(+++) THE PAST THROUGH TOMORROW

Mendelssohn: Transcriptions by Andreas N. Tarkmann—“Songs without Words” for Oboe and String Orchestra; Concerto for Violin, Piano and String Orchestra for Flute, Harp and String Orchestra. Ramón Ortega Quero, oboe; Anette Maiburg, flute; Emmanuel Ceysson, harp; Südwestdeutsches Kammerorchester Pforzheim conducted by Douglas Bostock. Coviello. $22.95.

Edward Smaldone: Beauty of Innuendo; Prendendo Fuoco (Catching Fire); Murmurations; June 2011; What no one else sees... New Focus Recordings. $18.99.

Paul Lansky: Patterns (in wood and metal); Metal Light; Hop; Touch and Go. Bridge Records. $16.99.

Dante De Silva: Shibui—a dirge in memory of my mentor, Deborah Clasquin; Four Years of Fog; Katherine Balch & Katie Ford: estrangement. Lucy Fitz Gibbon, soprano; Ryan MacEvoy McCullough, piano. False Azure Records. $15.

     The mellifluousness of Mendelssohn’s music is so pervasive that its loveliness comes through not only in its original form but also in arrangements that allow instruments other than the originally planned ones to partake of its lyricism. There is no inherent reason to transcribe Mendelssohn – his sense of apt ways to explore the engaging and emotive qualities of the instruments he chose for his works is unerring – but doing so is certainly tempting for arrangers such as Andreas N. Tarkmann. On a new Coviello CD, Tarkmann’s arrangement for oboe and strings of seven Songs without Words proves a highly enjoyable way of hearing these small salon-like piano pieces in a new guise that expands their expressiveness while remaining basically true to their small scale and underlying delicacy. The works in this charming suite are Op. 19, No. 1; Op. 30, No. 4; Op. 30, No. 6; Op. 85, No. 6; Op. 67, No. 5; Op. 67, No. 6; and Op. 30, No. 2. All of Tarkmann’s transcriptions are sensitive and pleasant, and all are played stylishly and engagingly by Ramón Ortega Quero with accompaniment led by Douglas Bostock. Op. 30, No. 6 (Venetianisches Gondellied) is a particular charmer with its pizzicato underpinning, and following it with the sprightly Op. 85, No. 6 was an especially good idea. And the gently rocking Op. 67, No. 6 comes across quite delightfully as heard here. In truth, the entire suite is a very pleasurable experience, remaining basically true to Mendelssohn while shining some new light on the small jewels that are the Songs without Words. The D minor Concerto for Violin, Piano and String Orchestra is a larger work, lasting 40 minutes, and quite an early one: Mendelssohn wrote it when he was 14, and it is one of the pieces lending credence to the comparisons made in Mendelssohn’s lifetime between him and Mozart. Likely influenced by a double concerto for the same instruments by Hummel, Mendelssohn’s work lies well on the solo instruments and is especially sensitive to then recently developed violin techniques. Tarkmann’s transcription obviously minimizes that element of the composition, but it actually increases parallels with Mozart, who wrote his own flute-and-harp concerto (K. 299/297c). The original Mendelssohn work is not especially well-known, so many listeners will not have it in mind while hearing this flute-and-harp version – and even those who do know the original will enjoy the setting of different solo instruments against the same string orchestra for which Mendelssohn composed the piece. The delicacy of playing by the Südwestdeutsches Kammerorchester Pforzheim is noteworthy here, and the unusual interplay of flute and harp gives the concerto a sound quite different from, yet obviously related to, its original one. Unlike the Songs without Words suite, however, this concerto rearrangement has more of an experimental feeling about it: there is nothing particularly revelatory about the transcription, which seems mostly like an exercise in what Tarkmann can do with a work of early Romantic sensibility conceived on a substantial scale. Anette Maiburg and Emmanuel Ceysson play the concerto with skill and a good sense of enjoyment of its pleasantries, and Bostock ensures fine ensemble support throughout. But it is only in the shortest movement, a central Adagio whose opening actually foreshadows the later Songs without Words, that the flute-and-harp combination really shines. Tarkmann’s transcription is a contemporary reimagining of this early Mendelssohn gem, but this is not a work that in any way cries out for a new approach: it deserves to be better-known in its original version, to which this arrangement, although certainly well-made, ultimately adds very little.

     Today’s composers may be influenced not only by their contemporaries and the works of the recent past, but also by differing types of music – as well as nonmusical material. Edward Smaldone (born 1956) is one composer who casts an especially wide net, as is shown on a New Focus Recordings release of five of his works for various sizes and types of ensembles. Beauty of Innuendo and June 2011 are orchestral pieces, both here conducted by Michael Toms, the first featuring the Brno Philharmonic and the second the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Beauty of Innuendo is a rather intense, brassy, proclamatory work with contrasting lyrical touches and an overall sound of emphatic intensity. June 2011 is more jazzy and less Coplandesque, with pointed xylophone and glockenspiel elements. Toms and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra also perform Prendendo Fuoco (Catching Fire), an extended piano-and-orchestra work requiring the soloist (Niklas Sivelöv) to engage with a wide variety of styles and some decidedly over-the-top passages showing the influence of multiple compositional approaches. This is an impressively spun-out piece that is perhaps a touch too breathless for its own good but that, as it progresses, certainly will have listeners wondering what is coming next. Another solo-and-ensemble work here, Murmurations, is more modest in scope: it features clarinetist Søren-Filip Brix Hansen with the wind orchestra Den Kongelige Livgardes Musikkorps conducted by Giordano Bellincampi. Somewhat self-consciously imitative of avian communication, the piece is interesting for some of its wind-against-winds settings. Winds are also the focus of What no one else sees… (spelled that way, including ellipsis). This is a pleasant, largely lighthearted three-movement work for woodwind quintet (played by a group called Opus Zoo). The movement titles – “Playful,” “Serious,” and “Free Spirited” – sum up the moods of the work rather well, although there is a somewhat sly hint of the not-too-serious in the central movement. These disparate pieces show Smaldone’s interest in a wide variety of compositional techniques and influences and highlight the varying effects of his focuses on different organizational principles, musical structures and stylistic approaches.

