(++++) NORTHERN LIGHTS

Scenes from Finland: Music by Jean Sibelius, Selim Palmgren, Einar Englund, and Kalervo Tuukkanen. Oulu Sinfonia conducted by Rumon Gamba. Chandos. $21.99. 

Pictures from Finland: Music by Jean Sibelius, Selim Palmgren, Leevi Madetoja, Väinö Raitio, and Robert Kajanus. Oulu Sinfonia conducted by Rumon Gamba. Chandos. $21.99. 

     A good title for the Chandos series of recordings featuring Rumon Gamba and the Oulu Sinfonia might be “Finnish Music beyond Sibelius,” even though the most famous composer from Finland appears, more or less inevitably, on all three recordings released so far. The first was called “Overtures from Finland” and included works by no fewer than eight composers in addition to Sibelius. The second and third recordings in what is clearly a series – although not formally labeled as such – also seem designed to put Sibelius in a wider context while retaining a focus on Finnish classical music from the late 19^th century to the mid-20^th. 

     Unlike the “Overtures” disc, whose title refers to a specific musical form, “Scenes” and “Pictures” are simply catch-alls: any of the pieces on one of these CDs could as readily appear under the other one’s title. “Scenes,” which includes just four works – all of them incidental music of one sort or another – is the better-organized and better-focused release. It opens with excerpts chosen by Gamba from Sibelius’ 1913 music for the pantomime Scaramouche. Sibelius wrote a fair amount of music for the stage, and here shows his ability to illustrate a melodramatic and rather macabre tale of the ultimately fatal encounter between a woman and the hunchbacked dwarf of the title, who has a magically attractive viola that can even call to a victim from beyond the grave. Resisting any temptation to overdo the overdone plot elements, Sibelius produces music of some subtlety, notably in the way Scaramouche’s viola initially penetrates the orchestral texture quietly and only gradually becomes a force to be reckoned with. This is followed by a suite from a play called Tuhkimo and the Princess (1903) by Selim Palmgren (1878-1951). Also labeled Cinderella Suite on the disc, reflecting the fact that the play contains elements of the familiar Cinderella story, the work produces its fairy-tale atmosphere through skillful use of glockenspiel, harp and various instrumental touches that give it an otherworldly feel. Highlights include a short and light Dance of the Forest Fairies and a pleasantly swaying waltz. Next on the disc is The White Reindeer by Einar Englund (1916-1999) – a 1954 suite drawn from music for a 1952 film. This too is a fairy tale – a dark one involving a woman transformed into a murderous reindeer that is eventually struck down by the woman’s husband and regains human form at death. The music is illustrative without being overly dramatic, and is most distinctive in scene-setting involving the vast expanses upon which the story plays out. The final work here is the 1953 Christmas Suite for small orchestra, drawn by Kalervo Tuukkanen (1909-1979) from his incidental music to a 1950 play called The Tale of the Last Shepherd. The six movements are rather monochromatic in sound and similar in pacing – everything is Andante or Moderato – but there is a quiet beauty to the illustration of the peace and wonder of Christ’s birth, broken only briefly by a reminder that Herod, fearing a challenge to his power, has ordered the killing of firstborn children in Bethlehem. It is hard to imagine that any conductor and ensemble could present this material with greater sensitivity than that of Gamba and the Oulu Sinfonia: these performers have clearly lived with this music and these composers for years and know just how to extract the maximum effectiveness from the material. If it is true that material by the less-known composers here often sounds like warmed-over Sibelius, that seems not to be a matter of imitation but, more likely, an instance in which the sensibilities and tone-painting throughout these pieces draw on the same culture and atmosphere from which Sibelius produced his oeuvre. 

