Modern and Contemporary

Lei Liang – Hearing Landscapes/Hearing Icescapes
Lei Liang
New Focus Recordings FCR360 (newfocusrecordings.com) 

Lei Liang’s disc Hearing Landscapes/Hearing Icescapes could easily have opened with the voice of Captain Kirk of the Starship Enterprise as it sets off to “go where no man has ever gone before.” With a sense of deep mysticism and a philosophical and artistic leap, Liang has first pierced the celestial dome of the sky and then returned to plumb the roar of the deep. 

On the riveting works of this album the composer has created a sonic diptych that beckons the listener to traverse with him from celestial heights to oceanic depths. In the first work – Hearing Landscapes – Liang takes off from the terrestrial promontory guided by the invisible hand (brush, really) of Huang Binhong, a fin de siècle painter, whose landscapes prove inspirational. 

On the opening movement of the work the composer also gives wing to a Chinese folk song sung by the celebrated Zhu Zhonglu from Qinghai, in Northwestern China. The mournful lyric gives way to the jagged soundscape of electronics, becoming eerily speech-like at one point in the second movement, ultimately evaporating by the end of the final part of the work. 

Liang, though, is far from done and the album continues in the raspy rustling of Hearing Icescapes, constructed around field recordings made literally 300 metres below the surface of the Chuckchi Sea north of Alaska. On paper this sounds impenetrable. Nevertheless, the performance of the whole score carries its powerful physical weight, obviating the necessity of narrative clarity.

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Steve Reich – Music for 18 Musicians
Colin Currie Group; Synergy Vocals
Colin Currie Records CCF0006 (colincurriegroup.com/the-music) 

Minimalist music is a late arrival. We owe Steve Reich a debt of gratitude for freeing our ears of the tired refrains of the past. And just in time. Alex Ross recently wrote that Max Richter’s exhalations “exude a gentle fatalism, a numbed acquiescence. Don’t worry, be pensive.” But where Richter’s music lulls, Reich’s stimulates. While we refer to Music for 18 Musicians as minimalist, it certainly doesn’t bear easy reductive analysis. There’s a LOT going on, and on, and on, the timing of the changes cunningly satisfying our love of regularity. Reich’s own breakdown of the piece is included in the liner notes, an additional treasure, a revelation of his process.

What to say about the playing and the production values? Both sound great in my headset, where it seems like they belong. Instruments and voices ranged about me, colours pass by on parade. I would love to hear this live, but I’d be distracted thinking about how tired the players are halfway through the 14 subparts, which run nonstop for just over an hour. I’d be envious, too, wanting to be up there working in the same groove. And no doubt I’d have a crush on at least one of the vocalists way sooner than half-way.

Recorded at Abbey Road Studios in 2022, Swingle-y sung by Synergy Vocals and battened down by the Colin Currie Group, there must be at LEAST 18 of them, just going for it. Put it on and forget it. Waltz through the chores and cares, in time and rhythm, see if you don’t feel better about the dusting or the sorting of the laundry. Or if you have the luxury of leisure, put it on and slip into couch-lock mode: be massaged, be refitted, recreated. Let the shifting shades and steady pulse iron out the folds in your psyche. Go about your day, propelled and sustained.

Mahler | Guđnadóttir | Elgar – Music from and inspired by the Motion Picture Tár
Cate Blanchett; Sophie Kauer; Dresdner Philharmonie; London Contemporary Orchestra; London Symphony Orchestra
Deutsche Grammophon 486 3431 (deutschegrammophon.com/en/catalogue/products/tar-hildur-gunadottir-12805)

Hildur Guđnadóttir – Women Talking
Various Artists
Decca B0037031-02 (shop.decca.com/artist.html?a=hildur_gudnadottir)

Listening to and critiquing music written for film – in other words, a “soundtrack-only” compact disc – especially without having seen the film(s) in question – comes with not insignificant challenges. This is something score composers and film directors think about; certainly directors Todd Field (Tár) and Sarah Polley (Women Talking), and Hildur Guđnadóttir (who is credited with composing both soundtracks). Why, even eager record labels think about this. Field knows this all too well and alludes to it in his booklet notes for Tár, positing that listening to the music for the film without having it seen it can, indeed, be an altogether unforgettable experience: “Simply sit back and listen to the wonderful artistry on these tracks” he beckons. For the record, Polley hasn’t offered an opinion on booklet notes to the disc relating to Women Talking, but it is highly unlikely that she would disagree.  

