Music for Trumpet by Virginia Composers John D’earth, Carl Roskott, David Sampson, Dwight Bigler, Kelly Rossum, and Kent Holliday. Jason Crafton, trumpet. Blue Griffin Recordings. $15.99.
Music for Flute and Piano by Joshua Rosenblum, David Chase, Mary-Mitchell Campbell, Gary Adler, Georgia Stitt, and Joseph Church. Janet Axelrod, flute. Freedom Road Records. $10.
Music for Winds by Reena Esmail, Tyson Gholston Davis, and David Sanford. Zéphyros Winds (Jennifer Grim, flute and piccolo; Fatma Dogler, oboe and English horn; Marianne Gythfeldt, clarinet and bass clarinet; Zohar Schondorf, horn; Saxton Rose, bassoon). UNCSA Media. $9.99.
One of the longstanding benefits of CDs over vinyl records has been the ability of the newer format to fit so much more music onto so much smaller a physical product. CDs have long held 80 minutes and some now hold even more without loss of quality; vinyl always had difficulty reaching 60 minutes, and most classical vinyl records contained far less than that – about 45 minutes was the norm. Now that CDs themselves are a long-established medium (and being supplanted for many listeners by digital-only releases), some recordings are emerging that, for various reasons, return to the vinyl era in terms of total length. New ones from Blue Griffin Recordings and Freedom Road Records are cases in point: each lasts 47 minutes, and each is designed to present six contemporary works focusing on a specific instrument plus accompaniment.
The accompaniment on the trumpet-focused recording featuring Jason Crafton is usually piano, played by Richard Masters, but not always. The first piece, John D’earth’s Invisible Drummer, is a three-movement work for trumpet and jazz bass (Paul Langosch). The jazz orientation of the work is no surprise in light of the chosen instruments; and the trumpet’s licks are scarcely unexpected. The extended solo of the second movement, before the bass creeps in, is especially well-done, but the least derivative and most rhythmically interesting movement is the third, which goes beyond traditional jazz in some creative ways. Next on the CD is Carl Roskott’s single-movement Concerto for Two Trumpets, with Peyden Shelton on second trumpet. The insistent doubling of the trumpets gives fanfare-like flare to the work, whose piano part underlines and at times contrasts with the trumpets’ sound. David Sampson’s Counterwork intriguingly adds marimba (Annie Stevens) as well as piano to the trumpet, but despite the interesting aural possibilities, the piece never quite gels and seems rather unfocused. Dwight Bigler’s Three Appalachian Folk Hymns is for trumpet and piano. The comparatively straightforward simplicity on display here – in Land of Rest, O’ Thou in Whose Presence, and A Morning Song – is a welcome contrast with some of the more-ambitious rhythmic and harmonic approaches of several other pieces on the disc. Bigler’s piece has nothing to prove, and as a result Crofton is able to present the music with pleasant lyrical sensitivity; and the piano part, especially in the third hymn, is particularly appealing. Kelly Roshum’s Roshi, for trumpet and marimba (Stevens), produces some rather strange sounds in the instrumental combination, as if the two performers are disconnected rather than playing cooperatively. Kent Holliday’s Double Entendre, for two trumpets (Shelton on the second one) and piano, concludes the CD with considerable force and a touch more dissonance than is really necessary to make its points. No work here stands substantially above the others; all are interesting explorations of combinatorial trumpet sounds, and the disc’s length makes it into a kind of sampler both of modern works for trumpet and of music by composers who share a geographical location.
Janet Axelrod’s recording tries to encompass even more elements of contemporary music. The six works on the CD, all of them Axelrod commissions, are all by Broadway composers – that is, ones who share a metaphorical geography and, at least at showtime, a geographical one as well. In addition, all the pieces are for flute and piano; and in all cases but one, the composer is the pianist on this CD. That certainly gives an air of the definitive to the production, but it is left to the music itself to appeal or not appeal to potential audiences. Touch and Go by Joshua Rosenblum, a pleasantly meandering piece in mixed tempos, gives Axelrod plenty of chances to explore the full range of the flute as well as its expressive potential in multiple rhythms. The piano leads the flute as often as it is led by it. Jump Scher(z) by David Chase, titled as a pun on the horror-movie cliché of the “jump scare,” does indeed toss in periodic unexpected chords amid legato material, and its pacing varies from slow to tarantella. It is inconsequential but enjoyable. Mary-Mitchell Campbell’s fueille dans un ruisseau (“Leaf in a Stream” – one of those modern works with the affectation of avoiding capital letters in its title) drifts along pleasantly enough in both instruments, going not much of anywhere, like a leaf caught in a current that eventually ends in stasis. Gary Adler’s For Harvey…(A Theatrical Fancy for Flute and Piano), titled and punctuated just that way, is less pretentious than its title: it is a modestly lyrical, moderately warm exploration of some emotional realms that, if scarcely deep, are heartfelt – this is a work that really does sound like something composed for a Broadway show. Georgia Stitt’s Duet for Flute and Piano #1 has somewhat similar sensibilities and somewhat comparable emotional resonance. Here Axelrod gets to handle long melodic lines with very sure breath control, and the flute – mostly in its middle range – shows its warmly expressive side. Joseph Church’s Oasis, the final and by far the longest work on this disc, is the only one featuring a pianist other than the composer: Elizabeth DiFelice is at the keyboard. This piece is in three movements with the fairly traditional classical tempo indications of Lazily, Scherzando and Molto adagio, but the work’s sound skews more to the avant-garde than that of any other piece heard on the CD. Blips and single-note exclamations amid fast-changing tempos permeate the first movement, which ends perkily rather than lazily; the oddball rocking motion at the start of the second movement soon leads to some instrumental back-and-forths that justify the “joke” meaning of the chosen tempo; and the expressiveness (somewhat overdone) that opens and dominates the finale has a gentle forward impetus that, however, tends to lose its way as the movement progresses to its flute-fluttery concluding portion. In all these works, Axelrod plays with engagement, sensitivity and fine technique; and the comparatively short length of the disc actually seems quite sufficient to explore these pieces – none of which stands head-and-shoulders above the rest.
