(++++) GENRE BLENDING

Walton: Façade; Façade 2; Façade—Additional Numbers. Hila Plitmann, Fred Child, and Kevin Deas, narrators; Virginia Arts Festival Chamber Players conducted by JoAnn Falletta. Naxos. $13.99.

Rodney Lister: Faith-Based Initiatives; Complicated Grief; Friendly Fire. Chiara Quartet; Jonah Sirota, viola; Charles Blandy, tenor, with Collage New Music conducted by David Hoose. Métier. $18.99.

Robert Saxton: A Hymn to the Thames; Fantasy Pieces; Suite for Violin and Piano; Time and the Seasons. James Turnbull, oboe, with St. Paul’s Sinfonia conducted by Andrew Morley; Fidelio Trio; Madeline Mitchell, violin, with Clare Hammond, piano; Roderick Williams, baritone, with Andrew West, piano. Métier. $18.99.

Mikel Kuehn: Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird; Chimera; Entanglements; Colored Shadows [Hyperresonance IV]; Double Labyrinth; Table Talk; Rite of Passage [Hyperresonance V]. Deborah Norin-Kuehn, soprano, with Mikel Kuehn, electronics; Conor Nelson, flute, with Thomas Rosenkranz, piano; Daniel Lippel, guitar, with Nuiko Wadden, harp; Doyle Armbrust, viola, with Mikel Kuehn, electronics; Kenneth J. Cox, flute, with Henrique Batista, marimba; Yu-Fang Chen, violin, with Mei-Chun Chen, viola; Marianne Gythfeldt, bass clarinet, with Mikel Kuehn, electronics. New Focus Recordings. $16.99.

     The phrase “genre bending” is a common way to describe art, literature or music that more-or-less fits into a certain type, format or approach, but stretches that area so it is less recognizable or, in some cases, barely recognizable at all. But genre blending goes beyond that: it deliberately meshes or merges elements of more than one kind, in the process creating something new and often indescribable. At its best, genre blending, even if it is very much of the specific time when it was done, persists for many years thereafter and produces something that never quite fits anywhere – certainly not into the genres of which it is composed. And that is the case with Walton’s Façade, a very early work by the composer (he was just 18 when he began to write it) that he never came close to trying again (or wanting to try again). And it is not really Walton’s work alone: it blends the genres of chamber music (of a particularly witty kind associated with the years after World War I) and wordplay-focused, surrealistic poetry by Edith Sitwell (of a kind that fit neatly into the Dada art movement). Façade is very much a work of its time, and it is also one that has very much transcended its time – and nobody quite knows what to make of it, except that it is absurd (or absurdist) and incomprehensible (existing just on the edge of comprehensibility) and silly and funny and impossible to understand (nor is it designed for understanding). It is unique, one of a kind, and quite impossible to categorize. But it is not impossible to perform with aplomb, and that is what the forces under JoAnn Falletta do on a new Naxos recording that bears the somewhat surprising title, “The Complete Façades.” There is a reason for this: in addition to the 1922 Façade as it is generally known – itself the product of multiple rethinkings and revisions – there is a 1978-1979 addendum of sorts called Façade 2, also built around Sitwell’s poetry and containing eight additional tiny movements. And then there are four discarded-or-not-used pieces from 1922 and 1977, collected here as Façade—Additional Numbers. And it is all quite marvelous, incomparably silly and strange, and very decidedly not material fitting into any single genre. Harmonically and within the poetry, Façade is certainly a work of its era and its country of origin, replete with references to King James and Alfred, Lord Tennyson; but a century later, its specificity has become part of its general, generic, genial wordplay. And that is the spirit in which the three narrators working with Falletta perform the work. Façade was not intended for three narrators but for one: Sitwell herself was a superb reader of her poetry, and a few later performers, such as Vera Zorina, put their very different personal stamp on the work. But Falletta thinks she hears three different narrative voices in the poetry, and accordingly has three performers deliver the lines. This is not an entirely successful approach: it is much easier to follow the cadences and oddities of Sitwell’s poems and stories by adjusting to the way a single voice recites them; and the whole point of the narrative is to depersonalize the reading – that is, not to “act out” anything – by speaking straightforwardly while saying words that are anything but straightforward. Hila Plitmann, Fred Child, and Kevin Deas sometimes try a bit too hard to do something with the verbiage, when all they need to do is let it flow and bathe the audience in its cadences. Still, the basic delivery by all three narrators is fine, and the accompaniment by Falletta and the Virginia Arts Festival Chamber Players is perpetually pithy and pointed and pleasant. The result is not a façade but a Façade (or several of them) offering considerable pleasure.