     The music is more variegated on the “Pictures” disc but is much less well-organized. Here there are eight works by five composers, the music’s dates offering a squandered opportunity to illustrate the changes over time of Finnish music and to explore the individual characteristics of each composer. The years of composition of these works are all over the place as the disc is sequenced: 1904, 1933, 1938, 1913, 1935, 1906, 1886, and 1917. Two pieces by Väinö Raitio (1891-1945) are separated by a work by Robert Kajanus (1856-1933), after which two non-Kajanus pieces are presented before a second Kajanus work appears. And the two works by Leevi Madetoja (1887-1947) appear second and eighth on the disc – with the earlier piece presented later. There is no explanation offered for any of this, and it is a shame that more attention was not given to the sequencing of the material here, since the music itself contains many very worthy elements. Curiously, Sibelius is here represented only by the very short Scene with Cranes from his music to the play Kuolema. This material is slight enough so that it could have been omitted altogether without noticeably changing the effect of the disc as a whole. More extended and more impressive is Palmgren’s Aus Finland, subtitled Four Symphonic Pictures and presenting seasonal scenes ranging from the Impressionistic to the emotive. The two short Raitio works are a pleasantly atmospheric Idyll and a jaunty scherzo called Felis domestica that captures at least some of the playfulness of a house cat. The two pieces by Kajanus are a broadly conceived but restrained Adagietto and the insistent if scarcely compelling Finnish Rhapsody No. 2. The most effective music on the disc comes from Madetoja. The four movements of his 1933 Suite pastorale, orchestrated from his 1916 Suite for Piano, are a pleasantly evocative Morning, a bright little Caprice, an expansive Legends, and a concluding and rather elegant Waltz. In addition, Madetoja’s setting, in Finnish and for female chorus and strings, of the Stabat Mater, which concludes this recording, proffers a degree of seriousness and emotional connection beyond anything else on the disc. The work is sung with understanding and emotive heft by the Madetoja Music High School’s Girls’ Choir and the Soma Ensemble, and brings the recording to a conclusion far more heartfelt than anything that has come before. The vocal work does fit a bit uneasily with the seven purely instrumental ones, but since the entire organization of this “Pictures” recording is somewhat slipshod, having so telling a finale is welcome. Interestingly, the booklet notes discuss the pieces in chronological order, making the failure to present the music logically all the stranger. The very fine and idiomatic performances, however, make the disc a first-rate entry into this continuing series offering Finnish music that includes Sibelius but is in no way limited to (or by) him. Hopefully there are more releases still to come.

(+++) TO CELEBRATE AND TO CHALLENGE

Contemporary Uzbek Music for Clarinet and Piano. Sayyod Mirzomurodov, clarinet; Mariya Akhadjanova, piano. Clarinet & Saxophone Classics. $13.99. 

Contemporary Music for Brass by Valerie Coleman, Satashi Yagisawa, Barbara York, Katahj Copley, Harrison Collins, Katelyn Petersen, and Félix Mendoza. Brass for Uncommon Times conducted by Brian Kaufman. Naxos. $19.99. 

