(+++) CONTEXTS FOR THE CONTEMPORARY

Gershwin: An American in Paris; Beethoven: Piano Sonata No. 14 (“Moonlight”); David Biedenbender: Refraction; Grieg: Holberg Suite—Air. Sonus Quintett (Linda Gulyas, clarinet; Viviana Rieke, bass clarinet; Lena Iris Brendel, saxophone; Eloi Enrique Hernández, oboe; Annika Baum, bassoon). Genuin. $18.99.

Poulenc: Violin Sonata; Prokofiev: Violin Sonata No. 1; Arvo Pärt: Spiegel im Spiegel. Paul Huang, violin; Helen Huang, piano. Naïve. $16.99.

Kenneth Fuchs: Point of Tranquility; Russell Platt: Symphony in Three Movements (for Clyfford Still); Randall Svane: Concerto for Oboe and Orchestra; Wang Jie: The Winter that United Us. Henry Ward, oboe; Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by JoAnn Falletta. Beau Fleuve. $15.

Philip Glass: Aguas da Amazonia. Third Coast Percussion (Sean Connors, Robert Dillon, Peter Martin and David Skidmore); Constance Volk, flute. Rockwell Records. $19.99.

Stockhausen: MANTRA; John Liberatore: Sedgeflowers; Yi-wei Angus Lee: Rage Over Lost Time; Dante de Silva: Too Sedated to Rage; Aida Shirazi: RAGE—Screamed, RAGE—Stolen, RAGE—Silenced; LJ White: Rage Is the Bodyguard of Sadness; Andrew Zhou: Con variazioni; Christopher Castro: Beethausenstro-Castockhoven; Laura Cetilia: sense of missing; Christopher Stark: Foreword. Ryan MacEvoy McCullough and Andrew Zhou, pianos and percussion. False Azure Records. $25 (2 CDs).

     It is a truism for contemporary composers that it is much harder to get a second performance of a new work than to get a first one: plenty of ensembles are willing to try out a recent composition, but it is only if the piece resonates with an audience that it has a chance of being picked up for additional hearings elsewhere and by different performers. It is also true that much contemporary classical music is self-limited in its appeal: its sounds and structures are off-putting to many self-professed classical-music lovers, and indeed it is arguable whether “classical music” as a descriptor still retains the meaning that it has had for many years – music is now so intermingled and interbred that many modern works are very difficult to label (a state of affairs that is fine from many composers’ perspective but less so from that of many audiences). What has evolved in recent years have been various ways of introducing new musical experiences to audiences that may not be receptive simply to hearing something new for its own sake: there will always be devotees of whatever may be contemporary at any time, but they are a small group and often ill-suited to helping new compositions reach a wider listenership – assuming composers want a bigger audience, which not all do.

     One approach to contemporary music involves presenting it along with more-familiar material – and if the more-well-known works can be given an unusual twist, so much the better. The Sonus Quintett is an unusual assemblage of wind instruments, and its debut recording, on the Genuin label, makes some often-heard works sound new while including a piece from 2015 whose sound contrasts significantly with that of everything else on the CD. Orchestrations of Gershwin often give his music a particular affinity for winds – the clarinet in Rhapsody in Blue, for example – so an arrangement of An American in Paris for wind quintet is not quite as outlandish as it might seem. This performance is fun to hear, the music’s many mild outbursts possessing a kind of bright amusement while its meandering-about-town setting comes through well in (for example) the contrasts between bassoon and oboe. The arrangement is a curiosity – enjoyable as an occasional contrast to the original but ultimately likely to encourage listeners to go back to the work’s more-familiar form. It is, however, salutary to hear how well the music fits this arrangement, which is very well played indeed. Beethoven’s “Moonlight” sonata is even more curious and not really as successful. The delicacy of the opening movement actually seems overdone in this arrangement, as if the work had been reimagined by Ravel. The second movement flows well enough, but the third just sounds silly in its chordal outbursts and the underlining of the lower winds. The Beethoven is followed by Refractions by David Biedenbender (born 1984), a three-movement, 10-minute mixture of styles and rhythms and sounds of all sorts that contrasts in every way with Beethoven’s three much-smoother movements and seems designed mainly to show off the virtuosity of the performers. They do indeed play it with considerable skill, but that serves only to highlight the sorts of deliberately overdone dissonances and exclamatory elements that seem to be more enjoyable to play than they are to hear. Interestingly, after this work the Sonus Quintett offers a Grieg encore that is quiet, slow-paced, pretty rather than profound, and focused on the warmth and lyricism of which the group proves itself more than capable. In all, this is a CD certainly worth an occasional hearing, if not one to which most listeners will likely turn frequently.

