Category: Tracks

Dedicated to the victims of all wars, William Kraft’s unsettling Contextures II: The Final Beast, a massive 1986 cantata for adult vocal soloists, boy’s chorus, and a large orchestra with tons of percussion, is screaming out for a revival. It’s more than crystal clear message should blare on radio stations across the country. I can dream, can’t I? Well, at least this long out-of-print historic Los Angeles Philharmonic recording from the Meet The Composer Orchestra Residency Program, originally distributed by Nonesuch, has been re-issued, now in a much more attractive package on First Edition Music. But will the people who need to hear this music and heed its directives ever listen to it?

—FJO

If there was any danger that David Lang’s output is being overshadowed by his involvement with colleagues Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe as part of Bang on a Can, Elevated should help him…ehem…rise above that. This new two-CD set on BoaC house label Cantaloupe includes an audio-only disc and a DVD of the same works with film accompaniment. Lang’s 43-minute Men, included here with film by Matt Mullican, carries a dedication to Hans Werner Henze and is performed by the European Music Project, with Mike Svoboda playing solo trombone. A work of Buddhist-like temperament and pacing—moving forward with a sort of soulful ache yet never gaining, without seeming to have a beginning or end—the piece encourages the ear to sit back in its host’s head and listen through the thickness of the sound, mining it for every slight change, addition, or subtraction.

—MS

Samuel Barber singing at the piano, from a radio broadcast at the Curtis Institute of Music on December 26, 1938

Despite the ubiquity of singer/songwriters in all sorts of musical genres, much rarer is a singer among composers who principally create music in longer forms, especially prior to our own time. Which is what makes this CD featuring historic recordings of Samuel Barber singing and playing the piano—featured on a new Bridge CD along with a recital of art songs sung by the great American soprano Leontyne Price accompanied by Barber at the piano—all the more fascinating. While Barber’s rendering of the Kentucky folksong “The Deaf Woman’s Courtship” is a far cry from the Adagio for Strings, it is a rare opportunity to find the possible cipher for his unique melodic gifts. More composers should sing!


—FJO

Performed by the Los Angeles Master Chorale, with Grant Gershon conducting

Steve Reich has a signature sound and it’s all over this work in the same way a master painter can often be ID’d by his brush strokes. We can anticipate how he’ll move through the music well enough to take pleasure when he does what we expect and then get a little giddy when he trips us up a little. The harmonies and the rhythmic pulls on display here are a picture of Reich at his craft (I only hesitate to say “height” as this work did not supplant my personal Reich favorites). If you’re wondering how you might get similar results, you might take Reich’s example. He tells Tim Page in the booklet notes, “I just set out to have a good time composing…Sometimes when you start off doing what you know how to do, it can lead you to things you never knew you knew how to do!”

—MS

Sweet Heresy is an extremely unusual disc of duo performances on instruments created and performed by Untravelled Path, which is Mitsuko and Arthur Fankuchen of Taos, New Mexico. Theirs is an extraordinarily uncompromising slow and inward music inspired by musical traditions from around the world utilizing such instruments as bowed deep bass monochords played like the South Indian vina, a 48-key quartertone kalimba (I want one, don’t you?), and shakuhachi-type instruments with larger finger holes to allow for all sorts of microtonal fingering variants. Sadly, their self-proclaimed anti-authoritarian tendencies belie giving potential listeners much information on their CD, which lists only the names of instruments used on each track rather than titles and does not even include their last names. Their website—www.untravelledpath.com—while equally cryptic about their identities, at least offers some wonderful images of the instruments they play as well as a brief history of how they came to create the music they make.

I can’t swim, but I love floating in water, an activity to which I can devote myself until quite frozen and pruny. Zeitgeist’s performance of Apnée (poetry by Philippe Costaglioli) pushes the floating listener much further down beneath such a surface idyll. The piece is a mix of percussion, bass clarinet, voice, and electronic processing, and the effect really does conjure a kind of listening through black water. The balance seems to be left hanging between enjoying the weightless recreation and wondering what else might be lurking out there in the darkness of a deep ocean.

—MS

Copland’s Piano Variations sounds like a recipe for hobo soup: austere structure, an atonal sounding theme, set theory-like development, massive chords, jazzy rhythms, moments of show tune whimsy, tone clusters, and one kitchen sink. This piecemeal classic gets the raucous performance it deserves delivered by Benjamin Pasternack. And the best part of all, it’s on Naxos. Blessed be the name of the almighty label which is merciful to the poor musician’s wallet.

—RN

A few years back, in the final days of CRI, I wrote the booklet notes for Martin Bresnick’s Opere della Musica Povera. The more I listened to his music, the more excited I became about the whole process of music and composing. It actually got me out of a major creative slump. Part of why Bresnick is such a successful teacher—Michael Torke, the whole Bang on a Can triumvirate, the members of the Common Sense Composers Collective—is because his own music is simultaneously so open minded and so intoxicating. The pieces on this latest disc equally fascinate, and grow more and more interesting the more you hear them. I admit that the first time I heard Songs of the Mouse People, in a live concert performance, I was somewhat disappointed. But I was blown away when I heard it again on this CD and like it more each time I hear it, especially how the cello and vibraphone seamlessly switch roles in a chain of modulations in the penultimate movement, “A Thousand Shoulders Tremble (under a burden actually meant for one).” This time, I don’t have to listen to the disc again and again for any particular reason…I just want to. But what’s more even exciting is how much inspirational fuel is in here as well. Put it on for an hour, and then go write your own next masterpiece!

—FJO

For those in the crowd just counting the days until we can get rid of the pop/classical divide, Mikel Rouse throws his sledgehammer at the wall with a new album quite appropriately dedicated to both Steve Reich and Brian Wilson. Squint one eye and it seems to be all pop lyrics and pulses, squint the other and the careful layering and unique pitch choices show elements of a more new music composerly approach. The opening track, “JC Love Field,” demonstrates the concept quite neatly. It has the beats, the rhymes, the “baby”s in the lyrics, but then the harmonies get all wacky and the rhythm starts to collapse in on itself and you know it’s not quite the Casey Kasem countdown that’s coming through your speakers.

—MS

Over a delicate backdrop of percussion, spare bass lines, and vivid electronic washes, trumpeter Terence Blanchard’s pronounced tone soars, effortlessly sketching elegant melodic phrases with a steady ebb and flow. With its catchy tune, the title track of Flow—an apt descriptive—manifests on three separate occasions over the course of the album. The overall vibe is cool as tundra. Yet the band’s performance radiates enough confidence to melt the permafrost. But no worries, listening doesn’t contribute to the problem of global warming.

—RN