(++++) LIGHTER AND DARKER

Brahms: Fünf Lieder, Op. 49; Sihyun Uhm: Circus Suite; Edward Knight: Seventh Day of the Seventh Moon; Ravel: Ma Mère l’Oye; Glière: Cradle Song. enhakē (Wontak Kim, clarinet; M. Brent Williams, violin; Katherine Decker, cello; Eun-Hee Park, piano). MSR Classics. $14.95.

Dorone Paris: Abyss; Hollow Memory; All the Roads Are Blocked. Noam Dorembus, tenor sax; Maayan James, baritone sax; Eli Korman, soprano sax; Kim Kedar, alto sax. Métier. $13.99.

Music for Saxophone and Piano by Steven Banks, David Maslanka, John Anthony Lennon, Amanda Harberg, Elijah Daniel Smith, and Christopher Cerrone. Julian Velasco, saxophones; Winston Choi, piano. Cedille. $16.

     An interesting and unusual mixture of new music and chamber arrangements offers a pleasant listening experience on an MSR Classics CD featuring an ensemble with the gimmicky name “enhakē” (small letter at the start and e with a macron over it at the end – the name being based on the Seminole word for “sound” but coming across as just another contemporary affectation). Ignoring the name of this group and simply listening to it handle the five works on the disc is definitely the way to go. Brahms’ Op. 49 songs include the famous Wiegenlied (“Lullaby”) as No. 4, but it is scarcely the only delight in the cycle – and even with the words missing, the sumptuous sounds of clarinet and cello, in particular, lend these little pieces a lovely glow. The juxtaposition with Circus Suite (2014/2020) by contemporary composer Sihyun Uhm (born 1999) is awkward because of the major differences in the tonal language between Brahms and Uhm – but the Romantic-era songs and thoroughly modern miniatures have something in common in their brief encapsulation of specific scenes and their effective tone-painting, albeit with very different harmonic languages. Uhm’s pieces are called “Monkey,” “Clown,” “Trapeze,” and “Lion.” The first leaps acrobatically here and there; the second is actually less clownish than the first; and if the third lacks the kind of high-flying charm one might expect from its title, the fourth roars (or at least growls) in interesting ways. After the Brahms/Uhm contrast there is a kind of reset of the music, which leads to a different sort of contrast as the CD progresses. Seventh Day of the Seventh Moon (2010) by Edward Knight (born 1961) is the longest piece on the disc – twice the length of the Brahms cycle – and is a retelling of a Korean legend of the origin of the Milky Way, the tale itself being cast as a love story about a weaver and a herdsman. Listeners who do not know the literary origin of the material will not enjoy the music nearly as much as those who do know the myth, but the music itself has considerable charm on its own, with the contrasts between winds and piano especially pronounced in the scene-painting. After this none-too-familiar work, the ensemble offers the well-known Ma Mère l’Oye by Ravel – also a five-movement suite, also expressive, also featuring a pervasive sense of childlike wonder. The Ravel is often heard in its two-piano, solo-piano and orchestral versions, but the arrangement played on this disc is effective enough, especially in the third movement (Laideronnette, impératrice des pagodes) – although some of the color evoked by Ravel when he orchestrated the suite is rather pale here. Still, the performance itself is first-rate, and genuinely moving in the slow finale – which always tends to come as a surprise to listeners who expect something more rousing at the conclusion of a work based on fairy tales. The final piece on this disc continues the feeling of the last section of Ravel’s work and recalls the mood of Brahms’ Wiegenlied. It is the Cradle Song by Reinhold Glière (1875-1956), and here the ensemble brings forth an exceptional level of warmth and engagement to produce a lovely rumination on childhood and family. This mixture of familiar and unfamiliar music works unusually well, and the playing is so fine that the disc provides enjoyment not only through what is performed but also because of how the pieces are presented.