     World première recordings abound when it comes to contemporary-music CDs, and are even more likely when the discs have a very specific focus – as does one featuring Sayyod Mirzomurodov and Mariya Akhadjanova on the Clarinet & Saxophone Classics label. Every piece on the CD – there are nine of them, by six composers – is a world première recording; seven of the pieces were written in the 21^st century. None of the composers here will likely be known to most audiences; indeed, many listeners would be hard-pressed to locate Uzbekistan (and other Central Asian nations) on a globe or world map. But one thing that music can do, sometimes very effectively, is to reach across borders and function as a unifying force in a world that increasingly feels dislocated and dysfunctional. One avowed purpose of this recording is to familiarize listeners with contemporary Uzbek concert-hall music and, through the music, to bring greater awareness of Uzbek culture and background – on which these pieces draw again and again – to audiences heretofore unacquainted with them. Whether an exploratory venture like this one reaches out successfully ultimately depends on the music itself: however well-meaning the assemblage of material, however reflective the works are of the culture from which they spring, they need to stand on their own as pieces worthy not just of hearing but of re-hearing in order to sustain and retain more than curiosity value. Thus, the success of this endeavor largely falls on the music of Mustafo Bafoyev (born 1946), four of whose pieces are heard here, collectively taking up more than half the CD’s length. The most-substantial work is a piano reduction of Bafoyev’s Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra (2008). This is a multifaceted concerto of considerable scope, requiring not only virtuosity from the clarinet but also great sensitivity to the instrument’s considerable emotionally evocative potential. Rhythms and harmonies range from ones that are generally familiar in contemporary works to ones that evoke and draw upon specific Uzbek musical characteristics, giving the piece pleasantly unusual coloration and a sense of the comparatively exotic. Unfortunately, in the absence of the orchestra, it is impossible to know just how well the music works as a true concerto: Akhadjanova handles the piano part with aplomb, but there is really no substitute for the scope and coloration of a full instrumental ensemble in a work designed to highlight the soloist within a soundworld of greater scope than the piano can provide. Bafoyev’s three other works on this disc are much more modestly scaled. Buxorcha (2024) calls on many of the same elements as does the concerto, highlighting the clarinet’s expressive capabilities within rhythms that sometimes sway gently, sometimes become more declarative, and shade over into density and intensity at the end. Qo’shiq-poema (Song-Poem) (2012) is gentler, more lyrical and warmer, sustaining itself expressively throughout. And Lirik Hikoya (Lyrical Story) (1972) is all warmth and expressiveness at a moderate tempo that allows the music to unfold naturally. The rest of the pieces on this disc all have interesting elements of their own to present. Fantasy (2024) by Sherzod Sobirov (born 1988) is a brightly energetic tour de force that dips briefly into more-lyrical material. Sonata for Clarinet and Piano (2024) by Farrukh Akramov (born 1985) is a single-movement work packed with contrasting elements for both clarinet and piano, and with more-extensive dissonance than in many of the pieces heard here. Sonata-Fantaziya (2024) by Nurali Erkaev (born 1991), also a one-movement piece, is even more dissonant, and pushes the clarinet into a high range where the instrument is not at its best or most expressive – although more-congenial material provides a degree of balance from time to time. Poema-ballada (2016) by Habibulla Rahimov (born 1946) has a more insistently contemporary sound than many other works on the disc, refusing to establish any real sense of flow or rhythmic regularity and instead having both clarinet and piano produce fragmentary material that is sometimes contrasting, sometimes complementary. And Sharq Kaprichchiosi (Eastern Capriccio) (1994) by Anvar Ergashev (1954-2020) ends the disc with a multiplicity of techniques and sounds, its forays into pointed dynamism contrasted with bouts of perkiness, on the one hand, and dips into warmer expressiveness, on the other. As a totality, the disc stands out for the quality of the performances and for the clear evidence it provides of a vibrant contemporary Uzbek music scene. Little seems to separate the individual composers’ styles, however: the distinctiveness here lies more in the fact that they all use material drawn from Uzbek culture than from any significant stylistic propensity setting any specific composers apart from any others. The foundational question of the likelihood of listeners wanting to re-hear any of these pieces is not clearly answered by any individual work on the disc: repeat listening will likely be an all-or-nothing matter for non-Uzbek audiences, since everything here speaks a similar musical language, and no piece stands far enough above the rest to become a work especially worthy of being heard again and again. 

