(++++) RESCUED FROM OBSCURITY

Smetana: Má Vlast—Vltava; From Bohemia’s Fields and Forests; The Bartered Bride—Overture; Wallenstein’s Camp; String Quartet No. 1, “From My Life.” NBC Symphony Orchestra and Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by George Szell. Ariadne. $18.99.

Leopold Mozart: Concerto for Two Horns and Strings; Friedrich Witt: Concerto No. 3  for Two Horns and Orchestra; Franz Anton Hoffmeister: Concerto No. 3 for Two Horns and Orchestra; František Xaver Pokorný: Concerto for Two Horns and Orchestra. Jacek Muzyk and Daniel Kerdelewicz, horns; Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by JoAnn Falletta. Naxos. $19.99.

Handel’s Organ Banquet. Daniel Yearsley, organ. False Azure Records. $20.

     The earliest recordings by George Szell are now almost totally unknown, and his rather uneven relationship with the music of Smetana is also unfamiliar. So the Ariadne release featuring Szell conducting Smetana with two American orchestras during World War II is doubly welcome. In fact, it is triply welcome, since it includes not only some familiar Smetana music but also the world première performance and recording of Szell’s orchestration of Smetana’s largely autobiographical String Quartet No. 1 (1876). It is interesting that Szell undertook the orchestral arrangement of this highly personal work – showing in the process his firm command of orchestral forces and his considerable sensitivity to the nuances of the music – even though he was not an especially dedicated advocate of Smetana’s music in general: for example, he never conducted a performance of the entire six-tone-poem cycle Má Vlast. He did, however, perform and make recordings of portions of Smetana’s masterwork, and this release offers a chance to hear Szell’s handling of Vltava (recorded in 1941 with the NBC Symphony) and From Bohemia’s Fields and Forests (recorded in 1945 with the Boston Symphony). These live performances, which were done for radio airplay, are very well paced and quite attentive to detail, to the extent that can be shown through the elegant remasterings by Lani Spahr – which, however, can do nothing about the less-than-forgiving sound quality of the notorious Studio 8-H, where NBC Symphony recordings were made for many years. Nevertheless, Szell’s interpretations glow with sincerity and are emotive in ways that his performances in later years sometimes were not. In addition, the overture to The Bartered Bride crackles with gaiety here, while Wallenstein’s Camp is suitably atmospheric and variegated in its different largely self-contained sections. As for the quartet arrangement, it is in many ways the gem of this recording: the work itself is deeply personal, reflecting Smetana’s many travails that culminated in his becoming completely deaf in 1874 – two years before he wrote this work, whose finale in part reflects the ringing in his ears that the composer experienced before losing his hearing. Szell’s sensitivity to the mood of this quartet is complete, his performance showing how thoroughly he understands the material from both a musical standpoint and a human one. Sometimes considered rather cold in his later conducting, Szell here shows warmth and emotional engagement that point to a stronger bond between the Hungarian conductor (born György Endre Szél) and the Bohemian composer than has previously been apparent.

