Kim Kashkashian / Sivan Magen / Marina Piccinini TRE VOCI Takemitsu - Debussy - Gubaidulina

Kim Kashkashian, who won a Grammy last year with her solo viola Kurtág/Ligeti disc, returns with a new trio. Tre Voci includes Italian-American flutist Marina Piccinini and Israeli harpist Sivan Magen. All three musicians have been acknowledged for bringing a new voice to their instruments. Kashkashian, Piccinini and Magen first played together at the 2010 Marlboro Music Festival, and agreed that the potential of this combination was too great to limit it to a single season. Since then they have been developing their repertoire. On this compelling first release it revolves around Debussy’s 1915 “Sonata for flute, viola and harp” and its influence, most directly felt in Takemitsu’s shimmering “And then I knew ’twas Wind”. Debussy himself had been profoundly moved by his encounter with music of the East and in his last works was emphasizing tone-colour, texture and timbre and a different kind of temporal flow. 

In this music, the elasticity of Debussy’s feeling for time (as Heinz Holliger observed) pointed far into the future and to the works of Boulez. And indeed to the music of Sofia Gubaidulina, whose “Garten von Freuden und Traurigkeiten” (“Garden of Joys and Sorrows”) makes its own reckoning with orient and occident. Gubaidulina has said that she considers herself "a daughter of two worlds, whose soul lives in the music of the East and the West". As Jürg Stenzl points out in the liner notes, hardly any composer of his generation was more greatly affected by the discovery of Debussy's music than Tōru Takemitsu: “This largely self-taught composer had already studied a broad range of recent 'western' musics before he turned to the 'classical' traditions of his native Japan. The late work ‘And then I knew 'twas Wind’ scored for the same instruments as Debussy's second sonata, is especially characteristic of his understanding of music” ...

 … and emphasizes what Takemitsu called “the vibrant complexity of sound as it exists in the instrument”. His composition resembles Debussy's in its free and rhapsodic form, but unlike Debussy's 'musique pure', Takemitsu's title relates to a poem by Emily Dickinson:

“Like Rain it sounded till it curved / And then I knew ‘twas Wind – / It walked as wet as any Wave / But swept as dry as sand – / When it had pushed itself away / To some remotest Plain …” 

Sofia Gubaidulina’s “Garten von Freuden und Traurigkeiten” (“Garden of Joys and Sorrows”) also draws upon lyric poetry for inspiration. The work concludes with a recitation of a poem by Austrian-born writer Francisco Tanzer, but its title comes from a text by the Moscow poet Iv Oganov. The vivid imagery of Oganov’s poem makes itself forcefully felt in Gubaidulina’s work: “The lotus was set aflame by music / The white garden began to ring again with diamond borders.” 

The composer, in her words, was compelled to a concrete aural perception of this garden, explored at length in the music. As with Takemitsu the flow of the work retains an improvisational freshness, and the combined sound-colours of viola, harp and flute are as beguiling as in the Debussy sonata. 

Tre Voci’s album was recorded in April, 2013 at the Auditorio Radiotelevisione svizzera, Lugano, and produced by Manfred Eicher. It is released in time for a European tour with a programme including music of Debussy, Takemitsu and Gubaidulina.

Wu Man / Yuri Bashmet / Moscow Soloists TAN DUN Pipa Concerto - HAYASHI Viola Concerto - TAKEMITSU Nostalghia

Tan Dun's Concerto for String Orchestra and Pipa (1999) is a reworking of one of his most popular works, Ghost Opera, written for and recorded by the Kronos Quartet. In this version, the composer's characteristic polystylism -- which here includes Chinese folk song, Copland-esque Big Sky music, quotations from Bach, and vocalizations by the orchestra -- comes across as a jumble, without much of a strong vision holding the disparate elements together. Pipa virtuoso Wu Man, who appeared on the Kronos recording, plays the concerto with energy and delicacy. She's ably accompanied by the Moscow Soloists, led by Yuri Bashmet. The concerto is followed by Takemitsu's Nostalghia (1987) for violin and string orchestra. Its compositional assurance, clarity, subtly nuanced orchestration, and emotional directness make it all the more striking in contrast to the Tan Dun. Here Bashmet is the impassioned soloist, with Roman Balashov conducting with great sensitivity. The three brief excerpts from Takemitsu's film scores are a pleasant stylistic diversion -- light, strongly differentiated character pieces. Hikaru Hayashi's Concert-elegia for viola and strings is a substantial contribution to the small repertoire of successful viola concertos. As its title suggests, its tone is essentially one of gentle melancholy, but it's also characterized by an optimistic serenity. It's elegantly and beautifully conceived and constructed, with a transparent emotional appeal. The versatile Bashmet plays with warmth and deep feeling. Onyx's sound is clean, clear, and warmly atmospheric. (Stephen Eddins)