Moreover, it is difficult enough to compose music; to put together a truly great soundtrack for one film, let alone two. However, the inimitable Icelandic composer Guđnadóttir has done just that. Leonard Bernstein, who would know what composing for film was like, once used the words: “most awesome” to describe a celebrated effort by Igor Stravinsky for the film Oedipus Rex. He might have handed down the same judgement for Guđnadóttir’s too, for she has succeeded in conveying astute ideas and observations about humanity with exacting drama and in truth I, for one, would go further and suggest that this is exactly what Aristotle demanded of art and artists in his Poetics: he regarded this exact kind of artistic integrity as a model of formal dramatic perfection. Guđnadóttir’s soundtracks bring out that (Aristotelian) truth of both films with uncommon perfection. 

In the case of the soundtrack for Tár, riveting drama is maintained throughout, thanks to snippets of dialogue from the film that are interspersed with the music. This is enhanced by cutting into a musical sequence, or better still, taking Cate Blanchett’s dialogue relating to musical direction during rehearsals and overlaying it on the score – particularly poignant in the rehearsals of Mahler’s Symphony No.5 in C-sharp Minor. This device is also repeated to great effect in the recording of Elgar’s Cello Concerto in E Minor Op.85. The use of this during poignant bits of dallying, repeated phrases in the Largo movement of Tár is similarly affecting. 

Meanwhile, for ardent lovers of the cello, the genius of the young cellist, Sophie Kauer shines bright everywhere, suggesting that she could hold court with the finest – Misha Maisky, Yo-Yo Ma, Steven Isserlis and Jacqueline du Pré, notwithstanding the fact Du Pré’s high watermark recording of the Elgar occupies so prominent a place (in cello literature and) on this recording. Kauer’s dolorous lines in the performance of Mahler’s Symphony No. 5 is further proof of her prodigious craft. And then there are the choice bits of Blanchett (as actor) during the Bach piece and Elisa Vargas Fernandez’s beautifully forlorn Cura Mente. I could go on ad infinitum.

The ingenuity of Guđnadóttir’s score for Polley’s film Women Talking is of quite another kind. Here the composer uses a more contemporary musical vernacular – enhanced by a sweeping colour palette – to alternatively darken and brighten the despair contained within the film. For instance, Guđnadóttir makes particularly emotional use of the radiant sound of bells, contrasting this with the lonesome sound of pizzicato guitar lines. This music provides us with a sense of time and place, and setting for the unfolding drama, just as (once again) the use of a desolate sounding cello takes us to a place of loneliness and foreboding.

Clearly the challenge here is not only to provide colour and context in cinematic proportions, but in two or three minutes – or sometimes in mere seconds – to express a nuanced mood or emotion and to do it in a manner that is almost symphonically dramatic and trance-like. Guđnadóttir’s compositional style does all these things in both scores. Finally, both films are unmissable and so experiencing these soundtracks whilst watching them would almost certainly take you into whole new worlds. But that is quite another story.

Maxime Goulet – Symphonie de la tempête de verglas (Ice Storm Symphony)
Orchestre Classique de Montréal; Jacques Lacombe
ATMA ACD2 2866 (atmaclassique.com/en)

January 1998 – a meteorological disaster leaves millions across eastern Ontario, southern Quebec, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia without power, many for weeks. It’s recalled now in the 40-minute Ice Storm Symphony by Maxime Goulet (b. Montreal 1980). (Titles appear in French and English; I’ll give the English.)

Turmoil describes the storm with icy crackles, surging rhythms, crescendoing dissonances and pounding percussion. In Warmth, a raucous Quebec folk dance represents people finding refuge with others having access to fireplaces or electricity. Goulet wants the lights off during performances of the sombre, spookily pulsating music of Darkness to evoke “the feeling of ultimate vulnerability that seized us during those dark nights.” Returning lights, fanfares and tolling bells in Light celebrate the restoration of “normal life,” a happy ending to this vivid, colourful symphony.

Two shorter works by Goulet employ theatrical visual effects, described in the booklet. The cinematically scored, 13-minute What a Day, using ticking clocks, conflates one day with an entire lifetime, from Joyful Morning (birth) to Long Day at Work, Tête-à-Tête Evening and Serene Night (death). The nine-minute Fishing Story for clarinet (here, Kornel Wolak) and strings, inspired by Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, veers from moody waves and seagull cries to repeated slapstick splashes.

These works, all commissioned by Orchestre classique de Montrėal, are spiritedly conducted by Jacques Lacombe. Goulet dedicates this CD to the late Boris Brott, who conducted the premieres of What a Day and Fishing Story.

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