     It is the music itself that is very little known on a new Naxos CD featuring concertos for two trumpets from the mid-to-late 18^th century. All four works here are unfamiliar, and the one by Franz Anton Hoffmeister is a world première recording. The pieces are scarcely profound, but they are uniformly pleasant, engaging and nicely structured to take advantage of the expressive capabilities of the horn, which was just becoming a virtuoso instrument in this time period. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s horn concertos – which stretch the capabilities of the instrument in its pre-valved form – are a high point of horn music of the period, but his father’s two-horn concerto (written in 1752, four years before Wolfgang’s birth) is an interesting signpost for horn playing that is not at the level that was still to come but that still requires the soloists to exhibit more than a little dexterity, especially when the concluding “La Caccia” movement calls for using the horn in its traditional hunting-call mode. The concerto by Hoffmeister (1754-1812) was written later (1783) and is on a much larger scale than Leopold Mozart’s: it is twice as long, with a first movement lengthier than the entirety of the L. Mozart concerto. The broad concept of the first movement gives the horns plenty of opportunities to mingle with each other as well as the ensemble, and the writing is pleasantly idiomatic: the whole concerto lies quite well on the solo instruments. The middle movement, designated “Romance,” is the shortest, and it is a small gem in its warm but never overdone lyricism. Even later than Hoffmeister’s work is the one by Friedrich Witt (1770-1836): this concerto dates to 1797. Witt was born the same year as Beethoven and wrote this concerto six years after Wolfgang Mozart’s death, and while it does not have the grand scope of Hoffmeister’s concerto, it has greater expressive intent, with a stronger sense of emotional connection in the first movement and considerable warmth in the second. The finale lightens the mood considerably while highlighting the dual horns’ intermingled sound. As for the concerto by František Xaver Pokorný (1729-1794), its date is unknown, but its straightforward presentation and comparatively modest demands on the soloists place it closer to the world of Leopold Mozart than to that of Hoffmeister and Witt. Pokorný’s concerto is a work of pleasantry rather than profundity, its themes mostly gentle and its overall scale modest, although its finale certainly requires some acrobatics by the soloists. Jacek Muzyk and Daniel Kerdelewicz handle all the concertos with sensitivity and a fine sense of the necessary interplay between their parts, and JoAnn Falletta leads the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra with style and enthusiasm throughout. Even when using valved horns and modern orchestra tuning, these concertos are impressive in their virtuoso demands as well as the elegant balance they all show between the soloists and the ensemble. This recording offers a most welcome chance to hear music that scarcely deserves the oblivion to which it has been consigned for the past two centuries.

     Much of Handel’s music has also gone unremarked for a considerable time, despite the enormous popularity of a small number of his works (Messiah, Music for the Royal Fireworks, Water Music, etc.). It happens that Handel was well-known as a virtuoso organist, and wrote half a dozen organ concertos as interludes for oratorios – the first pieces of this type ever created, which deserve much more frequent performances than they receive. But if those concertos are comparatively unknown, the rest of Handel’s output of music for organ is totally unfamiliar. And there is not much of it. What then is an organist who wants to perform Handel to do? David Yearsley’s answer, heard on a fascinating False Azure Records recording, is to pull together a whole passel of Handelian works in organ arrangements, and play them on a thoroughly modern instrument (dating to 2010) that is far larger than anything Handel himself would have known or played. Listeners who get into the spirit of this project will have a wonderful time listening to this CD, which makes no pretense to authenticity and as a result can be enjoyed entirely for what it is rather than for professing to be something it is not. The very first track on the disc, combining a bit of Messiah with a little of the Suite in E Minor, HWV 429, showcases Yearsley’s approach effectively: he looks for Handelian material that lies well on the organ (or can be made to lie well there) and that makes some amount of musical sense even though it was not written for this instrument or this approach. Think of this as a pleasant repurposing of Handel: everything on the disc sounds good (thanks to Yearsley’s well-chosen registrations as well as to Handel’s underlying music); and in this admittedly rather outré context, following that opening track with ones presenting music from Theodora, the Passacaille HWV 399, a Chandos Anthem, Rinaldo, the Trio Sonata Op. 5 No. 6, the Concerto Op. 4 No. 1, and the concluding “Amen” from Messiah results in a delectable listening experience. For an encore (a kind of “dessert,” given the title of the CD), Yearsley includes a short “Hallelujah” improvisation that seems entirely fitting in this context – although it is thoroughly outside the context in which Handel placed the material. Handel’s music tends to be taken very seriously, deservedly so, but this disc shows that it is possible to approach it more lightly than usual, if not exactly lightheartedly. The CD is an unusual one that manages not only to please the ear but also to engage the mind by shining a light onto Handel’s work in unexpected ways.

(++++) CONFLICT AND RESOLUTION

Charpentier: Les Arts Florissants; Sonata a 8, H548. Haley Sicking, Kara McBain and Stéphanie Varnerin, sopranos; Dianna Grabowski, mezzo-soprano; Matthieu Peyrègne, tenor; Patrick Gnage, David Grogan and Andrew Dittman, basses; New York Baroque Dance Company and Dallas Bach Society conducted by James Richman. Rubicon. $16.99.

Music for Chorus by Schumann, Brahms, Viktor Ullmann, Ernst Krenek, and Max Reger. Seicento vocale with Cornelia Samuelis, soprano; Henriette Gödde, alto; Cornelia Glassi, piano; Jan Croonenbroeck, musical direction; conducted by Alexander Toepper. Resonando. $14.99.

