(++++) GALLIC EXTREMISTS

Charles-Valentin Alkan: Complete Piano Music, Volume 7—Early Works & Juvenilia: Variations sur un thème de Steibelt, Op.1; Les omnibus, variations, Op. 2; Il était un p’tit homme, rondoletto, Op. 3; Rondo brilliant pour piano et cordes ad libitum, Op. 4; Variations à la vielle sur l’air chanté par Mme. Persiani dans l’Elisir d’amore de G. Donizetti; “Ah! Segnata è la mia sorte” de l’opéra Anna Bolena de Donizetti, varié, Op. 16, No. 4; Air des Capulets et des Montaigus de Bellini (“La tremenda ultrice spada”), varié, Op. 16, No. 5; Variations quasi fantaisie sur une barcarolle napolitaine, Op. 16, No. 6; Rondeau chromatique, Op. 12. Mark Viner, piano. Piano Classics. $19.99. 

Satie: Piano Works—Petite ouverture à danser; Facheux exemple; Effronterie; Airs à faire fuir I-III; Son binocle; Profondeur; Idylle (à Debussy); Aubade (à Paul Dukas); Méditation (à Albert Roussel); Nocturnes I-III; Froide songerie; Prélude canin; Deux reveries I-II; Prélude de la porte héroique du ciel; Songe-creux; Caresse; Poésie; Désespoir agréable; Nostalgie; Préludes I-III. Christina Bjørkøe, piano. OUR Recordings. $17.99. 

     Although it is unlikely, objectively speaking, that French composers are any more eccentric than those of other nationalities, there are some French musicians whose thinking – musical and otherwise – is so far off the “norm” or “the beaten track” as to make one wonder just what was in the air they breathed. This is even more so when the eccentricities sound (literally) from opposite musical poles, from the grand and large-scale and intense and dramatic and precisely titled to ones that are small, delicate, evanescent, evaporative, and labeled with ambiguity bordering on meaninglessness. 

     And thus we come to Alkan and Satie. Marc Viner’s intrepid march through Alkan’s more-or-less complete piano works, the seventh volume of a projected maybe-18 depending on how many improbably missing pieces are eventually improbably rediscovered, takes listeners back to Alkan’s very first published piece, written when he was all of 12 years old and already asserting himself in the panoply of brilliant pianist/composers whose skill was exceeded only by the superficiality of their music. And who, to put it bluntly, cares? The Variations sur un thème de Steibelt and Les omnibus, variations are pure display pieces that display quite brilliantly even today – Viner is astonishingly adept at playing this suffocatingly difficult music – and any listener not left a bit breathless after hearing these performances probably needs some retuning of the musical version of an oxygen concentrator. That is to say that these pieces are breathtakingly difficult, thoroughly splendid in a thoroughly trivial way that in no degree minimizes their effectiveness and, if anything, increases it, since they never profess to be more than they are. Whether Alkan at this stage could profess to something higher is a moot point, although some of the pieces on this Piano Classics CD already begin to hint at much greater depth to come. As the titles of the opera-based variation sets make clear, Alkan was at pains to indicate exactly what then-highly-familiar material he used as the basis for these compositions, although interesting confusions and complications do arise from time to time: the supposed material from L’Elisir d’amore is actually from Ugo, Conti di Parigi (dating to the same year, 1832), and the designation à la vielle (“in hurdy-gurdy style”) does not seem to refer to anything in Alkan’s work or Donizetti’s but perhaps carries a mild tinge of sarcasm. In any case, Viner’s always-brilliant and often truly remarkable pianism shows all these pieces to be absolute gems of their kind – semi-precious gems, if you will, but ones that shine wonderfully in these amazingly polished performances. Hearing Alkan’s handling of the barcarolle napolitaine, for instance, provides a delightful aural contrast to Liszt’s use of the same melody in Années de pèlerinage, while the mere existence of the Les omnibus variations propels one’s ears to a time when an entire company of horse-drawn buses was built around an opera: Boieldieu’s La dame blanche. Superficial but far from trivial, the nine works on this disc – four of them world première recordings – provide fascinatingly foundational insight into Alkan’s compositional and pianistic thinking in the earliest years of a burgeoning career that would later be famously derailed by the personality peculiarities of the immensely talented but psychologically unstable virtuoso composer/performer. 

