Category: Listen

Thomas Buckner-voice, Gustavo Aguilar-percussion, Wu Man-pipa, Earl Howard-electronics

Thomas Buckner’s appropriately-titled new CD Contexts puts his trademark extended vocal techniques in a variety of them: completely a capella, accompanied by piano, in duet with cello, and, my favorite, a tapestry of pipa, percussion, and electronics titled “Ilex” shaped by composer Earl Howard. Here, Buckner’s solo voice is transformed into an other-worldly chorus amidst Wu Man’s electronically-altered pipa improvisations and rhythmic interjections by percussionist Gustavo Aguilar. The result is highly abstract yet very compelling. As Earl Howard explains in his note on the CD:

When you hear someone crunching a carrot over the phone, or you know from the sound of their tone of voice that they are tired or upset, you are hearing a sound image. You do not say this is music, but know a lot from hearing only sound. If you imagine when you see a bundle of wire standing on end with some metal arms coming out of it, and a flat piece of metal on top of it as being figurative, you might imagine a cluster of clicks as an abstracted crunch, and the sound of a sigh resonant with emotion an abstract kind of singing.

—FJO

With big-ticket American opera premieres from Adams and Picker already under our belt this season, there’s been a lot of ink-spilling over how new opera can/should function in the 21-century. Is opera just too over the top for cynical modern audiences, who can take hours of CGI violence but not suspend belief far enough to enjoy musical number in their films? Michael Torke and A.R. Gurney have made an attempt to bridge the gap without futzing with the style expected by conservative lovers of the form-rather they have dealt with it by creatively approaching their plot. The core of the 38-minute Strawberry Fields is simple enough: an elderly woman sitting on a bench in Manhattan’s Central Park is suffering from the delusion that she is actually at the opera. But the plotline means it’s much less peculiar that people are singing all around her. Instead, the cast of characters is just kind of enveloped in her non-threatening madness. Though at the same time, the point that opera is not so far from real life gets a jab in. When a panhandler starts begging, the old lady laments, “Now that’s opera. It’s called German expressionism. I don’t like it, but I suppose I should support it.”

—MS

Hila Plitman – soprano, Richard Clement – tenor, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Robert Spano

One of the bravest acts by a record company in recent memory must certainly be Telarc’s commitment to record, music unheard, two works commissioned by the Atlanta Symphony and Chorus from composers not known for their choral writing. The two works—Christopher Theofanidis’s The Here and Now and David Del Tredici’s Paul Revere’s Ride—are both big, sprawling musical canvasses. Both are given truly committed treatment here by performing and engineering forces alike who went into the studio to record the works the day after their world premiere performances this past May. Theofanidis (b. 1967) is a rising star in the orchestra community whose Rainbow Body, also recorded by the ASO for Telarc, has been one of the most frequently performed contemporary American orchestral works. His radiant timbral palette serves the equally radiant poetry of the early 13th-century Persian sufi Jalalu’ddin Rumi, sung here in the widely-acclaimed recent English translation by Coleman Barks. It proves a fascinating companion piece to David Del Tredici’s equally over the top orchestral rendering of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s popular Revolutionary War ode.

The inclusion of only one movement from Leonard Bernstein’s Jeremiah Symphony, a work not commissioned by the ASO which has been recorded several times previously, seems a concession either to the dictates of critics who demand at least 70 minutes per CD or to retailers who feel more confident in the sell through of a disc with at least one somewhat familiar item on it. However, the Lennie extract, based on the Lamentations of Jeremiah from the Old Testament, was also performed on the concert leading up to the recording. In both the concert and this recording, Spano uses works from three generations of American composers, each based on texts from very different eras, to evoke and memorialize the events of September 11, 2001, in an indirect and ultimately more universal way than most 9/11 memorials thus far.

—FJO

Warning: Turn the volume down a little bit before you pop this disc into your player, otherwise prepare yourself for an earsplitting assault. I’ve encountered all sorts of wall-of-sound approaches, from noise shows requiring earplugs to acoustic forays into aural chaos, but for some reason this CD seems really f-ing loud. Now then, with the audio at a comfortable level, enjoy the rush of spastic guitar licks that howling in quasi-unison with reed-biting sax squeals swathed in convulsing freak-outs from the drummer. As for stamina, the trio manages to keep the ruckus up for about two and a half minutes—respectable, but not exactly tantric.