Even shorter than these two recordings is one from the University of North Carolina School of the Arts that showcases three contemporary woodwind works in performances by the Zéphyros Winds chamber group. This is a half-hour recording featuring three composers whose pieces unashamedly require listeners to familiarize themselves with and understand a variety of extramusical concepts – and to be as interested in the nonmusical material as in the notes that are played. Thus, The Light Is the Same (2017) by Reena Esmail (born 1983) uses two different Hindustani ragas as philosophical touchpoints for the 13th-century musings of Sufi mystic and poet Rūmī on the underlying oneness of God despite the many religions and spiritual paths through which people reach out for greater meaning and more-complete understanding. The entirety of the conception is then supposed to resonate with contemporary sociopolitical issues. This is a lot of freight to load onto a nine-minute piece for woodwinds, and it is somewhat surprising to find that the work itself is considerably more melodic and less pretentious than the gloss of philosophical importance supposed to be attached to it. In fact, heard simply as music, with no attempt to probe its underlying intended meaningfulness, the work is a pleasant blending of varying woodwind sounds, proceeding at a deliberate pace through gentle undulations. It is more straightforwardly pleasing than its foundational reasons for being would suggest. Desert Pass (2023) by Tyson Gholston Davis (born 2000), here given its world première recording, is a shorter work – seven minutes – but seems longer because of its determination to produce interlocking dissonances among the instruments at the expense of any significant forward motion. The work’s title is that of a 1976 painting by Helen Frankenthaler (1928-2011), and familiarity with the artist’s oeuvre and with this specific painting is necessary for understanding and appreciation of the music – which intends to translate the flow of the canvas into sound. This is a rarefied concept involving an art work with which very few listeners are likely to be as familiar as is the composer. Heard on its own, without knowledge of the painting, the piece swells and subsides, expands and contracts, flows a bit and pinpoints a bit, and ultimately has no sense of a particular destination. It is an assemblage of sounds rather than a convincing musical structure. Whether it adequately reflects its source material will be a matter to be discussed among members of any audience that has sufficient familiarity with the specific Frankenthaler work that inspired the music. The longest piece on the CD, lasting 15 minutes, is Tatu (2018) by David Sanford (born 1963). This is one of those combinatorial works intended to reach across genres while pushing instruments and the techniques of their players beyond their usual limits. Drawing on sources including Miles Davis, Karlheinz Stockhausen and filmmakers Lars von Trier and Jørgen Leth, the material meanders here and there, mildly comprehensibly, sounding sometimes a bit like the “space music” of György Ligeti, sometimes like an étude for one woodwind or another, sometimes like a concatenation of sounds that just happen, as if incidentally, to be musical. There is certainly an “in group” audience attracted to avant-garde music for its own sake, and Tatu will likely appeal to its members even if they are not fully cognizant of the work’s reasons for being. But for a wider audience and when heard in purely musical terms and without reference to all the matters on which it draws, the piece seems to have little to express and to spend rather too much time expressing it – although it must be said that the members of Zéphyros Winds dedicate themselves fully to it, as they do to the other works on this disc.
Fans of modern chamber music that focuses on wind instruments will hear much that is interesting on these recordings, although it may be that the works will be of greater interest to performers seeking an expansion of their repertoire than to audiences that are less than fully committed to the sounds on offer. All the discs do have value as samplers of a sort; and if there is a valid generalization that can be made about the explorations of little-known contemporary music on these three CDs, it is that sometimes the modest length of a release fits well with the modest pleasures it brings.
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