     Traditional Western classical music is, in one sense, all about discord and ways to overcome it: dissonance resolving to consonance, modulations through keys that sound “right” or “wrong,” disharmony and eventual harmony. So music is a natural way to explore competition, up to and including warfare, and ways to resolve it in the world at large. Marc-Antoine Charpentier (1643-1704) was one of many composers who did just such an exploration – in an interesting way and with interesting effect – in his 1685 chamber opera, Les Arts Florissants. The work, available in a very fine Dallas Bach Society performance on a new Rubicon CD, is a tribute to King Louis XIV and is structured as an allegory involving a scarcely surprising dispute between Peace (soprano Haley Sicking) and Discord (bass Patrick Gnage). The stage action shows the arts flourishing under the Sun King until Peace and Discord get into their struggle – in which Discord and his followers are about to triumph when Peace gets Jupiter to unleash thunderbolts to chase the discordant characters to the underworld so a time of peace can again prevail and persist. Among Peace’s followers are characters representing Music (Kara McBain), Poetry (Stéphanie Varnerin), Painting (Matthieu Peyrègne), and Architecture (Dianna Grabowski) – all areas that are shown to flourish as long as Peace persists through the reign of Louis the Great. James Richman directs a highly idiomatic reading of the score: all the soloists are well-versed in period performance practice; the chorus is suitably small (Charpentier expected the soloists themselves to make up most if not all of the choruses); and the modest instrumental ensemble (Baroque flutes, Baroque violins, Baroque violoncello, viola da gamba, theorbo and harpsichord, the last of those played by Richman himself) is just right for the work and for its role in underlining and enhancing the vocal material. Charpentier’s opera is brief, running less than 50 minutes, and is not intended to make any significant points about peace and the lack thereof – or even about the beneficent rule of the king (which underlies the opera but is not a point belabored). Les Arts Florissants is intended as entertainment of a particular type, with attractive sung passages (some of them vocally challenging) and musical expression that breaks no new ground but throughout displays poise, elegance and balance – characteristics also associated with peace, music, poetry, painting and architecture, and by implication with King Louis XIV. Richman makes no attempt to overdo anything in the work or to present it more grandly than Charpentier intended. Instead, he allows it to flourish fully within its limited musical and emotional scope – a very effective approach. The CD also includes a Charpentier instrumental work that gives the ensemble chances to shine instead of appearing only in a supporting role. The Sonata a 8, H548 is really a suite, containing the expected dances (sarabande, bourrée, gavotte, gigue, passecaille and chaconne) and giving individual players chances to show some of their solo capabilities. It is a very pleasant complement to a very pleasant performance of an opera packed more with pleasantries than with profundities.