     The Air from Grieg’s Holberg Suite is scarcely minimalist music, but it has a somewhat similar effect in the Sonus Quintett arrangement – and a minimalist piece, a modern one, is also a significant element of a new Naïve recording featuring violinist Paul Huang and pianist Helen Huang. The work, Spiegel im Spiegel (1978) by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt, is placed on the disc between sonatas by Poulenc and Prokofiev – making this CD another one in which a modern work is offered within a program of older and better-known pieces. Interestingly, although Spiegel im Spiegel has been arranged many ways, in this case it is played as originally written, for violin and piano. It is a somewhat soporific piece, as is usual in minimal music, but it certainly provides a sense of relaxation that contrasts with the mood of the Poulenc and Prokofiev sonatas, which both date to World War II and reflect the war to a considerable extent. Poulenc’s sonata is heartfelt, dramatic and tragic (the finale is marked Presto tragico), and the performance by Paul Huang and Helen Huang (who are unrelated to each other) delivers considerable emotional impact in its outer movements. The central Intermezzo, on the other hand, provides a degree of respite despite some underlying acerbity – and its modest sense of relaxation proves particularly welcome when the finale starts, since the concluding movement is a nonstop study in intensity. After this, the Pärt work is a welcome island of calm before the Prokofiev sonata, whose four movements often proceed at a moderate pace (three of the four have Andante tempo indications) but whose harmonic language is dark and disturbed throughout. If there is something hectic in the Poulenc, there is a great deal that is funereal in the Prokofiev, although the second movement (Allegro brusco) partakes of some of the same sensibilities that pervade the Poulenc sonata. This performance is especially effective in the unsettled delicacy of the third movement and the way the finale first complements and later contrasts with the mood of its predecessor. All the playing here is sensitive and convincing, and the inclusion of the newer, shorter Pärt work does help elucidate the communicative power of the lengthier pieces by the earlier composers.

     Some presentations of modern works seek audience approval not by including better-known material but by offering multiple differing (but hopefully complementary) pieces by contemporary composers. That is the approach on a Beau Fleuve CD featuring the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra under JoAnn Falletta. All four pieces on the disc certainly have modern sensibilities, but none has the sort of avant-garde sound that many potential listeners might find off-putting. Point of Tranquility (2020) by Kenneth Fuchs (born 1956) is something of a throwback to the sound of Copland in his more-popular music. Inspired by a painting by Morris Louis (1912-1962) and originally written for wind band, the 11-minute tone poem sounds in its orchestral version like a work exploring forms of inwardness, using muted brass and sectional balance to convey a feeling of meditative calm. It goes on a bit too long after making its basic point, but remains lyrical and expressive throughout. Symphony in Three Movements (for Clyfford Still) was written in 2019-2020 by Russell Platt (born 1965) and is even more directly connected with a painter, as its title indicates: Still (1904-1980) was an important figure in abstract expressionism. Platt dates the three movements to specific years (1957, 1955, 1954/1962) and ties the music directly to four Still paintings from those years – which means that listeners unfamiliar with those works or with the artist himself will not get the level of connection to the music that Platt is seeking. Without that connection, the symphony sounds much like other symphonies written in recent times: it makes full use of the orchestra’s capabilities and offers a variety of sounds and forms of expression, flitting here and there without apparent order and without the connection among themes and their development that is usually considered a hallmark of symphonic style. It is well-made music but requires audiences to bring a bit more advance knowledge to it than is really reasonable. In contrast, the Concerto for Oboe and Orchestra (2023) by Randall Svane (born 1972), an orchestral version of a work originally for oboe and piano, requires no familiarity with any particular inspiration. It is a rather pleasantly old-fashioned concerto in some ways, bringing the oboe’s expressive potential to the fore throughout the first two movements, both of which are slow-paced and lyrical. The finale is brighter but retains a sense of warm expressiveness and gentle flow, and the language throughout the work is mostly tonal: this is an easy concerto to listen to, and it is in some ways a throwback harmonically. It is rather monochromatic, exploring the oboe almost entirely from the standpoint of lyricism, which means that although soloist Henry Ward handles the music well – and although Falletta brings the same level of commitment and understanding to this work that she brings to all the pieces on this CD – the net effect of Svane’s music is underwhelming. The disc ends with The Winter that United Us (2022) by Wang Jie (born 1980), which opens with a decidedly Coplandesque fanfare but quickly moves into more-dissonant realms and a thorough exploration of the percussive capabilities of the orchestra – and not just the percussion section. The work is kaleidoscopic both in scoring and in pacing, and its multiple moods contrast strongly with the single (albeit multifaceted) one explored by Fuchs. The result is a CD presentation bookended by tone poems of very different sensibilities that share some commonalities in the use of orchestral color but that otherwise come at audience engagement from very different directions. This disc as a whole is not very unified thematically, but it does a good job of giving listeners the chance to hear how some skilled contemporary composers approach writing for a full orchestra in ways designed to reach out to a broader audience than many modern composers seek.

