(++++) BITS AND PIECES

Ives: Short Works and Fragments. Orchestra New England and Orquesta Sinfónica de Navarra conducted by James Sinclair. Naxos. $19.99.

Bruce Wolosoff: Rising Sun Variations. Bruce Wolosoff, piano. AVIE. $19.99.

Music for Clarinet and Piano by Female Korean Composers. Wonkak Kim, clarinet; Eunhye Grace Choi, piano. MSR Classics. $14.95.

Music for Solo Flute and Flute with Electronics. Roberta Michel, flute and piccolo; Victoria Cheah, Mert Morali, and Angélica Negrón, electronics. New Focus Recordings. $16.99.

     Charles Ives was, among other things (many other things), a miniaturist, and James Sinclair’s continuing exploration of Ives’ orchestral music on the Naxos label makes that abundantly clear in a release whose shortest elements run less than a minute and whose longest is by Schubert. This is not quite as peculiar as it would be for any composer other than Ives, who not only delved into atonality, polytonality and twelvetone composition before those approaches even had names (much less advocates), but who also was given to creating sequences with missing elements – Tone Roads Nos. 1 and 3 on this recording, for example, No. 2 being missing or maybe only planned but not created or maybe turning up sometime in somebody’s attic. Ives’ penchant for thumbing his figurative nose at anything-but-figurative pretension permeates his work, as in this CD’s Chromâtimelôdtune, a portmanteau of “chromatic,” “time,” “melody” and “tune” with diacritical marks thrown into the title because that’s what those effete Europeans do. There was always – okay, usually – method to Ives’ madness, though, including, in Chromâtimelôdtune, a twelvetone building-block melody but a climactic chord in plain-vanilla C major. Ives was serious about music (well, except when he wasn’t), and many of the tiny pieces collected here have genuine musical and historical interest. His Four Ragtime Dances, for example, deliberately incorporate hymn tunes – since ragtime was generally considered very much “downscale” music (socially, not just musically) and was associated with distinctly worldly pleasures. A couple of march fragments heard here are in both F and C – and sound just fine that way. Two more-extended marches presented here in complete form (Nos. 2 and 3; and no, there is no No. 1) incorporate popular tunes of the 1890s (one of which, My Old Kentucky Home, remains well-known today, albeit with altered lyrics). Ives’ penchant for titles as intriguing as his music shows up repeatedly on the CD, as in Fugue in Four Keys on “The Shining Shore” and An Old Song Deranged. Sinclair fully plumbs the piquancy of all the music here, and the chamber-sized Orchestra New England plays with the sort of clarity and attentiveness from which Ives always benefits. The full-scale Orquesta Sinfónica de Navarra is reserved for three interesting Ives arrangements made in his student days, of Schubert’s Marche militaire in D and Impromptu No. 1, and Schumann’s Valse noble from Carnaval. There is nothing particularly “Ivesian” about the arrangements, but all are musically quite solid and effective, and all show that Ives had a thorough command of traditional approaches to classical music – a command that he became ever more disinclined to display as he created more works of his own.

     There is a slight Ivesian flavor to Bruce Wolosoff’s Rising Sun Variations, not in the sound – which is far less acerbic and musically confrontational than much of Ives – but in the genesis of this 40-minute piano piece. The work is based on the familiar folk song, House of the Rising Sun, just as Ives based many pieces on folk music that would already be well-known to any audience that he happened to have. And Wolosoff’s piece had a lengthy genesis, as did many works by Ives – although in Ives’ case that usually meant the same piece ended up existing in multiple forms and instrumentations, while in Wolosoff’s it means winnowing: he created about 150 variations on the song, then eventually whittled them down to the 39 that he plays on a new AVIE disc. The original song, House of the Rising Sun, is scarcely profound or musically significant, but Diabelli’s little waltz was never very much on its own until Beethoven got hold of it, so what is intriguing is not so much the source material as the method and extent of its development. Wolosoff certainly understands variation form, and he takes the tune through many iterations: light and delicate, thumping and chordal, somewhat overly dramatic (strong left-hand chords low on the keyboard with the theme delivered intensely by the right hand in significantly higher regions), slow and sweet, lyrical, impassioned, warm, dissonant (but not too dissonant), even quietly thoughtful. Wolosoff’s determination to keep the theme fully recognizable throughout makes Rising Sun Variations easy to listen to but, in truth, a trifle dull as the work progresses. Pitch, rhythm, intervals, speed, key structure and many more elements can be adjusted in a set of variations, sometimes resulting in a listener losing track of the underlying theme – only to rediscover it later in the work. That makes for a more-engaging listening experience than Wolosoff provides. Individual variations, such as the charming No. 27, keyboard-spanning No. 30, and strongly jazz-inflected No. 35, do stand out, but there is a foundational sameness to many of the elements here, resulting in a piece that, taken as a whole, does not fully sustain interest. This (+++) CD will surely captivate enthusiastic fans of the original tune, but even they are unlikely to return to the disc repeatedly for further doses of Wolosoff’s handling of variation form.

