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Beethoven: Egmont Overture; Wagner: Elsa’s Procession to the Cathedral from “Lohengrin”; Messiaen: Apparition of the Eternal Church; Healey Willan: How They So Softly Rest; William C. White: Flood of Waters (Noah and the Flood); Brahms: Variations on a Theme by Haydn; Mahler: “Urlicht” and Finale from Symphony No. 2. Chicago Gargoyle Brass and Organ Ensemble conducted by Stephen Squires. MSR Classics. $14.95.

Samuel Barber: Sonata for Cello and Piano; Lukas Foss: Capriccio for Cello and Piano; Kenji Bunch: Broken Music for Cello and Piano; Clancy Newman: From Method to Madness. Clancy Newman, cello; Natalie Zhu, piano. Albany Records. $16.99.

Missy Mazzoli: Tooth and Nail; Katherine Balch: Apartment Sounds; Nathalie Joachim: Watch Over Us; Anna Clyne: Rest These Hands; Eve Beglarian: Well-Spent; Kate Moore; Synaesthesia Suite. Yvonne Lam, violin. Blue Griffin Recordings. $15.99.

     Music is sometimes considered a universal language, but that is a vast oversimplification: even speaking just of Western forms, heavy metal does not speak the way Gregorian chant does. And within a single musical genre such as classical (however defined), communication and its effects vary greatly depending on how composers create pieces and how those pieces are presented to audiences. It is precisely because music is not universal in its communicative effects that so many individuals and ensembles decide to revamp, restructure, rearrange and even rewrite individual works in order to have them speak to audiences in new, different, and hopefully interesting ways. An MSR Classics CD featuring the Chicago Gargoyle Brass and Organ Ensemble conducted by Stephen Squires takes this matter somewhat to extremes in a series of Craig Garner arrangements of well-known and originally carefully orchestrated works, besprinkled here and there with some less-familiar pieces. The result is strange – sometimes enthralling, like gargoyles, but equally often off-putting, like gargoyles with their tongues and other appendages featured rather too prominently. Beethoven’s Egmont Overture here sounds particularly funereal, even in its triumphant portions. An excerpt from Wagner’s Lohengrin fares better, its sense of ethereality well-captured in the arrangement. Messiaen’s Apparition of the Eternal Church comes across even better, perhaps because the strangeness of the arrangement is mitigated by the comparative unfamiliarity of the music – and the churchlike atmosphere is well-sustained by brass and organ. How They So Softly Rest by Healey Willan (1880-1968) is a short piece, a kind of quiet and placid interlude. Flood of Waters by William C. White (born 1983), on the other hand, is broad and dissonant and uses the brass-and-organ combination to good if somewhat overstated effect. The Brahms and Mahler arrangements, however, are just plain weird. Variations on a Theme by Haydn starts out well enough, with an understanding of Brahms’ orchestration of what was originally a piece he wrote for two pianos. But as the variations progress, it is never quite clear whether Garner is trying to duplicate Brahms’ orchestral effects, seek alternatives to them, or comment on or even mock them. The use of the organ is particularly odd: it is sometimes emphatic, sometimes complementary to the brass, sometimes almost clownish in its passages – the seventh variation (Grazioso) is essentially evaporative, and the finale never delivers a satisfactory summation or denouement. As for the excerpts from Mahler’s “Resurrection” symphony, the excerpting itself makes little sense – the work is carefully planned from start to finish – and while Urlicht sounds suitably churchlike in Garner’s arrangement, the lack of words turns the musical language in a direction that does not quite match Mahler’s intent. And then comes a nine-minute excerpt from the symphony’s finale, nicely mapped to the brass-and-organ forces but wholly out of context – and ultimately purposeless in the absence of so much that has come before and of the choral material that comes later, as the symphony moves toward its conclusion. Mahler was an exceptionally careful orchestrator and was well aware of the languages “spoken” by sections of an orchestra – and how they intertwined with the language of human singers. Reimagining a small portion of his “Resurrection” symphony for brass and organ is an intriguing experiment, but to what end? That, indeed, is the question for this entire CD: as well-played as its careful arrangements are, there is nothing here that supplants or even does much to supplement the original works – the disc is simply a pleasant curiosity.

