(++++) THE IMPASSIONED

Mozart: Symphonies Nos. 39-41. Ensemble Appassionato conducted by Mathieu Herzog. Naïve. $24.99 (2 CDs).

Perpetual Twilight. The Choral Scholars of University College Dublin conducted by Desmond Earley. Signum Classics. $17.99.

Mark Dal Porto: Song of Eternity; I Seek Rest for My Lonely Heart; When Your Song Rang Out to Me; Romance for Oboe and Piano; Spring, the Sweet Spring; Exotic Animals Suite; Mystic Mountain. Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Petr Vronský; Vox Futura conducted by Andrew Shenton; Tracy Carr, oboe; Mark Dal Porto, piano; Arcadian Winds (Vanessa Holroyd, flute; Jane Harrison, oboe; Rane Moore, clarinet; Fred Aldrich, horn; Janet Underhill, bassoon). Navona. $14.99.

Frederic D’Haene: Music with Silent Aitake’s. Reigakusha Gagaku Ensemble and Ensemble Modern conducted by Kasper De Roo. Ravello. $14.99.

David Rosenboom: Deviant Resonances—Live Electronic Music with Instruments, Voices & Brains. Ravello. $14.99 (2 CDs).

     The emotional intensity brought to their music by certain composers – think Mahler for an obvious example – is only one aspect of the passionate way in which music and music-makers connect with audiences. Performers, after all, are as much a part of the musical experience as the works they perform, which is ultimately what interpretation is all about. This is scarcely a new observation, but every once in a while, a recording comes along that so clearly exemplifies the music-as-passion model that it demonstrates with unusual force just how important performers are in connecting composers and their intentions with audiences. The extraordinary and sure-to-be-controversial interpretations of Mozart’s last three symphonies by Mathieu Herzog and Ensemble Appassionato on a new Naïve recording fit this model well. This chamber-sized group presents Mozart in a way that is as far as possible from what listeners will likely expect from a small ensemble. This is in-your-face Mozart, intense and, yes, passionate to such a degree that the composer seems to have been nearly as much a Romantic as, say, Schubert. It is a fair bet that few listeners will ever have heard these symphonies sound this way. For one thing, the performances are fast, often very fast – but that in itself has no more meaning than saying, for example, that Toscanini’s performances were fast. The statement is true, but what matters is why the speed, not that the speed exists. There is nothing capricious in the way Herzog drives this music – and he does drive it, to such an extent that only an extraordinary group of musicians like this one could possibly keep up with the pacing while articulating the works with such clarity and style. It is not Mozart’s style – these should not be confused with period performances, and they are certainly not stately or courtly readings. But because the music is already so well-known, the drive and speed of these performances prove revelatory of elements of Mozart’s thinking that rarely, if ever, come to the fore. The handling of each symphony’s first and third movements is particularly telling. The first movements dash headlong into the audience’s consciousness, insisting through their propulsiveness that these symphonies have something important to say and are going to drive their points home. The third movements are, in effect, split in two, with the main Menuetto settings as driven as anything by Bruckner and then coming to a screeching halt for the Trio portions – which are taken much more slowly, almost like additional slow movements within each symphony’s structure. The slow second movements of all three symphonies are less emotive than in other performances: this is a set that shows its Romantic inclinations through extensive rubato and considerable freedom of pacing, not through inappropriate slow-movement swooning. As for the finales, each gets its own approach: very fleet and light in No. 39, exceptionally intense and dark in No. 40, and played at such breakneck speed in No. 41 that if Jupiter is listening, his ears will be ringing. Yet there is such precision in all the playing that the music’s lines are clear throughout, the interplay of themes (including inner voices) comes through to excellent effect, and the chamber-ensemble-like sound serves as anodyne for the highly unconventional pacing and overall interpretative excesses. These should not be the first-choice recordings of these symphonies for anybody – but they are, in their own way, so revelatory and so flat-out unusual that the more familiar listeners are with the music, the more their ears will be opened by hearing the way Herzog and Ensemble Appassionato perform it.

