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William Horne: Sonata for French Horn and Piano; Sonata for Alto Saxophone and Piano; Trio for Flute, Alto Saxophone, and Piano. Mollie Pate, French horn; Xiting Yang and Joonghun Cho, piano; Walter Puyear, alto saxophone; Brandon LePage, flute. Blue Griffin Recordings. $15.99.

Gabriel Vicéns: Mural; Sueños Ligados; El Matorral; Una Superficie Sin Rostro; Carnal; Ficción; La Esfera. Roberta Michel, flute; Raissa Fahlman, clarinet; Joenne Dumitrascu and Adrianne Munden-Dixon, violin; Rocío Díaz de Cossío, Wick Simmons, and Julia Henderson, cello; Corinne Penner, Mayumi Tsuchida, and Mikael Darmanie, piano; John Ling, vibraphone; David Bloom, conductor; Nu Quintet (Kim Lewis, flute; Michael Dwinell, oboe; Kathryn Vetter, clarinet; Tylor Thomas, bassoon; Blair Hamrick, horn). Stradivarius. $15.

Music for Piano by Armenian Women Composers. Şahan Arzruni, piano. AGBU/Positively Armenian. $18.59.

     Contemporary explorations of small-ensemble combinations continue to turn up new ways to mix a limited number of instruments while exploring their expressive potential. The third volume in a Blue Griffin Recordings series of the chamber music of William Horne (born 1952) features up-to-the-minute music, written in 2021-2023, but nothing overtly avant-garde: Horne has an easy way with modern compositional techniques, but long since abandoned his earlier proclivity for twelvetone and atonal approaches in favor of material that reaches out emotively to audiences while never sounding old-fashioned, much less dated. Sonata for French Horn and Piano (2021) flows with a pleasing naturalness and a firm comprehension of the horn’s capabilities: there is no attempt here to force the instrument to make sounds for which it was not designed, and if the work’s “quick, energetic” finale is a touch on the acerbic side, that simply gives it a pleasingly piquant character that contrasts well with the mellower mood of the first two movements. The three movements of the Sonata for Alto Saxophone and Piano (2022) are less strongly contrasted than those of the horn sonata – indeed, all three are in more or less the same moderate tempo. A gentle rocking motion characterizes the first, a calm and expressive berceuse-like mood the second, while the finale – marked “Moderately” – continues the sense of crepuscular warmth and produces an overall feeling of relaxation. The Trio for Flute, Alto Saxophone, and Piano (2023) is sonically the most interesting of these three works, Horne’s contrast of the winds being particularly effective and his use of piano highlights and underlinings always well-considered. Part of the designation of the work’s first movement – “amiably” – stands as a good description of the piece as a whole: nothing here sounds complex or demanding; everything is pleasantly thoughtful, nicely balanced and hinting in the finale at just a bit of puckishness. Horne mingles the instruments attractively and shows in all three works on this well-played CD that modern chamber music can have a contemporary sound while still being effective in communicating some old-fashioned pleasures to listeners.

