during the record’s almost 69 minutes.

The scene was vividly captured by two musicians, who traversed slowly through the space, wearing binaural microphones on their heads. While not a definitive documentation of the work, listened to with headphones this evocative binaural recording is as close as you can get without being in the space. There’s something magical in Tudor’s synthetic forest of sight and sound.