Modern and Contemporary

mirrors: 21st Century American Piano Trios - Lysander Piano Trio

mirrors – 21st Century American Piano Trios
Lysander Piano Trio
First Hand Records FHR11 (lysandertrio.com)

The formidable Lysander Piano Trio celebrates its ten-year anniversary with an attractive new disc, featuring music hot-off-the-press by living American composers. The trio is fervently committed to new music and to the commissioning thereof: no less than six world-premiere recordings populate this disc.

Ne’er to shy away from muscular playing and athletic feats of prowess, the members of Lysander crack on through these works (generally having been constructed with their triply impressive strengths in mind). The composers represented here do seem to ensure a freshness of concept, sometimes sojourning in new directions. Thankfully, the result is a 21st-century deliverance of the genre from the shackles of a 19th-century canon.

The extra musical inspiration throughout the record is notable. Reinaldo Moya’s Ghostwritten Variations has been inspired by four novels that highlight composers as protagonists, namely those of Thomas Mann, David Mitchell, Richard Powers and Kim Stanley Robinson. Moya’s piece offers a reimagining of what music by these four might sound like – a compelling conceit. The Black Mirror by Jakub Ciupinski turns to the visual arts for incentive, referencing a portable painting aid, curiously known as a “Claude glass.” And Sofia Belimova’s brief, Titania and Her Suite, reaches our eyes by way of A Midsummer’s Night Dream.

Without doubt, a highlight of this release is Love Sweet by Jennifer Higdon, as sung by Sarah Shafer. The young soprano’s narrative abilities and refined vocal colour bring the new, five-song cycle to life.

Wang Lu: An Atlas of Time - Boston Modern Orchestra Project; Momenta Quartet; Ryan Muncy; Daniel Lippel; Miranda Cuckson

Wang Lu – An Atlas of Time
Boston Modern Orchestra Project; Momenta Quartet; Ryan Muncy; Daniel Lippel; Miranda Cuckson
New Focus Recordings FCR277 (newfocusrecordings.com/catalogue)

Chinese-American composer Wang Lu’s works excite like a case of sudden-onset-fireworks display. Frenetic bombast prevails amid haunting breath-like interjections that induce enjoyable sonic nightmares of a welcome kind. This whirlwind of activity is ever-present throughout the composer’s latest release titled An Atlas of Time – a disc with recent orchestral and chamber compositions.

The title track, performed by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, is modernist excitement at its finest. Set in five character pieces, this is the gem of the disc and provides compelling landscapes and novel environments for the ear. Another exemplary selection of the release is the solo violin work Unbreathable Colours, performed by Miranda Cuckson. This piece is Wang’s artistic response to the unrelenting smog encountered on a recent visit to China – her native land. The hesitant, yet sharp, plucks and swells in this work truly provoke a suffocating listening experience – one that brilliantly paints a simultaneously eerie and beautiful musical haze.

Each piece on this release is an example of why Wang is one of the most original voices in contemporary classical composition, and each track unfolds with some of the most organic and strikingly enjoyable pacing in recent memory – I’ll be listening many more times!

Listen to 'Wang Lu: An Atlas of Time' Now in the Listening Room

Scott Lee: Through the Mangrove Tunnels - JACK Quartet; Steven Beck; Russell Lacy

Scott Lee – Through the Mangrove Tunnels
JACK Quartet; Steven Beck; Russell Lacy
Panoramic Recordings PAN20 (newfocusrecordings.com/catalogue)

I was lucky to receive this album during the latest COVID-19 lockdown, as it provided a welcome escape from my own four walls. This album is great storytelling, an audio film of tales of imaginative discoveries by the composer growing up wandering the swamps and bayous of Florida. Drawn from Lee’s memories of exploring the Weedon Island nature preserve as a youth, from one movement to the next I was captivated. From the opening track, Through the Mangrove Tunnels, we are transported to a small craft, peeking around corners through overgrown channels, encountering the unexpected. This album is an expertly played audio escapade featuring pianist Steven Beck, drummer Russell Lacy and the JACK Quartet.

Part historical narrative, and part personal reflection, Lee manages to engage the listener with his blend of contemporary classical and extended jazz techniques, travelling seamlessly between tonalities and polyrhythmic styles without a single extraneous or gratuitous beat. Each track is expertly crafted to tell a tale of mystery: from shootouts, strange figures, ceremonial Native American gatherings, bootlegging, plane crashes and marvellous natural phenomena, the accompanying stories are fantasmic sketches perfectly enhancing each gorgeous composition almost to the scale of Saint-Saëns’ Carnival of the Animals. The tracks Playthings of Desire and The Ballad of Willie Cole are both full compositions almost on their own, but presented here they remind us that although the album provides some entertaining and humorous listening, these are compositions of great depth. The final track, Floating Away, takes us home in a way that evokes the end of a long and mysterious voyage.

Be sure to get a hard copy or a download of the booklet if possible, and follow along with the stories, as this is an album that deserves to be experienced as we used to, when a composer shared a journey with us, and we stayed in one place to listen and receive it in full. Perfect lockdown listening.

lanterne - Richard Carrick

lanterne
Richard Carrick
New Focus Recordings FCR273 (newfocusrecordings.com/catalogue)

American Richard Carrick’s phenomenal artistic abilities, including composer, pianist, artistic director and educator, are showcased in his sparsely orchestrated compositions.