     The selections performed by the ensemble Seicento vocale (so spelled) on a new Resonando CD are much more recent than Charpentier’s music, having been composed in the 19^th and 20^th centuries. The underlying mood is darker, too, and the concerns about conflict expressed more directly and by no means in allegorical form. The disc includes works both written and arranged for chorus; the focus throughout is less on the music (although everything is sung very well) than on the underlying theme of the depredations of war. There is no suggestion here that music is one of the handmaidens or fruits of peace, as in Charpentier – instead, the ensemble chooses works that comment directly on war and in some cases were created in wartime, the better to put across themes of sorrow, depredation and remembrance. The concerns here are scarcely unique, and listeners interested primarily in the music – notably the centerpiece of the disc, Victor Ullmann’s Die Weise von Liebe und Tod des Cornets Christoph Rilke – will be disappointed: the work by Ullmann (1898-1944), which he wrote in the Theresienstadt concentration camp, is arranged for chorus by Jan Croonenbroeck and interrupted several times to insert pieces on analogous themes by Brahms and Schumann. The setup is surely well-meaning, the interpolations being designed to enhance Ullmann’s message and heighten its effect, but from a strictly musical standpoint, the approach here overdoes the presentation of admirable but unexceptionable feelings and attitudes, making the CD into more of a lecture and less of a musical event. The result is that this is a (***) disc: it features excellent performances with strongly felt emotional underpinnings and a very fine sense of ensemble throughout – but the music is put too strongly at the service of a cause that, however worthy, is presented a bit too intensely through the modification of works that communicate quite effectively on their own. True, that communication is more subtle and less direct and pointed than in the arrangement of material here. But for that very reason, there is more thoughtfulness in the original material than in the modified presentations on this disc. The Ullmann/Brahms/Schumann mixture is preceded on the CD by Schumann’s Schnitter Tod, Op. 75, No. 1, and is followed by three additional works: Kantate von der Vergänglichkeit des Irdischen, Op. 72, by Ernst Krenek (1900-1991); Requiem “Seele, vergiß sie nicht,” Op. 144b, by Max Reger (1873-1916); and Brahms’ Dem dunkeln Schoß der heilgen Erde, WoO 20. Each of these pieces, like the original version of Ullmann’s, has something meaningful to communicate, and each is intriguing in its own right. The Reger, for example, sets words by Christian Friedrich Hebbel (1813-1863) instead of the usual Latin text used in a Requiem. And the Brahms, from Schiller’s Das Lied von der Glocke and with its meaning of “the dark womb of the holy earth,” may put some listeners in mind of Das Trinklied vom Jammer der Erde from Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde. But the fact is that strictly musical thoughts  and connections are not the primary interest here: the concern of the CD is to find ways to communicate the suffering brought by war and the importance of peace. As admirable as that aim is, the approach of the disc, by bending the music to a nonmusical (or supra-musical) theme, undermines to some extent the excellent performances and the composers’ foundational thoughtfulness and expressivity.

(+++) GHOULS, GORE, GRIEF, GOBBLEDYGOOK

Stuff of Nightmares: The Monster Makers. By R.L. Stine. Illustrated by A.L. Kaplan. Colored by Roman Titov with Gonçalo Lopes. BOOM! Studios. $16.99.

Stuff of Nightmares: No Holiday for Murder. By R.L. Stine. Illustrated by Adam Gorman and Pius Bak. Colored by Francesco Segala with assistance by Gloria Martinelli. BOOM! Studios. $16.99.

     The thing about tributes is that it really helps to know what they are tributes to – even if knowing leads to some disappointment in comparing the tribute to its inspiration. There is no question that R.L. (Robert Lawrence) Stine (born 1943) greatly admires and has long loved the horror comics of the old EC Publishing empire under William M. Gaines (1922-1992) – comics that were destroyed by government attacks and the ensuing censorship during the McCarthy era, when Stine was still a preteen. Indeed, Stine’s introduction to Stuff of Nightmares: The Monster Makers makes his love of The Crypt of Terror and The Vault of Horror explicit, and Stuff of Nightmares follows the old comics’ clever framing approach by having the stories introduced by a suitably weird figure – not the Crypt Keeper or the Old Witch but, here, the Nightmare Keeper. There is even an attempt, now and again, to duplicate the offhanded grim humor that was an EC trademark in the framing characters’ introductions and postmortems (ha!) to the chilling and suitably (often gruesomely) illustrated stories.

     The problem is that Stine, whose career is built on his skill at evoking chills for young readers, does not have the frightening adeptness of the old EC writers and artists for producing scary scenarios that appealed to readers beyond the preteen years. EC Publishing was destroyed in large part because of the supposed influence of its horror comics on adults, with the charge led by Fredric Wertham through his book Seduction of the Innocent – in which (and in other venues) Wertham argued that all sorts of criminals, juvenile delinquents and societal misfits inevitably said, when he asked them, that they read lots and lots of horror comics; thus, the comics clearly inspired the evil people’s later depredations. This seems a ridiculous and illogical stretch nowadays and was ridiculous to saner voices even in the 1950s, ignoring the simple fact that far, far, far more people read these comics and did not turn into evildoers (not to mention that Wertham’s leading questions, when his research was not altogether fabricated, invited bad guys to blame what Wertham wanted them to blame). But it is certainly true that EC aimed at readers beyond the preteen/teenage years, delving into largely taboo topics such as domestic abuse (which did not even have that name yet). For instance, one notable story of a woman constantly abused by a perfectionist husband demanding everything at home be perfectly arranged, perfectly lined up, perfectly labeled and perfectly positioned ended with a scene of the numerous perfectly labeled and symmetrically arranged jars and other containers into which she put all the parts of his body, from internal organs to fingernails.