     That mixture of ability and instability is very much present in Erik Satie as well and is perhaps the only significant parallel between him and Alkan, despite the partial overlap of their lives (Satie was born in 1866; Alkan died in 1888). Alkan thought large; Satie was a miniaturist, indeed often a micro-miniaturist, creating numerous works lasting one minute or less. Alkan was given to grand pianistic gestures; Satie was a proto-minimalist whose works often sound as if they are barely there. Alkan’s music (unlike his personality) is deeply extroverted and proclamatory; Satie’s (unlike his personality) is withdrawn, quiet, tentative. Alkan’s pieces’ titles are as clear and explicit as possible; Satie’s are offbeat, ironic-to-meaningless, giving little or no hint of what the music is “about.” Alkan stretches and expands the piano’s capability at every opportunity, to the point of sometimes providing alternative staves for pianos of lesser range (at a time when the number of keys was not yet standardized); Satie stretches not so much the instrument and technique as the expressive possibilities of pianism and the intellectual/emotional experiential requirements of listeners. Christina Bjørkøe’s unending sensitivity to the unique and sometimes strange elements of Satie’s music makes her exploration of 27 miniatures on an OUR Recordings CD a thoroughly engaging experience. The selection and arrangement of the works appears entirely arbitrary – for example, the Six pieces de la période are all presented, but as numbers 3, 8, 16, 20, 22 and 23 on the disc; and any sense of chronology is absent – for example, Préludes I-III are the earliest works on the CD (1888-1892) but are the last three pieces that Bjørkøe plays. In the case of Satie, though, none of this matters very much, since his unique and highly personal style did not so much evolve as effloresce: he wrote these little pieces as he wished, when he wished, and while there are certainly differences among them, those are not so much stylistically developmental as they are emotive. This CD stands as an excellent hour-long sampler of Satie’s work, quite suitable no matter how much or how little of his oeuvre a listener already happens to know. And of course the disc is sprinkled with works bearing the odd, sometimes dada-esque titles that Satie favored, some of which translate as An Unpleasant Example, Effrontery, Airs for Scaring Away, His Glasses, Cold Dreaming, Canine Prelude, and Pleasant Despair. Seeking direct connections between those titles and the music is a fool’s errand, which is part of the Satie sensibility: as direct and formidably difficult as Alkan’s piano music is, Satie’s is as moody, difficult to capture (although captivating), mild on the surface but always hinting that it possesses depths that remain tantalizingly out of reach of performer and audience alike. It is very much to Bjørkøe’s credit that she appears thoroughly to appreciate each of the miniature sound worlds tone-painted in these small, frequently odd, always expressive little works. Each piece pulls a listener into a difficult-to-pin down “ear space” that hints at becoming comprehensible just as the music ends – giving Bjørkøe the chance to open the next door to another shimmering landscape whose blurry emotional edges are as distant in one direction as Alkan’s distinctively blatant intensity is in the opposite one.

(+++) THE MAKINGS OF A MISHMASH

Shostakovich: Suite for Variety Orchestra (Jazz Suite No. 2); Moscow, Cheryomushki—Suite; Jazz Suite No. 1; Tahiti Trot. Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Berlin conducted by Steven Sloane. The Bolt—Ballet Suite; The Tale of the Priest and His Servant Balda—Suite; The Age of Gold—Ballet Suite. MDR Sinfonieorchester conducted by Dmitrij Kitajenko. Piano Concerto No. 1. Reinhold Friedrich, trumpet; Thomas Duis, piano; Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin conducted by Lutz Köhler. Violin Concerto No. 1. Vladimir Spivakov, violin; Gürzenich Orchester Köln conducted by James Conlon. Capriccio. $33.99 (3 CDs). 

     Although he has now been dead for half a century, Dmitri Shostakovich has offered a near-perfect encapsulation of this exceptionally odd three-CD re-release of his music, calling it “a frivolous and indigestible provincial mishmash.” 

     Well, all right, Shostakovich did not say that specifically about this recording – he made the comment in 1934 about what he saw as the burgeoning trivial use, or misuse, of jazz as an element of concert music. The words do fit, though: someone who thought of throwing all sorts of Shostakovich recordings against the proverbial wall to see which ones would stick could well have conceptualized this compilation of performances from 2004 (CD #1), 2005 (CD #2), 1995 (part of CD #3), and 2000 (the rest of CD #3). The mixture of recording dates and venues is not the issue here, nor is the inclusion of performances led by four different conductors (although one of them, Dmitrij Kitajenko, outshines the rest). The problem is that the works offered here coexist so uneasily within the Shostakovich catalogue that it is very hard to understand to whom the recording is intended to appeal. Yes, Shostakovich himself offers, again and again, an odd mixture of the intense and serious, on the one hand; the intense and acerbic, on the other; and the light and decidedly un-intense on the third. And it does not hurt to have three ears, or at least three listening styles, to encompass all the frequently contradictory elements of the composer’s oeuvre. 