     Most but not all of the works on a Naxos CD of 21^st-century music played by the ensemble called Brass for Uncommon Times are world première recordings, but while this disc certainly intends to showcase the quality of its featured performers, the underlying purpose of the music here is very different from that of the disc featuring Mirzomurodov and Akhadjanova. This is an entire CD of what might be called “cause” music, meaning works written in furtherance of a particular viewpoint or to highlight composers’ sociopolitical beliefs – works that, in other words, specifically exist for reasons beyond the music itself. This begs the question of whether the pieces are successful as music: if listeners are required to adhere to whatever point of view a composer puts forth – or at least to study that point of view carefully before hearing a piece – then the composer wants extramusical matters rather than musical ones to be the driving force for the audience. By definition, this limits the outreach potential of the music: nowadays not even a tub-thumping national anthem is sufficiently universal in appeal to reach out beyond a core group of enthusiasts. Thus, the effectiveness of this disc is tied more closely to societal issues and political stances than to the inherent qualities of the works themselves. There is nevertheless material of considerable interest here. The longest piece is a 2021 arrangement of Concerto for Tuba “Wars and Rumors of War” by Barbara York (1949-2020). Packed with suitably optimistic-sounding, foursquare march tunes that eventually devolve into nostalgic material reflecting a soldier’s wish to be home and far from battle, then concluding with a chaotic finale intended as an antiwar message, the piece is much more interesting for its handling of the tuba solo (played very well by Velvet Brown) than for its thoroughly unexceptional viewpoint. The second-longest work on the disc is Respire (2022) by Katelyn Petersen (born 2000), which is supposed to be about how difficult it is to breathe, both literally and metaphorically, because of environmental degradation and spiritual heaviness. The expressive arc through dissonance and struggle to eventual hoped-for calm is clear enough although scarcely original; the piece does, however, show Petersen’s skill especially in the use of massed brass forces. The other works on the disc are shorter but equally focused on societal matters. Fanfare for Uncommon Times (2021) by Valerie Coleman (born 1970) uses the instrumentation that Copland chose for Fanfare for the Common Man but tries, not particularly clearly, to focus on racial unrest and the COVID-19 pandemic. Listeners may find it interesting to listen back-to-back to Coleman’s work and that by Copland – who was scarcely unaware of the societal challenges of his time. Blueshine Emblem, An Eternal Elegy (2006) by Satoshi Yagisawa (born 1975) is about the world being in conflicts of all sorts, using forceful ensemble sections to contrast with solo-instrument passages intended to indicate fear, timidity, worry and so forth. The solo and full-group portions contrast well, even though they do not really make the points the composer wants to make. Beyond (2018) by Katahj Copley (born 1998) is supposed to home in on victims of gun violence. Interestingly, it structurally does not focus on that topic at all, being expressive and uplifting throughout – the intent is to escort the souls of the victims to a better afterlife. There is nothing particularly original in the musical writing itself, but the underlying notion is at least less formulaic than are the underpinnings of many of the other works heard here. Young Voices (2018) by Harrison Collins (born 1999) is a piece intended to reflect the combination of confusion and determination of today’s youth – as if those feelings are unique to the modern era and the current young-adult generation. Leaving aside the rather silly notion that nobody ever before had difficulty negotiating the world and finding his or her place in it, the piece has a level of forthright boldness that is at odds with its supposedly uncertain and questioning foundations. It is quite well written as music even though it is intended to be supra-musical. The CD concludes in unexpectedly upbeat fashion with Guerra de Secciones (2007) by Félix Mendoza (born 1983). It features vocals by Hiram Diaz, Fran Vielma on percussion, and Daniel Prim on drum kit, and is an ebullient affirmation of the sounds and rhythms of Venezuela, intended to celebrate music – yes, music – and the pleasures that making it and participating it in bring, no matter what the external circumstances may be. There is a life-affirming quality to this piece that stands in strong contrast to the generally downcast outlook of all the other music on the CD, and while everything on the disc is performed with skill and engagement by the ensemble under Brian Kaufman, this piece brings out celebratory qualities that the others seem unable or unwilling to produce. The message here, to the extent that one is intended, seems to be one of hopefulness despite everything – a considerably more attractive conclusion to the disc than yet another dour exploration of real and imagined wrongs would have been.

(++++) JOY UNSPOOKEN

The Haunted Playground. Words by R.J. Palacio. Pictures by Brett Helquist. Random House. $19.99. 

     A wonderful concept that is delightfully illustrated but slightly marred by some inelegance in the storytelling, The Haunted Playground is a Halloween-themed book worthy of being read not only in the season for which it is intended but also at any other time when kids may feel a bit of a chill and need a touch of enjoyment and reassurance. R.J. Palacio’s foundational idea is packed with potential: what if scary ghosts need respite now and then from being frightening, and need to let their hair down (so to speak) and just have fun? And when better to do that at Halloween – at an ordinary children’s playground turned extraordinary through a powerful spell cast by Rex Magnificus, the king of all ghosts? 

