WOMEN OF NOTE

Clara Schumann's recently recovered G-Minor Sonata['s]...bold gestures and the strong development of its ideas, especially in the substantial and stormy first movement, offer plenty of rewards, both emotional and intellectual... And while the excerpts from Fanny Mendelssohn-Hensel's The Year fit more comfortably into the orthodox parameters of music for (advanced) domestic use, they do so with exquisite polish... Highly recommended to anyone intrigued by the repertoire. (Peter J. Rabinowitz)

Lasting a shade under twenty minutes, Zwilich's Third Symphony is large in scale. Sinewy, assertive and confident, it is very much in the tradition of the Great American Third Symphonies of the 30s and 40s. As is the case with some of her music from the past decade or so, Shostakovich is the muse in some of the symphony's timbres, rhythms, power, and intensity... Marked Largo, the third movement cyclically revisits the first. Its midsection is strikingly dark and somber... This CD is a release of a major importance. Top recommendation. (Benjamin Pernick)

The great find of this release, however, and reason to rush out and buy it, is Galina Ustvolskaya. Born in 1919, one of the most important students of Shostakovich, and longtime resident of St. Petersburg, her music is fiercely original. I find myself almost at a loss for words to describe it. Simple motives are reiterated and developed with a sort of hypnotic force, but the os.tinati are never “cheap.“ Every gesture seems won through a titanic struggle. This is deeply spiritual music, but informed as much by anguish as transcendence... [B]y the 1988 sonata, Ustvolskaya is completely her own composer. It is only six and a half minutes long, but its thunderous, relentless low clusters (brutal sound-masses, yet still full of harmonic meaning) make it unique among piano music I have heard over the last decade, and its intensity suggests a piece far larger than its real-time duration. Though I have heard some of her music over the radio, and though I know a boomlet of her music is emerging on CD, this is my first encounter with Ustvolskaya on disc, and it has been shattering, the type of discovery that adventurous listeners dream of. (Robert Carl)

Los Angeles Master Chorale / Grant Gershon / Maya Beiser STEVE REICH You Are ( Variations)

Urban activity: buses moving; keypads clicking; bikers cutting off cabs; window washers scaling up a half completed skyscraper; the distant wail of an ambulance siren, and its sudden pitch modulation as it zooms past, carrying a rush of wind and a trail of receipts, wrappers, or the rare leaf; the clang of the subway; cash registers opening, closing, opening; everyone is counting something: time, money, appointments, each other; the whistle of a traffic cop and hundreds of half-heard conversations in the street. The flurry of the city isn't something best described as "beautiful" so much as alive, unstoppable, cruel, and complex.

American composer (and native New Yorker) Steve Reich has been writing the definitive city soundtrack for 40 years. From his early tape pieces "Come Out" and "It's Gonna Rain", to his now classic minimalist works-- though Reich would certainly scoff at the term-- Drumming and Music For 18 Musicians, to more recent works bother greater in scope and somehow conventionally attractive (Tehillim, Different Trains, The Desert Music), he's invented a sound that nails both the intricate detail and speed-ridden blur of some abstract "downtown." Where Philip Glass's music from the 1960s and 70s is vaguely futuristic and precise, Reich's is warm. Where Terry Riley, who never felt a particularly strong allegiance to the minimal aesthetic in the first place, is boundless and organic, Reich is brainy, propulsive, and hardened to the interiors of a metallic landscape. I read someone call him the "greatest living American composer," and though any all-encompassing title is debatable, you'd be hard pressed to find a more fitting example of individualism and stubborn will so often identified with this place.

You Are (Variations). is Reich's first CD of new material since the not altogether warmly received Three Tales (2002). If the composer has suffered complaints from critics of lacking ambition in recent years, he hasn't let that affect his writing: You Are is prime Reich, using choral and orchestral elements similarly to older pieces like Tehillim and The Desert Music, but seeming as rhythmically driven as anything he's done in years. Harmonically, he sticks to majors and relative minors (that is, a minor key that utilizes the same notes as a major one, but starts from a different point in the scale)-- a common Reich device-- thereby blurring the line between different tonalities. He uses a choir to impart text translated from Hasidic mystical verse: "You are wherever your thoughts are", "Explanations come to an end somewhere," and the idea of saying "little and do much". Words are repeated and spread out over great lengths, so the end effect is not one of narrative but of words as purely musical ingredients.