     That was grisly, to be sure, and over-the-top, but even in our age – which is so much more tolerant of writing and illustration of horrible things – nothing in Stuff of Nightmares matches that sort of tale, however much of a tribute Stine intended. What readers get in these two comic-book-size collections – illustrated throughout in dark colors, unlike the deliberately garish ones used in the old comics – are stories with lots of chopping and slashing and such but without any chills beyond those offered by Stine in his hyper-popular Goosebumps books.

     Of course, that may well be enough for many readers. The Monster Makers is the latest of innumerable retellings of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, thoroughly lacking (as do most of these reimaginings) in the original’s philosophical/theological underpinnings and doing its best to seem up-to-date through elements such as the livestreaming of a double murder. A mediocre attempt to make Frankenstein’s monster a sympathetic character, as Shelley did, here involves making the primary monster a childlike and child-sized being, complete with diaper, that is given to asking everyone for help and repeatedly saying “I a monster.” The thoroughly evil human creator of this pathetic little creature is given to proclamations such as, “I am quivering, electrified by my own excitement” – reflecting the role of electricity as a force for revival in Shelley’s novel and a force for whatever is going on in Stine’s story. Readers with little knowledge of Shelley and less of EC Comics may find this tale at last mildly thrilling, if scarcely cautionary (unlike Shelley’s: that was its whole point).

     No Holiday for Murder includes two stories, one involving a killer in the “Murderverse” who becomes a hero to legions of fans (a scenario with notable and obvious real-world parallels) and one focusing on a demented mall Santa Claus who goes on a violent crime spree in which he, among other things, delivers voracious rats to adults and children alike. In the setup pages surrounding the stories, Stine takes a stab (ha!) at some of the wryly ghoulish humor of the old EC comics, but his attempts are scarcely, um, cutting-edge – for instance, he has the Nightmare Keeper’s “manservant Reggie” bring dinner and say, “I prepared blood sausages, sir. Or is that joke too obvious?” To which the Nightmare Keeper, breaking the proverbial fourth wall of the theater, replies, “No jokes are too obvious in a horror comic, Reggie.” Oh, please.

     The Nightmare Keeper himself, with his trenchcoat and goggles, looks more like a pervert-in-training than a creature from the id such as the Crypt Keeper and the Old Witch. This too is a modernization of old comic-book tropes, and this too is a cheapening of them. Stuff of Nightmares is nowhere near as nightmarish as the models on which Stine draws (so to speak: he is the writer; the drawings are by various adequate illustrators). But perhaps the 21^st century has enough ongoing real-world horrors so that these comparatively formulaic tales will be a breath of desirably fetid air for those seeking escape of a sort into stories that, if nothing else, have definitive beginnings, middles and endings.

(+++) CONTEXTS FOR THE CONTEMPORARY

Gershwin: An American in Paris; Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 14 (“Moonlight”); David Biedenbender: Refraction; Grieg: Holberg Suite—Air. Sonus Quintett (Linda Gulyas, clarinet; Viviana Rieke, bass clarinet; Lena Iris Brendel, saxophone; Eloi Enrique Hernández, oboe; Annika Baum, bassoon). Genuin. $18.99.

Poulenc: Violin Sonata; Prokofiev: Violin Sonata No. 1; Arvo Pärt: Spiegel im Spiegel. Paul Huang, violin; Helen Huang, piano. Naïve. $16.99.

Kenneth Fuchs: Point of Tranquility; Russell Platt: Symphony in Three Movements (for Clyfford Still); Randall Svane: Concerto for Oboe and Orchestra; Wang Jie: The Winter that United Us. Henry Ward, oboe; Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by JoAnn Falletta. Beau Fleuve. $15.

Philip Glass: Aguas da Amazonia. Third Coast Percussion (Sean Connors, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin and David Skidmore); Constance Volk, flute. Rockwell Records. $19.99.

