(++++) THE FLOW’S THE THING

Chopin: Piano Concertos Nos. 1 and 2. Christian Zacharias, piano and conducting Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne. MDG Preziosa. $24.99 (SACD). 

     Sometimes a labor of love can be as much labor as love. That seems to have been the case with these recordings of Chopin’s piano concertos featuring Christian Zacharias – based on the unusually engaging and informative program note about them by Werner Dabringhaus (the “D” in MDG, “Musikproduction Dabringhaus und Grimm”). These performances date to 2003 (Concerto No. 2) and 2004 (Concerto No. 1), and are now being made available on MDG Preziosa, a kind of “archive” label within the firm. 

     Anybody who believes that classical-music recording is mostly just a matter of microphone placement and fiddling with a few knobs or volume-and-balance adjusters here and there, then letting the musicians play as usual, will be disabused of that notion by reading Dabringhaus’ account of the complexities of these particular recordings, which delve into everything from the inability to use control-area air conditioning to the necessity of rearranging instruments in order to capture sound accurately within a theater setting that was not designed for orchestral performances – all of this after being initially unable to locate the recording venue because of map imprecision. A well-told tale of events that are amusing and worthy of recollection in hindsight but were surely quite frustrating when initially endured, Dabringhaus’ reminiscences provide greater context than listeners usually get when it comes to considering just how a particular recording came to be. 

     None of this would matter much, of course, if the performances did not turn out to have been worth the effort to capture them more than 20 years ago – and to remaster them for release now in SACD form. Thankfully, though, Christian Zacharias’ sensitivity to Chopin, both as pianist and as conductor of Orchestre de Chambre de Lausanne (of which he became artistic director in 2000), makes this a very worthwhile release that does not require audiences to know anything about its provenance in order to involve them deeply in the high-quality interpretations. 

     Chopin did not much want to write for orchestra – he did so only about half a dozen times – and it has long been observed that these concertos are lacking in their orchestral accompaniment, which is mostly accompaniment rather than genuine interplay between soloist and ensemble. Nevertheless, the works endure and continue to provide great listening enjoyment thanks to their many manifest charms. Zacharias is quite sensitive to this: his impeccable pianism melds well with a conducting style that treats the 40-or-so orchestral players as collaborators to a somewhat greater extent than the music is typically thought to allow. This becomes clear immediately in the very expansive opening of the first movement of Concerto No. 1 – a movement that is half the length of the entire concerto and significantly longer than any other in either of these works. Zacharias conceives its four minutes of introductory material on a grand scale, taking a genuine Allegro maestoso tempo with an emphasis on the second word. This leads to a grandiose piano entry and a performance that thereafter keeps the soloist in the dominant position that Chopin envisioned but that does not allow the orchestra to fade entirely into subservience. It is a winning and impressive way of handling the material, helping to turn the work into something more closely approximating a Romantic-era concerto rather than a solo-piano work with occasional accompaniment by other instruments. After this large-scale opening, it is lyricism that dominates the always-lovely second movement, with Zacharias allowing the music to unfold at a deliberate pace without ever dragging or appearing on the verge of becoming stale. Expressive warmth dominates without ever becoming cloying – and the result is a very strong contrast when the brisk finale sweeps away the rampant emotionalism in a bright and bouncy krakowiak that gives Zacharias plenty of opportunities to show off his nimble finger work. 

     Concerto No. 2 (actually written shortly before No. 1) gets equally sensitive and thoughtful treatment. The concertos are structurally very similar, but Zacharias is sensitive to numerous subtle ways in which they differ. The opening movement of No. 2, for example, is approached with less sense of grand scale, and its lyricism rather than anything portentous comes to the fore. Concerto No. 2 is considerably shorter than No. 1 but places equal emphasis on its first and longest movement. Here Zacharias makes less of an attempt to balance solo and orchestral roles, allowing the free flow of pianistic virtuosity to stay in the forefront of a rather one-sided musical conversation. Zacharias’ playing here is more forceful and intense, more overtly display-oriented, than in the opening of Concerto No. 1, although he is still at pains to bring forth the lyrical beauties of the music. The second movement, even more heartfelt than the slow movement of Concerto No. 1, is pervaded by decorative delicacy that Zacharias offers with admirable clarity of individual notes within the many cascades. And the concluding mazurka exudes charm and a pleasant sense of wavelike motion as its themes unfold and intermingle. Zacharias the pianist expertly balances the more strongly chordal passages with the lighter, shimmering ones, and if the orchestra has little of significance to contribute, Zacharias the conductor does make sure that the ensemble material is presented with style and rhythmic flair. This is, all in all, a highly pleasing release that, the exigencies of recording notwithstanding, comes across as demonstrating that, in this case, love’s labor is scarcely lost, even two decades after these sounds were first captured.

