Modern and Contemporary

Ispilu – Works for Quarter-Tone Accordion
Lore Amenabar Larrañaga
Metier mex 77108 (divineartrecords.com)

Talented accordionist Lore Amenabar Larrañaga researched and self-designed her microtonal quarter-tone accordion. The sounds are produced in both left and right hand manuals, with the range and timbres expanded by 15 right hand and 7 left hand registers. Custom built by Bugari Armando, this is her first recording playing it. She commissioned eight composers to write collaborative solo compositions to explore her organ’s capabilities between 2020 and 2022, during her PhD studies at the Royal Academy of Music.

Fleeting Puddles by Claudia Molitor is an accessible minimalist work. The sounds below water are created with fast repeated notes like ripples or waves while slower chords, subtle atonal held notes with added melodies and intriguing low-pitched notes create water stillness. My Time Is Your Time by Donald Bousted has fast, ringing high notes, detached lower chords, meditative held-notes, descending lines and held clusters separated by welcome reflective silences. Lore’s held-notes bellow control at different volumes is amazing. Feast by Mioko Yokoyama features percussive accordion hits mixed with pitched and quarter tone accented chords, glisses and lower notes. Der Stimme der Stadt composer Christopher Fox writes his work grew out of a series of bell resonances exemplified by extended rippling atonal/quarter-tone chords, repeated intervals, then slower calming held-chords with slight tonal changes and melody. Compositions by David Gorton, Electra Perivolaris, Michael Finnissy and Veli Kujala are also performed.  

Lore’s musical virtuosic performances make this a must-listen release for all.

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.