     The organizing principle of an MSR Classics disc featuring Wonkak Kim and Eunhye Grace Choi is not musical but is a sort of identity politics: all eight of these 21^st-century works are by female Korean composers. That tends to make the (+++) recording somewhat self-limiting, since audiences in general are unlikely to seek out music because of the nationality + gender of the composers. And the notion of artistic commonality because of one’s geography and sex is at best an arguable one. So the question here is whether the music as music is interesting or meaningful enough to attract people beyond the limited audience to which this collection of world première recordings appears designed to reach out. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out that it is mainly the differences among the works, not their similarities, that are of greatest interest. There is one solo-clarinet piece here, Blush (2018) by Jean Ahn (born 1976), and it is a pleasant, middling-paced work that does not push clarinet technique into uncomfortable regions and that is, in some places, evocative of traditional Korean music. The remaining seven pieces are for clarinet and piano. Arcade (2022) by Juri Seo (born 1981) rather uneasily combines jazzlike material with clarinet sounds that are periodically evocative of electronic music. Weather Change (2016) by Nicky Sohn (born 1992) sounds like two pieces, one for each instrument, with occasional overlap and aural collisions now and then. Open Letters (2020) by Joanne Na (born 1997) includes four effectively tone-painted short movements whose titles turn out to be quite apt and accurate: “Dreamy,” “Mischievous,” “Wondering…” (yes, with an ellipsis), and “Playful.” The other multi-part work on the disc is Ariaria (2020) by Jiyoun Chung (born 1982). Its movement titles refer to Korean instruments, although the extent to which the clarinet sound approximates those instruments’ sounds is unclear – the three movements come across mainly as offering variations in clarinet performance technique. A Beautiful Polonaise (2018) by Hyunjung Ahn (born 1973) is pleasant rather than beautiful in the clarinet part, with the piano accompaniment, much of it gently rippling, more reflective of the work’s name. Parents’ Love (2017) by Sihyun Uhm (born 1999) is short and somewhat dissonant, although its extended main clarinet theme is highly expressive – it is, all in all, an intriguing exploration of its title. Last on the disc is Red Light! Green Light! (2022) by Eunseon Yu (born 1993) – and this is another work in which the two instruments intertwine only occasionally, tending to go their separate ways much of the time. Several of the pieces on this CD are noticeably imitative of the sound of traditional Korean music or instruments, but by and large, the music is not “exotic” in any significant way and is mainly concerned with exploring potential interrelationships between clarinet and piano. Unsurprisingly, the works are of varying sound and interest level, even if they were packaged in this way because of superficial similarities among their composers.

     A different wind instrument is front-and-center on a New Focus Recordings CD featuring Roberta Michel, but here too it is the differences among the pieces rather than their similarities that are of most interest. Two of the works are solos. Red by Jane Rigler is for piccolo, but it sounds more like a piece for percussion, featuring key taps and incorporating the performer’s voice over a rather screechy trill at the climax. The Great Bridge and a Lion’s Gate by Jen Baker, for solo flute, also incorporates voice – in this case near the beginning, in a series of monosyllabic exclamations – and moves from extended repetitiveness into a somewhat more-relaxed central section before the opening mood recurs. The three remaining works here are for flute and electronics. And for you, castles, by Victoria Cheah (who performs this piece on fixed media herself), is textural rather than melodic or harmonic, creating sound clouds that then evaporate to make aural space for more sound clouds. Quintet by Mert Morali, for bass flute with four speakers, is the longest work on the disc, at 17½ minutes, and is another piece in which the woodwind component fades into (or is overcome by) the electronic material. Like many electroacoustic pieces, it deliberately blends and thus confuses “electro” and “acoustic” elements within an overall aural mixture that alternately clarifies and distorts various sounds. It goes on much too long for what it has to say, although it will undoubtedly appeal to listeners enamored of this particular approach to musical and nonmusical sounds. Hush by Angélica Negrón is even more percussive in orientation than Rigler’s Red, using electronically modified chime sounds to shape the overall aural world through which the flute meanders to no very discernible effect. This is a (+++) disc that reaches directly for an audience subset that will immediately grasp the intentions and approaches of the composers and that will see wind instruments not as melodic or melodious but as partial carriers of notes within a world largely delimited by the capabilities of electronically generated sounds.