(++++) SOUND WORLDS

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 20^th and 21^st 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-20^th 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.