     It is also true that, taken individually, the performances offered here are all quite fine, so anyone who does want this particular grouping of material will be satisfied with the release, despite the dismal mismatch of the music on the included CDs. It would be easier to recommend the recording wholeheartedly if it were better priced, but it is not; so the bottom line is that there are some very well-done readings here of music that is quite ill-fitting within a single package – but that will certainly please anyone who happens to want to own this particular conflation of elements of Shostakovich’s musical personality. 

     The third disc, containing the first piano concerto (actually for trumpet and piano) and the first violin concerto, is all seriousness and intensity (and errors, as in the incorrect timings given for the piano concerto’s first and second movements). The ever-changing moods of the piano concerto range from playfulness to irony (sometimes both together) to pensiveness to somber thought. It is a difficult work to bring off effectively, precisely because of its quicksilver mood alterations, but Reinhold Friedrich and Thomas Duis do a more-than-creditable job with the solo parts, including the occasional conflicts between them, while Lutz Köhler conducts with care and competence if without any notable sense of flair. In Violin Concerto No. 1, the differing moods and emphases are more clearly delineated: the long first and third movements are deeply felt, while the brief second and fourth (which together are shorter than either the first or the third) provide some respite and at least a fleeting sense of something lighter (although the second movement, like many Shostakovich scherzos, never strays far from mockery). Vladimir Spivakov clearly feels this music deeply, and his performance is expressive and strongly emotional throughout. James Conlon is a dutifully supportive conductor, generally content to cede the foreground to the soloist – an approach that serves the music at least reasonably well. 

     If the overall mood of the third CD in this package is deep and dark, that of the first two CDs is substantially lighter. Some of the works on these discs had serious purposes within the then-mandated “socialist realism” approach of the Soviet Union to music, but even those managed to maintain, sometimes uneasily, a rather light touch. The first disc here includes the two Jazz Suites, the second of which is now often called Suite for Variety Orchestra and is significantly longer than the first (eight movements in 25+ minutes compared with three movements lasting less than nine minutes). Both suites contain versions of a notable and deservedly popular waltz, a kind of valse triste (first movement of the first suite, seventh of the second); the other movements, although less immediately appealing, are similar in character and suitably light. This CD also includes four excerpts from Moscow, Cheryomushki, a mid-1950s work about housing issues in a specific Moscow district and the machinations of some corrupt (and eventually conquered) officials to turn things to their own benefit. The disc concludes with Tahiti Trot, Shostakovich’s famous transcription of the song Tea for Two from the musical No, No, Nanette – a straightforward little piece that in no way dispels the charm of the original and even adds to it here and there. Steven Sloane conducts on this disc with perhaps a touch too much seriousness in the lighter material, although several of the dance movements are winningly rhythmic. 

     Dmitrij Kitajenko is the conductor of the second disc included in this set, offering music that is less-known than that on the first CD but that really comes alive under his leadership. Both The Bolt and The Golden Age were stage works designed to highlight the superiority of Soviet Communism over Western decadence – the former about a foiled attempt to sabotage work at a factory, the latter involving a Soviet sports team triumphing over an evil capitalist one. Despite the rather grim party-line approaches of the two works, Shostakovich created some very pleasant music that nicely contrasts the “good guys” with the evildoers – although, rather oddly, the “decadent” music often sounds more appealing than the forthright and often foursquare material given to the “heroic” characters. Kitajenko manages to handle the music for its own sake, without any propaganda dross associated with it. As a result, the contrasting sections of the material, especially in The Bolt, come through to very good effect, and the overall lightness of both suites is pleasant rather than dogmatic. Also here is a genuine rarity in the form of music from a now-lost 1933 animated film called The Tale of the Priest and His Servant Balda. The six short movements of this suite provide such clever musical characterizations – of “the Obscurantists,” a bazaar and “the priest’s daughter’s dream,” among others – that it is easy to visualize the sorts of scenes to which Shostakovich’s music would have been attached, even if it is impossible to know the actual visuals. 

