Modern and Contemporary

Crossroads
Ksenija Sidorova; Sinfonietta Riga; Normunds Šnē
ALPHA 1090 (outhere-music.com/en/albums/crossroads)

Latvian accordionist Ksenija Sidorova’s Crossroads features arrangements J.S. Bach’s music and later works by composers influenced by that master. She plays both solo and in ensemble with Sinfonietta Riga under conductor Normunds Šnē. Her accordion pictures show a right-hand piano keyboard. The left-hand button side appears to have a switch activated traditional chord stradella bass, and free bass multi octave single note bass buttons.

Bach’s famous three movement Concerto in D Minor, BWV1052 opens. Bach’s first 1720’s version featured solo organ and 1730’s version solo harpsichord, both with orchestra. Future arrangements by others include solo piano, violin, recorder and heavy metal guitar! Sidorova’s accordion arrangement has wide-pitched contrapuntal lines for both hands, colourful blending with orchestra, and tight accordion and orchestra contrasts in alternating sections. 

Composer Sergei Akhunov’s solo accordion Sketch III has lyrical broken chords and single note lines. His Bach-inspired five movement Concerto Chaconne Bach has SO much to listen to from an opening mysterious low orchestral feel, high-pitched held accordion notes “squealing” above repeated orchestral chords, modernizing percussion hits and reflective calms. Dobrinka Tabakov’s virtuosic Baroque style The Quest: Horizons for solo accordion and orchestra features wide-ranging volumes with touches of contemporary sounds. Solo works Beyond Bach by Gabriela Montero, arranged by George Morton and Sidorova, and Sidorova’s arrangement of her childhood favourite Bach’s Ich Ruf Zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ, BWV 639, highlight Sidorova’s impressive musicianship and breathing bellows control.

This is accordion and orchestra at their very best. A standing ovation for all!

Vijay Iyer – Trouble
Jennifer Koh; Boston Modern Orchestra Project; Gil Rose
BMOP Sound 1099 (bmop.org/audio-recordings/vijay-iyer-trouble)

I like it when a composer admits they have trouble finding their way to what they eventually write. While the product in no way betrays difficulty, if the search is somewhat successful, it’s there anyway, because no doubt what provoked them to write the piece is indeed troubling. Such is the case with Vijay Iyer’s new release (in italics this time), Trouble. He approaches the role of orchestral composer as something of an outsider, but one who brings vital new material inside. 

Asunder (2017) opens the disc with worrisome momentum (the first movement is called Agitated), a pulsing major third that passes from voice to voice. I grew more and more anxious as his ideas provoked me to see the worst outcomes, to fear the things to come. But I also just enjoy hearing his textures play out, an urgent though mindless race, all the voices like commuters on the same narrow path. Written for and premiered by the Orpheus Ensemble, it travels quite a way from its opening unease through subsequent movements Patient & Mysterious, Calm & Precise and Lush. Iyer found inspiration in the collaborative non-hierarchic ensemble’s working method; Asunder evolves.

Once more for everyone in the back, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project led by Gil Rose is fantastic. As is the violinist soloist Jennifer Koh in the title work, an alien voice within a landed chorus. Guiding Iyer towards rethinking the genre (he admits to having had doubts about writing a typical concerto form), Koh shared her experience of being an “artist of color in the U.S… nearly a year in the making, Trouble (2017) remains, for me, one of my most layered... intense works,” the composer writes in his liner notes.

Crisis Modes (2018), a work for strings and percussion, closes the disc. It’s simply gorgeous, while still infused with the unease that colours the whole disc. Iyer wrote all three works in the years of Trump’s first administration, as an American of Colour aware of the suddenness with which things can turn. It’s no surprise that the themes are of dysphoria and doubt.

Plucked & Struck
Percussia
Neuma 197 (neumarecords.org/home/ols/products/percussia-plucked--struck)

Anything recorded can go astray, especially if the music purports to be from a group “… a mash-up of classical, modern, popular, and global music styles….” This excellent album plucked & struck, for instance, might easily be construed as an elegant railway system linking all of the aforementioned (styles) as chamber music coming from an ensemble born of a 21st century post-serialist conservatoire. Of course, to describe the ensemble Percussia as such would give the impression of overcooking when, in fact, the whole project is a masterpiece of subtlety.

