Category: Listen

Before listening to this disc, Carei Thomas was completely unknown to me, although this sixty-year-old African American composer/pianist has been creating wild free improvisational music in the Twin Cities for over 30 years. Perhaps that’s because apart from a few self-produced homemade cassettes, his music only just started to appear on commercially released CDs. “Ibidem,” from his new album on innova, synthesizes a variety of musical approaches: in only a few minutes it goes from a scorching violin-laptop duet to an almost Feldman-esque tranquility highlighted by Thomas’s spare piano phrasing.

—FJO

Over the past 15 years, The Barton Workshop has garnered a reputation for their topnotch interpretation of New York School composers. Naturally they are the obvious choice to disseminate Morton Feldman’s mid-period graphic scores, the subject of this latest release in Mode’s ongoing Feldman Edition. Personally, I love the few loud and fast Feldman gems like Intersection III. Here, pianist Frank Denyer manages a proper freak out on the keys, evoking a Tudor-like gusto. And for the obsessed collector, the disc contains three premiere recordings: Intersection I, Marginal Intersection, and In Search of An Orchestration.

—RN

When pianist Marc-Andre Hamelin took the stage at the 2001 Grammy Awards ceremony in Los Angeles, I still recall staring at the T.V. in disbelief and then, once I was over the shock of seeing a classical artist playing live at the ceremony, wondered aloud if this would be the industry’s Field of Dreams, “build it and they will come” moment. Surely, after the millions of viewers heard Hamelin, the concert halls would be flooded with the newly enchanted? Ok, so perhaps it was a naïve fantasy on my part, but Hamelin, especially when he’s alone at the piano, continues to charm me. His performance of Sonata Rhythmikosmos by Jay Reise (a revised version of the 1993 work) is no exception. It’s a cerebral bit of music that maintains contact with its softer side, and Hamelin offers a reading to match.

—MS

The American Symphony Orchestra; Leon Botstein, conductor

Beginning a symphony with maracas usually implies a Latin tinge. Not so for Roger Sessions’s Eighth Symphony, composed in 1968, which uses maracas as the sole accompaniment for the first utterance of an angular twelve-tone row. The result is one of the most clearly stated openings of a serial orchestral work I have ever heard. The Sessions symphony is one of four extremely cerebral works collected on a new CD featuring the American Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leon Botstein. The common ground between it and its companions on this disc—George Perle’s Transcendental Modulations (1993), Bernard Rands’s Beckett-inspired …where the murmurs die… (1995), and Aaron Copland’s Inscape (1967) from his late serial period—is that all of these were New York Philharmonic commissions funded by Francis Goelet, who was arguably the most significant music patron in U.S. history.

—FJO

Orchestra 2001; James Freeman, conductor

A friend mentioned recently that encountering something small done perfectly is one of the most satisfying experiences. Listening to the molto lento of Gerald Levinson’s For the Morning of the World, I had a similar epiphany. It turns out that the simple melody that snakes through the entire movement is based on the “highly refined, archaic Gamelan Semar Pegulingan (Gamelan of the Love God).” Performed by Orchestra 2001 using western timbres, the lines lose any specifically “world music” edge and instead float exotically in the mist just off the coast of an unnamed country.

—MS

If you hear a raucous clamor of guitars, bass, and drums wafting from your local museum, chances are the New Humans are somewhere inside. Their distinctive brand of alt-rock noise made a splash at the re-opening of the Walker Art Center, raised some minimalist-styled hell at the Swiss Institute – Contemporary Art, and are slated to shake things up at PS1 sometime soon. In a gimmicky sort of art-informed slapstick, the group often performs in colorful conjoined outfits, sporting loud matching stripes—real cute. Of course the artworld glitterati eats it all up. This limited edition self-titled CD captures the collective’s improbable mélange of bona fide punk, noise, and old school minimalism. If pressed, I’d have place it somewhere in the Ernstalbrecht Stiebler meets Black Flag camp.

—RN

Sandwiched in between two of William Schuman’s most potent symphonies is a shocking three-minute waltz from 1963 that is so anachronistic it’s downright revolutionary. Long before Dennis Busch and Milos Raikovich’s new classicism or Stefania De Kennessey’s Derrier Guard, Schuman proved with gusto that in the post-Cage universe where anything goes, new ideas could still emerge within the trappings of old sounding music. An arrangement of an Austrian folk song that sounds more Robert than William, this innocuously-titled ditty reveals itself to be a product only possible in our time through its completely fresh orchestration.

—FJO

So Percussion

Drumming is a piece that audiences never had to learn to like. At its premiere in 1971, after a hypnotically rhythmic performance delivered by a crew of 13 musicians, the audience was on its feet. The work remains a defining pinnacle in Western composition to this day. On this fresh recording of the minimalist classic, So Percussion maintains their reputation for performances of striking depth and precision that takes the concept of drumming way beyond keeping the beat.

—MS

Chamber Chorus of UC Berkeley with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, conducted by Marika Kuzma

Do you think music with complex harmonies can never sound happy? Think again! Jorge Liderman’s setting of the Old Testament Song of Songs is exuberant and its exuberance is infectious.

—FJO

Something of a premonition of James Levine’s headline-grabbing tenure at the Boston Symphony, these live recordings with the Munich Phil show off how completely at home he can make musicians feel as they navigate through thorny atonal and serial waters. Carter’s Variations for Orchestra, his first orchestral composition after developing his mature modernist idiom, comes across as downright lyrical. But, if you buy the CD, make sure to go straight to track 2, or be subjected to the 21 seconds of applause which bizarrely open this disc as a stand-alone track.

—FJO