Record Roundup: Enigmas And Excitations

The composer starts with a blank page - or screen - and fills it with notes or diagrams, which are meant to enable others to issue forth sounds that previously only existed in the mind of their maker. While there may be iterations based on collaboration with the musicians, with a back and forth between writer and performers - or even an invitation to improvisation - the fact remains that it all begins one person's mind. Gain entry to some truly enigmatic and exciting thoughts below.

Spektral Quartet - Anna Thorvaldsdottir: Enigma Beethoven, Bartok, Schoenberg, and Shostakovich - just to name a few - all served to make the string quartet a proving ground for a composer. The exposed format presents both an opportunity and a challenge to translate your individuality and complexity across just 16 strings on four instruments. It's a different matter than a solo piece, which can also present difficulties, as one key element is interaction between the players. Still, the rigidity of the quartet makeup provides an excellent opportunity for the listener to compare approaches, like creating an overlay in he mind of The Beatles and Wire, who both use two guitars, bass, and drums as their essential lineup. Shostakovich also helped establish the idea of the string quartet being an especially personal expression, away from the more public space of the symphonic or operatic.

Those are some reasons I was all aquiver when I heard that Anna Thorvaldsdottir, one of the preeminent composers of our time, had written a string quartet. The work, called Enigma, premiered in Washington DC in 2019 and is finally being released on August 27th in a stunning performance by the Spektral Quartet, beautifully produced by Dan Merceruio for Sono Luminus. Right from the start of the three-movement work it's obvious that Thorvaldsdottir is operating on her own trajectory, with little reference to what's come before in the medium. Beginning with some mysterious alchemy that has the strings sounding like a distant wind, or someone's breath, Enigma is instantly arresting. Long, drawn-out chords further the piece's grip, almost physically pulling you in, as a melody emerges from the drip-drip-drip of the sequences. More breathing, the sound of insects ascending in a swarm, glassy notes interleaving, and sustained drones all assemble in a sound world that seems as visual as it is sonic. 

After listening several times, I'm not surprised to learn that there is a virtual reality component to Enigma, created in collaboration with filmmaker Sigurdur Gudjonsson. While the first release will be a conventional CD, eventually you will be able to  explore this at home with a VR headset. However, I imagine its full expression may be in future performances, each conceived to be a "360 degree full-dome theater live concert experience," premiering in Chicago and Reykjavik in spring/summer 2022. Hopefully additional dates will include New York!

The second movement is a little more active, with dramatic barks underpinning drones and occasional quick-moving passages. What starts to sink in is Thorvaldsdottir's preternatural understanding of the many varieties of sound that can be produced between wood, string, and bow. An extraterrestrial would not need much to be convinced she had conceived and built these instruments herself strictly for the purpose of making this music. Movement three is a bit eerie, as if exploring a pitch dark space, cobwebs dancing in pin-sized shafts of light. Then, ever so slowly, a melody develops, an ascending series of chords that seem to pay homage to the human need for order and narrative. An ancient song to carry you home. Listen to Enigma once and you just may believe it has always existed.

José Luis Hurtado - Parametrical Counterpoint Even as the board chair for Talea Ensemble, who play on six of eight tracks here, it took a random internet occurrence - i.e. luck - for me to learn about this album. At a recent board meeting, I learned it was a surprise to the ensemble as well, having recorded the works back in 2015 and then lost track of the project. Perhaps the delay was due to Hurtado, wanting to fill the album out a little, which he does with the two piano pieces that bookend the collection. Hurtado plays those himself, opening things up with the almost violent The Caged, The Immured (2018), which pushes the piano to some of its limits of volume and sustain. It's a thrill-ride from start to finish, with Hurtado in complete control throughout and the patented excellence of Oktaven Audio's sound on full display. Apparently there's a two-piano version, with the second instrument playing the same score, yet read upside down - must be quite an experience!

Retour (2013) is next, putting Talea through their paces for a dynamic, fragmented seven minutes and change. It's spicy and tart, full of agitated strings, a blatting trombone, and a flute whispering like a shy person trying desperately to get your attention among the noise. It's a delightful introduction to Hurtado's ensemble work, as are the four versions of Parametrical Counterpoint (all 2015), which pit two variable ensembles against each other to play a series of modules in an order of their choosing. Each version is a fast paced swirl of ideas, with the musicians trading melodic and rhythmic ideas with verve and commitment. Incandescent (2015) for 12 amplified instruments, is full of mechanical interactions, like a rusted engine trying to turn over. While still fragmentary, there's a greater sense of unity among the ensemble and a real sense of forward motion. Le Stelle (2015), for piano and fixed media, closes the album, a starlit and occasionally disorienting series of short, linked pieces that have the piano and electronics combining with a masterful organicity. This is the first I'm hearing of Hurtado, but thanks to this stunning collection he's firmly on my radar now.