The "variations" in You Are take up most of the CD, but the closing track is Reich's Cello Counterpoint, featuring cellist Maya Beiser (Bang On a Can) overdubbed eight times to create a surprisingly dense string ensemble. As Reich points out in the CD insert, the cello is great because its capable of resonating clearly in a very wide range-- this piece was actually written for a full string octet, but its marked accents and interweaving melodies sound great all performed by one person. There is a slight similarity to Different Trains for string quartet, though Cello Counterpoint is nowhere near as "industrial," sounding more conventional, perhaps less confrontational, yet still unmistakably Reich. As with the You Are tracks, the constant rumble of motion fills up whatever mental space I have to drift away from the music. (Dominique Leone)

Maya Beiser WORLD TO COME

Over the course of her career, cellist Maya Beiser has continued to transcend the traditional boundaries of her instrument, reaching far beyond mere interpretation of the classical repertoire, indeed beyond classical music altogether, to become a creative performer drawing on a variety of genres and influences: Eastern, Western, and South American folk music, jazz, even rock & roll.
"World To Come" finds cellist Maya Beiser at the height of her risk-taking and boundary-crossing ambition. She defies not only cultural differences but also conventional oppositions of artist and medium, music and visual art, live performance and recorded material.
David Lang's "World To Come" is written for solo cello, the title piece incorporates pre-recorded cello tracks, theatrical lighting and video projection. A cellist and her voice are separated from the outset and struggle through out to reunite. As Lang describes it, "World To Come" is an introspective and highly personal prayer, a meditation on hope and hopelessness, and an elegy about the life and death of the soul."
Osvaldo Golijov's "Mariel" contains haunting melodies based on the native music of Northern Brazil this new version is for solo cello, drones and vocals.
World To Come also features Arvo Part's "Fratres," which was written for the eight-cello ensemble of the Berlin Philharmonic. Beiser plays the piece herself through multi-tracking.

Nico Muhly / Owen Pallett / Bryce Dessner / Shara Worden DAVID LANG Death Speaks

Death is present in so many of Schubert's lieder, and those appearances provide the starting point for the five songs that make up David Lang's Death Speaks. Lang went through the 600-plus texts that Schubert set, extracting all the lines that are either attributed explicitly to death, or to characters representing him, translating them "roughly" into English and creating lovesong-like lyrics. The settings are wonderfully spare and insistent, with accompaniments from guitar, piano and violin. Shara Worden, lead singer of My Brightest Diamond, is the vocalist, recorded in a close perspective, while the other work on the disc, Depart, offers a very different kind meditation on death. It was commissioned to be played in a French morgue, a peaceful setting in which the bereaved could see their loved ones for the last time. A sequence of slowly changing drones for wordless women's voices and cello, makes the perfect foil for Lang's naggingly memorable songs. (Andrew Clements / The Guardian)

Maya Beiser / Michael Harrison TIME LOOPS

The mysterious power of music has intrigued thinkers across the centuries. Plato described a universe in which Sirens situated atop the rings of the cosmic whorl each sing a single note from a great scale, together producing concords that can transport mortals to the heavenly regions. In our own time we tend to use other metaphors to explain the phenomenon -- with terms like "brain scan" and "beta-endorphins" -- but when listening to an exquisite piece of music, who could deny the emotional truth of Plato's vision?
Perhaps we respond so forcefully because, as Clement of Alexandria put it, the human body is itself a musical instrument. That was the view not only of the ancient Greeks but also of the Indian masters who strongly influenced Michael Harrison's musical development. Both proposed deep connections between the arrangements of tones and the human condition, and pointed to the most fundamental musical relationships -- those defined by Pythagoras in "whole number" proportions, as when strings vibrate in the ratio of 2:1, or 3:2, or 4:3 -- as being endowed with special qualities.
These comprise the tuning known as "just intonation," and generate the musical alchemy found throughout this intoxicatingly beautiful recording. In Just Ancient Loops, says cellist Maya Beiser, these unique musical relationships allow the sound of the cello to shimmer and bounce. "It's as if you are turning all the artificial lights off and just letting the rays of sunlight into your space," she says. In her recording and concert collaborations, Ms. Beiser has sought to redefine the traditional boundaries of the cello, opening new sonic possibilities for human expression. In this collaboration, Beiser and Harrison's musical and spiritual worlds converge.
"Michael's music is perfect for our times," Beiser observes. "It's architectural and precise, yet exhilarating and beautiful. It draws on music from ancient Greece and the Renaissance, Indian ragas and minimalism." This project is just the latest example of Michael Harrison's remarkable path, which has wound its way through compositional possibilities outside the modern Western canon and the denatured sounds of its modern tuning system. In his landmark piano work Revelation, he used "very small but perfectly tuned microtonal intervals to create a sound world of sustaining, pulsing" and kaleidoscopic effects. "With Time Loops, I'm demonstrating the simpler and more harmonious aspects of just intonation," he says. "As a result the tunings on the CD don't push the boundaries, but rather they sound clearer and more direct than the normal equal tempered scale that is used in most Western music."