Modern and Contemporary

Bartók; Ligeti
Ensemble InterContemporain; Matthias Pintscher
Alpha 217

Though György Ligeti’s early large-scale works brought him fame, his name was largely absent from North American orchestra programs in the 1980s. As a result, for many, he is associated with bagatelles and études instead of megaliths like Atmosphères. This Ensemble InterContemporain recording, better than merely reminding us of his orchestral roots, reaffirms his genius in both styles.

This is especially true of the Piano Concerto, featuring Hidéki Nagano, which feels at times like orchestral Ligeti and intimate Ligeti happening simultaneously, the sound streams occasionally lining up in a happy coincidence akin to those moments when a car’s turn signal blinks in time with the radio. This mechanical analogy is particularly apt, as the perpetual motion piano part also conjures up Conlon Nancarrow’s player piano works. The second movement showcases Ligeti’s trademark cosmic orchestral writing; here he weaves slide whistles and ocarinas into the fabric of a soundscape reminiscent of his Lontano for orchestra, delicately toeing the line between the apocalyptic and the mawkish in a way only Ligeti can.

Also featured are Ligeti’s concertos for violin and cello. Ligeti described his piano concerto as “music as frozen time, as an object in an imaginary space,” but these words might be yet better suited to his Cello Concerto, performed here by Pierre Strauch. The above are joined by two Bartók pieces, Contrasts and the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion, and appropriately enough – for no two composers offer a more compelling solution to the problems posed by a world where both trite tonality and humourless avant-gardism are equally exhausted.

Concert Note: Matthias Pintscher makes his Toronto Symphony Orchestra debut conducting Mahler’s Symphony No.1, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No.24 (with Inon Barnatan) and his own Towards Osiris on April 28 and April 30.

Samuel Andreyev – Moving
ensemble proton bern; Matthias Kuhn
Klarthe K014 klarthe.com

Paris-based Canadian composer Samuel Andreyev is deeply influenced by the plastic arts; he describes the first work on this disc, the Marcel Duchamp-inspired La Pendule de Profil, in terms of cubism, and his pieces tend toward an object-like quality. A good analog for the entire decade of work represented here, however, might be abstract impressionism. The impressionists placed the immediacy of perception above all else, carefully modulating light and colour to reproduce the experience of motion and time. The abstract impressionists took it further, distilling the object until only motion and colour remained. Andreyev, too, reduces musical perception to its elementary components, exploiting attack and especially timbre for their visceral, immediate impressions.

Where the abstract impressionism analogy fails, however, is in Andreyev’s meticulous structural clarity. An abstract impressionist painting overwhelms with its chaotic density. Andreyev’s music, although saturated with chromaticism, is not spatially dense, and as a result the listener perceives the music as both weighty but translucent, ordered but atemporal.

The miracle material that enables this remarkable paradox is ensemble proton bern itself; the symbiosis between composer and the musicians is palpable throughout. As rare instrument specialists, the Swiss ensemble gives free rein to Andreyev’s timbral explorations. The best examples are PLP, which features the Lupophon, a bass oboe with a fibrous, tenor saxophone-like sound, and Bern Trio, an ethereal gossamer fog for quartertone-tuned harp, viola, and oboe d’amore. A moving disc in both senses of the word.

Simon Martin – Hommage à Leduc, Borduas, et Riopelle
Quatuor Bozzini; Quasar quatuor de saxophones; Trio de guitares contemporain
Ambiances Magnétiques Collection QB CQB 1616 (quatuorbozzini.ca)

The young composer Simon Martin has created three separate works here with highly distinct instrumentation in homage to a trinity of closely linked Québécois painters central to the history of Canadian art. The first piece L’heure mauve, inspired by the Ozias Leduc painting and the last of these works to be composed (2009), is performed by a trio of classical guitarists. Historically, Martin has arrived at the earliest of these painters last and he’s matched Leduc’s symbolist landscape with an extraordinary minimalism, organizing a piece that matches periods of silence with complex rhythmic patterns created on strummed flurries or plucked notes on open strings.

Projections libérantes (2007), named for a text by Paul-Émile Borduas, was composed for Quasar saxophone quartet. The piece uses saxophone multiphonics created by alternate fingerings and shifting embouchures to mine the instruments’ sonic resources, drawing, for example, simultaneous low-frequency blasts and whistling highs from the baritone.

That sonic creativity is matched by Martin’s handling of the string quartet in Icebergs et Soleil de minuit — Quatuor en blanc, which takes its inspiration from Jean-Paul Riopelle’s series of black and white paintings. It’s a series of brief vignettes, sometimes highly gestural, in which Quatuor Bozzini explores different textures often employing harmonics to create a kind of richly nuanced transparency, a contradictory dense thinness of sound resembling the texture of a painted surface, as clusters can gradually reduce to single attenuated pitches.

What ties these works together is Martin’s fascination with the physical matter engaged by these painters and the power of brush or spatula strokes in their work, qualities transferred to his own dramatic exploration of individual instrumental timbres and subtly evolving sounds. The ultimate effect resembles the dynamic stillness and material transformation that links his three subjects’ work. It’s music of power, beauty and originality, worthy of its subjects.

Mohammed Fairouz – No Orpheus
Kate Lindsey; Kiera Duffy; Christopher Burchett
Naxos 8.559783