Title track laterne, for solo bass flute, performed by Margaret Lancaster, is an exciting listen, with breath and voice vocalizations, booming sounds, repeated rhythms and held notes driving the intense climax and the final faster fade with closing yelp. Carrick joins her on piano in une, a short and sweet roughly one-minute musical delight! Carrick performs with bass clarinettist Vasko Dukovski in the Korean vocal-music-influenced Sarang Ga. A quiet start leads to abrupt low piano chords and wide-ranging bass clarinet accents, melodies with dramatic squeaks, and a very modern tonality “echo” ending. Three works draw on the traditional Korean Gugak music. Highlight is the unique ensemble colours that surface in sandstone(s), as Western (New York New Music Ensemble) and Korean traditional instruments (Musicians of the Gugak Contemporary Orchestra) perform together.

The four-movement Space:Time – String Quartet # 2, performed by the Mivos Quartet, is musical space travel. Movement I, Claustrophobia, recreates spaceship solitude, with high-pitched, almost painful tight dissonances, accents at the end of ascending lines and tension-breaking brief use of lower lines. Low pulling down grounding tones and floating high counterpoint drive the storytelling in movement II, Gravity.

Four additional works and other great performers complete this Carrick collection of beautiful intimate sounds to appreciate even in pandemic isolation!

The Bells Bow Down: Chamber Music of Ilari Kaila - Adrienne Kim; Isabel Gleicher; Aizuri Quartet

The Bells Bow Down – Chamber Music of Ilari Kaila
Adrienne Kim; Isabel Gleicher; Aizuri Quartet
Innova Recordings innova 036 (innova.mu)

This well-conceived and well-crafted recording is a magnificent presentation of works by Finnish-American contemporary classical and theatrical composer, Ilari Kaila. Produced by Kaila and Silas Brown, the album features his noted single-movement piano quartet, The Bells Bow Down (Kellojen kumarrus) In Memorium Hanna Sarvala, the five-movement Taonta and four other works. The interpreters of this challenging music are the internationally regarded, multiple award-winning Aizuri Quartet, which includes Ariana Kim and Miho Saegusa, violins; Ayane Kozasa, viola; and Karen Ouzounian, cello. Also joining the stellar cast are the luminous pianist, Adrienne Kim; and flutist, Isabel Gleicher.

The title track is constructed out of non-corporeal gossamer light and sonorous strings, which wrap themselves lovingly around the heart of the listener. The grief, pain and loss contained in this work are palpable. Pianist Kim enters with elemental, percussive chords, bringing to mind tolling church bells, as she wends her way through the turgid waters of raw emotion. The majesty of this composition demands complete commitment, bravery and technical skill from all of the artists involved, which it receives in spades.

The nearly unbearable beauty of Hum and Drum’s Philip Glass-like repetitive themes easily floats the listener into a trance-like state and Wisteria seems to speak to loneliness and isolation, and perhaps the long winter of the Norse soul. Kaila’s Taonta is also a triumph for the pianist, and one cannot imagine a truer manifestation of the composer’s intent. A modern masterpiece.

Tavener: No Longer Mourn for Me - Steven Isserlis; Philharmonia Orchestra; Omer Meir Wellber

Tavener – No Longer Mourn for Me
Steven Isserlis; Philharmonia Orchestra; Omer Meir Wellber
Hyperion CDA68246 (hyperion-records.co.uk/find.asp?f=CDA68246)

Some albums follow a linear and straightforward path through their conception, recording and release, while others take many years of behind-the-scenes planning and work before finally reaching a listening audience. Tavener: No longer mourn for me falls into this latter category, starting its gestation as cellist Steven Isserlis’ own passion project in 2013, thrown into disarray by Tavener’s death later that year and, after a long and labyrinthine journey, eventually unveiled seven years later, in October 2020.

As is the case with much of Tavener’s output, many of the works on this disc defy strict categorization, a reflection of the composer’s numerous and eclectic influences including the Orthodox Church, the Anglican Cathedral tradition, Catholicism, Islam, Tolstoy and Shakespeare. The two principal tracks, The death of Ivan Ilyich and Mahámátar, are fascinating and stunningly beautiful cross-cultural experiences: in Ivan Ilyich, Tolstoy’s text (sung in English by bass Matthew Rose) draws on Tavener’s influences to form a uniquely dramatic work resembling a one-act opera; Mahámátar features Sufi singer Abi Sampa, along with Isserlis and the Trinity Boys Choir, in a magnificent exploration of East-meets-West through Tavener’s eyes and ears.

The remaining works on No longer mourn for me are, although smaller in scale and performing forces, no less impressive, either from a compositional or interpretive perspective. Of particular interest are the two arrangements for eight-cello ensemble: Shakespeare’s Sonnet LXXI, No longer mourn for me; and the Preces and Responses, a sublime setting of the prayers traditionally sung at the Anglican service of Evensong, originally composed for choir.

John Tavener’s lengthy and highly regarded career resulted in an extraordinary range of material, as varied as the composer’s influences and inspirations. Although only a portion of his late works is represented on No longer mourn for me, their depth and breadth serve both as an introduction for those previously unfamiliar with Tavener, as well as a point of exploration and discovery for those seeking to delve deeper into this great composer’s eclectic and evocative style.