     Brett Helquist does an exceptional job with this concept: the early pages of the book show the translucent grayish ghosts emerging from graves and haunted houses, gathering from all directions, wearing expressions of sadness mixed with scariness, drifting along through a night sky and nighttime scenes that verge on the monochromatic. The only hints of color come from strictly human artifacts – headstones, a house far below – until the ghost brigade gathers above a playground (seen from high above, as if from a drone’s viewpoint), then descends to ground level. And now the ghosts start to smile, donning discarded children’s Halloween costumes and beginning to play with abandon on the kids’ slides, swings, carousel and more. It is a wonderful transformation – but Rex Magnificus stands apart from it all, scowling as he supervises the activities. 

     And then two living kids show up: Joe and Lulu live in a house near the playground and have been awakened by the ghosts’ merrymaking. Their brightly colored pajamas make them fit right in with the colorful costumes the wan ghosts are wearing – but Rex Magnificus will not put up with living children amid his subjects, and in a superlative two-page illustration inflates himself to giant size (taking up almost the entire two facing pages), looming over the youngsters with his empty eye sockets, skeletal hands and frowning mouth: “‘HEY, YOU TWO!’ I fiercely howl / to scare them to the bone. / ‘Leave here NOW! YOU CANNOT STAY! / AWAY!’ I loudly moan.” But the kids are thoroughly unimpressed with Rex Magnificus and with the signs posted at the playground warning that the area is currently closed to children. The kids insist on playing in the playground – and much to Rex Magnificus’ discomfiture, his ghosts join in and everyone plays together, as Helquist shows in a truly wonderful mid-book foldout that spreads his art across the equivalent of three pages of fun and bizarrerie. 

     Eventually, even Rex Magnificus joins in the merriment: “It’s kind of nice for me to take / a break from being frightful.” But when dawn approaches and the party must end, and Joe and Lulu insist they want to go with the ghosts to wherever the ghosts are going, Rex Magnificus kindly but firmly draws the line – promising, however, that at next Halloween, the spirits will return and will be prepared to welcome these particular kids to their get-together. Until then, Rex Magnificus warns readers that he will be “truly petrifying” and that if you cross his path, “I’ll scare you till you’re green.” 

     Carried along by the excellence of the illustrations, the fable is a wonderful one from start to finish. It is unfortunately marred a bit by Palacio’s inattentive writing and her failure, or that of her editor, to catch and correct a number of errors. Twice she refers to “Hallow’s Eve” instead of the correct “Hallows’ Eve.” She writes that “us ghosts are meant to do” scary things instead of “we ghosts.” She opens the tale by saying the ghosts “leave the graveyards where they lay” when she means “where they lie.” She says the ghosts “skip and dance together, / like they did when they were young,” instead of the correct “as they did when they were young.” And she repeatedly loses track of the rhythm and syllabification of the verse in which she is writing, thus making the story more cumbersome and stumbling than it ought to be. One example among quite a few: “I cast the spell that brings to life / this playground of the night. / Here my phantoms come – / but not to spook or fright.” The frustrating thing is how easily the writing could have been better, not only for spelling and grammatical accuracy but also for its cadence: “Here my phantoms come to play – / and not to spook or fright” would have done it. Palacio is an experienced author who can do better than this, and has in her other books, so there is no obvious reason for things falling short stylistically in The Haunted Playground. Despite this issue, though, Palacio’s underlying concept is so appealing, and Helquist’s illustrations so excellent, that the book easily overcomes its author’s self-induced sloppiness and emerges as a genuinely clever take on the imaginative possibilities of Halloween – that is, All Hallows’ Eve.

(+++) MELODIES AND MEANINGS

Schubert: Songs. Clara Osowski, mezzo-soprano; Timothy Lovelace, piano. AVIE. $19.99. 

Cantus: The Secret Letter—songs by Abbie Betinis, Saunder Choi, Mohammed Fairouz, Leoš Janáček, Libby Larsen, Francis Poulenc, Steven Sametz, Mari Esabel Valverde, Consuelito Velázquez, and others. Cantus (Jacob Christopher, Alexander Nishibun, Paul Rudoi and Paul Scholtz, tenors; Rod Kelly Hines and Jeremy Wong, baritones; Samuel Bohlander-Green and Chris Foss, basses). Signum Classics. $20.99. 