     The two discs in this set containing some of Shostakovich’s lighter music provide the main reason for owning the discs, even though the more-in-depth material on the third CD is well-performed. The recording is, as a whole, a curious project, apparently driven more by the availability for re-release of high-quality readings of miscellaneous Shostakovich pieces than by any sense of suitability of the musical mixture. Still, listeners who happen to have an affinity for this specific three-hour-long mashup of music will find a great deal to enjoy in these generally fine performances of works that are familiar and less-familiar, lighter and darker, more serious and decidedly less so.

(++++) TWILIT TONES

Elgar: String Quartet; Carissima; Fauré: String Quartet; Préludes, Op. 103—Nos. 4, 8 and 9. Eusebius Quartet (Beatrice Philips and Sofia Kolupov, violins; Adam Newman, viola; Hannah Sloane, cello). SOMM. $18.99. 

Ignaz Brüll: Violin Sonatas Nos. 2 and 3; Suite for Violin and Piano. Brian Buckstead, violin; Irena Ravitskaya, piano. MSR Classics. $14.95. 

     There is a great deal of crepuscular music associated with the last years of Romanticism and the early 20^th century. The moodiness was scarcely new in that time period – brooding and the entire Romantic era go together – but as harmonic structures loosened and composers sought new sound combinations, while geopolitical events cast an aura of gloom that is clearer retrospectively but was somewhat evident even in its own time, darker sounds crept into more and more composers’ works and often cast a pall over concerts in the later Victorian era and thereafter. The overall ethos is one thing that the string quartets of Elgar (1917) and Fauré (1924) have in common. They have other superficial similarities as well: each is its composer’s sole work in the form; both are in E minor; in both, the slow movement is the longest; and both follow the traditional three-movement pattern of Allegro-Andante-Allegro, with a qualifying adjective for the tempo indications here and there. The works, however, were written at very different times in their composers’ lives, and it is to the credit of the Eusebius Quartet that its performers do such a fine job of exploring both the similar aspects of these works and their differing sounds. Elgar’s quartet is the more immediately appealing of the two, managing the tricky balance of intimacy and depth of feeling, on the one hand, and emotional restraint, on the other, with considerable skill. Elgar was recovering from a bout of poor health when he wrote the quartet, and although it is not overtly autobiographical, its delicate balance of feelings could very well reflect his gradually returning physical vigor. The quartet features some notable instrumental touches, such as the absence of the first violin in the first 22 bars of the second movement, and the use of mutes throughout that movement’s extended coda. Although the quartet is a work of wartime, its predominant impression is one of quiet that hovers somewhere between peace and resignation; its mood is largely contemplative, and the Eusebius Quartet conveys that admirably in its recording for the SOMM label. Fauré’s quartet is more acerbic, dissonant and morose than Elgar’s, and more interesting intellectually if somewhat less affecting emotionally. It dates to the last year of Fauré’s life, a time when he – like Beethoven and Smetana – had lost his hearing. And like some of Beethoven’s late quartets, Fauré’s seems to reach for a sound world beyond what audiences would expect, one audible more through inward perception than traditional aural absorption. The austerity of this work’s sound, well-communicated in the Eusebius Quartet’s performance, contrasts with the greater richness of Elgar’s quartet and, in sometimes surprising ways, with the underlying Romanticism that remained a touchstone for Fauré right to the end: he lived for only one month after finishing his quartet. Ultimately, these two works have more differences than similarities, but their Weltanschauung is similar and is reflective of the time period in which both were written. The CD also includes, as if for a touch of leavening, four string-quartet arrangements by Iain Farrington of shorter pieces that communicate more straightforwardly than do the quartets. Elgar’s Carissima, originally written for small orchestra, is graceful, simple and pretty. The three Fauré Préludes, from a set of nine created for piano solo, vary in mood. No. 4, the only one in a major key (F), shares some of the gentle nature of the Elgar encore, while No. 8 (C minor) is more intense, and No. 9 strongly reflects the twilight mood of Fauré’s quartet and its time period – and is written, like the quartet, in E minor. 

