Christos Hatzis: Through a Glass Darkly; Face to Face; Orbiting Garden; Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji: Nocturne “Djâmi.” William Hobbs, piano. Blue Griffin Recordings. $15.99.
Music for Flute by Philippe Gaubert, Bohuslav Martinů, Carl Mansker, and Raffaele Galli. Linda Marianiello, flute. MSR Classics. $14.95.
Listeners with a strong impulse to explore little-known nooks and crannies of classical music, and with a fondness for works focusing on specific instruments, have a wealth of recordings from which to choose. Although these CDs will not reach out to a wide audience, they can be refreshingly engaging for audiences interested in moving well beyond the standard repertoire and, indeed, even beyond explorations just outside the standard-repertoire realm. A Blue Griffin Recordings CD featuring pianist William Hobbs, for example, includes three world première recordings of works by Christos Hatzis (born 1953), plus an extended rarity written in 1928 by the long-lived but very-little-known Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji (1892-1988). Both composers are of hyphenated ethnicity, Hatzis being Greek-Canadian and Sorabji Indian (Parsi)-English; and a certain level of exoticism pervades all their music on this disc, although the extent to which it is directly attributable to their heritages is debatable. Hatzis’ Through a Glass Darkly (2005) is a meandering, virtuosic work of silence vs. loudness, with varying tempos and complex piano figurations and without any semblance of thematic or harmonic cohesion. It has impressively constructed elements, notably midway through, but seems mainly concerned with asserting its modernistic bona fides while giving the pianist a real workout – and it must be said that William Hobbs rises fully to its many challenges. Face to Face (2019) is in four movements called Encounter, Arcanum, Entanglement, and Restoration. A suite lasting nearly half an hour, it features a first movement that opens with great drama – again, strongly contrasted throughout with quieter, more-delicate material. The second movement has stronger forward impetus and, at first, greater delicacy, then turns dramatic and intense as it nears its conclusion. The third is a gentler landscape with intersections of exclamatory strength. And the fourth is quizzical: a few notes cascading here, then complete silence, then a few more notes emerging and expanding, then more absence-of-sound, and so forth – this the shortest movement and the most tiresome to hear. Orbiting Garden (1989/2019) is for piano and audio playback and is even more rarefied than Hatzis’ other works on this CD. It is packed with the usual squeaks and bangs, klangs and whistles, scrapes and screeches of formulaic electronic music, plus a more-or-less climactic vocal lament (“Dying Earth” by Chari Polatos) that veers mighty close to self-parody in its delivery of amplified groans and moans. As for the Sorabji Nocturne, it sways gently and athematically throughout, effectively setting a dark mood with periodic glimmers of light. It goes on much too long for what is essentially a monochromatic work – nearly 23 minutes – but if it is listened to without too much attentiveness and is allowed to subside repeatedly into the background of a listener’s awareness, it produces a succession of related moods to good effect. Hobbs is as sensitive to Sorabji’s worldview as to Hatzis’ machinations, playing everything on the disc with great attentiveness and unerring expressive skill. To an extent, he lavishes his interpretative gifts on material that is not entirely worthy of them – or, perhaps more accurately, he elevates the works he plays here through his exceptional skill in presenting them.
Considerable understanding and virtuosity are also on display on an MSR Classics recording of what might be called “flute-plus” music, featuring Linda Marianiello plus a variety of colleagues in multifaceted chamber pieces with some surprising elements. Bohuslav Martinů, the only composer here who is likely to be familiar to most listeners, is represented by the two-movement Madrigal Sonata for flute, violin (Wendy Thompson), and piano (Kazue Tsuzuki-Weber). The work is pleasant and far from acerbic, its slower and more-extended second movement flowing particularly well and featuring considerably more and gentler lyricism than is usually associated with Martinů’s music. It is preceded on the disc by Sonata No. 2 for flute and piano (Franz Vote) by Philippe Gaubert (1879-1941), a traditionally structured three-movement work with a generally pastoral feeling about it (the first movement is actually marked Pastorale). Gentleness and close cooperation between the instruments are hallmarks of this pleasantly lyrical sonata, which is expressive throughout without any pretensions of gravitas. There are two pieces on the CD by Carl Mansker (1935-2019). The shorter, Danza y Fuga for flute and piano (Tsuzuki-Weber), handles what is essentially a prelude-and-fugue form skillfully, with a suitable mixture of lightness and bounce, on the one hand, and seriousness of purpose, on the other. Der Fächer im Herbst: Five Chinese Poems for soprano (Ursula Hennig), flute, and piano (Tsuzuki-Weber) is a rather odd mixture of three very short pieces with two much longer ones. “The Fan in Autumn” is the title of the last and longest poem as well as that of the cycle as a whole. The expected evocations of Oriental sounds are very much present in these settings, but the vocal elements seem somewhat out of keeping with the poems: the brief Verschmähte Perlen (“Scorned Pearls”), Die Eifersüchtige (“The Jealous One”), and Die Verlassene (“The Abandoned”), the much longer Das Gras im Tsching-sin-Schloß (“The Grass in Ching-sin Castle”), and the concluding title poem. Some of the scene-setting – notably by the piano in the third and fifth songs – is effective enough, and Henning gamely explores the poems’ sentiments, despite the rather formulaic vocal settings. The cycle as a totality, though, is less than wholly convincing. As the only vocal work on the CD, it actually draws attention to the disc’s rather peculiar mixture of material, which also includes Capriccio on “Linda di Chamounix” by Gaetano Donizetti by Raffaele Galli (1824-1889), whose first name is here given as “Raffaelo.” This is interestingly scored for two flutes (Brooks de Wetter-Smith plays the second) and piano (Barton Weber) and is a very pleasantly contrived exploration of elements of Donizetti’s 1842 melodrama. The writing for flutes – both individually and as a duo – is handled skillfully: Galli created a number of opera-focused works of this type, including a Rigoletto fantasy and a two-flutes-and-piano work based on La Sonnambula. Extractions from popular operas were of course a mainstay in the 19th century, and the well-structured ones, including this Capriccio, continue to provide considerable pleasure – indeed, this Galli work is something of an undiscovered gem, and a disc including others by him would be worthwhile. This CD, however, concludes with something rather experimental and rather peculiar: an Improvisation for flute and Indian percussion (Tunji Beier playing mridangam, a double-sided barrel drum, and ghatam, a narrow-mouthed clay pot). The underlying work here is the Sarabande from Bach’s Partita for Solo Flute, BWV 1013. The “jam session” nature of this piece is clear and is pleasant enough, and there are some interesting contrasts explored between the Baroque melodiousness and the comparative delicacy of the percussive elements. Here as everywhere on the disc, Marianiello remains firmly in charge of the music’s progress and its effects, and her improvisatory abilities are as impressive in this piece as her interpretative ones are in the other works. If the Improvisation is ultimately rather inconsequential, the same may be said of other elements of the CD; yet that reality is only a mild distraction from the enjoyment that listeners will experience by hearing – likely for the first time – many of these interesting intricacies of the flute repertoire.
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