—RN

If you’re still smarting from the judgments of some critic who did you a bad turn, here’s a quote of ironic inspiration. The U.S. music critics lobbed this one at Antheil early in his career: “It would be difficult to imagine music staler and more stupid.” Listening to Quartet No. 1 for Strings in one movement (1925) on this disc of works for string quartet, passionately performed by the Del Sol String Quartet, it’s clear the composer had an ear cocked towards his contemporaries, but his work has an emotional rigor that reaches out to grab the listener even all these years later. And perhaps that’s the very thing the critics of the day found to be so disconcerting.

—MS

Ron Blessinger and Denise Huizenga-violins, Anna Schaum-viola, Hamilton Cheifetz–cello

One of music history’s great mysteries is how Roy Harris went from being one of America’s most widely performed and respected composers to someone whose music is almost never done and who gets referenced, if at all, only in passing in accounts of mid-century Americana, a broad stroke that does a disservice to the breadth of his compositional output. Last year, I flipped out over First Edition Music’s recording of his remarkable Violin Concerto, which ought to be a repertoire staple. This year it’s his String Quartet No. 3 from 1948 which is a series of four preludes and fugues that show Harris to be as adept at modern counterpoint as Hindemith and Shostakovich. The tragic third fugue, with its haunting chromaticism, is actually a fascinating historical parallel to the music that Shostakovich was writing on the other side of the Iron Curtain at the same time.

—FJO

David Jalbert, piano

John Corigliano thinks big. Just listen to the opening of his Etude Fantasy. Despite the fact that this is solo piano—the first Etude is played primarily by the left hand alone—the music is symphonic in scope with full-blown dramatic gestures that sound larger than life. Of course with the mountains come the valleys, here in the form of quiet vestiges where thematic cells are delicately presented and transformed before building once again into mammoth summits of sound.

—RN

Maria Schneider Orchestra Live at the Jazz Standard You have to be careful not to miss Maria Schneider’s discs these days. Now that it seems she’s releasing exclusively on ArtistShare, her albums don’t turn up in stores; they’re only offered online. This live recording from sets in January 2000 at the Jazz Standard is heavy on the standards and her early material, but the high level of musicianship will probably make that all right with fans of Schneider’s more recent original work. Perhaps the recognizable tunes will even serve as a sort of welcome mat to the more conservative jazz fans in the house.

Schneider gives the back story on a number of the album’s tracks in her earnest liner notes. The closer, “Bird Count,” is a sort of self-contained nine-minute party. She recalls that’s how she also chose to close the last set she played with her band in 1998 after five years of Monday-night gigs at Visiones Jazz Club. “The club was packed,” she writes, “and I’d invited guys who had played with us over the years to sit in for a few farewell choruses. ‘Bird Count’ bounced along, chorus after chorus, leaving Tim Horner and Tony Scherr ready to drop. I just couldn’t bring myself to cue in the final chorus that would end an era for the band.” Clearly it wasn’t the end but rather the beginning of Schneider’s career in jazz, and though this album is a more straight-ahead effort than her Grammy-winning Concert in the Garden, if you squint your ear you almost feel like you’re back at the Standard in 2000, elbowing your friend during the applause and knowing you had stumbled on something quite remarkable.

—MS

Steve Hunt – piano, John Lockwood – bass, Gregg Bendian – drums and percussion

Usually the pianist is front and center in a jazz piano trio, but everything shifts when a trio is led by the percussionist, as is the case with Gregg Bendian’s oxymoronically-titled (given the volume) Trio Pianissimo featuring pianist Steve Hunt and bassist John Lockwood. Perhaps the all-acoustic nature of the trio makes the moniker apt for Bendian, known for his fusion/prog rock excursions with the Mahavishnu Project and Interzone. “Sleep and Dream” gives Bendian a chance to really shine on glockenspiel as well as drums, creating a sound world that equally evokes Thelonious Monk and Morton Feldman, another avatar of pianissimo. The trio shows a thorough absorption of Monk’s sense of rhythm on this Bendian original as well as the cover of Monk’s little-known “Gallop’s Gallop” which makes the irritating misspelling of Thelonius, a common mistake for non-initiates, all the more puzzling. But, hey, it’s ultimately the music that matters!

—FJO

You’ve gotta love John Cage. The man foreshadowed too many things to mention, things we don’t yet know. Although he may have had Satie on the brain, pieces like In a Landscape, coming from Cage, seem like an indoctrinated prediction of not only minimalism, but the current re-embracing of tonality—irony anyone? After all, would it be possible to have a Christopher Theofanidis or a Jennifer Higdon without John Cage? Regardless, sometimes we tend to treat him like the Nostradamus of new music, forgetting that the true crux of John Cage is, in fact, just his music. Listening to these beautiful early pieces is a wonderful reminder.

—RN