Rarescale + Scott L. Miller - 05 IX I was eager to hear more from Miller after Tak Ensemble's marvelous recording of his Ghost Layers last year - and he delivered, putting this wild and occasionally wacky collection of telematically created pieces right in my inbox. With the pandemic pausing their usual collaborative methods, Miller and Rarescale, a flexible ensemble based in the UK, explored ways to work together online. As they normally work with graphic scores that encourage improvisation as the instrumentalist reacts to electronic sounds produced by Miller on the Kyma, they needed a platform that would allow them to interact in real time with very little latency, eventually settling on one called (yes) Netty McNetface. You can see some of how this worked in this video, which show Miller and his colleague, Pat O'Keefe (clarinet), in Minnesota jamming with Viv Corringham (voice and electronics, from Long Island) and Rarescale's Carla Rees (flutes, from London), working off of Miller's graphic score. 

OK, that's a lot of the HOW of 05 IX, but what does it sound like? Featuring Rees and her Rarescale colleague Sarah Watts on clarinets, this varies greatly from Ghost Layers in sound and style. Full of witty asides and amusing outbursts, this combo of people and instruments seems primed for play. Round 2 is a perfect example, with Miller's Kyma echoing and leading Rees' flute, like a robot trying to imitate its human companion. Picture C3PO and Luke Skywalker - but in a Marx Brothers comedy - to get some idea. However, there's more to it than that, with moments of repose and atomization, as if each player is returning to a quiet corner before leaping forth and batting sounds around some more. In just under five minutes, the piece takes you on quite a journey, which can certainly be said for the album as a whole. What other tricks does Miller have up his sleeve?

Douglas Boyce - The Hunt By Night Having delighted in The Hunt By Night when it opened Against Method, last year's brilliant album from Counter)induction, I was excited to dig into this collection. As the four other pieces here demonstrate, the man knows what he's doing, generating chamber works that are both splashy and elegant, whether interacting with the genius of the past, as on Quintet "L'homme armé," inspired by that medieval melody, or the future, as on Sails Knife-bright in a Seasonal Wind, inspired by his son as a four-year-old. Alternately playful and contemplative, that piece, like many here, features members of Counter)induction, in this case, Miranda Cuckson (violin), Dan Lippel (guitar), and Jeffrey Irving (percussion), with everyone engaging deeply with Boyce's music. But all the performances and the recording are top-notch, making this a perfect showcase for a composer deservedly gaining wider attention - give him yours.

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Information For 16 Strings

Note: The illustration contains part of a work by François-Xavier Lalanne as seen at The Clark.

Three Portraits: Cheung-Trapani-Du Yun

Albums by ensembles featuring multiple composers are a great way to focus on a group’s skills, both as curators and players. But the “portrait album” is another thing, giving listeners a valuable opportunity to focus on a range of works by one artist. Here are three of the best from recent months. 

Anthony Cheung - Cycles and Arrows One common criticism of post-modernism when it first became widely known in the 80’s was that it was a movement based on superficialities. For example, when an architect used some vestige of a Greek column in their work it was just there because it looked good or called up certain associations. There was seemingly no reference or understanding about why the ancients might have developed such a form or what mathematical principles lay behind its visual perfection. 

The music of Anthony Cheung is a firm rebuttal to that line of thinking. When you read his program notes for this, his third portrait album, you quickly realize that any echo of past forms or other compositions comes from a place of deep scholarship and musical understanding. Combined with a sureness of orchestration that feels natural and intuitive but is surely the product of much study and experimentation, the result is a delightful array of compositions from the last five years. Take the opening work, written for flute and string quartet and cheekily entitled The Real Book Of Fake Tunes. Over five short movements, the dialogue between the players unfurls with such wit and elegance you almost forget there are five people working together to produce the sounds. It certainly doesn’t hurt that the players are the genius flautist Claire Chase and the excellent Spektral Quartet, who also appear on the angular Bagatelles with pianist Winston Choi. 

So it goes throughout the album, whether combining Chinese instruments with Western ones in More Marginalia (played by the astonishing Atlas Ensemble) or composing for solo oboe in Après Une Lecture, which is cleverly based on notated speech patterns Cheung saw in the notebooks of Leos Janacek and played to perfection by Ernest Rombaut. The International Contemporary Ensemble appears on two pieces, the swaggering Assumed Roles with violist Maiya Papach, and Times Vestiges, which ends the album with a sense of unresolved mystery, like a flashlight’s beam being swallowed by tunnel. Cycles And Arrows is, like Dystemporal from 2016, further proof that Cheung is one of the finest composers of our time. 