     None of the works conducted by Falletta is likely to be well-known even to committed followers of contemporary music, but the Philip Glass ballet score Aguas da Amazonia (1993-1999) has attracted some attention over the years – perhaps enough to draw in new listeners by putting this very new work in an even newer context. That seems to be the thinking behind a very short CD (36 minutes) on which Third Coast Percussion offers its own orchestration and sequencing of the Glass dance work, which was originally a set of piano sketches. Although the music is associated with nine rivers in the Amazon Basin, the piece is given as 10 movements on this disc, with the Madeira River section split into two parts. As is typical of Glass, the music relies on repetitive sounds and structures throughout, and its movements bear no aural relationship to any of the rivers. That relationship would be communicated in performance by dancers: the work was conceived as a ballet and is still often performed that way. The Third Coast Percussion arrangement is quite a good one, within the confines of the repetitious nature of the music: the players shift the sound world with considerable subtlety among their instruments, and they do a good job of varying the segments in terms of playing by the full ensemble or by individual or paired members of the group. The use of flute is a big plus here: Constance Volk does a fine job of blending her sound with that of the percussionists when appropriate while standing out from the ensemble when that approach is more apt. It is nevertheless undeniable and inevitable that the entire work, without the visuals that would be provided by dancers, tends to sound like background music: it is frequently soporific and, unlike the rivers after which its sections are named, never seems to be going anywhere – although, like many of those rivers, it certainly does meander with a rather calm and lazy flow. Listeners already enamored of the music of Glass in general, and of Aguas da Amazonia in particular, will enjoy the way Third Coast Percussion handles the material, but it is hard to imagine this brief Rockwell Records CD drawing in any new audience for this work – except perhaps for listeners who enjoy hearing the quiet meandering of percussion instruments while they engage in life in ways other than active listening.

     If the Glass CD is somewhat on the abstruse side, the two-CD Stockhausen-focused release from False Azure Records is even more so. Like Aguas da Amazonia, Stockhausen’s MANTRA has a reputation that has grown over time, in its case since Stockhausen composed it in 1970. But while an interest in reaching out to potentially wider audiences is evident in the Glass work through its intended use as a ballet score, Stockhausen’s interest was far more intellectual (as with a great deal of his work) and far more concerned with the mechanics of musical creation than with its eventual reception by anyone outside a kind of inner circle of cognoscenti. MANTRA in fact represented a new direction for the composer: he had gone through an extended period of creating indeterminate/aleatoric works, a time that ended with MANTRA because here the score is fully written down. MANTRA was also Stockhausen’s first creation to use what he called “formula technique” for the development of paired melodies that he did not want to refer to as themes or subjects. The piece is not and never was intended to be easy to listen to – not so much because of any extreme sound but because its compositional method is as much the point as is the composition resulting from use of that method. The scoring is for two electronically modified pianos, plus crotales and wood block; one of the two performers also produces Morse code with a short-wave radio or from a recording. The whole setup is abstruse in the extreme and can easily be parodied, but the underlying musical concept is quite serious, and Ryan MacEvoy McCullough and Andrew Zhou certainly approach it with the exploratory intensity it deserves. What is particularly intriguing about this recording, though, is not only the performance of MANTRA but also the juxtaposition of the Stockhausen work with two brand-new ones intended as MANTRA companion pieces, plus a series of short items that do not relate directly to MANTRA but that occupy the same musical thought space, or an analogous one. The pieces intended to accompany and comment on MANTRA are Sedgeflowers (2017-2018) by John Liberatore and Foreword (2017) by Christopher Stark. Both inhabit a sound world noticeably connected to Stockhausen’s, although both composers use the instruments and their enhancements differently from the way Stockhausen does. Liberatore is more concerned with pianistic percussion in his piece, Stark with electronic modification in his. The remaining pieces in this highly intriguing but very rarefied release are short (two-and-a-half to five minutes) and very different in sound not only from MANTRA but also from each other: Chris Castro’s, for example, punctuates delicate runs along the entire piano keyboard with strong crotale interpolations, while Dante de Silva’s has an Impressionistic air about it combined with strong, amplified dissonances. This is a release for the “in” crowd of Stockhausen admirers, for people who already know and appreciate MANTRA and want not only to hear a very fine performance of it but also to experience an additional set of pieces that are, in effect, commentaries on or supplements to Stockhausen’s work. The recording will certainly not reach a large audience, but it will be of very considerable interest to a highly committed group of enthusiasts who have a strong attachment to this composer and this specific example of his creative process.