Modern and Contemporary

Steve Reich – The String Quartets
Mivos Quartet
Deutsche Grammophon 486 3385 (store.deutschegrammophon.com/p51-i0028948633852)

Influential American composer Steve Reich’s portfolio contains three string quartets – Different Trains, Triple Quartet and WTC 9/11 – completed between 1988 and 2010. Reich recently suggested the Mivos Quartet revisit them for this album. Working in close collaboration with the composer, they make a powerful case for fresh interpretation of these quartets, bringing admirable clarity and taut precision to their performance.

The masterful Different Trains is a deeply biographical work. The title refers both to the American trains the young Reich took shuttling between separated parents, before the USA entered World War II and also the “different trains” destined for European death camps. 

The fast, motoric first movement effectively captures the exciting, abruptly shifting energy of Reich’s train rides. Judiciously interspersed with recordings of voices (porters, his governess), and of train horn blasts, they imbue the string quartet with a compelling narrative and sense of geography and time.

A key feature of this quartet, as well as of WTC 9/11, is Reich’s “speech melody” technique. In it he crafts melodic phrases and metric structures mimicking the tonal contours and rhythms of sampled voices, turning them into instrumental motives, then superimposing them on the spoken word passages. 

In movement II, train horns transform into a polyphonic shriek of sirens. Human voices here are survivors of the Holocaust describing their train trips to the death camps. 

The final movement, set after the War, interweaves European and American voices aiming to recap previous stories and musical elements, valiantly trying to make sense of what happened – as many of us also are.

Éliane Radigue – Occam Delta XV
Quatuor Bozzini
Collection Quatuor Bozzini CQB 2331 (actuellecd.com)

French composer Éliane Radigue has for much of her long career made electronic music, but 2004 marked a turning point. She has dedicated herself since then to composing for acoustic instruments, resulting most notably in over 80 (!) works for various forces in her extended Occam cycle. These compositions were inspired by William of Ockham’s (c.1287-1347) Occam’s razor principle, which in its most succinct form states that the simplest proposition is very likely the best. Premiered by Montréal’s Quatuor Bozzini in 2018, Delta XV for string quartet is among the latest in Radigue’s Occam series. 

For over two decades Bozzini has been a staunch advocate for contemporary string quartet music. They’re known for cultivating experimentation and collaboration, fearlessly nurturing an impressively large and diverse repertoire including those on the 2015 album Higgs Ocean with Toronto’s Evergreen Club Contemporary Gamelan.

Fascinatingly, Radigue developed Occam Delta XV through a collaborative “oral composition process” with the quartet. Dispensing with a fully notated score and relying on its oral transmission may well have been the most straightforward approach here – in the spirit of Occam’s razor – especially for a composer steeped in synthesizer music.

This premiere recording of Occam Delta XV offers two distinct Bozzini interpretations. Seemingly a slowly unfolding series of stacked chords sustained throughout, the music tests the four musicians’ skills in ensemble intonation, microtonal beating, string harmonics and group dynamics. Bozzini’s deeply attentive performance reaches through the recording, touching this listener. As for Radigue’s work, it effectively challenges expectations of music creation, performance and listening.

Ascenso
Santiago Cañón Valencia
Sono Luminus SLE-70028 (sonoluminus.com)

Cellist Santiago Cañón-Valencia is no stranger to the world stage, being an award-winning performer beyond his native Colombia. This is an artist from whom sound and texture flow with ease and authenticity. Ascenso is a fantastical album filled with scenic tours through countrysides, congested cities, mountain regions and flightpaths of monarch butterflies. The album is solo cello but feels full and rich, due in part to the compositions themselves, but mainly in response to Cañón-Valencia’s chameleon-like ability to inhabit the culture and place of each piece and execute them with stunning skill. 

La ruta de la Mariposa, commissioned from Damián Ponce de León, is a piece in three movements describing a reverence for the flight of the butterfly, the murder of an environmentalist devoted to protection of monarch butterflies in Mexico and the discovery of the shape of the thyroid gland. Mesonoxian (relating to midnight) is a melodic study of dark and light, commissioned by the cellist from Jorge Humberto Pinzón Malagón, followed by the only “vintage” composition on the album, Asturias by Isaac Albéniz, originally written for piano and transcribed for cello by the artist. 

Urban Rhapsody, inspired by the city of Bogota (which the composer Leonardo Frederic Hoyos describes as “Heaven and Hell”) is simply stunning. Using a scordatura tuning, meaning the cello is retuned in this case to A, D, F, B-flat, this already difficult piece brings new challenges but rewards us with an openness to the sonority of the cello and new possibilities for chord structures. The result is a breathless account of a single day within this major city, a closeup of microcultures full of contrasts between classes, social structures and people.  

The final track Ascenso Hacia Lo Profundo, composed by Cañón-Valencia, has an improvisatory feel, with energetic, cascading rhythmic flow, rounding out a beautiful and accessible album and letting us down gently.

[in]verse
Arlen Hlusko; Fall for Dance North
Bright Shiny Things (brightshiny.ninja)

How does one create a singularly audio dance project in isolation? [in]verse, by Grammy-award winning and current Bang on a Can Canadian cellist Arlen Hlusko, was conceived in lockdown and produced by Toronto’s Fall for Dance North dance festival. Hlusko’s dream collaboration delivers an album beautifully paired between dance artists, poetry and compositions. The texts were chosen and thoughtfully delivered by Canadian and international dance artists, merged with classical and contemporary selections curated and performed by Hlusko and a select few musical contributors. There are so many wonderful readings and performances, the collection of 26 tracks takes time to fully appreciate, and though the text and music are paired like wine to food, they each stand out on their own. 

The reading of Blue Head by Asisipho Malunga with dancer/choreographer Mthuthuzeli November is a standout moving tribute to loneliness and the self as home. Pairing it with the Sarabande from J.S. Bach’s fifth solo cello suite makes an interesting and introspective communion, and provoked thoughts on home through a colonialist lens, (whether intended or not). Another standout for me was transgender choreographer Sean Dorsey’s reading of his original poetry, excerpted from the sound score of his full-evening production Uncovered: The Diary Project. This powerful work is both heartbreaking and illuminating and was informed and inspired by a year-and-a-half long community research process researching diaries of transgender and queer people, with original music composed by Alex Kelly. This track is so perfectly delivered it’s worth the album alone.   

With readings chosen by the movement artists themselves, from dance legend Peggy Baker and a long list of award-winning dancers and choreographers, each selection is thoughtfully tied to wonderful music, reimagined as if walking through the text while listening. Whether or not you delve deeper, it’s a beautiful album.  

One caveat: the album notes included do not seem to contain more than the basic credits or tracklists; for full notes, including the composers and text translations, you will need to go to the album’s website. It is worth the time to check them out properly.