(+++) IT’S ALL ABOUT THE SOUND

Music for Winds and Voice by Ornette Coleman, Oliver Nelson, Eric Dolphy and Jeff Lederer. Mary LaRose, vocal soloist; Jeff Lederer, clarinet; Wildebeest Quintet (Michael Gentile, flute; Mike McGuiness, clarinet; Katie Scheele, oboe; Sara Schoenbeck, bassoon; Nathan Koci, horn). Little (i) Music. $10. 

Lei Lang: Six Seasons—Instrumentation Lab. Charles Deluga and Lei Lang, live DSP; Stephen Drury, piano; members of Ensemble Dal Niente, Mivos Quartet, loadbang, and [nec]shivaree. New Focus Recordings. $24.99 (2 CDs). 

     The way music “should” sound is not always clear. Modern instruments and modern tunings produce effects very different from those employed in times past, and modern performance techniques – vibrato on strings, flutter tonguing on winds, and so forth – have also changed over time. Inherent performance expectations change as well: for example, the improvisational elements that are foundational in jazz have made their way into concert-hall music as well, taking the classical-music world well beyond traditional score modifications such as rubato. Elements of both the jazz and classical worlds intersect on a new CD from clarinetist/saxophonist Jeff Lederer (born 1962) – offered on his own label and including more than a touch of the electronic. The result is music both instrumental and vocal that will not likely reach a wide audience but that should intrigue, even fascinate listeners to whom works by Ornette Coleman, Oliver Nelson and Eric Dolphy already speak. Coleman’s Forms and Sounds, here rather unnecessarily presented as tracks separated by other material, has a strongly electronic aural quality along with some improvised bassoon material. Dolphy’s Woodwind Sextet, mvt 2 mixes enhancements with some very pure instrumental elements, notably in the flute. But most of the material on the disc comes from Nelson: Images, Lem and Aide, Nocturne, There’s a Yearnin’ and Three Seconds, all arranged to include electronically modified vocals (the adjective is “enhanced” for those predisposed to enjoy such modifications). Listeners who know and enjoy the music of Coleman, Nelson and Dolphy – these works or others – will find the differing sound of the arrangements here intriguing, and the entire involvement of a woodwind quintet casts a blanket of sound over the material that differs from what is usually heard. Enjoyment of specific tracks will be a matter of personal preference, but There’s a Yearnin’ and Three Seconds come across particularly well thanks to the clarity of Mary LaRose’s vocal delivery and the attractive differences between the two tracks’ rhythms. Also of considerable interest here is a work by Lederer himself, which has the intriguingly overdone title Cruxifiction (not a word). Arranged for winds and electronics, the piece has a haunting quality that does go on for too long – nine-and-a-half minutes – but that brings forth an interesting instrumental mixture of acoustic and electronic material whose varied pacing, from very slow to very quick, combines to good effect in some respects even though, in others, an underlying repetitive element simply becomes irritating. All the music here is well-played and presented with a sense of commitment to the composers’ forms and their communicative objectives. Heard simply as a sequence of intermingled sounds of varying types and points of origin, the pieces will be worthwhile experiences for audiences that gravitate to mixed genres and interpretation/reinterpretation of established composers’ works. 

