Category: Listen

Mary Lou Williams’s twelve-movement Zodiac Suite is arguably her most important extended instrumental composition. Originally composed for and recorded by her piano trio in the spring of 1945 and expanded for big band later that year, it is a curious jazz parallel (not to mention a great alternative) to similarly inspired works like Tchaikovsky’s Seasons or Vivaldi’s Four Seasons. Of course, in order for it to have the kind of afterlife that music by Tchaikovsky and Vivaldi has, others have to take up the cause. This is precisely what pianist Geri Allen, bassist Buster Williams, and drummer Billy Hart do as “The Mary Lou Williams Collective” on Zodiac Suite: Revisited in their recreation of the original trio version. There are many treasures to savor throughout this nearly 50-minute performance, but I have a particular soft spot for Gemini; must be the time of the year.

—FJO

Who can resist the raw beauty of Lou Harrison’s music? The composer’s gamelan works possess an even stronger allure, mixing hints of exotic tunings and timbres with direct melodies flitting around this hypnotic accompaniment. In Serenade for Betty Freeman and Franco Assetto, Harrison himself weaves the melodic line, performing on an Indonesian vertical flute called a suling, backed by the Gamelan Sekar Kembar. The brief serenade shows the power of innocence and sincerity, proving that the simple things in life are usually the best.

—RN

The University of Iowa Center for New Music; David K. Gompper, conductor; Mark Weiger, obeo

Program notes can be dangerous. Think not? How do the phrases “protracted cadenza for oboe” and music with a “decided ‘edge’ ” make you feel? Are you running towards or away from your CD player? I was left felling both ways, which basically left me stranded in the middle of my apartment holding this disc in my hand. Not very useful. Whereas if I’d just put in on and settled in, I wouldn’t have gone through any anxiety whatsoever. Okay, yes, sometimes program notes really do help the first-time listener out, but Rands’s composition does not require preparatory instructions. The piece opens with a sensual tour of the oboe before meeting up with the rest of the ensemble to spin filigreed passages that, whether they sound edgy to you or not, will expand beautifully in your ear and are perhaps best heard unhindered by the adjectives of the English language.

—MS

Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, José Serebrier, conductor; Jeffrey Khaner, flute

Using a slippery harmonic language pioneered by the likes of Debussy, Ned Rorem’s Flute Concerto shimmers with a nostalgic, yet timeless sense of beauty. At moments the soloist’s part dips up and down the register like harp arpeggios, always landing on its feet as gracefully as a cat. Composed only four years ago, the concerto proves that Rorem hasn’t lost a bit of his musical prowess.

—RN

Knowing Brad Mehldau’s work as a jazz pianist little prepared me for his opulent and somewhat aphoristic art songs for voice and piano, for which Mehldau accompanies soprano Renée Fleming on a new Nonesuch disc. Mehldau’s lush fin-de-derriere-siècle might sound a little anachronistic in these early years of the 21st century, but given that he’s setting poems by Rainer Maria Rilke, any other approach would probably not have done proper justice to the words. Besides, at this point anything goes, right? So don’t worry about the particular vintage and just enjoy the wine.

—FJO

Rich West, drums, accordion, pieces; Dan Krimm, electric bass; Bruce Friedman, trumpet; Emily Beezhold, electric piano, Korg ms2000; Lynn Johnston, saxophones, clarinets

The liner notes for this disc are basically intriguing scraps of anecdote and scores that look like they were originally constructed on cocktail napkins. There’s really no telling, but that may or may not be all the instruction these talented musicians got. Rich West’s five-player band mixes up winds, brass, electronics, and percussion in a sort of zoo of an album, and though the players may be generally penned in under West’s directions, I’d be cautious of tossing them any peanuts. To illustrate this track, West confesses, “‘Come to my gig,’ I tell my girlfriend. ‘You can take a nap.'” And though the piano lulls us, anyone who can sleep to a lullaby that is also colored with tweaking electronics and scronking sax clearly took an Ambien before the set.