Stockhausen: MANTRA; John Liberatore: Sedgeflowers; Yi-wei Angus Lee: Rage Over Lost Time; Dante de Silva: Too Sedated to Rage; Aida Shirazi: RAGE—Screamed, RAGE—Stolen, RAGE—Silenced; LJ White: Rage Is the Bodyguard of Sadness; Andrew Zhou: Con variazioni; Christopher Castro: Beethausenstro-Castockhoven; Laura Cetilia: sense of missing; Christopher Stark: Foreword. Ryan MacEvoy McCullough and Andrew Zhou, pianos and percussion. False Azure Records. $25 (2 CDs).

     It is a truism for contemporary composers that it is much harder to get a second performance of a new work than to get a first one: plenty of ensembles are willing to try out a recent composition, but it is only if the piece resonates with an audience that it has a chance of being picked up for additional hearings elsewhere and by different performers. It is also true that much contemporary classical music is self-limited in its appeal: its sounds and structures are off-putting to many self-professed classical-music lovers, and indeed it is arguable whether “classical music” as a descriptor still retains the meaning that it has had for many years – music is now so intermingled and interbred that many modern works are very difficult to label (a state of affairs that is fine from many composers’ perspective but less so from that of many audiences). What has evolved in recent years have been various ways of introducing new musical experiences to audiences that may not be receptive simply to hearing something new for its own sake: there will always be devotees of whatever may be contemporary at any time, but they are a small group and often ill-suited to helping new compositions reach a wider listenership – assuming composers want a bigger audience, which not all do.

     One approach to contemporary music involves presenting it along with more-familiar material – and if the more-well-known works can be given an unusual twist, so much the better. The Sonus Quintett is an unusual assemblage of wind instruments, and its debut recording, on the Genuin label, makes some often-heard works sound new while including a piece from 2015 whose sound contrasts significantly with that of everything else on the CD. Orchestrations of Gershwin often give his music a particular affinity for winds – the clarinet in Rhapsody in Blue, for example – so an arrangement of An American in Paris for wind quintet is not quite as outlandish as it might seem. This performance is fun to hear, the music’s many mild outbursts possessing a kind of bright amusement while its meandering-about-town setting comes through well in (for example) the contrasts between bassoon and oboe. The arrangement is a curiosity – enjoyable as an occasional contrast to the original but ultimately likely to encourage listeners to go back to the work’s more-familiar form. It is, however, salutary to hear how well the music fits this arrangement, which is very well played indeed. Beethoven’s “Moonlight” sonata is even more curious and not really as successful. The delicacy of the opening movement actually seems overdone in this arrangement, as if the work had been reimagined by Ravel. The second movement flows well enough, but the third just sounds silly in its chordal outbursts and the underlining of the lower winds. The Beethoven is followed by Refractions by David Biedenbender (born 1984), a three-movement, 10-minute mixture of styles and rhythms and sounds of all sorts that contrasts in every way with Beethoven’s three much-smoother movements and seems designed mainly to show off the virtuosity of the performers. They do indeed play it with considerable skill, but that serves only to highlight the sorts of deliberately overdone dissonances and exclamatory elements that seem to be more enjoyable to play than they are to hear. Interestingly, after this work the Sonus Quintett offers a Grieg encore that is quiet, slow-paced, pretty rather than profound, and focused on the warmth and lyricism of which the group proves itself more than capable. In all, this is a CD certainly worth an occasional hearing, if not one to which most listeners will likely turn frequently.

     The Air from Grieg’s Holberg Suite is scarcely minimalist music, but it has a somewhat similar effect in the Sonus Quintett arrangement – and a minimalist piece, a modern one, is also a significant element of a new Naïve recording featuring violinist Paul Huang and pianist Helen Huang. The work, Spiegel im Spiegel (1978) by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, is placed on the disc between sonatas by Poulenc and Prokofiev – making this CD another one in which a modern work is offered within a program of older and better-known pieces. Interestingly, although Spiegel im Spiegel has been arranged many ways, in this case it is played as originally written, for violin and piano. It is a somewhat soporific piece, as is usual in minimal music, but it certainly provides a sense of relaxation that contrasts with the mood of the Poulenc and Prokofiev sonatas, which both date to World War II and reflect the war to a considerable extent. Poulenc’s sonata is heartfelt, dramatic and tragic (the finale is marked Presto tragico), and the performance by Paul Huang and Helen Huang (who are unrelated to each other) delivers considerable emotional impact in its outer movements. The central Intermezzo, on the other hand, provides a degree of respite despite some underlying acerbity – and its modest sense of relaxation proves particularly welcome when the finale starts, since the concluding movement is a nonstop study in intensity. After this, the Pärt work is a welcome island of calm before the Prokofiev sonata, whose four movements often proceed at a moderate pace (three of the four have Andante tempo indications) but whose harmonic language is dark and disturbed throughout. If there is something hectic in the Poulenc, there is a great deal that is funereal in the Prokofiev, although the second movement (Allegro brusco) partakes of some of the same sensibilities that pervade the Poulenc sonata. This performance is especially effective in the unsettled delicacy of the third movement and the way the finale first complements and later contrasts with the mood of its predecessor. All the playing here is sensitive and convincing, and the inclusion of the newer, shorter Pärt work does help elucidate the communicative power of the lengthier pieces by the earlier composers.