     E minor is also the key of one of the sonatas by Ignaz Brüll on a new MSR Classics CD. Brüll (1846-1907) is almost completely unknown today, although the second of his eight operas, Das goldene Kreuz (1875), was quite successful for a time. Brüll was well-known as a pianist – he regularly played with Brahms in private performances of Brahms’ works – so it is scarcely a surprise that the piano elements of his violin-and-piano works are well-crafted and expressive. As Brian Buckstead and Irena Ravitskaya show, however, Brüll did not allow the piano complete dominance in this chamber music: he had a finely honed sense of appropriate balance of the two instruments, allowing each considerable expressive potential. The expressiveness, however, is very firmly in the late-Romantic idiom, infused with some genuinely morose feelings but also possessing a sense of the gestural, as if Brüll knows what is expected of music in the Brahmsian and post-Brahmsian vein and has no desire to move beyond those expectations. The three-movement Sonata No. 3 (1899) explores its E minor tonality thoroughly, but with emotion that is more evanescent than deeply felt – it is noteworthy that the second movement, where darkness and depth might be expected, is an Andante con moto that is pleasant but emotionally superficial. The four-movement Sonata No. 2 in A minor (1890) is similarly unchallenging in terms of emotive capacity: here the slow second movement is marked Cavatine—Andante, and again the pleasantries abound, including some lovely use of decorative violin trills, but profundity is altogether absent. And the following lighthearted Scherzo and concluding dancelike Allegro ma non troppo sound much more congenial than intense and belie the potential drama of the sonata’s home key. As well-performed as the sonatas are, they indicate little more than that Brüll was a composer of a specific period with little interest in moving beyond the typical strictures of his time. He actually seems somewhat more comfortable in major keys, including the A major of his Suite for Violin and Piano (1882), whose five movements’ pleasantries are disconnected from each other. Here hints of somewhat surprising creativity peek through, as in the unexpected minor key of the second-movement Scherzo and the gentle sway of the third-movement Reigen (“dance”). The work as a whole is insubstantial but enjoyable – indeed, that description applies to the entirety of this (+++) CD. No listener will likely deem Brüll a significant rediscovery on the basis of this disc, but anyone interested in some of the forgotten byways of late Romanticism will here experience the ephemeral enjoyment of the twilight of a major musical era.

(+++) FORMS OF MODERNITY

Sarah Louise Bassingthwaighte: Cape Flattery; Concerto for Double Bass and Orchestra; Let There Be Sparrows, then; A Mountain Symphony. Steve Schermer, double bass; London Symphony Orchestra conducted by Bobby Collins and Jonathan Pasternack. Aria Classics. $18.99. 

Music from SEAMUS, Volume 34. New Focus Recordings. $16.99. 

     Modern composers have a myriad of influences from which to choose and a nearly infinite variety of compositional processes and approaches available from which to craft their works. The specific methods and sounds each composer selects are determined in large part by the type and size of audience that each seeks to reach, in addition to whatever content, whether “pure” or programmatic, the music is intended to possess. The four works by Sarah Louise Bassingthwaighte (born 1967) on a new Aria Classics CD all have extramusical associations and illustrative purposes, and all use traditional acoustic instruments and typical orchestral forces to paint their sound pictures. The symphonic poem Cape Flattery is intended as a portrait of the land at the farthest northwest point of the continental United States. As in many similar “landscape” works by other composers, it reflects variegated scenes and weather events through differing pacing, orchestration and music that contrasts the intense and emphatic with the almost-lyrical. It is well-made but will be most effective for listeners who already know the place to which it refers, or at least the surrounding region – it lacks the atmospheric tone painting of works that reach out beyond a specific time and place, such as Mendelssohn’s Fingal’s Cave overture. Bassingthwaighte’s Concerto for Double Bass and Orchestra is considerably more interesting. Here the supra-musical inspirations are subsumed within a work that is intriguing on its own terms and that moves effectively from a rather extended slow movement (titled Lachrymae but not overdoing a sense of tearfulness) through a nicely proportioned Scherzo to an energetic concluding Pesante feroce that displays double-bass virtuosity in a way rarely heard since the days of Giovanni Bottesini. The people involved in the inspiration for the work, soloist Steve Schermer and conductor Jonathan Pasternack, present it with strong commitment and understanding, and listeners intrigued by the very notion of a double-bass concerto will certainly be drawn to the piece, especially the back-and-forth between solo instrument and ensemble in the finale. Let There Be Sparrows, then (the final word of the title uncapitalized) is supposed to be bird-focused, poetry-focused (its title comes from a line in a poem by Shaun O’Brien), and focused on Dietrich Buxtehude, whose D minor Passacaglia provides the basis of its theme-and-variations form. This is rather a lot of freight for the music to carry, and its determinedly contemporary aural world – more of a bow to the avant-garde than are the other works on this disc – makes the various connections rather attenuated. The most expressive and interesting element of the work is its delicacy (it is scored for chamber orchestra), which tends to be at odds with portions of its soundscape, almost as if its avowedly contemporary elements are constantly under threat of being overtaken by a rather sweet lyricism. The inevitable birdsong-like elements actually fit rather imperfectly into a sound world that is more elusive than precise. A Mountain Symphony is more matter-of-fact and forthrightly illustrative than works such as Hovhaness’ Mysterious Mountain symphony, although it uses similar tonal language. Like Cape Flattery, Bassingthwaighte’s symphony is intended to portray and display impressions of a specific landscape, and like that single-movement work, the two-movement symphony consists of variegated instrumental sections designed to show the many moods of a mountain region and, by extension, of people experiencing it. There is nothing particularly groundbreaking in the work’s expressiveness or its rather forthright portrayals of varying environments. But it is well-crafted and has some especially effective integration of percussion into its structure – along with an almost achingly sweet violin solo and some other well-considered individual-instrument touches. The London Symphony Orchestra does a first-rate job with all the music, with Bobby Collins conducting everything other than the double-bass concerto (in which Pasternack leads the orchestra). Bassingthwaighte is a skilled orchestrator whose works on this disc are at their best when they are least insistent on being “about” something and most content to be offered simply as high-quality experiential presentations that are sufficient unto themselves. 