Christopher Trapani - Waterlines While it’s usually terrible when visa problems derail a concert, it was actually to my benefit when Talea Ensemble had to shift gears for their slot at last month’s Resonant Bodies festival. Instead of playing a world premiere by a European composer, the group decided to revisit Trapani’s Waterlines. As a board member of Talea, I saw this happening in real time but still had no idea what to expect as I had missed a previous performance of the piece. 

“Home is the pull of a tonic chord,” Trapani writes in his liner notes for Waterlines, “Home is the warm glow of consonance, radiating through a hissing layer of noise.” He then goes on to describe the gestation of the piece, from being in Paris and watching Katrina hit his home city, to seeking solace in the old country and Delta blues records that animate this five-song cycle, especially ones about the great flood of 1927, to finding parallels between those old shellacs and the spectral music of Gerard Grisey and others.

I felt that pull and warmth right from the first strummed dulcimer chords that open the first song, Can’t Feel At Home, a feeling that only increased when Lucy Dhegrae began singing with the perfect combination of real feeling, theatricality and classical control. Waterlines brought me back to the first time I heard Barstow by Harry Partch, to that feeling like it had been with me all my life. All five songs in Waterlines were riveting and I marveled at the fractured vernacular, the lean orchestration, which has a few unusual instruments (fretless Turkish banjo) but no gimmicks, the quotes from Mahler and others that somehow fit just right...before it was over I knew I was in the presence of an instant classic. Dhegrae was fantastic throughout and Talea's playing, led by conductor James Baker, was intricate, powerful, and immaculately balanced. And now we have this recording featuring the same forces and I cannot recommend it highly enough.

There are four other excellent works here as well. Passing Through, Staying Put is a tart piano trio stylishly played by Longleash, who put such a stamp of greatness on Scott Wollschleger's Soft Aberration last year. The JACK Quartet takes on Visions And Revisions, elucidating its harmonic and melodic ties to Dylan's Visions Of Johanna with what sounds like great affinity for the music. There's further magic in the way Marilyn Nonken's sparkling piano in The Silence Falling Star Lights Up A Purple Sky segues into the final work, Cognitive Consonance.

The longest piece on the album, it consists of two long movements for stringed instruments bookending a brief electronic interlude. Talea Ensemble also contributes here and the electronics were crafted at IRCAM, the electronic music incubator founded by Pierre Boulez. The first part, Disorientation, uses a specially modified qanun (a kind of zither), played with extraordinary facility by Didem Basar, to explore a tactile landscape of immersive microtonality. I hung on every pluck and sweep of the strings, taking great pleasure from the way they interacted with the electronic textures. The second part, Westering, is played by Trapani himself on a hexaphonic electric guitar, which has transposition controls for each string, each of which is amplified by its own pickup, allowing for great control of pitch, timbre, etc. But you won't need to think about any of that as you listen - just enjoy the journey, which has no shortage of mystery.

While Trapani's music has been played by many distinguished performers over the years, and included on some fine albums, Waterlines is the first album devoted solely to his work and its display of his scholarship, emotional depth and originality could not be more successful or musically satisfying. I can only imagine what he will do next.

Du Yun - Dinosaur Scar I'm one of those slightly clueless types who actually needed Du Yun to win the Pulitzer Prize (as she did last year for Angel's Bone, her second opera) for me to become fully aware of her music. Seeing her furious concentration as a performer at the MATA Festival last spring was only a reiteration of her talents. Now we have this album, which is probably the most complete overview of her shorter works to date. I could be churlish and point out that six of the ten tracks have been in the can since 2009 - almost a decade, which is far too long for an artist as protean as Du Yun. 

But there are many wonders within Dinosaur Scar, such as Air Glow, which combines five brass players with electric guitar and bass for a sinuous, atmospheric experience that goes on for nearly 11 glorious minutes. The performers are all from the International Contemporary Ensemble, a testament to their 20-year working relationship with Du Yun and an assurance that they are all at the top of their field. Special note must by paid to guitarist Dan Lippel, whose does stunning work all over the record. Claire Chase is also here and in full effect on Run in a Graveyard, which she first included on her debut solo album in 2011. Pitting her alto flute against Du Yun's gnarly electronics creates a unique blend indeed, its strong narrative drive keeping you in suspense throughout.