The duo’s take on things plucked and struck – Ingrid Gordon’s Orff xylophone and other small percussion and Susan Jollies’ Celtic harp – summon magical sounds from notes that whirl and twirl, and dance in graceful arcs and leaping parabolas that float benignly around each other. Each note adds a rich and not entirely predictable foundation to this music, as does Melissa Fogarty’s luminous soprano to the lyrics of Cuando El Rey Nimrod ai Compo Salia. 

The surprises, when they come, are effective, but discreet: gamelan-like riffs are often played as pizzicato harmonics, a delicate curlicue of a bassline underpins what sounds like a Gaelic lament on Fogarty’s Ladino lyrics. Everywhere close-knit ensemble passages develop from single magical phrases. In the music of plucked & struck Percussia have pierced music’s mysterious skin. Kudos to them for having done so.

Listen to 'Plucked & Struck' Now in the Listening Room

David Lang – Composition as Explanation
Eighth Blackbird
Cedille CDR 90000 230 (cedillerecords.org/albums/composition-as-explanation)

This album is serious fun. As an adaptation of Gertrude Stein’s seminal 1926 lecture, David Lang’s multi-disciplinary work showcases the creative and technical prowess of this Pulitzer-prize winning composer. Adding to the marriage is the dedication to the work of Grammy-winning sextet Eight Blackbird, who bring us a solid performance of an interesting and dynamic work. And a performance it is, as the piece was written to be presented on stage, with the composer asking the musicians to be stage performers, to learn acting, diction and the art of theatre, to produce an integrated and seamless work. 

The lecture by the iconic Stein, Composition as Explanation, was a description of what she is doing in her writing. “…in her same repetitive, plainspoken and circular format that she uses in her writing…” (Lang). Lang paints the lecture’s writing as billboard-sized enactments, blurring the lines between text and performance, while also stretching the musicality of his writing to showcase the versatility, technical skill and group dynamics of Eighth Blackbird. Each track of the composition reads as a small chapter of the lecture, which includes nearly all of Stein’s writing word-for-word, and the complex music never overshadows the text. As an illustration of Stein’s work, it is a colourful, theatrical exposition, a larger-than-life performance allowing the listener to discover the lecture in more detail, giving it new meaning and relevance today. It is a work one would wish to see live, but the album does well to impart the flavour of a stage performance, and the album booklet’s inclusion of photos from the performance does well to set the scene.

New Music for Brass and Percussion
Metalofonico
New Focus Recordings FCR413 (newfocusrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/metalofonico)

What happens when you mix 16 brass players, seven percussionists, electric guitar and synthesizer? A sonic wallop, here courtesy of trumpeter Jon Nelson, University at Buffalo professor and his ensemble Metalofonico, named after Brazilian Dimas Sedicias’ rowdy, big-band dance piece, included in this CD. (Sedicias’ bluesy tuba solo, Raymond My Friend, played by Raymond Stewart, comes midway through the disc, a brief respite from the mostly clamorous goings-on.)

This newly-released CD was recorded back in 2001-2002. Responding to my email query, Nelson explained that it was originally manufactured in 2003 to serve as a limited-distribution promotional item – “I decided last year to put it out ‘for real’ in the hope of giving new life to the pieces.”

Four world-renowned composers are represented – Charles Ives’ From the Steeples and the Mountains, memorably evoking overlapping, reverberating church bells; Iannis Xenakis’ Khal Perr (Greek for “Walking Dance”), a kaleidoscopic compendium of percussion-braced sonorities; Milton Babbitt’s atonal, amorphous Fanfare for Double Brass Ensemble; Giovanni Gabrieli’s noble Canzona XXV, from the first golden age of brass.

The disc’s longest piece, Tom Pierson’s 11-minute Music for a Solemn Occasion, is predominantly slow and introspective. In marked contrast are Nelson’s pounding, jazz-rock Insomnio and his rollicking arrangement of Perez Prado’s 1950 hit, Mambo No.5, Brian McWhorter’s industrially pile-driving Lucre Iota and David Felder’s Two Tuttis – Incendio and Shredder, the latter, writes Felder, “meant to be ferocious fun.” There’s ferocity and fun aplenty on this CD.

Listen to 'New Music for Brass and Percussion' Now in the Listening Room