     And speaking of intermingled sounds, they are very much the point of a very extended work called Six Seasons by Lei Liang (born 1972). New Focus Recordings offers the two-hour piece on two CDs, the first (Solos) lasting an hour and a quarter, the second (Ensemble) taking up the remaining time. Rather than being continuous, Six Seasons consists of a series of short works, ranging in length from less than one minute to more than 10. Most are not music in a traditional sense – the opening Prelude, for example, starts with the call of a beluga whale, followed by electronic-keyboard chords. The following items include a baritone solo featuring indrawn breath that sounds like an extended scream of pain, a trumpet-and-trombone item that sounds like percussion, and then pieces for piano, harp, bassoon, ensemble, trumpet, voice, trombone, bass clarinet, piano, cello, and electric guitar. The point made again and again is that he instruments do not sound like what listeners will expect them to sound like: Liang explores soundscapes that insist on being something beyond the “merely” aural, reaching out to – well, what they reach out to is far from clear. The sounds emanating from all the instruments are altered, filtered, overlaid, switched, expanded or contracted, and generally transformed into something recognizable as sound but not in terms of its point(s) or instrument(s) of origin. Liang’s idea involves taking ocean sounds (recorded off the coast of Alaska) and mingling them with highly modified instrumental sounds and extended performance techniques in order to produce a sense of immersion – presumably within the ocean, although this is never made explicitly clear, with some sections sounding more as if they are transporting listeners to the innards of a toilet bowl or the workings of a thunderstorm’s clouds. Both animal calls and instrumental sounds are occasionally intelligible, but their clarity comes within a sonic environment designed to distort perception and undermine the reasons for being of animals, instruments, and performers. The first part of Six Seasons ends with two pieces labeled Postlude, one sounding like gentle rain interrupted by a crash and the other like a small shriek with tiny bits of piano sprinkled on it. Liang’s determination to be perceived as extremely avant-garde is everywhere apparent, and the notion that only the cognoscenti can possibly appreciate the depth and richness of his tone-and-noise painting pervades  the project. The second, “ensemble” part of Six Seasons is entirely for grouped instruments and consists, unsurprisingly, of six elements – which share their titles with six of the parts of the “solo” material. However, it is not always apparent that there are multiple instruments involved in these items, since the alterations worked in the “solo” material are also used in the “ensemble” elements, and the intentionally extensive electronic manipulation does an excellent job of concealing the source of whatever is being modified. The primary difference in the “ensemble” segments is length: they are much longer than the individual pieces in the “solo” realm. But they produce exactly the same impressions by using exactly the same methods of distortion, overlay, extension, textural modification, and so forth. Two hours of this is a lot of it, and if Liang was looking to reach an extremely rarefied audience and take listeners on a long, long journey to realms whose connection with any traditional notion of music is obscure at best, he has certainly succeeded. Six Seasons demonstrates, if any such demonstration is still necessary in the 21^st century, that contemporary composers are quite as capable as slightly less-recent ones of producing material that will be extremely off-putting to the vast majority of potential listeners while making a tiny subgroup of fans feel as if its members are part of an inner circle of auditory superiority.

(++++) FAITH AND CLARITY

Bach: St. Matthew Passion. Thomas Cooley, tenor; Paul Max Tipton, bass-baritone; Sherezade Panthaki, soprano; Reginald Mobley, countertenor; James Reese, tenor; Harrison Hintzsche, baritone; Cantata Collective conducted by Nicholas McGegan. AVIE. $44.99 (3 CDs). 

     An exceptionally clear-headed and clearly sung St. Matthew Passion from Cantata Collective shows just how meaningful Bach’s music remains in our secular age – and how involving it can be even for those without any particular faith, much less Bach’s Lutheranism. As was customary for Passions, Bach’s says nothing about Jesus’ Resurrection – its entire reason for being is to explore Christ’s pain and suffering, and the wrongs done to him in fulfillment of Biblical prophecies. The result is a far more humane-feeling work than would exist if the Resurrection, the central miracle of Christianity, were its core: this is a story about suffering and redemption, about betrayal and sacrifice. And on that basis, although it is religious through and through, Bach’s St. Matthew Passion becomes a vehicle for expressions of despair, fear, worry, and eventual hope – emotions thoroughly familiar even to audiences that do not share the belief system underlying the music. 

     What this means – and what is communicated with exceptional skill and beauty by Cantata Collective – is that the arias and choruses expressing everyday worshippers’ feelings about Jesus’ suffering, and reactions to it, take on greater emotional heft than does the foundational narrative about the events of Christ’s last days on Earth. The Gospel-based narrative is delivered everywhere with sensitivity and understanding by Thomas Cooley as the Evangelist, and the comments and proclamations of Jesus are handled with suitable gravity and intensity by Paul Max Tipton. But again and again, what impresses in this beautifully balanced performance are the thoughts and reactions of the everyday people of Jesus’ time, as expressed through choruses and the individual voices within them. 