—MS

Ever had a tough time deciding on the perfect title for a piece? The minimalist-noise outfit New Humans conquered the situation by embracing the problem. Each track carries at least 25 possible names, but hey, with hand silk-screened cover art and a limited edition release—the vinyl edition is glow-in-the-dark!—we’re cool with the, um, artistically done alias overkill with regard to the album’s four tracks. And speaking of overkill, those familiar with the band-cum-art-collective’s debut release might be scratching their heads for the first 15 minutes, wondering where the ultra-subdued, almost pristine, droning à la early synth music is coming from. Then, suddenly, timbres turn hard-edged on track 3, which we’ll call “virtually any shape or line repeated often enough will produce a pattern of some sort” or “self-sabotage.” Both monikers shed light into the New Human’s modus operandi: conceptually based minimalism vs. the entropy of noise aesthetics. The sonic results are mesmerizing, revealing both the beauty repetition can hold and its insidious underbelly, conjuring pep rally cheers that border on chants to Der Führer.

—RN

Klaus-Dieter Lerche (as Columbus); Bruckner Orchester Linz, conducted Dennis Russell Davies

Arguably one of the most anticipated premieres of the previous decade was Philip Glass’s commission from the Metropolitan Opera to write an opera marking the 500th anniversary of Columbus’s arrival in the New World. After all, the staging of Einstein on the Beach at the Met, though not a Met production, put Glass on the world stage. So, at the time, everyone wondered what an actual Met production for Glass would be. Might this have been the work that would finally have made Glass’s trademark minimalist style an endorsed historical inevitability in the canon of Western classical music by the mainstream classical music establishment?

This, of course, didn’t quite happen. The Voyage received mixed reviews and soon faded in the public consciousness. I, too, remembered being disappointed, thinking the work was pretentious, bloated, and a knock-off of earlier, much more interesting music that Glass had previously written. But, after such a set up, how could anyone have heard it any other way?

Now, nearly 15 years later, as a result of this music finally being released on CD, we can hear The Voyage with fresh and hopefully untainted ears. And doing so makes for some revelatory listening. On the recording, The Voyage comes across as exciting, harmonically adventurous, and completely at home with the operatic idiom in ways that Glass’s earlier revolutionary stage works had not been since they were still the work of a maverick outsider. Glass, now the insider, here shows full mastery of orchestration and acute sensitivity to operatic voices. Listen to the gorgeous aria that Columbus sings at the opening of Act Two, Scene Two, during his historic voyage in 1492. For me, it feels like the sequel of the “Hymn to the Sun” aria in Glass’s 1983 opera Akhnaten, and which, like that earlier aria, is positioned as the centerpiece of the entire work.

So why such a different reaction? For starters, the layers of hype and inevitable critical barbs that surround such auspicious premieres are now just historical footnotes that no longer can intrude upon the listening experience. But, perhaps more importantly, Dennis Russell Davies and the soloists of the Landestheater and Bruckner Orchester, both of the Austrian city of Linz, convincingly deliver this music in a way that the Met just didn’t. Hopefully the new regime at the Met will hear this recording and gain inspiration from it. New opera deserves this kind of advocacy.

—FJO

The Gravitas Quartet is like a love match in a world of arranged marriages. Let me explain. Horvitz says that he was looking to join his interest in through-composed chamber music with small group improvisation in this particular format and with these particular individuals. The musical results of such projects can sound ill-matched under the harsh lights of the stage, but Horvitz’s gang seems to have cleared such cross-genre hurdles. Nothing forced, nothing awkward. Just that old cliché of wanting the best of both worlds and, in this case anyway, getting it.

—MS

The clang of loud dissonant piano chords got you down? Throw on the title track of Neil Rolnick’s latest CD Digits. Sure, pianist Kathleen Supové pounds out some noisy chords, but you would never find these tuneful sonorities in a Boulez sonata. With the addition of digital delay and computer processing, things get a little dizzy, but this 11-minute tour de force won’t leave you with a hangover.

—RN