Modern and Contemporary

Richard Danielpour – An American Mosaic
Simone Dinnerstein
Supertrain Records 025 SR (richard-danielpour.com)

The ever-engaging American pianist, Simone Dinnerstein, has been rather active during the COVID-19 pandemic. Early on, in lockdowns last spring, she retreated into studio – inspired by nourishing walks through Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery – to lay down some favoured works by Schubert and Philip Glass. (See my review of the album A Character of Quiet, in the October 2020 issue of The WholeNote.)

She has now embarked on an attractive new project with Grammy Award-winning composer, Richard Danielpour: an album of pieces written expressly for her. This is a sequence of 15 miniatures, each offering comfort and musical solace during the difficult pandemic months of 2020 and 2021. The disc is capped by three arrangements of Bach’s music by Danielpour, as a tribute to Dinnerstein. He was first inspired by Dinnerstein’s celebrated recordings of Bach and set pen to staff paper in a generous outpouring of sound portraits of American society (usually in slow tempi!) over the past months of crisis: parents, teachers, first responders, religious leaders and even politicians. This recipe makes for a rich and varied (albeit lethargic) musical feast, contemporaneously narrating an era of suffering in which we still find ourselves. But why not take stock at such a close vantage point, reflecting on recent traumas still evolving? 

As for Dinnerstein herself, how could she not record such music? This set was made especially for her quintessential artistry, quietly singing through at every corner. Here is the optimal example of performer-meeting-composer-meeting-performer-again; the results are worthy of a two-eared listen in these fraught, often one-eared times.

À Claude
Benedetto Boccuzzi
DiG Classic DCTT111 (naxosdirect.com/search/8054726141112) 

Twentieth-century piano-repertoire specialist, Benedetto Boccuzzi (b. 1990), is not only a concert pianist but also a composer, improviser and teacher. He regularly performs in Italy and conducts workshops on contemporary piano repertoire, extended techniques and improvisation.

À Claude, Boccuzzi’s debut album, is an eclectic keyboard feast, featuring works by Claude Debussy, George Crumb, Toru Takemitsu, Olivier Messiaen, Diana Rotaru and Boccuzzi himself. The programmatic conceit of the album pays homage to Debussy, before moving on to a selection of the French maître’s musical heirs.

Beginning with three miniatures from Debussy’s Images: Cloches à travers les feuilles; Et la lune descend sur le temple qui fut; and Poissons d’or (1907); the album sets a relaxed, impressionistic atmosphere inviting the listener to let imagination roam. Boccuzzi then very effectively renders six of American composer George Crumb’s texture- and allusion-rich Makrokosmos I (1972-1973). This collection of aphoristic piano pieces describes the temperaments of the houses of the zodiac, famously using an encyclopedic range of colouristic effects including plucking the strings, producing massive tone clusters, coaxing overtones from depressed keys not played and directly quoting music of composers such as Chopin.

Three pieces of the Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus (1944) by French composer Messiaen receive a muscular performance here, though sections of Regard de la Vierge exude a poignant cantabile quality. Particularly admirable is Boccuzzi’s precise rendering of the demanding birdcall references throughout.

Listen to 'À Claude' Now in the Listening Room

Blow – Wind Quintets by Donatoni, Salonen & Lash
The City of Tomorrow
New Focus Recordings FCR294 (newfocusrecordings.com)

Part way through the sixth movement of Leander and Hero (2015) by Hannah Lash, a ghostly flute-like voice enters the texture. As the liner notes reveal, the sound is one player blowing across the open mouth of another. When it comes to unusual directions from composers, I apparently have neither seen nor heard it all. This new release, from the spectacularly capable woodwind quintet The City of Tomorrow, delights and amazes.

Put aside that in the current circumstances this would simply be an unacceptable breach of personal safety for both performers, the intimacy of the act demands trust and care, to say nothing of technical control of “embouchure” and/or “instrument.” It wouldn’t surprise me to learn the effect was overdubbed onto the track, but I’m willing to bet the players didn’t need to. Given how the rest of this disc is presented with complete assurance and musicality, a little thing like playing your colleague’s head like a jug in a jug band would hardly be beyond them. 

The title track, Franco Donatoni’s stutter-stepping Blow (2000), provides the players an opportunity to show off more conventional contemporary skills. I love his music, it’s always full of swing and fire, and this is no exception. The group’s sound is crisp, tart and sweet, like a perfect fall apple.

Esa-Pekka Salonen closes things with Memoria (2003), music reworked partly from unpublished material, composed over a period of 20 years, and compiled to celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Avanti! Chamber Orchestra, a group he co-founded. Angst-y Finnish melancholia suits the group to a tee.

Listen to 'Blow – Wind Quintets by Donatoni, Salonen & Lash' Now in the Listening Room

Arnold Griller – Orchestral Music, Volume Three
Kamila Bydlowska; Matilda Lloyd; Liepaja Symphony Orchestra; Paul Mann
Toccata Classics TOCC0590 (naxosdirect.com/search/tocc0590)

In 1955, while studying composition with Darius Milhaud, Arnold Griller (b.1937 in London, England) wrote his 13-minute, Coplandesque Concerto Grosso for strings, filled with long-lined, brooding melodies. Griller’s father Sidney was first violin of the renowned Griller Quartet but, writes Douglas Finch, “Griller chose to withdraw from the musical maelstrom into which he was born and for most of his adult life has remained in relative seclusion.” Now living in a small Cornwall village, Griller even spent 25 years teaching ESL in Winnipeg!

Three recent (2017-2018) works, each over 20 minutes, variously utilize what conductor Paul Mann calls “the Griller gamelan” – harp, xylophone, marimba, celesta, glockenspiel and harpsichord.

Griller’s Violin Concerto memorializes Yodit Tekle, Toccata Classics founder/CEO Martin Anderson’s partner, cancer victim at 37. The dark-hued orchestra, lacking violins, growls atonally while Kamila Budlowska’s agonized violin struggles, rallies briefly with a rising tonal sequence but succumbs to snarling brass. Now alone, it sustains a long-held single note, then vanishes.

Dances under an Autumn Sky has no stated program, but its jagged rhythms, angry brass and percussion outbursts create an increasingly violent scenario, ending in tragedy. The Trumpet Concerto opens with soloist Matilda Lloyd busily meandering over fragmented, percussion-heavy, violin-less sonorities. A march past Dvořák’s house begins in high spirits, then darkens, the muted trumpet playing a dirge marked “with great sadness.” The concerto – and the CD – concludes with a motorized crescendo of celebratory fanfares and percussive fireworks. Finally, a happy ending!