Alison Balsom ARUTIUNIAN - MacMILLAN - ZIMMERMANN Trumpet Concertos

British trumpet player Alison Balsom has established herself as one of the leading performers on her instrument in the early 21st century. This 2012 album features three modern and contemporary concertos for trumpet. Balsom is phenomenally secure in her technique and in the musicality she brings to each of the pieces. The BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Lawrence Renes, and the Scottish Ensemble, led by Jonathan Morton, provide colorful and energetic accompaniment. Bernd Alois Zimmermann's 1954 Trumpet Concerto is the standout work on the album. It is certainly one of the most distinguished, substantial, and immediately appealing trumpet concertos of the 20th century. It is subtitled "Nobody knows de troubles I see," and uses the melody of the spiritual as the basis for its sophisticated musical development. Like many of Zimmermann's works, its themes are political and he changed the title from "seen" to "see" to highlight the ongoing struggle for racial equality throughout the world, with pointed reference to the lingering racist attitudes of National Socialism in post-war Germany. It's an intensely dramatic and inventive piece; Zimmermann interweaves the original spiritual with jazz influences and modernist techniques in a way that's emotionally direct and thoroughly engrossing. Balsom negotiates its extreme demands with complete assurance. The Trumpet Concerto in A flat by Armenian composer Alexander Arutiunian, written in 1950, bears the stamp of the Soviet demand that music be immediately entertaining for the proletariat. The concerto is tuneful and uses folk material and for the most part sounds like it could be the soundtrack for an "exotic" adventure film. What it lacks in musical sophistication it makes up for in the opportunities it gives the soloist to really shine melodically. James MacMillan's 2010 concerto Seraph, which Balsom premiered, is an inoffensive but not especially profound work, characterized by pleasant, lyrical note-spinning. EMI's sound is pristine, balanced, and nicely ambient. (Stephen Eddins)

Momo Kodama LA VALLÉE DES CLOCHES Ravel / Takemitsu / Messiaen

Momo Kodama’s first ECM New Series album is a marvel, a mesmerizing journey from the shimmering surfaces of Miroirs, Maurice Ravel’s piano cycle of 1904-45 to Olivier Messiaen’s Fauvette des jardins (written in 1970), a late masterpiece of piano music from the visionary composer. Kodama’s insights into Messiaen’s sound-world enable her to convey his religious feeling for nature, for birdsong transfigured, through the compelling, insistent piano figures, into spiritual utterance. Linking Ravel’s valley of the bells and Messiaen’s open sound field is Toru Takemitsu’s Rain Tree Sketch (1982), music from the East informed by Western experiment, a Japanese reflection on French music. “Its opening bars” writes Hans-Klaus Jungheinrich in the liner notes, “evoke not only the rapturous crystalline chord progressions of Messiaen, but also the flashing, glittering sophistication of Ravel.”

Kodama has a personal perspective on dialogues of Orient and Occident. Born in Osaka, she spent her early childhood in Germany, moving to France at 13 to become the youngest student ever accepted at the Conservatoire national supérieur de musique in Paris. Later there were studies with great pianists including Murray Perahia, András Schiff, Vera Gornostaeva and Tatiana Nikolaïeva. At 19 Momo Kodama was the Munich International Competition’s youngest prize winner.

She has gone on to play with leading orchestra of Japan, Europe and the US and worked with conductors including Seiji Ozawa, Kent Nagano, Roger Norrington, Charles Dutoit, Eliahu Inbal, Valery Gergiev and Lawrence Foster. Her chamber music partners include Steven Isserlis, Rohan de Saram, Renaud Capucon, Augustin Dumay and Jörg Widmann. Momo and sister Mari Kodama, meanwhile, form a piano duo that plays the core repertoire and premieres new works.

Momo Kodama’s recital repertoire reaches from Bach to the avant-garde. A major part of her performance schedule is dedicated to contemporary music, and Messiaen has been a special focus. In 2002, on the 10th anniversary of Messiaen's death, she performed his Turangalîla Symphony, Les Visions de l'Amen with her sister Mari, and Les vingt regards sur l'enfant-Jésus in a series of highly successful concerts. In the Messiaen centenary year 2008 she received awards in Japan for a concert series dedicated to the composer. At the Festival La Roque d'Antheréon 2006, at the urging of Yvonne Loriod-Messiaen, she premiered, with Isabelle Faust, Messiaen's Fantasie for violin and piano, a piece written in 1933 but never previously performed. Her recordings of the Vingt regards sur l’enfant-Jésus and the Catalogue d’Oiseaux for Triton, received high critical acclaim. In 2008 she commissioned Toshio Hosokawa’s Stunden Blumen, a work with the same instrumentation as Messiaen’s Quatuor pour la fin du temps, and performed both pieces at festivals in Lucerne, Paris, Hamburg and Vienna.

A number of composers have written works for Kodama. She is also the dedicatee of works including Lichtstudie 3 by Jörg Widmann, which she premiered at the Lucerne Festival, and Echo by Ichiro Nodaira, which was composed for Momo and Mari Kodama.