     What Bach does with such brilliant sure-handedness in his St. Matthew Passion is to establish a grand layout – two orchestras and two choruses, plus soloists – and then generally use only selected elements among the available performers, reserving the massed forces for specific purposes. This approach becomes a way of emphasizing the emotional underpinnings of Scripture and its importance to the lives of ordinary people of Jesus’ time, and by extension of Bach’s era (and later periods as well). The careful and sensitive pronunciation of the work’s texts, even though these performers are not native German speakers, lends additional meaning to such statements as “the scourges and bonds and what you have endured – my soul has merited them.” It is undeniably true that the texts have full meaning and resonance only for those who share Bach’s religious beliefs, or other Christian ones. But it is also true that the expressiveness of Bach’s music creates a kind of transcendence of the spiritual material, allowing emotional participation in the St. Matthew Passion even by those who do not accept its narrative at face value. 

     The sheer quality of the vocal and instrumental performances under the absolutely first-rate direction of Nicholas McGegan makes this three-CD release from AVIE an outstanding one. McGegan’s unfailing and unfailingly stylish approach to the totality of the St. Matthew Passion as well as its individual elements produces a highly memorable experience from start to finish. Sherezade Panthaki, who sings the soprano arias and the words of Pilate’s wife, is especially commendable for purity of tone and lightness of delivery. The tenor arias are well-handled by James Reese, the bass ones and voice of Pilate by Harrison Hintzsche: everything is delivered with suitable but not overdone emotion and with close attention to the sound of the words and the way they blend with their instrumental underpinnings. Countertenor Reginald Mobley, who sings the alto parts, is a touch shaky and a bit over-emphatic from time to time, but on the whole gives a very creditable performance. And the small solo parts given to chorus members – Jennifer Paulino as the Maids whose comments lead to Peter disavowing Jesus three times, Jeff Fields as Peter, Chung-Wai Soong as Judas – are uniformly delivered with care and sensitivity. The instrumental material is excellent throughout, with the members of Cantata Collective, supplemented by additional performers, playing with strong understanding of period style and unflagging attention to balance and precision of intonation. Interestingly, this St. Matthew Passion reaches out all the more effectively beyond its core audience because of its sheer musicality: even a listener who does not understand the German text and does not try to follow a translation as the music progresses can be pulled into the emotional world of this work through the sheer loveliness of Bach’s music. Even the irreligious may thus be able to experience, to some extent, the feelings evoked by the substantial use of minor keys and dark instrumental coloration to express sorrow – and, eventually, hope – in the most beautiful way possible.

(+++) AS AMERICAN AS….

Aaron Larget-Caplan: Guitar America 250. Aaron Larget-Caplan, guitar; Irina Muresanu, violin; Charles Coe, Jeffrey Lependorf and Trevor Neal, spoken word. Navona. $20. 

Kip Winger: Violin Concerto “In the Language of Flowers”; Symphony of the Returning Light. Peter Otto, violin; Nashville Symphony conducted by Giancarlo Guerrero. Naxos. $19.99. 

     The evolution and eventual revolution of England’s American colonies into the United States of America are being predictably and in many ways suitably celebrated on the 250^th anniversary of the United States’ Declaration of Independence – even as internal and external questioning and geopolitical turmoil and uncertainty remind historians (if no one else) that the world of 1776 was in some ways just as chaotic, disturbed and uncertain as the world of 2026. Then as now, music was very much a part of life, and then as now, it could be a means of unification or division, depending on how it was created and used. Aaron Larget-Caplan’s new Navona recording, whose rather unwieldy full title is Guitar America 250: Revolutionaries and Rockstars, is largely in celebratory vein; but it does acknowledge, often and largely intentionally, some of the inherent challenges and contradictions of the American experience. Most of the release is musical, and most of the music is arranged by Larget-Caplan as well as performed by him. And those aspects of the recording are very fine indeed: Larget-Caplan is a first-rate guitarist with a strong command not only of the technical side of performance but also of the guitar’s emotional range and evocative capabilities – elements of which composers as diverse as Vivaldi, Sor and Tárrega were well aware but that are not always brought forth as effectively as they are here. The hint of this being something more than a jingoistic display is, however, clear from the first track, which is not The Star-Spangled Banner (originally a British drinking song called To Anacreon in Heaven, one of many ways in which “American exceptionalism” is less than clear-cut) but Leonard Bernstein’s America, from West Side Story – a song whose portrayal of the United States through members of the 1950s Puerto Rican diaspora is far from completely celebratory. The Star-Spangled Banner is heard after this, and afterwards there are various expected tracks: America the Beautiful and God Bless America, for example, and Battle Hymn of the Republic – originally John Brown’s Body, a Civil War entry whose origin tends to be largely ignored in favor of its religious fervor. Also here are Simple Gifts, Over There (another war-originating song), and more. Again and again, Larget-Caplan shows his sensitivity as both arranger and performer: there is genuine beauty in many of the familiar tunes, and a freshness in their sound that keeps even the best-known ones enjoyable to hear. But a great deal of the recital, which includes 14 world première recordings in its 21 tracks, goes beyond now-traditional material to include elements such as Paul Simon’s America, Van Halen’s 316, Alan Hovhaness’ Mystic Flute, and three entries from John Cage – one of them a reading by Jeffrey Lependorf. Cage’s words fit uneasily into the overall atmosphere here, and the other word-only tracks will certainly not be to everyone’s taste – including the last of them, read by Larget-Caplan himself, which uses the First Amendment text with repeats of “no law” and other words to make some rather heavy-handed political points. As a whole, the recording is “occasional music” in the sense of being intended for a specific occasion – and is also, occasionally, non-musical by intent and design. That gives it a sense of personalization but also likely reduces the chance that listeners will continue to enjoy it, or at least some parts of it, after the occasion for which it was created recedes into memory. 