     Some presentations of modern works seek audience approval not by including better-known material but by offering multiple differing (but hopefully complementary) pieces by contemporary composers. That is the approach on a Beau Fleuve CD featuring the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra under JoAnn Falletta. All four pieces on the disc certainly have modern sensibilities, but none has the sort of avant-garde sound that many potential listeners might find off-putting. Point of Tranquility (2020) by Kenneth Fuchs (born 1956) is something of a throwback to the sound of Copland in his more-popular music. Inspired by a painting by Morris Louis (1912-1962) and originally written for wind band, the 11-minute tone poem sounds in its orchestral version like a work exploring forms of inwardness, using muted brass and sectional balance to convey a feeling of meditative calm. It goes on a bit too long after making its basic point, but remains lyrical and expressive throughout. Symphony in Three Movements (for Clyfford Still) was written in 2019-2020 by Russell Platt (born 1965) and is even more directly connected with a painter, as its title indicates: Still (1904-1980) was an important figure in abstract expressionism. Platt dates the three movements to specific years (1957, 1955, 1954/1962) and ties the music directly to four Still paintings from those years – which means that listeners unfamiliar with those works or with the artist himself will not get the level of connection to the music that Platt is seeking. Without that connection, the symphony sounds much like other symphonies written in recent times: it makes full use of the orchestra’s capabilities and offers a variety of sounds and forms of expression, flitting here and there without apparent order and without the connection among themes and their development that is usually considered a hallmark of symphonic style. It is well-made music but requires audiences to bring a bit more advance knowledge to it than is really reasonable. In contrast, the Concerto for Oboe and Orchestra (2023) by Randall Svane (born 1972), an orchestral version of a work originally for oboe and piano, requires no familiarity with any particular inspiration. It is a rather pleasantly old-fashioned concerto in some ways, bringing the oboe’s expressive potential to the fore throughout the first two movements, both of which are slow-paced and lyrical. The finale is brighter but retains a sense of warm expressiveness and gentle flow, and the language throughout the work is mostly tonal: this is an easy concerto to listen to, and it is in some ways a throwback harmonically. It is rather monochromatic, exploring the oboe almost entirely from the standpoint of lyricism, which means that although soloist Henry Ward handles the music well – and although Falletta brings the same level of commitment and understanding to this work that she brings to all the pieces on this CD – the net effect of Svane’s music is underwhelming. The disc ends with The Winter that United Us (2022) by Wang Jie (born 1980), which opens with a decidedly Coplandesque fanfare but quickly moves into more-dissonant realms and a thorough exploration of the percussive capabilities of the orchestra – and not just the percussion section. The work is kaleidoscopic both in scoring and in pacing, and its multiple moods contrast strongly with the single (albeit multifaceted) one explored by Fuchs. The result is a CD presentation bookended by tone poems of very different sensibilities that share some commonalities in the use of orchestral color but that otherwise come at audience engagement from very different directions. This disc as a whole is not very unified thematically, but it does a good job of giving listeners the chance to hear how some skilled contemporary composers approach writing for a full orchestra in ways designed to reach out to a broader audience than many modern composers seek.

