(+++) INSTRUMENTS OF CHOICE

Stephen Jaffe: Light Dances (Chamber Concerto No. 2); String Quartet No. 2 (Aeolian and Sylvan Figures); Sonata in four parts. Da Capo Chamber Players; Borromeo String Quartet; David Hardy, cello, with Lambert Orkis, piano. Bridge Records. $15.99.

Beth Mehocic: Piece by Piece; Somewhere Between D and C#; Concerto for Piano and Orchestra; Left of Winter; Picasso’s Flight; Tango Concerto. Navona. $14.99.

David Loeb: Five Fantasias for the Japanese Consort; Fantasia on a Rondeau of Dufay; Chanson Malagache; Fantasia sobre ‘una Hija Tiene del Rey’; Yaku (Night Crossroads); Arietta; Gaunkyo (Bridge to the Lingering Clouds); Between Sea and Sky; Het Nieuwe Madrigaalboek. Furious Artisans. $16.99.

Jake Heggie: Eve Song; Songs and Sonnets to Ophelia; Camille Claudel—Into the Fire. Melissa Davis, soprano; Jerry Wong, piano. MSR Classics. $14.95.

     Contemporary composers are often especially careful to select specific instruments or instrumental combinations that will reflect their thinking in particular pieces and forms, and will produce sound worlds that express very different thoughts and emotions while still reflecting their individual musical styles. Listeners who enjoy recent classical or classically inspired works will find CDs devoted to individual composers – but using a multiplicity of instrumental combinations – especially interesting for showing how the composers’ approach varies (or does not vary) depending on chosen sounds. For example, a new Bridge Records release of the music of Stephen Jaffe (born 1954) offers works for a chamber group, a string quartet, and a cello-and-piano duet. Light Dances (Chamber Concerto No. 2) is a pleasant three-movement assemblage of atonal but strongly rhythmic (although not particularly danceable) material. Percussion, including piano, produces much of the flavor of the work, especially in the middle movement; the finale’s enthusiasm is especially welcome. Throughout, Jaffe uses the varying tonal possibilities of the chamber ensemble to good effect. The sounds are quite different in his five-movement String Quartet No. 2 (Aeolian and Sylvan Figures), which uses the traditional string-quartet ensemble but tends to treat the instruments individually more than as a group. Jaffe is fond of evocative movement titles that may or may not accurately reflect the music: in this work, “Muted Interlude” fits well, “Scherzino Chickadee” less well, and “Homage to the Breath” surprisingly effectively in a work without winds. Reducing the instrumental complement still further, Jaffe’s Sonata in four parts also offers titles intended to reflect the musical notes, among them “Breathing, Still, Undulating” and “Strutting.” Jaffe here treats the cello-and-piano combination as more of a cooperative endeavor than the strings tend to be in the quartet, with the two instruments’ differing sounds and ranges intermingling to good effect. This fourth volume of Jaffe’s music on Bridge does a good job of showing how the composer approaches varying instrumental groupings.

     The instruments chosen by Beth Mehocic in the works on a new Navona CD cover an even wider span, from a piano trio to a full orchestra plus piano, accordion and bandoneon. In Piece by Piece, Mehocic (1953-2022) produces an interestingly scored chamber work (flute, bass clarinet, trumpet, bass trombone, violin, contrabass and percussion) that never really goes anywhere but sounds quite good not getting there. Somewhere Between D and C#, for violin, cello and piano, is a musical interpretation or commentary on a poem Mehocic wrote about being on the edge of here-or-there. Musically, it is rather inconsequential, although here too the interplay of instruments is well-handled. Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (featuring pianist Charlene Farrugia with the Croatian Chamber Orchestra conducted by Miran Vaupotić) is a large-scale work from early in Mehocic’s career (it dates to 1974). In the traditional three movements, it is unashamedly conventional tonally and somewhat reminiscent of Tchaikovsky in its insistent percussion – all in all, a derivative piece that is nevertheless well-made. Left of Winter is also for orchestra (here, the Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Jiří Petrdlík) but is a much later work, dating to 2014. Strongly martial – it was written as a men’s dance about soldiers going off to war – it is suitably intense and percussion-focused, and not at all celebratory. As occasional, programmatic music, it is effective enough, although its overall sound is somewhat obvious and overdone. Picasso’s Flight is for string quartet and is not about the artist but about Mehocic’s African Grey parrot and its struggles to fly gracefully (this type of parrot is not an elegant flyer). This is strongly representational music that neatly indicates the parrot’s struggles with airborne life – and even listeners who do not know what the music is about can enjoy the skillful way that Mehocic combines and contrasts the sounds of the four string instruments. The CD ends with Tango Concerto for orchestra (the Zagreb Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Ivan Josip Skender) plus piano (Farrugia) as well as accordion and bandoneon (Franko Bozac). Written in 2018, it is a carefully balanced work – each of its three movements runs four-and-a-half minutes – that treats the piano and accordion/bandoneon more as obbligato instruments than as full-scale soloists. This gives the piece a pleasant level of intimacy, with Mehocic writing more idiomatically for the piano than for the other instruments – which provide a kind of exotic color but are not as fully integrated into the work as is the piano. Even if Mehocic was not entirely comfortable with this specific instrumental combination, though, she uses it mostly sure-handedly and retains her career-long willingness to produce essentially tonal music that retains a contemporary feeling through its rhythmic vitality and willingness to explore instrumental effects thoroughly without trying to make performers produce sounds beyond those of which their instruments are normally capable.

