(++++) PERSONALIZATIONS

Elgar: Enigma Variations; Haydn Wood: Mannin Veen; Holst: Suite No. 1 for Military Band; Vaughan Williams: Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. Park Avenue Chamber Symphony and Park Avenue Chamber Symphony Wind Ensemble conducted by David Bernard. Recursive Classics. $11.99.

EBENBILD: Music by Bach, Hans Leo Hassler, Johann Gottlieb Janitsch, Frederick Septimus Kelly, Charles Bochsa, and Theo Verbey. Juri Vallentin, oboe; Trio d’Iroise (Sophie Pantzier, violin; François Lefèvre, viola; Johann Caspar Wedell, cello); Bernward Lohr, harpsichord. PASCHENrecords. $8.99.

Kate Soper: The Understanding of All Things; Dialogues I and II; The Fragments of Parmenides; So Dawn Chromatically Descends to Day. Kate Soper, voice and piano; Sam Pluta, live electronics. New Focus Recordings. $16.99.

Adam Larrabee: 24 Preludes for Solo Banjo—Volume One, Books 1 & 2, Nos. I-XII. John Bullard, banjo. Bullard Music. $15.

Mark Winges: Loki’s Lair; Paul Théberge: Maqām; Pamela Sklar: Two Journeys; John Newell: …and nothing remains the same.; Jorge Amado: Eídos II; Péter Kőszeghy: Souls. Eight Strings & a Whistle (Suzanne Gilchrest, flute and alto flute; Ina Litera, viola; Mark Goeke, cello). Ravello. $14.99.

     Personal matters pervade music, from its creation to its re-creation (performance) to its reception by an audience. This is true even for occasional works written on commission or for specific purposes that might not seem particularly conducive to a composer’s personal predilections – it is hard, for example, to imagine anyone but Beethoven creating Wellington’s Victory in even approximately the same way. The extent of personal matters in music, however, varies quite widely. Certainly Elgar’s Enigma Variations is among the most intensely personal works of its time period, with its explicit (if cleverly concealed) representation of specific people in Elgar’s circle and of the composer himself. The work is thoroughly obscure for anyone who does not know what each variation represents – but at the same time, it works wonderfully as music, because its theme-and-variations form is readily accessible, and Elgar imbues the material with his personal sense of harmony, orchestration and pacing. Thus, all that is really needed to enjoy the Enigma Variations is a good performance – although a very good one, such as that by the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony under David Bernard, is even better. In less-adept hands than these, Elgar’s music can sometimes have a clotted quality, even a kind of bloat. But Bernard and his ensemble present the Enigma Variations with a transparency that displays the work in the best possible light, allowing its care of construction and its flashes of humor to come through clearly – even to listeners who do not know exactly to whom each element of the piece refers. Bernard’s handling of Haydn Wood’s Mannin Veen is equally engaging and adept. The full title of this work is Mannin Veen—“Dear Isle of Man”—A Manx Tone Poem, and the piece is a short six-movement suite celebrating Wood’s childhood home on the Isle of Man. Dating to 1933, some 34 years after Elgar’s work, Wood’s shares some of the characteristics that help the Enigma Variations reach out even to people who do not know precisely what the music meant to the composer. Wood weaves four folk songs into Mannin Veen, gives each movement a title intended to show what it represents(Manx Fisherman’s Evening Hymn, for example), and varies the pacing among the movements effectively. Certainly this pleasantly evocative work deserves to be better-known. The other two pieces on this disc are well-known already. Vaughan Williams’ Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis is a feast of string tone, giving the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony ample opportunity to show just how rich and warm even a comparatively small orchestra can sound. And Holst’s bright and lively Suite No. 1 for Military Band gives the ensemble’s wind players their chance to shine, which they do with considerable brightness. Holst’s work, a rousing encore, is placed second on this CD (the sequence is Wood, Holst, Vaughan Williams, Elgar); listeners may thus want to pause a bit after each piece to absorb the feeling generated by each work before listening to the very different evocations of the next.

