Modern and Contemporary

Leo Ornstein – Piano Quintet; String Quartet No.2
Marc-André Hamelin; Pacifica Quartet
Hyperion CMA68084

Why has there been a revival of music by composer/ pianist Leo Ornstein (1893-2002)? From early groundbreaking piano pieces onward, his was an extraordinary (and extraordinarily long!) musical life. In 1906 his family emigrated from Russia to the United States where he trained as a piano virtuoso, but after an amazing start he gave up concertizing. His father was a cantor and Ornstein’s Russian-Jewish musical heritage came to the fore. In a modernist context it permeates the Piano Quintet (1927), which I think ranks in quality with the Shostakovitch and Bloch quintets for piano and string quartet. The tempestuous opening movement typifies Ornstein’s rhapsodic process of linking varied phrases and sections that suggest frenzied dances, song-like laments, marches and much more. I particularly liked the slow movement, especially a passage with high violin, mysterious piano repeated notes and chords, and uneasy supporting strings. The Quintet reflects Ornstein’s piano virtuosity; Marc-André Hamelin, who has recorded a notable Ornstein solo disc on Hyperion, is ideal, while the outstanding Pacifica Quartet partners him with confidence, colour and clarity.

Ornstein’s String Quartet No.2 (c.1929) is a more orderly affair. Strings are treated more independently than in the Quintet,and the lower instruments are given solos. The Pacifica Quartet emphasizes the work’s lyrical beauty with well-shaped melodic gestures and sensitive playing of accompanying parts, which through Ornstein’s variety of chord spacings, registers and rhythmic patterns become just as interesting as his melodies.

Spin – like a ragged flock
James Harley; Ellen Waterman
Independent ADAPPS 15001(jamesharleymusic.com)

Morton Feldmann - For Bunita Marcus 1985 
Ivan Ilic
Paraty 135305 (ivancdg.com)

American avant-garde composer Morton Feldman, the pioneer of “indeterminate music,” began (like Varèse) with the orchestra making weird sound effects as tonal paintings and later simplified it to white noise like his famous Rothko Chapel where people could sit for hours in isolation, meditate and chill out. For further simplification he turned to the piano with long works lasting over an hour, like this one that sounds like soft notes moving slowly and undisturbed around the middle of the keyboard, always quiet, no crescendo and never reaching forte. Sometimes shrill and percussive very high notes interrupt in a different rhythm like a bird chirping, then a sudden blob of a broken chord in the lower register like a drop of water into a still pond ….

Listen to it lying down and soon you’ll drift and float, no longer awake but not asleep either, and when it’s suddenly over you feel as if you have been asleep and perhaps missed something. Wagner wrote such subliminal music like the ancient, atavistic shepherd pipe tune meandering in and out of the consciousness of the mortally wounded Tristan that miraculously breaks through his coma and returns him to life.

Feldman’s music operates on this level, but it is also a set of 22 very loose variations with changes so imperceptible, like things that happen in real life. When you expect it, it usually won’t happen but if you don’t, it might. You’ll notice the difference between each variation when you quickly sample the tracks. The whole thing is actually composed and written down, but then it has to be played to sound totally improvised or haphazard, completely unstructured. With his soft and wonderful touch pianiste extraordinaire Ivan Ilić’s mind is so dedicated and attuned to Feldman’s that he can do this like no one else can. It’s spellbinding. (You can get a taste of it along with commentary by Ilić at youtube.com/watch?v=V1B9uX4v1H0.)

Fancies and Interludes
Jacques Israelievitch; Christina Petrowska Quilico
Centrediscs CMCCD 21315

Fancies and Interludes is both a labour of love and musical declaration, intuited and played by two ingenious and accomplished musicians – former Toronto Symphony concertmaster Jacques Israelievitch and pianist Christina Petrowska Quilico. Recorded live at York University’s Tribute Communities Recital Hall, it has the immediacy and the vigour of a live performance (background sounds of pages being turned included), which makes the music come alive with the splendour of the excitement (or the sorrow) of each precious phrase as it was played in the moment.

Fancies and Interludes includes four duos for violin and piano by contemporary Canadian composers. The title track belongs to the last piece on the album, the lengthy and rich Fancies and Interludes VI by Raymond Luedeke, a prolific composer and former TSO clarinetist who wrote this composition especially for Jacques Israelievitch. Five Fancies are framed by Six Interludes, starting as a somewhat fragmented conversation between two vastly different voices and resolving in a harmonious ending.

On the other hand, the album opens with the strong momentum of Oskar Morawetz’s Duo for violin and piano. This piece grabs the listener right away, taking them on the journey from the rhythmical flow of the beginning to the deep lament in a Phrygian D-minor in the last section. Nestled in between are Drop by James Rolfe, my personal favourite on this recording, a fascinating musical travel from earth to heaven and back, and ...and dark time flowed by her like a river, by another composer with a TSO connection, composer-adviser Gary Kulesha. The work is a play between tonal and atonal, reflecting a search for the meaning of a moment in time.

The programming on this CD is exquisite – the compositions flow one after another as if they were meant to be. Israelievitch and Petrowska Quilico allow the impulse, the urge to soar and expand in their playing while granting the listener a breathing space – the true embodiment of Fancies and Interludes.

Editor’s Note: Jacques Israelievitch, who enjoyed an international career as a soloist, conductor and teacher, died September 5. He was 67 years old. He was diagnosed with aggressive, metastatic lung cancer in late February this year. Israelievitch had the distinction of being the longest-serving concertmaster of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. Retiring in 2008 after 20 years, he joined the faculty of York University’s School of the Arts, Media, Performance & Design, as professor of violin and viola. On August 14, in a special ceremony at his home, Israelievitch was presented with the Order of Canada, one of this country’s highest civilian orders, recognizing outstanding achievement, dedication to the community and service to the nation for nearly three decades. Although Fancies and Interludes was the last CD released during his lifetime, Isrealievitch and Christina Petrowska Quilico completed recording Mozart’s 28 violin sonatas last May. The CDs will be released in 2016.