     David Loeb (born 1939) also retains an essentially tonal orientation in many works, but he likes to explore sounds beyond those typical of Western instruments – and to do so, he sometimes turns to instruments from different musical traditions. This is clear on a new Furious Artisans release featuring nine Loeb works of varying length and from different compositional periods. The Five Fantasias for the Japanese Consort (1985-1993), played by the Yukimi Kambe Viol Consort, use scales and harmonies of non-European musical cultures (Japan, Indonesia, India) to produce very brief character sketches. Fantasia on a Rondeau of Dufay (1978/2008) is for two guitars (Vilian Ivantchev and Daniel Lewis), but the writing suggests lute music of the time of Guillaume Du Fay (1397-1474). Chanson Malagache (1996), for violin (Antonin Hradil) and orchestra (the Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Ruben Silva), uses a Malagasy theme but explores it in European ways, both older (Bach-like) and newer (à la Bartók). Fantasia sobre ‘una Hija Tiene del Rey’ (1980) is an extended, indeed somewhat overextended, solo-guitar work (played by Terry Champlin) that is based on a Sephardic melody of Renaissance times – listeners to this CD will by now realize that Loeb has a fondness not only for mixing styles but also for reinterpreting and developing elements of the musical past in new ways. In Yaku (Night Crossroads), which dates to 1985, he also introduces a non-Western flute, the Japanese shinobue, having the solo performer (Kohei Nishikawa) combine its sound with that of the Western flute in various ways that show more of the instruments’ similarities than their differences. Arietta (1986/2008) is for violin (Sabena Torosjian) and guitar (Champlin), with the violin muted throughout – the sound world here is one of gentleness and quietude in which the instruments complement each other well. Gaunkyo (Bridge to the Lingering Clouds) dates to 2001 and includes the Japanese mouth organ called a sho (played by Mayumi Miyata), plus the Yukimi Kambe Viol Consort. This work has the most unusual sound on the CD – an emphatic and at times almost unpleasantly strident intensity contrasts with comparatively gentle string tones. Between Sea and Sky (1998), played by the Six Hands Guitar Trio, is another work in which Loeb tries to illustrate a specific non-Western scene (a villa on Kyoto’s highest mountain) by using traditional Western instruments (acoustic guitars) in ways that accentuate some of the traditional elements of non-Western musical expression. And the five-movement Het Nieuwe Madrigaalboek (1983), played by the Netherlands Clarinet Quartet, is another work showing Loeb’s interest in and absorption of music of the past: its five very short movements evoke the feelings generated by Renaissance madrigals without actually using tunes or instruments of that time.

     One instrument frequently used by composers to produce very specific effects is the human voice – which is what Jake Heggie (born 1961) employs in three song cycles on an MSR Classics CD featuring soprano Melissa Davis and pianist Jerry Wong. Eve Song (2000) includes eight settings of texts by Philip Littell (born 1950). The songs range from the operatic (“My Name”) to the Broadway-show-like (“Good”) to the somewhat over-dramatic (“Snake”). Songs and Sonnets to Ophelia (1999) includes four pieces, the first using Heggie’s own words and the others setting texts by Edna St. Vincent Millay. A certain level of seasonal cyclicality is intended here, with the first song being “The Spring Is Arisen” and the last one “Spring.” The overall impression, enhanced by the piano’s comparatively modest contribution in underlining the words throughout the sequence, is one of gentleness and resignation. More ambitious and considerably longer (nearly 35 minutes), the eight-movement Camille Claudel—Into the Fire (2012), originally for mezzo-soprano and string quartet, uses texts by Gene Scheer (born 1958) exploring the life of the French sculptor (1864-1943). Claudel, who worked mainly in bronze and marble, became famous only after her death, but Scheer’s words and therefore Heggie’s cycle – several of whose songs are rather extended – focus mostly on her life and personality, not her work or its eventual recognition. The piano has greater importance in this cycle than in the others, introducing the entire sequence, doing considerable scene-setting throughout, and sometimes almost seeming to take on the role of a character in Claudel’s story (notably in “La Valse”). Familiarity with Claudel’s life and creations is a necessity for full understanding and appreciation of the vocal material. For example, “Rodin” is about her time as the older sculptor’s student and lover, and “Shakuntala” (usually spelled Sakuntala) refers to a sculpture made by Claudel in several versions from 1886 to 1905. The cycle’s final song refers both to Claudel’s 30-year confinement to the asylum where she died and to her relationship with Jessica Lipscomb, which dates to the time when they both worked in Rodin’s studio. Without an understanding of Claudel’s life and times, this extended exploration by Heggie will be an interesting instance of musical biography but not an especially distinctive use of the voice to create a sound world commensurate with its topic. Indeed, the piano, although it does not dominate the cycle, often seems to have more-interesting things to say than does the singer. Because piano and voice are used in different ways in the three song sequences on this disc, the CD, taken as a whole, does show Heggie’s skill at vocal writing and at using the voice-and-piano mixture to explore several topics in differing sonic environments.