The title track is the oldest piece, written for solo saxophone in 1999 when Du Yun was a sophomore in college, and played like it was hot off the sheet music by Ryan Muncy. This well-rounded collection also includes two scintillating improvisations, one which features Du Yun on kazoo, toy harmonica and phone, showing her humor. The electrifying and episodic by, of...Lethean ends the album, effectively soundtracking a movie I made up in my mind as I listened. What stories will Du Yun tell you? 

P.S. A number of the works on Dinosaur Scar will be performed as part of Du Yun's Composer Portrait at the Miller Theater on November 15th. Perhaps I will see you there!

Find tracks from all of these albums and other notable classical releases from 2018 in this playlist - and, as always, tell me what I'm missing.

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Skylark's Liminal Journey

The world of contemporary classical music, like all music, is full of niches. But it may not get more niche than an album of recent choral music around the theme of "the dream state at the end of life." But that is indeed what the vocal ensemble Skylark has delivered with Crossing Over, their new release on Sono Luminus. Having recently watched a great friend succumb to pancreatic cancer, I was actually completely uninterested, even resistant, to listening to anything that purported to describe what he had gone through. I also wasn't sure that anything other than tuneless primal screaming could express how I felt about the situation. 

But listen I did and found that I had been taking Skylark's concept a bit too literally. Crossing Over is, in fact, a superbly sung and brilliantly sequenced album that makes you think about death about as much as listening to Mozart's Requiem makes you think about death. It's in there, for sure, but despite the booklet's heavy handed subtitles (Denial, My time has come, etc.) there need be no utility to the collection. Overall, it is a meditative and elevating listening experience, with the rich, warm recording seeming to surround you with the perfectly balanced voices of the ensemble.

The composers chosen by Skylark's leader Matthew Guard range from those firmly established in the 20th century canon, like John Tavener and William Schuman, to younger musicians like Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Daniel Elder. It's Elder's Elegy that opens the album with a beautiful evocation of Taps emerging from a cloud of voices. By Elder's hand the overly familiar melody is imbued with a new gravity that may surprise you. 

Tavener is of course the composer Paul McCartney picked to lend a little weight to the releases on The Beatles' Apple Label, which put out his The Whale in 1970. Featured here is Butterfly Dreams from 2003, a short eight-part piece that explores a variety of moods, even touching on the primal scream in No. 6. The Butterfly: My Most Horrifying Nightmare. This is a small but important part of Tavener's legacy and we owe a debt of gratitude to Skylark for this definitive rendering of a rarely performed piece. 

Heyr bú oss himnum á, Thorvaldsdottir's setting of an Icelandic psalm with the key line "We cannot make a joyful song unless we are moved by love," is somber but shot through with shafts of light. I wasn't looking for further proof of her versatility but I'm glad to have it nonetheless. The longest work on Crossing Over is the world-premiere recording of Robert Vuichard's Heliocentric Meditation, which uses text from John Donne's Meditation XVII ("ask not for whom the bell tolls..."). It has some of Donne's solidity to it's structure and covers a variety of emotions from sorrow to raging against the dying of the light. It may never be performed by a glee club, as have some of Vuichard's other compositions, but it is a valuable addition to the contemporary choral catalog, which goes for the album as a whole.

Don't be scared off by the concept - give Crossing Over a chance. If you love the sound of the human voice you will find it a deeply rewarding journey.

Another recent release from Sono Luminus is not quite so satisfying. Everyone knows that a joke that must be explained is not a joke at all and there is a lot of explaining going on in the liner notes to Serious Business by the Spektral Quartet. The idea is to "look at humor" from different musical angles but the results are not always something you want to hear more than once. Many, Many Cadences by Sky Macklay opens the album and drives its point home with a repetition that seems unnecessary rather than clever. David Remnick's The Ancestral Mousetrap has the virtuoso instrumentalists singing in addition to playing, which might amuse in concert but not in my living room.

Hack by Chris Fisher-Lochhead closes the album with many, many (22) short "transcriptions" of comedians, from Lenny Bruce to Tig Notaro. It may be that you had to be there but these just seem like unfocused fragments. There's nothing terribly wrong with it, musically speaking, but there's not enough to engage me either. 

However, there is one saving grace on Serious Business, and that is the Spektral's absolutely masterful performance of Haydn's String Quartet Opus 33, No. 2 in E-flat major, "The Joke." I'm usually the one saying "Do we really need another recording of this?" when it comes to pieces from the classical era but in this case the answer is resounding YES. The recording is pure perfection and the quartet never oversells Haydn's melodies, with playing that reflects the elegance of the period so exactly that listening feels like time travel. The famous tease of the multiple endings still kills, too. Humor that stands the test of 200-plus years? Now, that's serious business.