     Very few instances of genre blending come anywhere close to the success of Façade, but that has scarcely stopped composers from continuing to try to mix-and-match. New (+++) Métier releases of music by Rodney Lister and Robert Saxton both contain attempts at blends. Friendly Fire, the most-extended work on the Lister disc, is as much of our time as Façade was of its era, but it is mired too strongly in modernity to be likely to appeal beyond a limited audience: the narration is largely declamation, it includes the usual Sprechstimme of 20^th- and 21^st-century vocal works, and the instrumental ensemble accompanies the narrative with a strong emphasis on the percussive quality of all the instruments, whether or not they are percussion. The overall message of Friendly Fire is a thoroughly straightforward antiwar one, utilizing poems by Allen Tate, Robert Lowell, Randall Jarrell, Brian Turner, John Ciardi and others to explore wars – multiple wars – and emphasize that they all involve killing and that all the deaths, on any side, are of human beings. The message is unexceptionable and unexceptional, and the same may be said of the music: it is non-illustrative, existing side-by-side with the words rather than complementing them, and does not really combine the medium of poetry very effectively with that of music. The other two works on the disc are instrumental and, all in all, more effective. Faith-Based Initiative, which is largely tonal and somewhat reminiscent of Ives, is a single movement that effectively puts across a sense of darkness (if not despair), warmth, and a kind of underlying hope: it is the most-compelling piece on the CD. Complicated Grief is a three-movement solo-viola work that has many individually effective moments, but does not sustain its moods or communication through its entire 24-minute length. It too is somewhat reminiscent of works by Ives, but where Ives tended to be emotionally compressed, Lister is expansive to the point, almost, of bloat. The disc does show him to communicate more movingly through instruments alone than through this particular attempt to blend the poetic and chamber-music genres.

     The Saxton CD also includes both vocal and instrumental material. Time and the Seasons is a seven-song cycle for baritone and piano that uses Saxton’s own texts and tries to combine the notion of cyclicality (inherent in examining seasonal change) with that of progression (since the next time a particular season occurs, it is a different year). The words tend to be over-earnest in the cycle, and delivered in a not-quite-singing style that will be instantly recognizable to anyone who has heard contemporary classical vocals. The piano contribution is often significant for scene-setting, if not for expansion or elucidation of the emotions evoked by the texts – indeed, in portions of Time and the Seasons, it is the piano rather than the voice that dominates, making for an unusual structure of parts of the cycle. This is not enough, though, to result in a truly effective combinatorial attempt: the words, in particular, want to be more important than they are. Like Lister, Saxton comes across better in his instrumental works, at least those on this disc. A Hymn to the Thames is moody, expressive, evocative both of the river and of its surroundings, and contains some especially well-thought-out woodwind parts; this is the most-involving piece on the disc. Fantasy Pieces is a set of six movements for violin, cello and piano, and although it is well-crafted and does a good job of balancing the three instruments while allowing each some leadership time, it is more a grouping of character pieces (of varying effectiveness) than a fully coherent single work. This may be by design: Saxton’s work was inspired by Schumann’s 1842 set of fantasy pieces for piano trio. But on its own, Saxton’s piece is musically rather thin. Its most interesting element is the strong contrast between the very slow underlying pace of the fifth piece and the assertive nature of the sixth. There is more coherence to the five-movement Suite for Violin and Piano, whose movements bear titles that do not really reflect their content but whose music explores the capabilities of the two instruments, both singly and together, in a way that gives an overall feeling of unity that respects their inherent differences. This is clearest in the fourth movement, “Bells of Memory,” where low piano passages and high violin notes intermingle to good effect. The one work on the disc that mixes vocal and instrumental material lies firmly within the song-cycle genre, except insofar as it tries to pull the texts along to greater meaning than they inherently possess. But as a whole, the instrumental pieces here make their varying communicative points to better effect.

     Yet another contemporary-music CD combining voice-and-instrument material with non-vocal works features music by Mikel Kuehn. The difference in this (+++) New Focus Recordings release is that the “instrumental” accompaniment in Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird is not acoustic but electronic. The piece, unfortunately, sounds almost like a parody of contemporary music, the vocal sections swooping up and down, the words used as sound patterns rather than for expression or understandability, and the electronics creating a sonic backdrop that sounds very much like the sonic backdrops for many other examples of electronic music. There is simply nothing special about the design or sound of the piece. The remaining works lack vocal components and offer at least intermittently interesting combinations of instruments or instruments plus electronics. Kuehn is at his most successful when showing his ability to create music for very different combinatorial elements. Thus, Chimera, for flute and piano, often has the keyboard producing flutelike runs and exclamations. Entanglements, for guitar and harp, intriguingly combines the very different types of strings and forms of playing of the two instruments, producing a number of unexpected sound palettes; this is the most creatively conceived and scored work on the disc. Colored Shadows, for viola and electronics, is, on the other hand, rather ordinary in the way it juxtaposes the viola – rendered screechy rather than warm – with unsurprising electronic elements. Double Labyrinth, for flute and marimba, does not explore the multiplicity of contrasting effects of these two very different instruments as interestingly as it might; indeed, the performers seem mostly independent of each other, and accordingly the work sounds disconnected. On the other hand, Table Talk, for violin and viola, places the two stringed instruments firmly in the same place, but does not do anything particularly interesting or unexpected with either of them, or with the combination of the two. And Rite of Passage, for bass clarinet and electronics, although it does explore the wind instrument’s deeper range, again uses electronic effects that add little to the overall sound picture. Kuehn manages to evoke some engaging effects in some of these pieces, but none of them contains enough ideas or a sufficient amount of exploratory material to be fully convincing – although Entanglements, thanks to its unusual and unusually well-explored instrumental combination, comes closest to giving the audience a fully satisfying experience, if scarcely one that goes beyond the tried-and-true contemporary-chamber-music genre.