     The communicative language on a new Albany Records CD featuring Clancy Newman and Natalie Zhu is of a different type – or rather the languages, plural, are of different types. On the face of it, this is a collection of four chamber works for the relatively common instrumental combination of cello and piano. But the composers’ use of this sonic palette is highly varied, with the result that the pieces express themselves – and connect with the audience – in very different ways. Samuel Barber’s Sonata for Cello and Piano ­interestingly combines the warmly lyrical with the acerbic, sometimes within the space of just a few measures. Much of the first movement has the cello and piano in dialogue, neither getting to complete its own musical thought before the other breaks in. Warmth dominates the central Adagio, at least until Barber tosses a scherzo-like segment into the middle. The finale brings the piano to the fore at the start and centers on the cello later. The work as a whole flickers hither and thither emotionally and never really settles into fully coherent expressiveness: it sounds as if it is constantly on the verge of revealing something that it never quite puts on display. Barber’s work dates to the 1930s, the decade before Lukas Foss wrote his Capriccio for Cello and Piano, but the works’ very different sensibilities reflect the composers’ thinking more than the dates of the music. Foss’ piece is as short and pointed as Barber’s is expansive, and evinces a sense of humor that is notably absent from Barber’s very serious sonata. One of the best things about the pairing of Newman and Zhu as performers is that both are thoroughly involved in the varying emotional sensibilities of the works they play: they are as engaged with the often-amusing elements of Foss as with the strength and intensity of Barber. This mutual clarity stands them in good stead in their performance of Broken Music by Kenji Bunch (born 1973). Each of this work’s four movements has a two-word title starting with the word “broken” – they focus on voice, chord, verse and music. Bunch has a clear and rather elaborate explanation of the sense in which he uses “broken” in each case, but his structural intentions are less important than the expressive ways in which he uses them. It is easy, for example, to hear the first movement as referring to a voice breaking with emotion, and to hear multiple instances of chords being broken into their component pieces (and accentuated with untuned percussive beats) in the second. These may not exactly be what Bunch is after – at least, not all that he is after – but this piece’s musical language expresses itself in a way that pulls listeners in without requiring them to know the details of the work’s structural intent. Newman himself contributes an encore to this rather short (50-minute) but highly varied CD: From Method to Madness starts as a kind of cello étude (with the piano barely present), then grows gradually in complexity and volume as an accelerando at its midpoint escorts the work’s character into something much more jazzlike (and with much more piano participation). By the end, the piece has an almost frantic quality that Newman and Zhu handle with aplomb.

     The musical language of the six pieces featuring Yvonne Lam on a new Blue Griffin Recordings CD is essentially electronic – although, on another level, it is essentially of the solo-violin variety. Each work on the disc features Lam interacting with electronics of one sort or another, and it is listeners’ reaction to those electronics, at least as much as their response to Lam’s violin playing, that will determine the nature of their response to these works. Thus, Missy Mazzoli’s Tooth and Nail features a persistent electronic ostinato around and atop which Lam plays scales, double stops, glissandi and more; after a while, a sort of electronic sound cloud emerges, and then the work goes through various changes – think of them as languages – that have Lam more or less prominent as the electronics swell and diminish and approximate other sounds (such as that of voices). There is a lot crammed into the piece’s 10 minutes. Apartment Sounds by Katherine Balch is much shorter, only three minutes, but it too employs an electronic ostinato as it presents exactly what its title suggests: mundane sounds the composer has heard in her apartment, with the occasional interjection of a bit of violin commentary. Nathalie Joachim’s Watch Over Us is one of those works that speak clearly only to listeners who know their genesis, which in this case is a documentary film about an Islamic casket maker. Cough-like electronic sounds blend and contrast with electronically modified vocals, including a call to prayer, as the violin plays music that seems to exist on a different plane from that of the electronics. The work may explore and comment on its source effectively, but simply as music without a referent, it is rather vapid. Anna Clyne’s Rest These Hands also has a very specific point of origin: the title is from a poem that Clyne’s mother wrote, and the poem itself is recited as part of the electronic accompaniment of the violin. Clyne also quotes from Bach’s Violin Sonata No. 1, creating a work that is a stylistic hodgepodge for anyone not in tune (so to speak) with its underlying components. Eve Beglarian’s Well-Spent is somewhat similar in construction, being a response to a line from one of Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks and incorporating in the electronics a 1942 performance of a work by Muddy Waters. Being significantly shorter than Clyne’s work (five minutes vs. nine), Beglarian’s has less of an overextended feeling about it; but the repetitiveness of much of Beglarian’s electronic material makes the piece feel longer than its clock time. The final work on this disc is by far the longest, at nearly 18 minutes: Synaesthesia Suite by Kate Moore. The work is in effect a concerto for live violin (which assumes the role of soloist in a Baroque concerto) and synthesized violin (which takes on the ripieno role). As with so many other contemporary works, this one is far more intellectually intriguing than emotive or musically gripping – its intentionality seems to revolve around being appreciated rather than being experienced by listeners. Pervaded throughout by repetitive figurations that become distracting and/or boring when focused on, but that make for effective background if listeners concentrate on other aspects of the material, Moore’s work possesses a level of aural monochromaticism that makes it a chore to hear from start to finish – brief components entice the ear, but the piece as a whole has little to say beyond “now hear this!” The language of acoustic-plus-electronic violin sounds simply does not seem equal to a work of this extent.