     The passion is somewhat more controlled, and used for different purposes, by The Choral Scholars of University College Dublin under Desmond Earley on a new Signum Classics release. There are 14 tracks here, mixing new choral music with arrangements of traditional Scottish and Irish folk material, everything written or arranged to allow the crystal-clear sound and intonation of the chorus to come through consistently. Instrumental touches – strings here, woodwind there, percussion elsewhere – set off the vocal material exceptionally well, and the voices sound committed and strongly involved with the material throughout, although never through over-emoting. Some of the tracks are quite extended: Earley’s Body of the Moon runs nearly eight minutes, and Bill Whelan’s Elegy lasts six-and-a-half. But there is no sense of musical or artistic padding anywhere here: each song grows and flows naturally and lasts just as long as it should. The massed-voice beauties of Timothy Stephens’ At That Hour When All Things Have Repose, the bounce of Earley’s arrangement of the traditional Dúlamán, the sweetness of the inevitable Danny Boy (in another Earley arrangement), are but some of the manifest pleasures here. The songs are actually quite wide-ranging, but they do have a connecting theme, which is that of nature and the human relationship to it. This is especially apparent in the traditional Wild Mountain Thyme (arranged by Eoin Conway), but also in Natasa Paulberg’s A Star, Colin Mawby’s Bright Cap and Streamers, and elsewhere. There is an elegance to the singing in this release that stands in pleasant contrast to the generally homespun content of the music and that helps listeners drift away into a twilit land where human nature and the natural world coexist somewhat less uneasily than they do in everyday life.

     Nature also arouses the passionate devotion and concern of composer Mark Dal Porto, as is shown on a new Navona CD that mixes vocal and purely instrumental material with similar focuses. The three choral works here are I Seek Rest for My Lonely Heart; When Your Song Rang Out to Me; and Spring, the Sweet Spring. The first, inspired by an ancient Chinese poem, is for a cappella choir, the second (based on a work by Clemens Brentano) and third (with words by Thomas Nashe) for mixed chorus with piano. The China-inspired material is quiet and thoughtful, the works based on German and Elizabethan sources much more upbeat, and all pay due respect to the place of humans in nature and their reactions to the surrounding world. There is something a bit distancing in the settings, though, for all their careful beauty: the music seems a bit formulaic, as indeed do some of the words. Some of the purely instrumental material on this CD actually evokes the people-and-nature theme more effectively. Song of Eternity does so especially well. This is another work inspired by ancient Chinese poetry, but its inward-looking, lyrical and rather nostalgic sound produces a more contemplative mood than does the a cappella setting from a similar source. Even more heartfelt is Romance for Oboe and Piano, a real husband-and-wife production: Dal Porto wrote it for Tracy Carr, to whom he is married, and it is performed by the two of them. The feelings here are clearly evoked and permeate the entire 12-minute work, although it must be said that, musically, there are a number of times when the emotional expressions of the two instruments clash and go off in different directions instead of blending. This is an entirely human-focused piece; Exotic Animals, a suite for woodwind quintet, is entirely nature-focused. It is also quite delightful: it is the piece offered here that is least concerned with being intense, serious and meaningful, and perhaps as a result is the most appealing work on the CD. The first, bird-focused movement has performers giving out with some deliberately discordant sounds through some playing techniques that are well beyond the ordinary – used here for a real purpose, not just to show the composer’s cleverness (as is often the case in works that stretch the boundaries of traditional instruments). The second movement, on snakes and lizards, is no less than a five-voice fugue whose subject slithers and slides impressively. The finale, on cats such as lions, tigers and leopards, reintroduces themes (and thus animals) from the first two movements, then has them scattered by horn proclamations that sound distinctly like big-cat roars. These three three-minute movements add up to a miniature suite both expressive and amusing, and one that connects with the natural world to very fine effect. The CD is bracketed by orchestral works: Song of Eternity is heard first, and the disc concludes with Mystic Mountain. The latter has something in common scenically and musically with Honegger’s Mysterious Mountain, but Dal Porto’s eight-minute montane scene is in some ways a far more compressed version of Richard Strauss’s Alpine Symphony: both Dal Porto and Strauss take listeners on a journey from the base of the mountain to its top. However, true to its title, Mystic Mountain ends not with stormy weather or a fast descent, but with a sense of expansiveness and the glory of nature as perceived and appreciated by humans. Dal Porto’s expressions of near-prayerful response to the mountain’s summit are somewhat straightforward, as are his choral settings of poems: the music on this (+++) CD is better when it does less-than-literal tone painting. Still, the emotional connections that Dal Porto seeks often come through with clarity and strength.

