(+++) COMPOSER-PERFORMERS, AND THE CELLO

Christoph Croisé: Cello Concerto No. 1; Voyage Exotique; Clarinet Trio; Cello Sonata No. 1. Christoph Croisé, cello; Kammerorchester der Niederlenzer Musiktage; Annette Jakovčić, cello; Damien Bachmann, clarinet; Oxana Shevchenko, piano. AVIE. $17.99.

Music from the Iranian Female Composers Association. Brian Thornton, cello; Katherine Bormann and Alicia Koelz, violins; Eliesha Nelson, viola; Callisto Quartet (Paul Aguilar and Rachel Aguilar, violins; Eva Kennedy, viola; Hannah Moses, cello); Amahl Arulanandam, cello; Nathan Petitpas, percussion. New Focus Recordings. $16.99.

Lee Weisert: Recesses; Similar Speeds. Lee Weisert, piano, guitar, percussion, and electronics. New Focus Recordings. $16.99.

     Many contemporary musical creators are as eager to showcase themselves in performance roles as in their compositions. There is, of course, a very longstanding tradition of this: a great many classical works in the past 400 years, and even earlier, were written by composers who also performed them or were part of their performances, and famous music of many types was created by and for composer-performers through the 19^th century (think of Liszt or the Strauss family) and into the 20^th (Rachmaninoff, for one). In more-recent times, listeners have largely become accustomed to performers presenting music by composers other than themselves – but the composer-performer tradition continues in some quarters, if in somewhat different ways from those of the past. Thus, cellist-composer Christoph Croisé (born 1993) offers four of his own works, all written between 2020 and 2022, on a new AVIE disc. The four-movement Cello Concerto No. 1 sets up a main theme that carries through the whole piece; frequently places the violin antagonistically against the cello; and reaches into non-classical acoustic realms through the prominent inclusion of a drum set. The second movement is intensely soloist-focused, with Croisé playing almost continuously and engaging in a very extended cadenza. The third movement nearly eschews classical structure altogether, its sound world that of the electronic dance music of techno clubs. The finale is speedy, dramatic, rhythmic in multiple ways, and intense at times while being nearly lyrical at others – it is something of a stylistic mash-up, and is the most effective portion of the concerto. The Clarinet Trio follows a somewhat analogous path in its three movements. The first movement features themes that flicker in and out, quickly replaced by others, without any particular development. The second focuses as much on the cello – which opens the movement with an extended solo – as on the clarinet, which does not exactly play second fiddle (so to speak) but which functions as the cello’s partner. The finale’s bossa nova beat is appealing and, as in much of the music on this disc, functions as a cross-genre element underpinning the material. Cello Sonata No. 1, like the concerto, is in four movements; also as in the concerto, the first movement sets out the thematic material that will be explored throughout. Croisé effectively contrasts strongly accented and rather ominous sounds with milder, quieter material that never quite counters the darkness. The second movement is gentle and surprisingly sweet: here Croisé takes advantage of the warmth and beauty of the cello’s sound in a way that he does nowhere else in any of the works on this CD. The third movement’s sounds are a strong contrast, strong and anguished and at times verging on the unpleasant. The finale is closer in mood to the third movement than the second, dissonant and unevenly rhythmic – like other finales on this disc, it has dance elements, but the ones here are of the danse macabre variety, even if not truly spooky. In some ways the most interesting piece on this disc is the most cello-focused of all: Voyage Exotique is a two-cello “Grand Duo” whose four movements carry listeners to distinctly different auditory realms and interweave the cellos so effectively that the piece seems to call on more sonorities than can be contained in a mere two instruments. The movements have interesting titles that, far from being arbitrary, provide listeners with some clues as to what is going on. Blu Rhino Track is by turns rhapsodically nocturne-like and strongly rhythmic. A Train to Ugudu Yelu journeys to an imaginary place on imaginary tracks in what sounds a lot like wave motion. Tarantula Spiritualis is more about the spider than the tarantella dance inspired by its bite: the web-spinning has both cellos producing electronic-sounding elements. The finale, Black Mamba Island, moves from spiders to snakes and actually has some of the rhythmic feeling of a tarantella – but, in the main, has the two cellos imitating the sounds and movements of venomous serpents. Croisé and his colleagues play all four works on the disc with enthusiasm, and the music itself – a generous helping of it, 80 minutes in all – has many points of interest through its intermingling of forms and its unashamed self-display as a stylistic mélange.