     The seven works by Gabriel Vicéns (born 1988) on a new Stradivarius CD are even more varied in their instrumental combinations, ranging from a sextet to a solo piano piece. The sextet, El Matorral, for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano and vibraphone, establishes an ostinato at the start before moving into exclamatory material: most instruments do not enter until more than a minute after the opening, and when they do, their percussive sounds complement rather than contrast with the initial keyboard material. The work stops suddenly, then enters a period of anticipatory quiescence that leads eventually to a series of brief outbursts from individual instruments; the ending fades to nothingness. There is something a bit gestural about the exclamatory material – nothing here sweeps the listener along – but the sounds of the instruments are well-differentiated. Almost as many instruments are involved in Ficción (2021): this is a woodwind quintet for flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn. Here the material is interlocutory from the start: a single-note, single-instrument  exclamation is answered by a somewhat longer response from several players. The work includes sections that seem to build toward proclamations, but it never actually takes the audience there: each buildup disintegrates or subsides into factional (or fractional) presentations by a portion of the group. The conclusion, although chordal, fades to nothingness. The CD also includes two three-instrument pieces: Mural (2021) for clarinet, violin and piano, and Sueños Ligados (2020) for violin, cello and piano. In the first of these, the piano rises very gradually from inaudibility to quietude, struggling to produce anything at all rhythmic before the violin finally appears after about three minutes and the clarinet 30 seconds later. Thereafter the piece meanders here and there and periodically stops altogether – Vicéns is fond of silence punctuated by single notes – and eventually dies out in the sort of ending that Vicéns clearly favors. Sueños Ligados asserts its atonality and sonic pointillism from the start, with the piano here providing an underpinning for the strings rather than taking the lead – although the keyboard does have the last word before the inevitable fadeout. In addition to these works, the CD includes two for two instruments: Carnal (2019) for violin and piano, and La Esfera (2021) for cello and piano. The violin opens the first of these in a standard kind of disconnected-sounding manner, eventually sounding brief phrases above a piano foundation until, later in the piece, the instruments make exclamations together rather than on an alternating basis. Many of the violin bursts come perilously close to self-parody of avant-garde music: they have no particular pattern or importance and are simply sound bursts. As for the cello-and-piano piece, its opening is given to the piano, which offers tiny note sequences interrupted by chords – until the cello more-or-less sneaks in with pizzicato notes and percussive sounds, its characteristic warmth and depth wholly absent. Indeed, Vicéns is at pains here and in all the music on this disc to avoid any impression or implication of flow, much less lyricism. The solo-piano work, Una Superficie Sin Rostro (2020), begins with the same sorts of individual notes used in several other pieces here and very gradually becomes a kind of aural cloud built by use of the sustaining pedal. The title, “A Faceless Surface,” seems apt for the portrayal of what is essentially nothingness – and could fit several of the other pieces on this disc as well. Despite the multiplicity of sonic environments available to Vicéns through use of varying instruments, these pieces all have a similarity of sound, as if the composer has a single view of what music means to him and utilizes varying forces to communicate what is essentially the same thing. Thus, listeners who find any of these works congenial will likely resonate to all of them, while those who do not find any one work attractive are unlikely to find any other of very much interest.

     The solo piano is heard in very different guise on a nicely varied CD featuring pianist Şahan Arzruni performing music by eight Armenian women composers – none of whom is likely to be known at all to the vast majority of listeners. Of the 17 tracks on the disc, only two have ever been recorded before; as for the composers, their music spans a time period from the 19^th century to the 21^st. The disc opens with Sonatina by Geghuni Chitchyan (born 1929). This is a nicely proportioned work, mildly dissonant, of no great consequence, but lying well on the piano. And it is followed interestingly by a slow-paced movement labeled Prelude that eventually simply evaporates. Next are two Preludes by Koharik Gazarossian (1907-1967), the first funereal and expressive, the second light and rhythmically inventive. These are followed by I Haven’t the Words by Mary Kouyoumdjian (born 1983), in which insistent repeated chords contrast with a melodic line that strives for expressivity but repeatedly is derailed by its underpinnings. After this comes Dance-Song by Sirvart Karamanuk (1912-2008), which does have elements of both musical forms in its title – although the blending is a somewhat uneasy one, with chordal insistence at the end lending the work a bit too much portentousness. Next is The Bells of Ani by Sirvart Kazandjian (1944-2020), where the tolling emerges with greater clarity and more insistence than the rest of the material in the piece. Then Arzruni plays six Preludes by Gayane Chebotaryan (1918-1998), and these are impressive: all are in minor keys, all are expressive in their own ways, and all call on the pianist to balance elements of strength and dissonance with some folklike material, sections of rhythmic clarity, occasional straightforward emotional expressiveness, and some instances of delicacy and hints of Impressionism. Collectively, these works are the highlight of this AGBU/Positively Armenian CD. They are followed by Ode to Vahani by Alicia Terzian (born 1934), which opens with a crash that fades only slowly, after which the piece proceeds atonally and athematically, incorporating electronically altered vocal declamations and other elements that some composers still consider up-to-date but that have become rather tired through over-insistent overuse. The disc ends with The Nightingale of Armenia by Lucy Hazarabedian (1863-1882), a tiny gem of salon music written by a short-lived composer when she was 16 – and the oldest work on the CD. The simple pleasures of this piece provide a substantial contrast with the far greater complexity of many of the other works heard here and show that nothing over-the-top is required to give listeners interested in unfamiliar material by unknown composers the chance to experience music that suffices on its own admittedly modest terms.