     None of the works conducted by Falletta is likely to be well-known even to committed followers of contemporary music, but the Philip Glass ballet score Aguas da Amazonia (1993-1999) has attracted some attention over the years – perhaps enough to draw in new listeners by putting this very new work in an even newer context. That seems to be the thinking behind a very short CD (36 minutes) on which Third Coast Percussion offers its own orchestration and sequencing of the Glass dance work, which was originally a set of piano sketches. Although the music is associated with nine rivers in the Amazon Basin, the piece is given as 10 movements on this disc, with the Madeira River section split into two parts. As is typical of Glass, the music relies on repetitive sounds and structures throughout, and its movements bear no aural relationship to any of the rivers. That relationship would be communicated in performance by dancers: the work was conceived as a ballet and is still often performed that way. The Third Coast Percussion arrangement is quite a good one, within the confines of the repetitious nature of the music: the players shift the sound world with considerable subtlety among their instruments, and they do a good job of varying the segments in terms of playing by the full ensemble or by individual or paired members of the group. The use of flute is a big plus here: Constance Volk does a fine job of blending her sound with that of the percussionists when appropriate while standing out from the ensemble when that approach is more apt. It is nevertheless undeniable and inevitable that the entire work, without the visuals that would be provided by dancers, tends to sound like background music: it is frequently soporific and, unlike the rivers after which its sections are named, never seems to be going anywhere – although, like many of those rivers, it certainly does meander with a rather calm and lazy flow. Listeners already enamored of the music of Glass in general, and of Aguas da Amazonia in particular, will enjoy the way Third Coast Percussion handles the material, but it is hard to imagine this brief Rockwell Records CD drawing in any new audience for this work – except perhaps for listeners who enjoy hearing the quiet meandering of percussion instruments while they engage in life in ways other than active listening.

     If the Glass CD is somewhat on the abstruse side, the two-CD Stockhausen-focused release from False Azure Records is even more so. Like Aguas da Amazonia, Stockhausen’s MANTRA has a reputation that has grown over time, in its case since Stockhausen composed it in 1970. But while an interest in reaching out to potentially wider audiences is evident in the Glass work through its intended use as a ballet score, Stockhausen’s interest was far more intellectual (as with a great deal of his work) and far more concerned with the mechanics of musical creation than with its eventual reception by anyone outside a kind of inner circle of cognoscenti. MANTRA in fact represented a new direction for the composer: he had gone through an extended period of creating indeterminate/aleatoric works, a time that ended with MANTRA because here the score is fully written down. MANTRA was also Stockhausen’s first creation to use what he called “formula technique” for the development of paired melodies that he did not want to refer to as themes or subjects. The piece is not and never was intended to be easy to listen to – not so much because of any extreme sound but because its compositional method is as much the point as is the composition resulting from use of that method. The scoring is for two electronically modified pianos, plus crotales and wood block; one of the two performers also produces Morse code with a short-wave radio or from a recording. The whole setup is abstruse in the extreme and can easily be parodied, but the underlying musical concept is quite serious, and Ryan MacEvoy McCullough and Andrew Zhou certainly approach it with the exploratory intensity it deserves. What is particularly intriguing about this recording, though, is not only the performance of MANTRA but also the juxtaposition of the Stockhausen work with two brand-new ones intended as MANTRA companion pieces, plus a series of short items that do not relate directly to MANTRA but that occupy the same musical thought space, or an analogous one. The pieces intended to accompany and comment on MANTRA are Sedgeflowers (2017-2018) by John Liberatore and Foreword (2017) by Christopher Stark. Both inhabit a sound world noticeably connected to Stockhausen’s, although both composers use the instruments and their enhancements differently from the way Stockhausen does. Liberatore is more concerned with pianistic percussion in his piece, Stark with electronic modification in his. The remaining pieces in this highly intriguing but very rarefied release are short (two-and-a-half to five minutes) and very different in sound not only from MANTRA but also from each other: Chris Castro’s, for example, punctuates delicate runs along the entire piano keyboard with strong crotale interpolations, while Dante de Silva’s has an Impressionistic air about it combined with strong, amplified dissonances. This is a release for the “in” crowd of Stockhausen admirers, for people who already know and appreciate MANTRA and want not only to hear a very fine performance of it but also to experience an additional set of pieces that are, in effect, commentaries on or supplements to Stockhausen’s work. The recording will certainly not reach a large audience, but it will be of very considerable interest to a highly committed group of enthusiasts who have a strong attachment to this composer and this specific example of his creative process.