     The how is of more interest than the what on a new (+++) Métier CD featuring music by Dorone Paris. This is a half-hour-long disc delving into darkness relating to Paris’ concerns about everything from climate change to the COVID-19 pandemic to Israeli-Palestinian relations (she was raised in Israel). It is also an exploration of saxophone sounds, using four different types of saxophone and also employing electronics. Like other “cause” assemblages, this one assumes that audiences understand the topics the composer wants to explore and agrees with her attitudes toward the subject matter – thereby “qualifying” to accept, understand and appreciate the music. The question is whether any of the music, on its own, is likely to convince listeners of anything, or at least draw them into the sociopolitical world that Paris inhabits. The answer is no: the material on the disc is intermittently interesting, especially insofar as it explores sonorities not usually associated with the saxophone – but even those explorations (as in the third “Chapter” of the primary piece on the CD, Abyss) come across as just another contemporary composer’s set of extensions of an instrument’s usual sound world and performance techniques. This may be of some interest to saxophonists, but listeners in general will simply hear more-pleasing and less-pleasing sounds emanating from the instruments of Noam Dorembus (the primary performer on the disc) and the other saxophonists. Abyss includes all four of the most-often-heard saxophones; Hollow Memory, a much shorter work, uses just two (tenor and alto). Hollow Memory exists in a sound  world where the aural impressions of the saxophones are the things that matter – not the specific notes they play. That is true to an extent in Abyss as well. And in the final work on this short disc, All the Roads Are Blocked, the mixture of Dorembus’ solo saxophone with electronics appears designed to produce the sound, experience and frustration of traffic jams, border-crossing delays, or just a generally unpleasant sonic environment whose existence is supposed to have implications that never come through with any clarity from the music itself. If the clarinet’s smooth expressiveness is the point of most of the arrangements performed by enhakē, then the ability of the usually warm saxophone to sound craggy and strained appears to be the point of most of Paris’ music on this disc. There is, of course, nothing wrong with trying to use music to make (or score) points in important societal debates. But all too often – as is the case here – listeners must already know what the debates are and where they themselves stand on the issues to be able to ferret out the meaning of the works and accept them, if not necessarily “enjoy” them on a strictly musical basis.

     Enjoyment is possible when it comes to contemporary saxophone works that are not quite as freighted with sociopolitical concerns as are those of Paris. Some of the six pieces on a new (+++) Cedille recording featuring Julian Velasco do try to be more than “pure” music, but they are not too heavy-handed about it, and Velasco’s performances on tenor, alto and soprano saxophones use the instruments with knowing skill and generally without trying to turn their sound into something it is not. To be sure, two of the works on the CD take the saxophone into some new aural territory – but they mostly do so by combining it with electronics, not by forcing it to sound un-saxophone-like. Animus by Elijah Daniel Smith (born 1995) is a kind of aural discussion between soprano saxophone and tape, while the five-movement Liminal Highway by Christopher Cerrone (born 1984) – originally written for flute, then re-created for soprano saxophone in collaboration with Velasco – uses unusual but not entirely outlandish performance techniques, along with electronics and even a harmonica, to illustrate lines from a poem by John K. Sampson. For listeners who do not know those lines and the poem as a whole, Liminal Highway will be much less effective than for those familiar with the literary material. But the piece asserts itself well enough in purely musical terms to appeal to fans of contemporary music and sounds. And here the word “sounds” really does matter, since the work has percussive elements and hard-to-pin-down electronic effects throughout, some of them aurally pleasant and some distinctly unlikable (especially in combination with the saxophone’s tones). For those who do not know the Sampson poem, this “poem suite” (not called that by the composer) is best heard by simply reading each movement’s title and listening with an ear to understanding how the music is supposed to reflect that specific line – “A dream you don’t recall,” for instance, has some electronic beats very similar to those in “Liminal.” The Smith and Cerrone works are the most insistently “modern” ones on the CD, standing in strong contrast to Court Dances by Amanda Harberg (born 1973). Harberg’s three pieces, for soprano saxophone and piano, only marginally resemble the “Courante,” “Air de Cour” and “Tambourin” as which they are labeled – they are modernized and jazzed-up versions of the old forms – but they are essentially consonant, and the often-innovative interplay that Harberg creates between saxophone and piano is engaging throughout. The four-movement Come as You Are by Steven Banks (born 1993) hews more closely to the material on which it is built: African-American spirituals or sacred songs. Banks certainly wants to connect the world at large with the world of this piece for tenor saxophone and piano – the specific songs were chosen by his mother and three sisters – and he also seeks a connection with traditional classical music by essentially structuring Come as You Are as a sonata. The work, which opens the CD, is richly resonant in sound and stands at the opposite end, in terms of the saxophone’s aural contribution, from Cerrone’s Liminal Highway, which closes the disc. Velasco also plays two single-movement pieces for alto saxophone and piano: Tone Studies No. 5—Wie bist du, Seele by David Maslanka (1943-2017) and Distances within Me by John Anthony Lennon (born 1950). Maslanka’s piece, derived loosely from a Bach chorale, is quiet and contemplative; Lennon’s is insistently dissonant and atonal, with saxophone and piano seeming to inhabit two different worlds that intersect only intermittently. The CD as a whole features excellent playing, both by Velasco and by Choi, and each work on the disc contains at least some material of interest – although the totality is not likely to reach out to a wide audience, except perhaps an audience of saxophonists intrigued by the moods and expressiveness heard in various guises throughout the recording.