Liszt: Études d’exécution transcendante.
Yunchan Lim, piano. Steinway & Sons. $17.99.
Jeffrey
Ryan: Everything Already Lost; Iman Habibi: False Morning; The River-Lip; Jean
Coulthard: Three Love Songs; Jocelyn Morlock: Involuntary Love Songs; Stephen
Chatman: Love Songs; Leslie Uyeda: Plato’s Angel; Melissa Hul: Snowflakes. Tyler Duncan, baritone; Erika Switzer, piano. Bridge
Records. $14.99.
Steven
Ricks & Ron Coulter: Music for Trombone, Percussion and Electronics. Steven Ricks, trombone and electronics; Ron Coulter,
percussion and electronics. Panoramic Recordings. $16.99.
Steve
Reich: Cello Counterpoint; Fjóla Evans: Augun; Emily Cooley: Assemble; Alex
Weiser: Willow’s Song; Shimmer.
Ashley Bathgate, cello. New Focus Recordings. $16.99.
In today’s seemingly unending parade of outstanding young pianists, a
few stand out as much for their musicality as for their technical abilities and
their competitive accomplishments. Most of the attention lavished on South
Korea’s Yunchan Lim has come from his winning the Van Cliburn International
Piano Competition in 2022 at the age of 18, making him the youngest performer
ever to win gold since that competition began in 1962. Cliburn himself was 23
when he won the International Tchaikovsky Competition in Moscow that propelled
him to worldwide fame and indirectly spawned the event that bears his name; and
he was notably modest afterwards in asserting that the honors accorded to him
really belonged to classical music rather than to a single individual. Lim made
no such statement after his victory, but his playing of Liszt’s Études d’exécution transcendante makes the assertion on its own. A new Steinway
& Sons CD gives listeners the opportunity to hear the actual live
performance given by Lim at the Cliburn competition and to share both in a
sense of history and in an interpretation that brought Lim the Audience Award
as well as the gold medal. It is really an astonishingly good reading, filled
with all the technique and emotionalism that Liszt packed into this exceptional
set of 12 studies. The very brief Preludio
showcases impeccable fingering and an understanding of pedal use that helps
turn this curtain-raiser into a delightful introduction to and promise of what
is yet to come. And then, for more than an hour, Lim produces delight after
delight as Liszt’s music goes through its always remarkable twists and turns,
its tremendous expressiveness designed to emerge from a keyboard command so
thoroughgoing that the extreme virtuosity needed to play the études sounds
entirely natural, unforced – and, strangely enough in this context, easy. In
other words, the extreme technical requirements of the Transcendental Études must, in the best performances, sound as if
they are not there at all, or are at most irrelevant – it is the feelings and
emotions communicated through technique
that need to come to the fore. And this is precisely why Lim’s performance is
so good: he showcases without overtly showing off. Yes, his technique is marvelous
throughout, whether in the individual-note clarity of the runs in the Molto vivace, the pounding chords of Wilde Jagd, or the evanescent fragility
of Chasse-neige. But it is the scenes
that Lim paints through his impeccable playing that are the focus of his
rendition: the intense drama of Mazeppa,
the flickering filigree of Feux follets,
the extended emotionalism brought forth through delicate finger work in Ricordanza. Every single one of the
études is captivating in its own way, with Lim performing each as a complete
work in itself while also approaching every one as part of a larger whole in a
way that creates breath-holding anticipation for what will come next. This is a
stunning performance, electrifying in its combination of sheer bravura with
emotionally trenchant expressivity. The opportunity to listen to it repeatedly
on this disc, exploring new aspects of its intricacies on each hearing, is a
most welcome one.