     The passion of Belgian composer Frederic D’Haene is for juxtaposition that results in something entirely new – not so much a blending of opposites as a merger of them to create something that does not superimpose one on the other but creates a style that, taking from both, sounds like neither. D’Haene calls this “paradoxophony,” and as the awkwardness of the word indicates, this is very much an intellectual rather than emotional exercise. D’Haene is one of those composers for whom the technical elements involved in constructing music are a passionate focus, while the communication of the music with an audience – to the extent that there is any specific communication at all – is decidedly a subsidiary matter. The new Ravello CD of D’Haene’s Music with Silent Aitake’s demonstrates just what D’Haene is after and just what listeners can and cannot expect from the approach. The oddest thing about this creation is that the music comes out sounding electronic even though it uses no electronics. That sound is the result of combining traditional Japanese court music, called gagaku, with music made by a Western instrumental ensemble. This is rarefied material indeed. There is some structural form to it, more or less along the lines of a suite: there fairly short netori, sort-of-preludes, are interwoven with two far more extensive gagaku sections in a whole lasting 40-plus minutes that never sounds as if it is going anywhere and that can be stopped at pretty much any point without diminishing or enhancing its overall effect. D’Haene offers a great deal of intellectual gloss for the intricate processes and procedures underlying Music with Silent Aitake’s, and some of his notions are interesting for the way in which they highlight the immense cultural differences between Western and gagaku traditions. Those differences largely flow from deeply differing underlying societal paradigms: the individualistic Western tradition of looking to leadership has much to do with the use of a conductor to lead and shape musicians’ performances, while the longstanding collectivist nature of Japanese and other Asian societies, in which individualism is downplayed to the point, sometimes, of disappearance, explains the way in which gagaku performance expects players to use their inherent time sense and their consciousness of other players to determine what to do, how to do it, and at what speed to proceed. Intellectual framework aside, the question for listeners – especially ones listening to the music on CD and thus without seeing the performers – is how the material comes across, what effects it produces. The answers will range from “none at all” to “utter boredom” to “fascination with an intriguing cross-cultural experiment.” For an ultra-avant-garde-favoring audience, this is a (+++) CD; for other listeners, there is really nothing of value in it, and not much of music.

     The entirety of Music with Silent Aitake’s is not much longer than a single work by David Rosenboom from another new Ravello release – this one a two-CD offering. The first piece on the first CD, Portable Gold and Philosophers’ Stones (Deviant Resonances) runs more than 35 minutes all by itself, and it is a fair bet that listeners who find it intriguing will want to hear other works on this recording, while those who deem it meaningless, pretentious or both will have no further interest in Rosenboom’s very extensively planned and executed material. Calling this “music” is something of a stretch, as even Rosenboom might acknowledge. Where D’Haene has “paradoxophony,” Rosenboom has “propositional music,” which means creating nonmusical propositions of all sorts (up to and including creating forms of consciousness and alternative universes) and then embodying those creations in musical forms of some sort. This is heady material, to be sure, and Rosenboom has been working with his ideas for half a century, so this is clearly a matter of passionate devotion for him. It is likely to be much, much less so for listeners, even those who would consider this a (+++) release for its sheer daring and the unusual nature of Rosenboom’s creations – which involve such techniques as analyzing the electrical signals from people’s brains and then using complex computer programs to turn the brainwave activity into the basis of a musical, or pseudo-musical, performance. Rosenboom certainly does not lack for audacity: one piece recorded here, The Experiment, is taken from a “mobile opera for 24 cars” that was actually staged in Los Angeles in 2015 in 24 limousines, each of them driving audience members somewhere in the city as they heard spoken and sung material. This sort of staged happening obviously owes a good deal to John Cage’s notion of the interchangeability of performers and audience, and also to Cage’s belief that everything is music whether or not traditionally deemed “musical.” Rosenboom, however, takes matters quite a bit beyond where Cage took them. Like much avant-garde material created under the general category of “music,” Rosenboom’s works lose something in the translation to audio-only format: they are inherently participatory and do not adapt particularly well to being heard on CD. Listeners who already known Rosenboom from his decades of creations are the natural and perhaps only significant audience for this release. But there is also something to be said for regarding these pieces as “found objects” of a sort: however carefully and meticulously constructed, they convey the impression of a quirky assemblage of random sounds, sometimes surprisingly quiet, sometimes bewildering in their range and complexity, and always passionate in their own way.