(++++) WORKS WITH A CAUSE

Malek Jandali: Concerto for Violin and Orchestra; Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra. Rachel Barton Pine, violin; Anthony McGill, clarinet; ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra conducted by Marin Alsop. Cedille. $16.

Reiko Füting: Mechthild. Hanna Herfurtner and Olivia Stahn, sopranos; Susi Wirth, narrator; AuditivVokal Dresden and Ensemble Adapter conducted by Olaf Katzer. New Focus Recordings. $16.99.

     Music being music has not been enough for many composers for a long time. From Bach’s insomnia-focused Goldberg Variations to Beethoven’s Wellington’s Victory to Wagner’s music dramas based on re-creating (or creating) a Volk mythic history, music of all sorts has been intended to reach beyond the notes and into society at large – for a wide variety of purposes. Music that lasts, however, transcends its original purpose and continues to attract audiences even when they are unaware of (or indifferent to) its original reasons for being. Whether that will be true of contemporary works composed for extramusical purposes is impossible to know. The question for listeners, though, is whether they can respond to the music as music or only because of its stance on one non-musical issue or another. Malek Jandali (born 1972), for example, is a Syrian-American composer whose concertos for violin and for clarinet – which receive their world première recordings on a new Cedille release – are intended both to preserve Syrian culture and to affirm the struggles of various groups that have suffered hardship. The violin concerto (2014) does something, musically, that is common nowadays and actually has a long history: it incorporates “exotic” (in this case, Syrian) melodies and structural elements into a work set in a traditional three-movement Western concerto form. To Jandali’s credit, there is nothing in the concerto that sounds like exoticism for its own sake, and the soloist is not required to stretch the violin’s technical requirements to the detriment of the instrument’s communicative ability. In fact, the concerto is immediately appealing in its own right. Rachel Barton Pine, a very versatile violinist, plays it with her usual dedication and strength of characterization, while Marin Alsop provides well-balanced backup in leading the ORF Vienna Radio Symphony Orchestra. Does the non-musical gloss matter? Are Jandali’s use of a “women’s theme” and his intent to honor Syrian women significant? Does it matter that soloist and conductor are both women? Not at all – and that is all to the good. The extramusical material, in this case, may enrich the listening experience for audiences wanting to know more about the genesis of the concerto, but knowledge of the work’s raison d’etre is thankfully not needed to appreciate the skill with which the music is created and performed. The clarinet concerto (2021) is dedicated to Anthony McGill “in memory of all victims of injustice,” but here too the music does not require knowledge of its underlying rationale to be appreciated for its own sake. This work is shriller than the violin concerto, with which it shares Jandali’s penchant for Syrian elements. Its rhythms are more angular, its percussion more pronounced, its use of the clarinet not fully engaging – the soloist spends a great deal of time in the instrument’s higher register. But these elements, although they may somewhat limit the concerto’s appeal on a strictly musical basis, have to do with Jandali’s compositional choices, not his societal concerns. Both these concertos are very much worth hearing on a strictly musical basis, and in fact it is good to know that some contemporary composers can subsume their concerns about the world around them within music that can attract listeners simply through its quality as music, without requiring the audience to be aware of and supportive of the composer’s underlying motivations in writing the works.

     The chamber opera Mechthild by Reiko Füting (born 1972) asks more of listeners and is less likely to resonate with a wide audience. This is partly a matter of the topic, partly the reality of contemporary opera’s appeal or lack thereof, and partly tied to Füting’s compositional techniques. The title refers to Mechthild of Magdeburg (c. 1207-c. 1282), the first mystic to write in German: her book Das fließende Licht der Gottheit (“The Flowing Light of Divinity”) contains prayers, visions and dialogues. Theologian Christian Lehnert created for Füting a libretto about faith, the ascetic life, and the balancing act between freedom and security. These are weighty topics, to be sure. But here they are tackled in bits and pieces rather than head-on. The Middle and High German words, which will scarcely be familiar to most audiences, are often given in pieces rather than their entirety: much of Mechthild is a work of fragments. Common contemporary vocal techniques – whispering, electronic modification, the use of breathing as vocalise, the layering of voices on a kind of cloudlike background sound – are integral to the opera, as is extensive repetition. The work is in three acts and a total of nine scenes, some of whose titles may help guide listeners to and through what would otherwise be obscure sounds: “In the Room of Divinity,” “Dumped,” “Where Will You Be Then?” Melisma, Sprechstimme and Sprechgesang create a sonic environment from which occasional individual words emerge with surprising clarity, their meaning and the purpose of their clarity, however, not always being clear. Readily audible narration above a choral background is used from time to time, as in “Descent into Hell,” and there are occasional touches of lyricism, whose presence contrasts strongly with the material surrounding them. In truth, the score is a very rich one stylistically, and certainly Füting capably uses a wide variety of vocal and instrumental techniques to highlight different elements of Lehnert’s libretto. But the philosophical and frequently obscure elements of Mechthild’s writings and their presentation here, along with the requirement that the audience in effect know everything in the opera’s purview before hearing it (since the presentation itself is far from straightforward), make this (+++) CD a frequently fascinating but equally frequently frustrating listening experience. A staged version with surtitles would make some of the material easier to follow and understand, but not all of it. This is a piece on which the librettist and composer clearly worked diligently and with appreciation of Mechthild’s visions and the language in which she communicated them. But the piece is fraught with more weight than it is really able to bear, and more than it is reasonable to ask most listeners to bear on its behalf. It is a very rarefied experience, something of a contemporary Passion Play for an audience that is highly committed both to the subject matter and to the verbal and musical techniques used to explore it.