Category: Tracks

Soprano Melanie Mitrano’s new CD of recent American art songs benefits from her impeccable diction, direct collaboration with most of the composers who serve as her piano accompanists here, and smart microphone placement in the recording studio that puts the voice front and center as it should be but normally only happens on pop records. The result shows there is not a whole lot of difference between the great standards by Broadway composers and art songs by so-called classical composers including 2004 Pulitzer-winner Paul Moravec. Should there be?

—FJO

No, actually, no pure voiced choir boys or lush orchestrations turn up here. Hunt if you must and try and uncover them. At the opening pitches, your ear is plunged into an electronic search for signal playing tag with acoustic contributions from the clarinet. Sometimes the sonic clouds clear and off in the distance you see it, yes it, over there, but the fog rolls in before you can possibly get there. The lines are crossed, the vision blurred, the dream continues. But wait, over there, there it is. No, wrong again. Here is half of a cell phone call to Saturn relayed through an outdated videogame unit. Is he frustrated? Damn straight he is and he wants to go home. Please come and pick him up. He’ll be waiting, waiting over there, next to it. You know. And hurry if you can.

—MS

Hmm. Miklós Rózsa? Peter Schickele’s long-awaited variations on “Rock-A-Bye Baby?” What on earth is this? Get ready, prepare yourself for a real Folgers Crystals moment: Morton Feldman! Yup, Morty penned a violin sonata way back in 1945, and the good folks at OgreOgress want the world to hear it. And not only the sonata, but everything single bit of music the composer ever wrote for solo violin and viola, with or without piano. Fans of the composer won’t be disappointed as Christina Fong (violin and viola) and Paul Hersey (piano) deliver quality performances throughout. I’m not so sure the sonata bears any of the seeds of Feldman’s later styles, it’s more like a cabinet of curiosities. To my ears, it sounds a tad derivative, but let’s chalk that up to youth. Of course it wasn’t long before graph paper set the composer in entirely new directions. I can’t help but think the composer felt Hubbert’s peak had come to pass, as far as melody was concerned, and the only solution was to leave pitch specificity completely behind—for a while anyway. All the compositions on this 2-CD set are presented chronologically, so you can hear how stylistic shifts evolve over the decades.

—RN

How many percussionists does it take to screw in a light bulb? It’s safe to assume the answer is one, but did you know it takes six to put a new spin on the famous “Wipe Out” drum solo. Not exactly The Surfaris, but no less rockin’ is composer Bruce Hamilton’s Raptures of Undream. Well okay, maybe not rockin’ but in the right neighborhood at least. Each percussionist is armed with floor toms and a suspended cymbal to execute Hamilton’s polyrhythmic score. Sadly, there will be no broken surfboards or maniacal laughter here—luckily, no wipeouts either.

—RN

Listening to Chas Smith’s newest CD, Descent, is like sifting through space. It’s atmospheric and otherworldly, yet never stands still. Here and there are small craters and crescendos of electronic sound, and the harmonic landscape seems to suggest a tonic center, but then it slowly drifts into outer orbits to explore a much larger sound vocabulary. Three tracks are all Smith needed—the first two enjoying fairly long sitting times for you to find your inner Dream House—but all three employ Smith’s own take on the limits, or lack there of, of the southern steel guitar using electronic enhancements.

—AR

Playing the piccolo can’t be an easy job. A quick Google search for piccolo jokes returns 628 pages of jabs at the instrument, most revolving around a certain problems of pitch and volume. But the opening moments of Persichetti’s three-minute Parable XII (just one of 25 meditations he wrote for various solo instruments) presents the piccolo as a strikingly pastoral sounding instrument. The lone sheepherder on the hill image doesn’t really do the capabilities of the piccolo player in question, Jeannine Dennis, adequate justice as she follows the work down the virtuosic path of its middle section. Still, the romance of lush fields and babbling brooks and all that quaintness is never far from the sound if you choose to listen for it. But I couldn’t help myself. And now, if you’ll excuse me, I have some sheep to tend to.

—MS

Present Music, Kevin Stalheim – principal conductor

People were wryly amused when Henry Brant tongue-in-cheekly remarked upon winning the Pulitzer Prize, in his 88th year, that he was an emerging composer. But Wind, Water, Clouds and Fire composed just two years ago (2004) in his 90th year, shows that this maverick nonagenarian is continuing to develop and explore new compositional terrain. This sprawling 35-minute work for three women’s choruses and ensemble adds unabashed beauty to Brant’s toolbox of techniques and the results make the most compelling case for his spatially-conceived music I have heard yet.

—FJO

Chin up all you drift-heads, Don’t Look Down, the latest album from Suilven Recordings’ founder, Daniel Patrick Quinn, enlists the talents of fellow dronemeisters DAC Crowell and Kurt Doles. The results: an intricate haze of timbres swathed in reverb and glistening electronics which lay the groundwork for gradually evolving melodies that pirouette in slo-mo, coalescing the misty din like a crochet hook. Lose yourself inside these Eno-inspired vistas filled with sustained electric guitar, clarinet, and who knows what else. Is that a shakuhachi? The final track, Kami To Isshoni Yodooshi, injects field recordings made by Crowell last year in Japan into the wash of sound, adding a layer of complexity which sounds like an underwater celebration, a village dance and feast after finally reaching the illusive end of the rainbow.

—RN

Ever feel like you just don’t get improv? I admit it leaves me feeling intellectually lacking sometimes, and the opening seconds of Leroy Jenkins’s The Art of Improvisation sound a bit like everything I’ve ever feared about musicians working this particular stylistic bent. But take a deep breath and just listen for a few minutes more to this band of violin, pipa, piano, and percussion, and the sounds start to connect in an abstract expressionist sort of manner. The second track, the 18-minute fantasy “To Sing,” begins with a the piano dragging itself up from a watery grave before Jenkins breaks into a cadenza that would likely have had Paganini enthralled with its audacity—ostentatious flourishes skimmed over in a sul ponticello and harmonic ethereal haze. Each band member gets a chance to take a solo turn before coming together in the closing minutes. But this is not to gear up for a powerhouse ending. Rather it’s more akin of a flock of migrating birds teaming up to fly a very long commute in each others company.

—MS

The first time I heard Marin Alsop conduct was back when she led Concordia, a chamber orchestra devoted to finding the elusive meeting point between contemporary so-called classical music and more—to invoke the dreaded “so-called” again—vernacular forms of expression. A new MMC disc offers three such musical explorations by John Carbon, William Thomas McKinley, and Peter Homans. But the composer that most sparked my curiosity, since I had never before heard a note of his music, was Homans, a one-time Donald Martino student who took a 12-year hiatus from musical composition to pursue a successful career in money management. While Homans is not quite a latter day Charles Ives, his Tribute—a series of homages to Frank Zappa, Bill Evans, and Igor Stravinsky—makes a compelling case for blurring musical categories, and not always ones you might think. To my ears, the Igor movement conjured Zappa’s sense of rock abandon as much as the Frank movement captured Bill Evans’s impeccable sense of jazz timing. Wonder if Marin will ever program this in Baltimore?

—FJO