Category: Tracks

It’s hardly shocking that New York music critics, the self-proclaimed arbiters of musical taste, panned the premiere of Paul Creston’s brilliant 1960 Second Violin Concerto at its New York premiere in 1962. They usually never get it right about new music. I imagine it must have shined in the hands of legendary violin prodigy Michael Rabin for whom it was written. (Rabin’s Paganini Caprices are still the only ones I’ve ever heard that are 100 percent flawless as well as musically moving.) Wish I could’ve been there, alas. What is shocking is that it took 35 years for this formidable work to be released on a commercially available recording.

Luckily, Gregory Fulkerson is up to the challenge, and a challenge it is with cascading scales and multiple stops galore. The CD booklet notes gush on about the daredevil cadenza in the second movement, but my moment of fixation is earlier in the movement when the tempo picks up and the violin soars amidst cycling impressionistic brass harmonies. It’s hardly avant-garde by any stretch of the imagination. But, so what! Nearly a half century later we can deal with it as a great work from our past and not be worried about whose zeitgeist it doesn’t neatly fit.

—FJO

Visit Mason Bates’s website and you’re faced with a choice right off the bat: electronica or classical. I imagine this decision is a cinch for some, but what if classical is your cup of tea just as much as electronica is your shot of vodka and Red Bull? Looks like your mouse is going to get a workout toggling between pages, but it’s worth the effort to see how one genre informs the other. On the classical page you’ll find an acoustic mashup of Beethoven’s 9th, and along with the excerpt of the Ludwig-laden Ode are a couple more MP3s to checkout. Navigate over to the electronica portion of the site and be greeted by a less introspective, slightly more pimped-out photo of Bates in a sporty red windbreaker. Here the MP3s showcase intricately constructed tracks with a slight jazz lounge vibe. The track “No Masterpiece” actually sounds more like classic Michael Torke from his “color music” days, rather than something you’d here spinning in a club. But no matter, just enjoy the free samples.

—RN

The organ generally gets short shrift outside of baseball fields and liturgical settings these days, but Harold Stover has created a whole disc of secular music and, in doing so, attempts to recapture a time in America when the organ was closer to the center of popular entertainment. Recorded on the 1928 Ernest M. Skinner organ housed in the Cathedral Church of St. Luke in Portland, Maine, Stover plays through work of early 20th century composers such as Sowerby, Alter, and even a Gershwin arrangement. The other half the disc, however, is devoted to original compositions by the soloist. The long tones and sparsely ornamented melody of the opening movement to his Mountain Music will definitely allow the listener to leave all memories of Sunday services behind.

—MS

Joan La Barbara – voice

There is something really disconcerting about hearing Joan La Barbara sing the line “Are boobs just mostly fat?” over and over again to a melody somewhat reminiscent of Steve Reich’s tune for Wittgenstein’s sentence “How small a thought it takes to fill a whole life” in Proverb. The words Neil Rolnick chooses for his 2004 composition Body Work, however, are not a major philosophic pronouncement but rather the first of series of questions posed by students in University of Portland professor Terry Favero’s biology class published in the November 2003 edition of Harper’s Magazine. The line is disconcerting not because it’s shocking—is anything anymore?—but because it isn’t. It’s just a series of syllables as worthy of a melodic turn of phrase as a sonnet by Petrarch that Monteverdi would have set, the difference here being that it is surrounded by other layers featuring La Barbara’s trademark vocabulary of extended vocal techniques.

This enshrining of the seemingly quotidian is a Rolnick hallmark which finds many more fascinating outlets in other works contained on this new disc as well. Infectiously catchy ditties emerge from seemingly austere cascades of single pitches in his wind quintet plus electronics Ambos Mundos. Idiomatic yet completely incongruous western swing invades the first movement of his string quartet Shadow Quartet as a memorial to his Texan father. All in all, Rolnick’s music is extremely approachable yet at the same time, it makes you rethink what you’re hearing, which is somehow the best of both worlds.