     The hour-and-a-quarter of music on a PASCHENrecords release called EBENBILD, however, is best experienced straight through. And it is certainly not an experience for everybody. The personalization elements here permeate the entire project, which has a distinct theatrical flair even without visuals. Complex and determinedly abstruse, EBENBILD (“Likeness”) is about multiple uses of a melody dating to the very start of the 17^th century: 1601. It was a secular love song by a composer/organist who was a near-exact contemporary of Shakespeare: Hans Leo Hassler (1564-1612). The song, to be sung by five voices, was called Mein G’müth ist mir verwirret (“My soul is confused” or, more colloquially, “I’m all mixed up”). The tune was later adapted, simplified, and put in the service of a hymn about Christ’s Passion, referring to the crown of thorns and known as O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden (“O head, bloodied and wounded”). In this form, Bach picked up the music and turned it into a major chorale in the St. Matthew Passion, BWV 244. All this is complex enough, but the conceptualizers/performers of EBENBILD go considerably further with the material. They include in the production not only Hassler and Bach material but also related music by Johann Gottlieb Janitsch (1708-1762), Charles Bochsa (1789-1856), Frederick Septimus Kelly (1881-1916), and Theo Verbey (1959-2019). Additional Bach material – from the Christmas Oratorio and Die Kunst der Fuge – is also presented. Nor are the many musical peregrinations of Hassler’s melody the only element here: there are also related madrigal readings (by Caroline Junghanns) interspersed among the musical works. Abstruse? Yes, in the extreme: this is a (+++) disc that gets high marks for an intriguing, very personal/individual concept and very fine performances, but that will be well-nigh incomprehensible to many potential listeners – and somewhat beyond the pale even for those who love the St. Matthew Passion and are acquainted with Hassler’s tune as incorporated into it.

     There is also plenty that is self-limited in audience appeal on a (+++) New Focus Recordings release featuring music and performances by Kate Soper. Here the types of personalization inherent in composition and performance are joined, with Soper effectively putting across her own musical visions by performing pretty much everything herself (although Sam Pluta also contributes when it comes to electronics). The performances deserve to be considered definitive, but to what end? That is what it is up to potential audiences to decide. As in EBENBILD, this is a recording mixing music and text, but the way in which this is done is quite different – and not only because all the Soper pieces here date to the 21^st century. The Understanding of All Things (2013/2015) uses words by Franz Kafka – or misuses them, listeners familiar with Kafka will think, since the words are dissected, changed into meaningless or only partially meaningful syllabification, and modified in ways both intelligible and unintelligible as Soper speaks them and performs on fixed media. Dialogues I and II (both 2021) feature Soper’s voice and Pluta on live electronics; the verbiage is quite clearly declaimed in the first, altered to a series of moans and sighs and yells and groans and the like in the second. The Fragments of Parmenides (2018-2019), centrally placed on the CD and the longest work on it, mixes a clear narrative with some straightforwardly tonal vocal settings (highly surprising in this context); it juxtaposes a rather naïve poem by William Butler Yeats with comments by the ancient Greek pre-Socratic philosopher Parmenides (flourished ca. 475 BC). Although this piece is overlong and makes its points rather too obviously, it contains a variety of interesting elements, in particular because here Soper is not self-consciously “contemporary” but is willing to write aurally pleasant, lyrical material as well as unsurprising-for-modern-times tone clusters and multi-note smashes. So Dawn Chromatically Descends to Day, the last and shortest piece on the disc, has Soper declaiming a portion of an academic treatise while playing bits of this-and-that on the piano. A worthwhile question for this piece – and, to an extent, for all the works here – is for whom they are written. That is, with whom are they intended to communicate? The Fragments of Parmenides does raise some interesting (if rather overdone) philosophical questions through its textual contrasts, although it is a matter of opinion whether the musical material enhances or elucidates the words. The purpose of the other pieces is harder to discern: clearly they all have personal meaning for Soper, but it is not clear that they reach out in any significant way to others – or that she intends them to do so.

