SUSIE IBARRA Talking Gong

 

TALKING GONG

 

DUO Stephanie & Saar CAVATINE

 

 CAVATINE

Jacqueline Leclair MUSIC FOR ENGLISH HORN ALONE

 

MUSIC FOR ENGLISH HORN ALONE

Spektral Quartet EXPERIMENTS IN LIVING

EXPERIMENTS IN LIVING

MICHAEL HERSCH I hope we get a chance to visit soon

I HOPE WE GET A CHANCE TO VISIT SOON

Duo Noire NIGHT TRIPTYCH

In this wonderful collection of works for two guitars by a group of composers hailing from many spots on the globe, Duo Noire provides a compelling snapshot of the range of expression in contemporary chamber music for the instrument. Featuring music by Clarice Assad, Mary Kouyoumdijan, Courtney Bryan, Golfam Khayam, Gity Razaz and Gabriella Smith, the duo virtuosically presents a program that is aesthetically diverse, but focused around the values of narrative shape and expressive transparency.

“Night Triptych” opens with Clarice Assad’s (of the famed Assad guitar family) Hocus Pocus, a dynamic work blending the rhythmic intensity and rich harmonic color of the music from her native Brasil with an encyclopedic understanding of the timbral possibilities on the instrument. Percussive effects and brilliant arpeggios mark the opening movement, and a brooding second movement leads into a driving finale. Mary Kouyoumdjian’s Byblos is inspired by the ancient Lebanese city of the same name, and involves an accompanying electronic track that subtly deconstructs a Mediterranean traditional dance in hazy washes of sound. The guitar writing at times evokes the figurations of its regional cousin, the oud, and the relationship between live performers and the atmospheric backing track frames the push and pull between past and present in Kouyoumdjian’s engagement with this city that has seen multiple civilizations come and go. With its title, Courtney Bryan’s Soli Deo Gloria signals its alignment with centuries of work dedicated to the glory of a higher being and purpose. The composition’s journey is framed in terms of Bryan’s relationship to the stages of prayer — Contemplative, Unsettled and Searching, Questioning and Hoping, a Prayer, Pursuing, Realization, Acceptance. Bryan’s incorporation of jazz and gospel elements is subtle, integrated elegantly into her evolving compositional argument. Iranian composer Golfam Khayam’s title work is in three movements, “Improvisatory”, “Quasi Furioso”, and “Rubato, Amoroso, Molto Cantabile.” As with Kouyoumdjian’s work, we hear echoes of the oud and Middle Eastern music in fleet, ornamental slurred passages and pointed grace notes. But despite the hints at a geographically specific orientation, overall Khayam’s work comes from a place of universal contemplation, a style consistent to those familiar with ECM, the revered German label on which she has been featured. Also of Iranian heritage, Gity Razaz’s work is more squarely within the modernist compositional tradition, and her Four Haikus are four tightly crafted pieces, reminiscent in language and approach to the great late 20th century repertoire for guitar commissioned by Julian Bream. These works give the listener a chance to hear Duo Noire’s cultivated ensemble blend, well considered interpretative approach, and particularly in the second and final movements, rhythmic vibrancy. Gabriella Smith’s Loop the Fractal Hold of Rain engages with popular music more overtly than the other music on the recording, opening with an ostinato figure articulated with a slide that gives way to an insistent groove with engaging polyrhythmic counterpoint in harmonics. Shades of bluegrass and slide guitar inflect the minimalist structure. (D. Lippel)

Jacob Greenberg HANGING GARDENS

Claude Debussy and the Second Viennese composers followed different paths of philosophical development, inspired by the trends of art and literature in their age, but they were aligned by a common embrace of sensuality in music. Theirs was a strongly shared language, and my interest as a pianist is to explore fields of intersection between these two musical worlds often thought to be opposite in character. Writing for the piano, an instrument equally wide-ranging and intimate, helped all these composers to explore decadent dimensions of harmony, form, and sound color.

For this recording, Debussy’s two books of Préludes and selected individual pieces offer a chance to view the music of Arnold Schoenberg’s school, assumed to be arid and formalist, through a tinted lens. The Préludes, influenced by otherworldly Symbolist poetry and the aesthetic of ancient classical art, give snapshots of places, objects, natural phenomena, and fleeting moods. Small musical forms bely the ambition of Debussy’s endeavor: he conjures minutely detailed scenes, each of the twenty-four pieces wholly distinct in feeling.

Both Schoenberg and Anton Webern thrive in similarly miniature constructions. Schoenberg’s song cycle The Book of the Hanging Gardens portrays a doomed, desperate romance in brief tableaus set in a mythic, lush landscape. Featuring some of Schoenberg’s earliest atonal pieces, the cycle is energized by its intentional instability. Its richly ambiguous harmonic language is well-matched to Stefan George’s poetry of emotions stretched to the breaking point. The heightened poetic sensitivity is reflected in the composer’s tactile approach to sound: this can be heard especially in number 11 of the set, which depicts the lovers touching each other lightly in the afterglow of passion. This movement can be compared to the exotic flirtation of Debussy’s Voiles, and the heat of La puerta del vino.

Alban Berg’s whole-tone patterns in his early Sonata draw a clear link to Debussy. The innovative, pervasive development of a simple motive leads Berg to coloristic extremes. And Webern’s Variations finds expressive continuity and intense energy in spare sounds or silence. Webern forges a totally original piano texture: notes become points of light, forming shapes in a gorgeous void. Debussy and the Second Viennese opened music to a sensual, seductive unreality that diverse composers, to our own age, have accepted as a promise of possibility. ( Jacob Greenberg)

Patricia Kopatchinskaja MICHAEL HERSCH End Stages - Violin Concerto

Virtuoso violinist Patricia Kopatchinskaja, for whom Michael Hersch's Violin Concerto was composed, wrote recently of the piece that it ''is an open wound, there is no other way to say it.'' She continued, the work ''is so convincing ... moves me so deeply, makes me speechless, tolerates neither doubt nor objection. It is like a mountain one can't ignore ... everything is crystal clear, there is no decoration, no superficial beauty, no compromises. Everything is exactly in place, has found its perfect form.'' A follow up to his haunting ''Images from a Closed Ward'', New Focus releases Hersch's Violin Concerto, performed by Kopatchinskaja with the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), and end stages in a performance by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. With both pieces, Hersch reinforces his reputation as a composer of gripping music, unafraid to tackle through sound the most vulnerable and difficult corners of the human psyche. Patricia Kopatchinskaja displays remarkable versatility in her diverse repertoire, ranging from baroque and classical often played on gut strings, to new commissions and reinterpretations of modern masterworks. Called ''America's foremost new music group'' by The New Yorker, the ICE is an artist collective that is transforming the way music is created and experienced. As performer, curator, and educator, ICE explores how new music intersects with communities across the world. Committed to innovation and artistic excellence, Orpheus is considered among the finest chamber ensembles in the world. Orpheus was founded in 1972 by a group of like-minded young musicians determined to combine the intimacy and warmth of a chamber ensemble with the richness of an orchestra.