     The commonality of the four works on a new CD featuring music by Paul Lansky (born 1944) is the pieces’ focus on percussion, in various forms and combinations. Lansky writes a wide variety of music – this is the 18^th Bridge Records release of his work – and has some interesting combinatorial ideas. For example, instead of an all-strings or all-woodwind grouping, Lansky creates a mallet quartet for his 2011 Patterns (in wood and metal). Performed by Gwendolyn Dease, Ji Hye Jung, Jisu Jung, and Ayano Kataoka, the piece is an evocative one in which the percussive elements are frequently downplayed in favor of the production of a kind of sound cloud from which individual instruments emerge periodically and into which they are then subsumed. Dease is the featured performer on the other works here, being the sole player of Metal Light (2017) for vibraphone and small percussion set. This is a mostly gentle piece with a sense of temple bells and crotales about it, but also incorporating some livelier sections. Hop (1993), for marimba (Dease) and violin (Yvonne Lam), does indeed bounce about here and there, without any particular sense of forward motion. Its most interesting aspect lies in Lansky’s use of the contrasting legato capabilities of the stringed instrument with the staccato propensities of the marimba – and the way each of those blends, sometimes surprisingly, into the other. The most-extended work on this disc is the three-movement Touch and Go (2012) for percussionist (Dease) and wind ensemble (the Michigan State University Wind Symphony conducted by Kevin Sedatole). The movements, of nearly equal length, are labeled “Tap,” “Stroke,” and “Tag,” but in this case the titles give a relative paucity of clues to the musical material. The work actually has a fairly traditional fast-slow-fast structure, the first movement bright and ebullient, the second quiet and atmospheric, and the third rather puckish and playful. More than the other pieces on this CD, Touch and Go is fun to hear and is appealing through its integration of percussion into a larger whole with inherently contrasting sound. Dease plays all the works on the disc with considerable aplomb, bringing forth different sounds from the varying percussion instruments and having a sure sense of when to attempt to blend with other players and when to stand out from them. In addition to a treat for listeners who enjoy Lansky’s music, the CD is an enjoyable way to hear some listenable modern pieces in which percussion is brought to the forefront and shown to have expressive capabilities beyond those with which it is usually credited.

     It is the expressiveness of piano and the human voice that is the focus of a False Azure Records release featuring works by Dante De Silva (born 1978) and Katherine Balch (born 1991) – with Balch’s using poetry by Katie Ford (born 1975). This is a disc of highly personal material throughout, and will really be suitable listening only for those who share the experiences of the creators and have mentally/emotionally processed them the same way. In the case of De Silva’s music, it also helps a great deal to know and be interested in the difference in tuning systems between equal temperament (the standard in most cases for many years) and just temperament (which provides more intervallic purity at a cost of greater performance complexity and melodic flattening). The tuning element is abstruse for most people but is in one sense the most interesting element of the disc, because the first piece recorded, Shibui, opens the CD in equal temperament and closes it in just temperament, providing an unusual chance to hear the clear distinctions between the tuning systems. As for Shibui itself, it is one of those you-had-to-be-there pieces, being a tribute to pianist Deborah Clasquin, who taught both De Silva and performer Ryan MacEvoy McCullough. Elements of the work relate to the specific musical interests of Clasquin, and since the piece was written for McCullough to play at Clasquin’s memorial service, the entire thing bears considerably more weight than its three-minute length would seem able to bear. For most listeners, the chance to hear it played two different ways, or rather in two different auditory systems, will be its primary attraction. As for De Silva’s Four Years of Fog (2016), this is specifically written for just-tuned piano and is intended to reflect the composer’s experiences as an undergraduate. Surely those experiences parallel the ones of others in similar circumstances, but the music is not specifically referential to anything to which listeners will be able to attach their own experiential memories. The four movement titles do give some guidance to the feelings the work is intended to evoke or memorialize: “Blissfully Ignorant,” “Sickness and Exile,” “A New Adolescence,” and “The Local Zenith.” But those titles are scarcely specific enough (or generally applicable enough) to be guideposts for listeners. The clarity of sound made possible by just tuning will be the most salient characteristic of Four Years of Fog for most audiences. As for Balch’s estrangement (the title is not capitalized), it is one of many modern relationship-ending musings, filled with phrases apparently meant to be meaningful but in practice sounding rather stilted (“the wash of the cellular level,” “a coffin of slur,” “it begins in loathing,” “the gore of actual heart,” etc.). Lucy Fitz Gibbon sings, or rather emotes, expressively enough, but the actual settings of Ford’s words make the verbiage often too difficult to hear and process. And as often occurs in similar works, knowledge of the piece’s origin is crucial for a full appreciation of it: it is supposed to be a modern female response to Schumann’s Dichterliebe and the Heine poetry on which it is based, although nothing in estrangement makes that the slightest bit apparent. Certainly the works by De Silva and Balch/Ford are heartfelt, but unless a listener’s heart feels just the same things that De Silva and Balch/Ford felt when experiencing elements of their lives and producing music exploring those elements, the communicative potential of these works will be minimal at best.