—FJO

In the seemly infinite stream of CD releases from Beverly Hills-based Michael Robinson comes Vachaspati, an hour-long exploration of raga and technology. Robinson fully notates his compositions and then records them with computer precision using sampled instruments such as ud, tabla, ghatam, dholak, and berimbau—you’ll hear all of these and more during the course of the piece. If you’re like me, you’d probably prefer the sonic subtleties of real live performers, but I have to admit that I was almost hypnotized by the electronic rainstick—have you ever heard an electronic rainstick before? What will they think of next?

—RN

When this Will Bernard Trio disc came around in the ol’ CD changer, I thought for sure I’d been woken by some New Orleans backroom blues band. Turns out to be a crew out of Oakland, but that hardly matters. A blues-jazz-barroom concoction heavy on the guitar and a lounge-y beat, things groove along in general, though tracks like “Riddle Me This” stand apart as being more “out” than some of the rest. The addition of violin deepens the sound world, and the ensemble takes a little more time to breathe, play, and develop rather than run a groove. There’s a head in there, but it hardly becomes the track’s strict road map. All the players throw in their measures of creativity, but personally the real gem is the National steel guitar work.

—MS

Whoever says the symphony died with Mahler has missed some of the most interesting repertoire of the past century, if not the most interesting repertoire bearing the epithet “symphony.” Yet, to define exactly what constitutes a symphony in the years since Mahler left his 10th incomplete is almost as big a conundrum as what constitutes music itself. Well, you might say, you need an orchestra, but I have heard great works called symphonies scored for 100 electric guitars as well as just four pianos. I believe there’s even a symphony for one piano. Go figure. Others say it must be a hefty multi-movement work. But, what then to make of Leo Kraft’s very orchestral 1985 Symphony in One Movement, which is just that and lasts a mere 17 minutes. Well, Sibelius gave us a one-movement symphony back in the 1920s, although he debated whether or not to call his radically-structured composition that for over a year. Kraft, on the other hand, crystallizes the trappings of a conventional four-movement symphony—fast, scherzo, slow, fast—into an extremely concentrated single utterance using a repeated interlude between each played by different sections of the orchestra as glue. The result comes off as extremely well-Krafted (sorry, couldn’t resist), but if analyzing what he’s doing here architecturally is not the way you listen to music, you can still revel in the details that pop out like the fabulous dissonant homophony that he carefully orchestrates about two-thirds of the way through.

—FJO

Lesser’s website greets you with a billboard-size message: “I don’t give a fuck what’s on your iPod.” All the same, you’ll find six MP3 to download which collectively amount to an EP release free for the taking. Obviously Lesser (a.k.a. Jason Doerck) doesn’t give a fuck if you download ’em either, but take it from me, these gems are worth the disc space. Aside from “This Is What We’ve Become,” the artist’s punk and breakcore past are set aside for a more languid and exploratory approach. “When It Comes To Fidelity” practically comes off as a ballad, intertwining field recording with digital call and response. Despite the occasional harsh texture, the track shows signs of folk-inspired melody and harmonies, almost but not quite.

—RN

Abraham Ellstein, though best known for his scores for the Yiddish Theater and Broadway, also penned his share of large and small-scale concert music, including this cantorial setting for violin and piano. It is here recorded by Zina Schiff on her third collection of Jewish music, Elijah’s Violin. This brief, charming work captures the ambiance of a Sabbath prayer and then develops into a showpiece while keeping well away from any sort of sentimental caricature. New fans will find much more of Ellstein’s work available on CD through the Milken Archive.

—MS

The Milken Archive of American Jewish Music through its series of recordings for Naxos American Classics continues to unearth important yet forgotten music. One of the latest is, to the best of my knowledge, the first ever CD devoted exclusively to the music of Jacob Weinberg (1879-1956), an émigré from the Ukraine who arrived in the U.S. in 1926 after composing one of the earliest operas sung in Hebrew. In America, he continued to create Jewish-themed music, among which is a ravishingly beautiful string quartet whose movements depict three of the most important holy days of the Judiac calendar: Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Sukkot through variations of traditional liturgical chants sung on those days. In the Yom Kippur movement, the holiest of all Jewish holy days is captured in music that reaches for the heights of the high Baroque albeit with themes Corelli and Rameau would probably not have considered harmonizing.

—FJO