     Contemporary American music, like contemporary American society, tends to be polyglot, and modern composers frequently straddle multiple genres or combine elements of different musical forms in their attempts to produce something distinctive. The extent of their success varies widely and tends largely to depend on how seamlessly they mix differing material into an effective (and, hopefully, aurally digestible) new recipe. Kip Winger (born 1961), for example, is a onetime metal-rock bass guitarist and songwriter who grew up in a jazz-musician family and eventually turned to writing ballet – which in turn led to commissions for the two works receiving their world première recordings on a new Naxos CD. Winger’s history is interesting enough, but the effectiveness of his music depends on the works themselves rather than the provenance of their creator. Certainly Winger’s Violin Concerto “In the Language of Flowers” (2024-2025) provides plenty of opportunities for soloist Peter Otto, for whom it was written, to show off his virtuosity – starting with the extended cadenza that opens the entire work. Somewhat surprisingly, the music turns intensely lyrical right after that cadenza, and if the floral titles of the four movements (Forsythia, Viscaria, Ambrosia, Wisteria) bring little clarity to the work’s emotional compass, the music really does speak effectively for itself. And Otto, in turn, speaks effectively for the music: he handles its performance complexities with apparent ease and seems to revel in the unusual rhythms and fantasia-like structure that pervades the individual movements as well as the concerto as a whole. Some of the exclamatory orchestral indulgences and uses of the upper extreme of the violin’s range are a touch overdone, and after a while the theatricality of the dips into lyricism becomes a bit much – although the warmth of the third movement is winning and provides the basis for an effective contrast with the finale, which interestingly echoes Shostakovich in some of its harmonic explorations (and, less appealingly, in some of its bombast). Symphony of the Returning Light (2018-2020), described by Winger as autobiographical, is intriguingly designed around Morse-code rhythms that are reflected in the titles of its four movements: S.O.S., Eleos, Metamorphosis, and Metanoia. However, once again the music needs to stand on its own in order to have any staying power: its structural underpinnings are a curiosity, but requiring audiences to study them in order to appreciate the work is no more reasonable than insisting that listeners study Berlioz’ love life in order to be moved by his Symphonie fantastique (which Winger cites as one of his models). Winger’s use of a MIDI keyboard to produce the Morse code that becomes the basis of each movement gives his symphony a suitably modern gloss, but what is more interesting is Winger’s handling of the orchestra, which shows considerable skill, and the very involving way in which Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony bring forth Winger’s musical thinking. Unfortunately, some of that thinking tends to confuse noisiness with emphasis and ostinato with inevitable forward momentum: Winger handles the orchestra very ably, and the players give the symphony their all, but the music itself, whatever individualized experiences it may be intended to illustrate, comes across as in large part superficial. It flows well enough, and the foundational Morse code is an intriguing design element, but ultimately the work is not especially convincing on its own terms: it does not reach out to an unenlightened audience – that is, one unfamiliar with its reasons for being – to any significant extent. Requiring listeners to equate Eleos with “Mercy” and Metanoia with “Change of Heart” in order to taste the full flavor of the musical material actually makes the symphony less effective, not more: the work shows how well Winger has moved among musical genres but suggests that, like America itself, he still has some adapting and growing to do in order to arrive at an even better place than the one that he and the country currently occupy.