     Some songs’ words transcend their times; others’ are firmly bound to them. The 19 by Schubert chosen by mezzo-soprano Clara Osowski and pianist Timothy Lovelace for a new AVIE recording have proven their durability and communicative potential for two centuries – even for audiences that do not know the words and may, even with the assistance of translation, not be familiar with all the poetic references. Part of Schubert’s genius at lieder lies in the way his songs’ tunefulness and emotional clarity sweep listeners along into a world, whether real or imagined, where they can dwell throughout a song’s duration, no matter the time period in which the words are set and no matter the era in which the audience itself hears the music. The songs to which Osowski lends her deeply expressive voice date from various times in Schubert’s short life and are unconnected thematically – the disc is essentially a personal collection of the performers’ favorites, less effective as a totality for being something of a mishmash even though Osowski’s way with individual songs is uniformly impressive. Virtually nothing here will be unfamiliar to listeners already acquainted with Schubert’s songs. Osowski tends to be a bit breathless, emotionally if not physically, in the faster-paced works, really coming into her own in the darker and slower ones such as Nachtstück, Wandrers Nachtlied II, and Nachtviolen. A certain degree of vocal delicacy is occasionally missing, as in Ganymed, in which the piano and voice seem somewhat at odds expressively – unusual in light of how well Osowski and Lovelace intermingle almost everywhere else. Indeed, the emotional balance between voice and piano, so key an element of Schubert’s songs, is very effectively highlighted in nearly all these selections, with the last one on the disc, Im Frühling, being an especially good example. This is a recording for listeners who simply want to have Schubert’s unending tunefulness flow over and around them – there is no foundational unifying principle here, and none is needed for anyone content simply to bask in selected elements of the beauty to which the emotional appeal of Schubert’s tunefulness consistently opens the door. 

     Matters are quite different on the latest Signum Classics release featuring the vocal ensemble Cantus. The 17 tracks on this CD are thoroughly disconnected from each other musically but united through the performers’ insistence that everything here flows from assertions of LGBTQ+ love. That is a somewhat self-limiting assertion, indicating that the recording is only for members of a specific community or non-members deeply in tune (so to speak) with that community’s sociopolitical and personal stances. In fact, the quality of Cantus’ singing is a better unifying factor for this material than any assertion of societal significance: the disc, like that of Schubert’s songs, can be enjoyed simply for the quality of performance, even by listeners who do not understand the multiple languages in which the songs are offered. The eight singers of Cantus (tenor Paul Rudoi now replacing Matthew Shorten) deliver all the disparate musical material with equal fervor, with the result that the interwoven readings of love letters of various types (the letters being the reason the disc bears the title The Secret Letter) seem more intrusive than unifying. Just like the cited letters, the actual music here crosses so many genres and time periods that any sort of aural convergence would be nonexistent were it not for the ensemble’s uniformly smooth, well-sung (and well-spoken) delivery of whatever material they put their minds and voices to. Thus, although a couple of minutes of Poulenc and a dash of Janáček have, objectively speaking, very little in common with the Chris Foss vocal arrangement of We Kiss in a Shadow from The King and I, and just as the connection between a Marcus Aurelius letter and one from Walt Whitman is at best rather strained, Cantus manages to cement a sense of unity of this recording simply by approaching all the material with equal attentiveness, balance and emotional receptivity. It is highly unlikely that any listener will want this recording specifically for the performance of the Lennon/McCartney Blackbird or the world première recording of Saunder Choi’s Light Years to Lebanon (which, at seven-plus minutes, is the longest work on the disc). It is much more likely that Cantus will here succeed in reaching out in part to those who accept the underlying “cause” elements of the disc and, more widely, to listeners enamored of the elegance and sure-voiced delivery of all the material, whatever each work’s foundational reason for being may be and whatever each is intended to convey in this specific context.