     John Bullard does have an audience in mind for his performance of a dozen of Adam Larrabee’s Preludes for Solo Banjo. His personal quest is to get other banjo players to see the possibilities of the instrument in classical or written-in-classical-style music, while retuning (so to speak) audiences’ ears so they hear the banjo as something more than a “country strumming” instrument. Whether or not this (+++) CD will accomplish what Bullard wants is hard to say. Certainly his performances are exemplary, and certainly Larrabee has skillfully fulfilled Bullard’s commission to produce a set of preludes in all the major and minor keys, as has long been the tradition for sets of 24 preludes. Larrabee has also done a fine job in the first 12 preludes of showcasing the varying moods and styles of which the banjo is capable – at least in Bullard’s hands. As a listening experience, though, the CD falls somewhat short, because its sequencing seems arbitrary – or, more accurately, is the personal province of the composer (and perhaps the performer, if Bullard requested certain pieces to follow certain others). What this means, for example, is that No. VIII (E-flat minor) has the banjo sounding like a 1980s guitar, thanks to a technique called “palm muting,” after which No. IX (A-flat) is a cakewalk and No. X (F minor) a Bach-inspired passacaglia. That is a lot of musical forms in a very short time – producing a kind of stylistic whiplash for listeners, if not necessarily for composer or performer. The most-interesting of the preludes in this first set of 12 is the third, in D, which itself represents a kind of miniaturization of the entire project. It includes a theme in the form of a sarabande, plus four variations designated Allegro, Allemande, Barcarolle and Mazurka. This single piece (or piece with others nested within it) runs four-and-a-half minutes and takes the banjo neatly through multiple styles, rhythms and paces: all by itself, No. III encapsulates what Bullard asked Larrabee to do to promote the banjo as a far more versatile instrument than it is usually deemed to be. Although the aim here is a lofty one, a lot of the music is fun; yet the banjo’s range is such that listening to the entire CD from start to finish is not ideal – better to hear the six preludes of Book I, take a break, then hear the six of Book II. If your personal predilection runs to banjo playing, you will find much here that is revelatory; for listeners who are not performers, though, there is somewhat less of interest on the disc. And it is worth mentioning that the use of the banjo in classical music is not unheard-of: Kurt Weill included it in The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny, and Frederick Delius, Ernst Krenek, Viktor Ullmann and others have used it in works of various types.

     The enjoyment of a new (+++) Ravello CD featuring the ensemble Eight Strings & a Whistle will also depend on the extent to which a listener’s personal preferences coincide with those of the performers: most works here were created with these players in mind. Not surprisingly in a contemporary-music CD featuring music by six different composers, there is a wide variety of communication attempted here, despite the pieces being written for the same set of instruments. Mark Winges’ Loki’s Lair (2018) suggests that the quintessential trickster god of Norse mythology lives in what sounds like a film set – at least the music is reminiscent of that often heard in slightly eerie movies that do not rise (or descend) to the level of full-fledged horror. The title of Paul Théberge’s five-movement Maqām (1978) refers to an Arabic musical system, although the piece is not based on that system and does not sound particularly “exotic,” coming across as a fairly standard 20^th-century exploration of juxtaposed sounds and irregular rhythms. The fourth movement, marked “Moderately,” does have a soupçon of pleasant bounce to it. Pamela Sklar’s Two Journeys (2018-2019) has a somewhat mystical feeling about it – nothing relating to Loki here! – and seems designed to accompany meditation, or to invite it. John Newell’s …and nothing remains the same. dates to 2012 and is one of those contemporary works that for some reason attach importance to a lower-case title (including an ellipsis at the start and a period at the end). It moves from a very slow, deliberative pace, along much the same lines as Sklar’s, to somewhat more-scattered and more-propulsive elements, although its pacing remains moderate throughout. Jorge Amado’s Eídos II (2017) is the most-interesting piece on the CD, using the instruments both percussively and lyrically, with some underlying strong rhythms suggestive of drums. The work is based on Afro-Cuban folkloric traditions, but knowing that is not necessary to enjoy it – this is a case in which the composer’s personal interests and attachments to a specific underlying source may influence the way music is created, but are not necessary for listeners to know: they produce engagement and audience responsiveness without requiring advance study or accommodation. Péter Kőszeghy’s Souls (2011) also draws on a specific tradition – a Hungarian one involving connections between the physical and spiritual worlds – but reaches out less effectively than does Amado’s work. Pitches are varied, often being made deliberately imprecise, and rhythms are used to produce a sonic environment that tends to sound self-indulgent, as if the composer is seeking ways to move the instruments beyond their comfortable ranges so as to pull the audience beyond its comfort zone as well. The piece is indeed not an easy one to hear from start to finish, and at more than 12 minutes in length, it makes and re-makes its points a few too many times. Certainly all six composers heard here, and all three performers, offer significant personalized elements in what they create and bring forth. But their ability to connect with audiences varies widely, and few listeners are likely to find all the pieces here of equal interest.