     Bassingthwaighte’s pieces tend to reach out to a fairly wide audience, even when some are rather self-limited because they reference specific places or circumstances with which few people will be familiar or acquainted. The audience for works from SEAMUS, the Society for Electro-Acoustic Music of the United States, is quite different and is self-identified as an “in crowd” for people who enjoy a venue in which the avant-garde composers who use SEAMUS as a membership society can test and sometimes extend the limits of acoustic instruments, voices, and electronics of all sorts. The 34^th  volume of SEAMUS creations, available on New Focus Recordings, offers nine pieces that fit quite comfortably into the SEAMUS universe and that are, by design, aimed by SEAMUS members (who perform on electronics) at other SEAMUS members – and perhaps a small “extended family” that finds productions and sounds of this sort congenial. Every work here, whether for electronics alone or for electronics plus something else, can be, indeed must be, experienced through the lens of the non-musical. Patrick Reed’s Premier D’Aion is about reincarnation and life cycles, using sound that moves through its own life cycle along with a supporting video (not seen on the CD, of course) that was created using artificial intelligence – which is, if you will, a “life” of its own. Leah Reid’s Jouer mixes electronics with amplified soprano saxophone (played by Kyle Hutchins); in line with its title of “play,” it is supposed to reflect adult and children’s games, sports events, casinos and more (and it has some distinctly amusing elements, as when the saxophone perkily plays “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” above electronic sounds). Andrew Burke’s I Wasn’t Thinking is supposed to be a journey through guided meditation, using everything from fixed-media electronics to cellphones and including visual elements (again, not available on the CD). Kerem Ergener’s In Praise of Shadows supplements electronics with flute (Lea Baumert), percussion (Chase Gillett), and violin (Aaron Gonzales), and is tied to a book of the same name by Japanese novelist Jun'ichirō Tanizaki – familiarity with which is a necessity for understanding of the piece. From the cycle Images by Liann J. Kang, for electronics and alto saxophone (Jack Thorpe), this CD includes Blue Air and Traces, the intent in both cases being to put across abstract and intangible ideas through aural impressions – which are indeed abstract and intangible, although no direct connection between these aural images and any specific ideas is determinable. Mickie Wadsworth performs both with her voice and with electronics in Mirror, Mirror, whose idea is to ask rather than answer the existential question of what stares back at someone who stares into a mirror. Oliver Harlan’s xerox In (the first word not capitalized – a frequent affectation in avant-garde titling) sounds like what people who are not particularly enamored of electronic music would expect it to sound like, being a series of repetitive noises including taps, bumps, squeaks, squeals, clangs, feedback and so forth, gradually accumulating atop each other until a final “outer-space-like” chord that eventually fades away. And the rain washed away the fear (no capital letters at all) features the voices and on-electronics performances of Aleu Botelho and Paul J. Botelho in a piece wherein the vocals are augmented, extended, electronically processed and otherwise modified, all with the intention of exploring the source of whatever people hear and the difficulty of knowing just what that source is. Everything here is very earnest, very sincere, and very unlikely to appeal in any way to people who are not already fully committed to the worldview and aural approach for which SEAMUS and its members stand.