Modern and Contemporary

Going North
Luciane Cardassi
Redshift Records TK480 (lucianecardassi.com/going-north)

The eight pieces that comprise pianist Luciane Cardassi’s latest release, Going North, are an impressive array of works by Canadian and Brazilian composers. The album is made up of several unique journeys – each piece providing a place where Cardassi’s panorama of expression, and mastery of unusual playing techniques, shine with a world-class radiance.  

The varied colours and vocal interjections in Terri Hron’s AhojAhoj create a clever collection of sonic cross-play. In a piece titled Wonder, Emilie Lebel gives us exactly that: a complexity of engaging musical events that bewilder and enchant. Chantale Laplante’s Estudio de um piano inhabits a world of distant creaks and whispers where a sorrowful beauty permeates a hollowed atmosphere. Punchy dissonances and prickly gestures pierce through rugged landscapes in Darren Miller’s For Will Robbins.

The hypnotic aura produced in Converse (a piece credited to several composers) offers a gentle pathway amid the turf of more abrasive expanses heard on the album. Last on the release, we are left with the mysterious whimsy in Fernando Mattos’ The Boat Sings, a work that creates an organic time domain of rubbery substances. 

The highly skilled interpretive prowess of Cardassi leaves no doubt as to why this pianist has established herself as one of Canada’s most important champions of contemporary music. With such an enticing set of performances, I’ll be listening many more times, and looking out, eagerly, for the next release from Cardassi.

Alexina Louie – Take the Dog Sled
Evie Mark; Akinisie Sivuarapik; Esprit Orchestra; Alex Pauk
Centrediscs CMCCD 28320 (cmccanada.org)

Evie Mark and Akinisie Sivuarapik practice and work to preserve traditional Inuit culture in northern Quebec’s Nunavik region; they have performed as throat singers around the world. Alexina Louie is one of Canada’s most distinguished composers, and the Toronto-based Esprit Orchestra, conducted by Alex Pauk, champions contemporary music and innovative approaches. As the Centrediscs program notes state: “Take the Dog Sled is a celebration of life in the Inuit communities in Canada’s far north.” Composed for Montreal Symphony musicians in 2008, it consists of eight musical numbers, five of which feature traditional Inuit songs. In throat singing, two women interact closely, facing each other. Louie’s scoring for the seven-member instrumental ensemble is lean and transparent, minimalist at times, supporting and adding musical variety to the singing. 

Sharpening the Runners on the Dog Sled is the first song, appealing and rhythmic as the activity suggests. Cradle Song is instrumental, a mother’s love for her child expressed simply then becoming more complex with cross-rhythms and parallel lines. The Mosquito is another traditional song, with added staccato, pizzicato, and a buzzing double bass tone; the instrumental Bug Music carries forth the humourous possibilities. I especially like the throat singing in The River, combining suggestions of flow and fear. The work has succeeded with audiences in many parts of the world, and is suitable for listeners of all ages. It is an achievement for which the contributors indeed deserve congratulations!

Music for English Horn Alone
Jacqueline Leclair
New Focus Recordings FCR272 (newfocusrecordings.com/catalogue)

Jacqueline Leclair’s latest album Music for English Horn Alone features seven works for solo English horn, four of which – by Hannah Kendall, Faye-Ellen Silverman, Karola Obermüller and Cecilia Arditto – are spectacular premieres. Leclair, known in the music community as a contemporary music specialist on oboe, brilliantly showcases her flair for new music techniques on the oboe’s darker cousin with equally stunning results, making these works an invaluable addition to the repertoire. 

From the outset, Leclair’s playing is exceptional; the richness of tone and beautiful, subtle articulations are displayed over the entire range. From multiphonics, flutter-tonguing, note-bending and the exploration of the extreme soft dynamic, Leclair charms with her mastery of the English horn.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of this thoughtful assortment is its ability to captivate and give rise to autonomic responsiveness to touch and visual and auditory stimulation through its exploration and depiction of the instrument’s possibilities and range, whisking the listener from one culture and destination to another without the need to traverse the physical. If one had to describe this collection in a single word, it would be “borderless.”

Listen to 'Music for English Horn Alone' Now in the Listening Room

Right Now, In a Second
Transient Canvas
New Focus Recordings FCR267 (newfocusrecordings.com/catalogue)

The ephemeral nature of sound is exquisitely captured in the poetry of this new music performed by bass clarinettist Amy Advocat and Matt Sharrock, a percussion colourist heard here on marimba. Experimental music, made with incongruous instrumental pairings, often begs the question: Can sound be toyed with if only to fill the heart and mind with a sense of wonder? Advocat and Sharrock answer in the affirmative, and emphatically at that.

The bass clarinet – among the whole family of single-reed woodwinds – is probably the most diabolically difficult to master. Advocat makes light work of it all with her extraordinary virtuosity, her application of soft dynamics to create atmospheric effect, and by this I don’t mean such effects that suggest the lugubrious (something she does on Jonathan Bailey Holland’s Rebounds), but also something resembling a beautiful gravitas (which is evoked on resonance imaging by Crystal Pascucci). 

Sharrock’s radiant marimba is the perfect foil for the rumblings of the bass clarinet. His crystalline sculpting of notes informs Stefanie Lubowski’s composition Right now, in a second. Meanwhile he turns his instrument into a kind of living, breathing being, as with glancing blows of mallets on wood he conjures a close dance with the bass clarinettist. 

The masterful centrepiece is Clifton Ingram’s Cold column, calving. This music seems to bow in reverence to the earth’s ancient permafrost. As it unfolds, you get a sense of how expressively the musicians tease out the geographical metaphor of this piece with profound grandeur.