(+++) AUDIOVISUALS YES, AMUSEMENTS MAYBE

Ligeti: Nonsense Madrigals; Makiko Kinoshita: Ashita no uta (Song for Tomorrow); Ola Gjeilo: A Dream within a Dream; Francesca Amewudah-Rivers: Alive; Joe Hisaishi: I Was There; Judith Bingham: Tricksters; Malcolm Williamson: The Musicians of Bremen; Paul Patterson: Time Piece. The King’s Singers. Signum Records. $17.99.

Mozart’s Jazz Requiem. The Queen’s Cartoonists. 7 Train Records. $9.99.

     The intermingling of music and visuals is scarcely new: that is what opera has been about for 400+ years, and church music, designed to enhance and accentuate the pomp and opulence as well as the solemnity of worship, even longer. But as in so many other matters, the audiovisual mixture has changed dramatically over time – think of silent movies, early cartoons, and the significant importance of music to more-modern movies (Prokofiev, Copland, Dimitri Tiomkin, not to mention the more-recent John Williams effect). Some contemporary composers and performers have, however, taken things in new directions, or to new extremes, depending on your point of view. And while music divorced from its original melding with visuals has long been a commonplace, it is considerably less clear, when it comes to some of the new approaches, whether the music can be fully enjoyed without its intended eye-attracting companionship.

     Take the new Signum Records CD featuring The King’s Singers. It includes eight works commissioned by the 55-year-old ensemble in the past half-century, the centerpiece being Nonsense Madrigals by György Ligeti (1923-2006), whose 100^th birthday the release honors. The Ligeti work – actually works, plural, the pieces having been written between 1988 and 1993 – is (or are) accompanied by and matched with six sets of cartoons turned into music videos by French illustrator Coralie Muce. But the CD, of course, omits the visual elements, which (for those who care to track them down) are amply illustrative of the music in a kind of awkwardly skewed surrealistic way. What exactly is, or is intended to be, the relationship here between the audible and the visual? Complicating matters is the fact that Ligeti’s settings of poems from William Brighty Rands, Lewis Carroll and elsewhere are very much in the composer’s usual style, which is to say the Nonsense Madrigals are somewhat more nonsensical than their verbiage, since their words are rather difficult to follow even with these singers’ usual super-clear enunciation. Making matters even more confusing is the fact that the Nonsense Madrigals are not presented as a group – they are interspersed on the disc with other, wholly unrelated works that were also commissioned by The King’s Singers. These include Makiko Kinoshita’s Ashita no uta (2020); Ola Gjeilo’s A Dream within a Dream (2022); Francesca Amewudah-Rivers’ Alive (2022); Joe Hisaishi’s I Was There (2022); Judith Bingham’s Tricksters (2019); Malcolm Williamson’s The Musicians of Bremen (1972); and Paul Patterson’s Time Piece (1972). None of the non-Ligeti works is tied directly to visual material, although several of them call up (or are intended to call up) images of many kinds: Williamson’s is based on the Grimm fairy tale; Gjeilo’s uses a famous poem by Edgar Allan Poe; Patterson’s and Bingham’s are creation stories; Hisaishi’s is a memorial and eulogy for modern tragedies even though it refers directly to none of them; and so on. Complexities within complexities. This is, in its totality, a very curious CD indeed: beautifully sung throughout, clearly arranged very thoughtfully (if rather peculiarly, in terms of alternating the Ligeti material with other, wholly different music), and often decidedly strange. The visual component of Ligeti’s Nonsense Madrigals actually helps elucidate the words, although the visuals were created decades after the music; and visualizations (imaginariums, if you will) enhance the remaining works as well. Yet it is easy – although it feels a bit strange – simply to enjoy the disc as music if one does not try too hard to picture what the music is about. This is certainly not a CD for everyone, not even for every aficionado of The King’s Singers; but it is a salutary experience for those inclined to look for – and listen for – something different. Different from what is a matter worth contemplating.

     Speaking of different: The King’s Singers are vocalists, while The Queen’s Cartoonists are instrumentalists – Joel Pierson, piano; Rossen Nedelchev, drums; Mark Phillips, clarinet, alto sax, soprano sax, and flute; Greg Hammontree, trumpet and trombone; Drew Pitcher, tenor sax and bass clarinet; and Steve Whipple, bass. Speaking further of different: there is an underlying seriousness to The King’s Singers, even when they present lighter material; what underlies The Queen’s Cartoonists is harder to fathom. Indeed, it is difficult to decide whether a new 7 Train Records recording is brilliant or idiotic, or both, and hard to know whether to be intrigued or appalled by it. One of the great works of the classical canon, one of those pieces featuring music intended to accompany visuals – solemn religious ones – but standing very much on its own, is Mozart’s Requiem, which the composer did not live to complete. The Queen’s Cartoonists have chosen this work – all 13 sections, from Requiem aeternam to Lux aeterna – as the basis for a set of five music videos that incorporate some of Mozart’s music and a whole lot of riffs, as in jazz riffs, upon it. The result is Mozart’s Jazz Requiem, and to say that it is weird is more than a slight understatement: it is practically the definition of bizarre. To get just a slight idea of the sound world of what The Queen’s Cartoonists have done here, consider the guest artists who join them on certain tracks: Jon Singer on xylophone and marimba; Samantha Lake on tuba; Jennifer Wharton on bass trombone; and Tatum Greenblatt and Wayne Tucker on trumpets. Consider also the cover of the CD, which features Mozart, arisen from a grave marked Requiem, conducting an ensemble of nine nattily dressed skeletons, most of them smiling and two of them using bones as drumsticks and mallets, respectively. As for respectfully, well, that is a matter of opinion. The problem is that it is hard to form an opinion. If this release had as its foundation pretty much anything but Mozart’s Requiem, it would be easy to admire the audacity of the performers and pianist/arranger Pierson. Jazzing up classical music, even Mozart, can be a lot of fun: Duke Ellington did just that with bits of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker and Grieg’s Peer Gynt. And poking fun at classical music (in the mode, for example, of Anna Russell, Peter Schickele or Gerard Hoffnung) can be thoroughly delightful. And listened to totally without context – that is, if heard by someone who does not know Mozart’s Requiem at all – this is certainly a disc of abundant delights, upbeat here, intense there, fascinatingly varied in one place, suitably solemn in another. But in context, for anyone who does know the grandeur and tragedy of Mozart’s short life and this end-of-life, incomplete masterpiece, Mozart’s Jazz Requiem is inescapably peculiar. And that is putting it mildly. Seeing the videos – which those with an especially macabre bent will want to track down online – gives the whole project an even stranger resonance, since they feature, among other things, genuinely upsetting (as well as not-at-all upsetting) death scenes from long-forgotten cartoons. One has to admire the sheer gall of The Queen’s Cartoonists at the same time one responds viscerally to the sheer panache of their playing. It is the gall/panache balance that will be perceived differently by whatever audience may find its way to this decidedly odd disc. It is almost impossible to dislike the performance, even as one questions and perhaps condemns oneself for daring to enjoy it.