Liszt had an unequalled ability to conjure
up scenes and feelings from a single instrument – one for whose evolution to
its modern form he is more than a little responsible. The piano, one way or
another, remains popular as a compositional medium, but more-recent composers
than Liszt, including those of today, often rely on combined sound rather than
a single instrument to elicit the effects they seek. Sometimes they use
tried-and-true forms modified in new ways, as is the case with some of the
songs for baritone and piano on a new Bridge Classics CD. Tyler Duncan and
Erika Switzer present the works of seven composers, none of them well-known, in
a sequence that is not chronological but that reveals some ways in which
emotional communication through art song has evolved – or has not – in the 20th
and 21st centuries. The interweaving of past and present is clearest
in the longest work on the disc, a four-song cycle by Jeffrey Ryan (born 1962)
called Everything Already Lost. A certain
degree of familiarity with the musical past is necessary for full comprehension
and appreciation of this work: it uses poetry by Jan Zwicky, but the fourth and
longest poem, Schumann: Fantasie, Op. 17,
is Ryan’s response to Zwicky’s commentary on Schumann’s musical reaction to
Beethoven’s An die ferne Geliebte. If
that sounds like a complex set of nested relationships, that is because it is. Schumann’s
emotional themes, reflected from Beethoven, were typical and typically
heartfelt Romantic ones of loneliness and absent love. Ryan’s cycle precedes
this extended Schumann-focused song, whose 10-minute length is exceptional for
a single art song, with three shorter ones in whose words Zwicky contemplates
similar themes with less of an intricate focus-on-earlier-music overlay. Tyler
Duncan’s firm, rich baritone fits the cycle very well, and Erika Switzer’s
sensitive piano accompaniment complements Duncan’s voice to very good effect:
Ryan’s cycle was commissioned by this duo and aptly complements their musical
relationship. Ryan’s work is placed last on this CD. First on the disc are two
songs by Iman Habibi (born 1985), False
Morning and The River-Lip, based
loosely on translations of the poetry of Omar Khayyām but using a distinctly
modern and often very dissonant idiom to communicate their thoughts. Next are Three Love Songs by Jean Coulthard
(1908-2000), which date to the mid-20th century (1948) but partake
of a Romantic musical temperament that emphasizes the voice and uses the piano for
enhancement rather than contrast or complementarity. Coulthard’s work is
followed by Involuntary Love Songs by
Jocelyn Morlock (1969-2003). These use poetry by Alan Ashton to describe
yearning from afar, surging emotions, and finally the acceptance of strong
feelings – although the music is generally somewhat milder than the words. Next
on the disc is the second song from Eight
Love Songs for High Baritone Voice by Stephen Chatman (born 1950). This
song, Something Like That, is
appealing in its directness as it considers the various simple and complex
elements that constitute what humans call love. Then comes Plato’s Angel by Leslie Uyeda (born 1953), a four-song cycle using
words by Canadian poet Lorna Crozier, who delves into somewhat darker and
more-thought-provoking matters than are considered by other composers here – phrases include
“huge mind,” “death’s own flower,” “the cat with wings in his mouth,” and “the
funeral of the world.” The music is both substantive and subtle, but fits
rather oddly with the overall focus of the other material on the disc –
although here as elsewhere, Duncan and Switzer effectively get to the heart of
the offering. Uyeda’s work is followed by Snowflakes
by Melissa Hui (born 1966), which uses a poem by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow –
the second of a set of three songs that Hui wrote based on Longfellow’s words. The
setting is somewhat at odds with the comparatively naïve and straightforward
expressiveness of the poem, although the delicacy of the presentation,
especially in the piano part, is attractive in and of itself. Taken as a whole,
this is a (+++) disc that offers a well-performed set of mostly
well-proportioned songs that collectively explore numerous aural landscapes and
soulscapes through varying compositional techniques that balance the vocal and
instrumental parts differently, often to very good effect.
The piano is essentially a percussion
instrument, but the sonic environment created by voice-plus-piano can be more
or less emphatically percussive – as can that of the piano alone, as Liszt
demonstrated. Contemporary composers who want to emphasize percussive sounds
often find themselves modifying the piano itself, writing for it in new ways,
or moving beyond it altogether to create percussion experiences through
different means. Electroacoustic composer/performers Steven Ricks and Ron
Coulter opt for a kind of hybridization of percussion and electronics (in
Coulter’s case), and of trombone and electronics (in Ricks’), to produce the
effects they want to evoke. The seven jointly composed, jointly performed works
on a new (+++) Panoramic Recordings CD show how Ricks and Coulter implement
their particular search for auditory engagement – at least on the part of an
audience already committed to experimentation and avant-garde sounds. The
opening Tap, Rattle, and Blow is aptly
titled, since tapping, rattling and trombone blowing are important elements of
its aural world. Late Night Call is a
kind of “found music,” combining now-rare-or-obsolete sounds such as those of a
dial-up modem and poor TV or radio reception. It may serve as a reminder, to
those who remember the sounds in the real world, that it is good to have moved
beyond them (beyond most of them, anyway). Mechanic’s
Choice is strongly percussive, with an emphasis on gong sounds mingled with
those of other objects that can be directly struck, their reverberations then
enhanced electronically. Charming Ways
incorporates snippets of words spoken on TV and radio into a mixture of
trombone notes and the sounds of rubbing and scraping. Button Drop is the most strongly percussive work on the CD, mixing
the comparatively straightforward sounds of a typical battery of percussion
with modified, electronic ones that complement and extend the directly played
material. The longest work on the disc, which bears the overly enigmatic title I-S3eM and lasts 17 minutes, includes
sections that fade in and out, ones that emphasize different registers (high
and low), and ones that allow somewhat unexpected material (such as trombone
sounds) to peek through a kind of aural curtain established by the electronics.