     The cello also plays a major role, both as a solo instrument and with others, on a New Focus Recordings CD offering six works by Iranian female composers, assembled and primarily performed by Cleveland Orchestra cellist Brian Thornton. Mahdis Golzar Kashani’s And the Moses Drowned is an extended single movement for string quartet, intended as a “cause” piece responding to the Syrian war but interesting to hear without needing to know its provenance. It includes two Largo sections alternating with two Vivace ones, the slower material’s mournful drama contrasting with the faster elements’ strong rhythmic drive. Nina Barzegar’s Vulnerable is for solo cello and is built on contrasts of technique and speed; it is somewhat too stretched-out to be fully effective, but its more-animated latter portions are well-thought-through. Nasim Khorassani’s Growth, for string trio, is textural rather than melodic or harmonic, and uses the interplay of instrumental sounds effectively. Niloufar Iravani’s three-movement The Maze for string quartet (played here by the Callisto Quartet) uses different modes and meters in each movement and comes across as a kind of journey through compositional techniques – in which the finale, Mysterious, is particularly intriguing in its channeling of Ives’ The Unanswered Question. Anahita Abbasi’s Sirventès for cello (Amahl Arulanandam) and percussion (Nathan Petitpas) is a study in sound, using the cello in a percussion context and the percussion to provide structure rather than merely emphasis. It is an interesting aural experiment whose appeal is more intellectual than visceral. Thornton’s cello, absent from the Iravani and Abbasi works, returns for the last piece on the disc, Mina Arissian’s three-movement Suite for Cello. This solo piece lies more naturally on the cello than anything else on the CD, and most fully allows the instrument to express its ingrained melodiousness and richness. A technical tour de force, the work does not sound as if it is trying to transform the cello into something beyond its inherent nature: it allows expressiveness to flow smoothly through multiple emotional peaks and valleys, with Thornton’s elegant phrasing and careful evocation of mood helping the material connect more directly with listeners than will likely be the case for the other pieces heard here.

     Unlike cellist Croisé, cellist Thornton did not compose the works he interprets – but Lee Weisert (born 1978) did compose the pieces he and colleagues present on another New Focus Recordings release. His instrument, however, is not the cello: Weisert holds forth on piano, guitar, percussion, and electronics, along with participants Allen Anderson (modular synthesis), Nicholas DiEugenio (violin), Jonathon Kirk (electronics), Melissa Martin (vocals), and Matthew McClure (saxophone). These instruments invite listeners to a very eclectic collection of sounds indeed, and that is just what Weisert provides in Recesses and Similar Speeds. Nearly the entire CD is devoted to Recesses, which is subdivided as Recesses I and Recesses II, the first of them being further broken into two portions. To anyone not thoroughly versed in, familiar with and enthusiastic about electronic music, all the material is going to sound very much alike. The first part of Recesses I has the usual background-ish electronic sounds with some foreground material such as children’s voices and occasional snippets of orchestral strings. The second part also mixes electronically generated tones (more individualized in this section) with vocal bits and pieces and occasional far-in-the-background consonances over which the foreground electronic waves wash incessantly. Recesses II starts as if it is growling, then turns into a series of unsurprising clicks, grunts, taps and individual piano notes, all within  the usual outer-space-sounding envelope of so much electronic music. In all, the Recesses elements take up 45 of the 51 minutes on the disc, which turns Similar Speeds into a kind of six-minute encore presented purely by Weisert. The work sounds like a procession of electronically generated and/or enhanced gamelan or other metallophone material, with frequent rhythmic changes that provide more-interesting variability than anything in Recesses – and the added plus that Similar Speeds is so much shorter that it spends much less time dwelling on its sonic profile. All this music is for a very narrow, strongly committed audience that is determinedly avant-garde and wedded to the notion of the power of electronics to produce engaging audio material. Those self-regarding cognoscenti will find much in this material to intrigue them. But anyone who is not already a member of the “in” group is highly unlikely to be drawn into it by experiencing anything on offer here.