Modern and Contemporary

Tim Brady – The How and The Why of Memory
Symphony Nova Scotia
Centrediscs CMCCD 21515

Montrealer Tim Brady is a fertilizing force on the Canadian new music scene. A composer, electric guitarist, improvising musician, concert and record producer, his active administrative engagement with the Canadian concert music community over the past few decades has been multifaceted and deep. On this album, as distinct from previous Brady albums I have reviewed in these pages, we hear his composer chops applied to orchestral forces: a symphony bookended by two string concertos, one for violin and one for viola. They are admirably rendered by Symphony Nova Scotia, conducted by Bernhard Gueller.

Listening to The How and the Why of Memory: Symphony #4, (2010-2013), cast in a single continuously unfolding movement, I was repeatedly reminded of textures and rhythmic and harmonic ideas of composers active in the early- to mid-20th century. Perhaps those allusions are implied by the title. Brady however never allows such superficial affiliations to get in the way of musical momentum or dramatic gesture, characteristics embedded in his musical voice which engage listeners on an emotional level.

Brady’s very confident Viola Concerto (2012-2013) is dominated by its violist Jutta Puchhammer-Sédillot’s cocoa-coloured sound and brilliantly lyrical playing. It is also imbued with a heart-on-sleeve expressiveness, counterpointed by poised classicist melodic phrases and minimalist sequences. The multi-hued orchestration is endowed with plenty of rhythmic excitement and harmonic movement, relieved by mysterious moments of elegiac repose. The last section, marked “groove,” is particularly effective and texturally surprising. The Viola Concerto is my favourite work on the album and it makes a very valuable new addition to the international viola concerto repertoire.

Stefan Wolpe Vol.7 – Music for Violin and Piano
Movses Pogossian; Susan Grace; Varty Manouelian
Bridge Records 9452 (bridgerecords.com)

Armenian-born Movses Pogossian, first-prize winner of the 1985 USSR National Violin Competition and now based in California, is the featured soloist in the latest of Bridge Records’ landmark series devoted to German-Jewish/American composer Stefan Wolpe (1902-1972).

Wolpe’s four-movement, half-hour-long Violin Sonata (1949) is among his most enduring works, spanning an emotional gamut from playful and joyous to melancholy and anguished, and all the way back again. Pogossian and pianist Susan Grace provide all the intensity and flexibility required for its varied moods.

Pogossian is joined by his wife, Varty Manouelian, in two pieces, Duo for Two Violins (1924), with motoric echoes of Bartók, and the short Two Studies for Two Violins and Piano (1933).

The CD opens and closes with unaccompanied works, Second Piece for Violin Alone (1966), a three-minute quirky charmer that would make an effective recital encore, and the 15-minute Piece in Two Parts (1964), a thoughtful, thought-provoking series of brief, pithy phrases, influenced perhaps by Wolpe’s interest in Oriental meditation. The disc also includes a 29-bar fragment from an unfinished Second Violin Sonata (1959).

The detailed booklet notes are by Toronto musicologist Austin Clarkson, who studied with Wolpe and became, in 1981, the first board chairman and general editor of the Stefan Wolpe Society.

This is intriguing repertoire that deserves to be heard.

John Cage: Four
Quatuor Bozzini
Quatuor Bozzini CQB1414 (actuellecd.com)

Montreal’s Quatuor Bozzini has been together for 16 years and has recorded 15 CDs of the kind of challenging contemporary music that they specialize in, including works by Canadians Malcolm Goldstein, Tim Brady and Jean Derome and international figures like Steve Reich and James Tenney. The experience tells as they take on John Cage’s three works for string quartet, realizing distinctive versions in the process.

The earliest of the compositions, String Quartet in Four Parts (1949-50), is a work descriptive of the four seasons with the composer’s notes encouraging light string contact and no vibrato. The work’s structure and minimal harmonies create an unlikely resemblance to the melodic purity of medieval music. Leaping ahead to 1983, Thirty Pieces for String Quartet presents the musicians with both demands and choices: each piece lasts about a minute, with each musician given a sequence of notes to be fitted into the “time bracket.” The musicians individually choose between microtonal, tonal and chromatic options, but the parts are not directly related to one another except for the coordination of segment lengths. The music that emerges within these configurations is rich in complexity and convergence, a kind of collaboration between composer, performer and listener.

The final work, Four, from 1989, is the most radically reductive of these works, still employing time brackets but offering choices from its sparse materials to all the performers. The result is spacious but continuous with tonal structures that may gently evolve or appear transient. The cumulative work is a serene landscape in which mysterious elements emerge and disappear.

Quatuor Bozzini assumes the substantial demand that this music makes on its performers: to at once realize the work in shaping its form while allowing the components to maintain their distinct, non-structural identities. If the Arditti Quartet’s recordings of these works (on Muse from the early 1990s) have long stood as masterful readings (they worked closely with Cage on Four), Quatuor Bozzini does a fine job of traversing this music, inevitably creating new works in the process.

The Korngold Project Part One
Daniel Rowland; Priya Mitchell; Julian Arp; Luis Magalhães
TwoPianists Records TP1039282 (twopianists.com)

Pianist Luis Magalhães, originally from Portugal and now living in South Africa, is co-founder of TwoPianists Records and its Korngold Project, which here makes an auspicious debut, daring to go head-to-head (in the Suite) against Sony’s recording (SK 48253) by the all-star cast of Joseph Silverstein, Jaime Laredo, Yo-Yo Ma and Leon Fleisher.

To my very pleasant surprise, in a movement-by-movement comparison, Magalhães and the European-based string players outdo the famous foursome in every way, bringing much, much more punch and passion to this punchy, passionate work, one of three Korngold composed for pianist Paul Wittgenstein, who lost an arm in World War I. The balances here are much better, too, with the strings as closely miked as the piano, while on the Sony CD the strings seem muted, lacking focus and presence. (The flaccid Swedish performance on DG 459 631-2 isn’t worth considering.)

The Piano Trio doesn’t sound at all like a composition by a 12-year-old – but it is! – and it’s filled with real music, late-romantic Viennese gemütlichkeit laced with many of the already-distinctive melodic and rhythmic gestures that would remain with Korngold all his life. It, too, receives a vigorous, upfront performance, recorded live, as was the Suite, with well-deserved applause at its conclusion.

The Korngold Project will focus on the composer’s chamber music. This Korngold enthusiast, for one, looks forward to Part Two and beyond.