The last work on the CD, Slurry,
mixes several elements heard earlier, including spoken bits, high flute in
birdsong mode, bells, trombone emissions, and a mallet-struck keyboard (the
glockenspiel). Although not intended as a summation of what has come before, Slurry is a good 10-minute overview of
or introduction to the entirety of the recording. Listeners unsure of whether
or not they would be interested in an hour-plus of these creations by Ricks and
Coulter may find it useful to start at the end of the disc and sample the works
that appear earlier only if they find the concluding one congenial.
Still another contemporary approach to creating an unusual sonic environment is explored by cellist Ashley Bathgate on a (+++) New Focus Recordings CD that includes, and takes off from, Steve Reich’s Cello Counterpoint. Reich wrote a number of works that he gathered as a “counterpoint series,” of which Cello Counterpoint is the fourth. Reich’s idea was to have a single cellist become a cello octet by performing with seven pre-recorded tracks. This creates an aural environment consisting of familiar acoustic instruments assembled in an unfamiliar electronic way, through the merger of a live performer with a previously assembled, electronically reproduced septet. The “layering” concept is interesting as an intellectual experiment, although its expressive potential is at best ambiguous. Still, Reich’s Cello Counterpoint is an intriguing piece in itself. In four movements, it contains tonal and tonally ambiguous elements and, in the second, slow movement, a canon for seven separate cellos. It is worth hearing in part for the nature of its sound and in part for the way its four-movement structure helps it sustain throughout its 11-minute length. Bathgate, who plays all eight cello parts, performs admirably with her pre-recorded self, clearly having a strong sense of how Reich structures the piece and how it can work on a CD – when all eight cello elements, not just seven, are heard in recorded form. The main thrust of this disc, though, is not the Reich work that is the disc’s foundation but music by three other composers who use the Reich solo-and-seven-electronic-tracks combination to create different works within the same aural world. These pieces prove less interesting than Reich’s. Fjóla Evans’ Augun, based on an Icelandic song, mixes consonance and dissonance, scraping and spiccato, and extended repetition of a basic motif. Emily Cooley’s Assemble breaks down the eight cellos into smaller groups and sets them to doing different things, bringing them together only at the end. As for the two Alex Weiser works, Willow’s Song serves as a 90-second introduction to the much longer Shimmer, although Willow’s Song was originally created for a different purpose. Here it offers some mildly lyrical material set against a chordal background, after which Shimmer picks up the shorter work’s conclusion and considerably extends it. Shimmer keeps the solo cello in the forefront, playing against individual members of the ensemble as well as the group as a whole. Given the fact that the group is really a solo multiplied, and that that solo is the same cellist who is the solo performing with and against the group and its members, there is a whole convoluted philosophical underpinning to this approach – none of which, however, has much impact on the impact of the music. Weiser’s work has some interesting elements in its treatment of the eight-cello totality, but it is somewhat too thin to sustain for the 14 minutes needed for his two pieces together. Actually, this is a very short CD – only 41 minutes in total – but it seems longer, largely because there is a somewhat monochromatic sound to the entire project despite the cello’s inherently broad range and wide expressive potential. Cellists and fans of cello music will find the CD intriguing, but for a more-general audience, its overall effect is on the bland side, the music, Reich’s excepted, seeming to be more of an intellectual exercise than any sort of attempt to broaden anyone’s auditory horizons.
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