(+++) THE MEANDERING PIANO

Michael Stephen Brown: Chamber Music. Michael Stephen Brown, piano; SPA Trio (Susanna Phillips, soprano; Paul Neubauer, viola; Anne-Marie McDermott, piano); Osmo Vänskä, clarinet and Erin Keefe, violin; Jerome Lowenthal and Ursula Oppens, piano and narration. First Hand Records. $22.99. 

Eric Moe: Alternating Currents; Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust; Scree Slope; Now This; Rowdy Sarabande; WHERE DO YOU SEE YOURSELF IN 5 YEARS. Eric Moe, piano and digital piano; Solungga Liu, piano; New York Music Ensemble conducted by Eduardo Leandro. New Focus Recordings. $18.99. 

     The expressive capabilities of the piano continue to make it an instrument of choice for contemporary composers. To be sure, modern piano compositions and presentations sometimes include extended techniques, “prepared” pianos, digital instruments and other variations on what is usually thought of as pianistic. But the willingness of some composers to present their own keyboard works remains unchanged: the tradition of the pianist/composer is a longstanding one, which Michael Stephen Brown (born 1987) and Eric Moe (born 1954) both continue. 

     A new First Hand Records recording of Brown’s chamber music showcases the composer’s performances of Four Lakes for Children (2024), Breakup Etude for the Right Hand Alone (2020), and Pour Angeline (2024), plus his accompaniment of soprano Susanna Phillips in Love’s Lives Lost (2023). All these works have personal meaning and resonance for Brown, but listeners will understandably be primarily interested in the extent to which the music communicates to them and their own lives and experiences. Thus, the “four lakes” reference is to lakes at the site of the Yaddo artists’ retreat in Saratoga Springs, New York, which are named for children who died before age 10; but for listeners, the straightforward simplicity of the music – intended to be playable by young pianists – will be the clearest element. Breakup Etude reflects the end of one of Brown’s relationships and his temporary loss of left-hand function, but its quicksilver mood changes and virtuosic single-hand requirements are its most notable elements. It contrasts strongly with the lyricism of Pour Angeline, whose title refers to Brown’s fiancée; here the quiet delicacy (inspired by Chopin) is noteworthy, although the work is rather cloying. The love-focused but very different inspiration for Brown’s setting of eight poems by Evan Shinners is another composer: Schumann, specifically his setting of Adelbert von Chamisso’s Frauen-Liebe und Leben. Shinners’ poems, unlike Chamisso’s, are not about a woman’s love and life (one Shinners poem is actually called “Parody of Chamisso”) but focus on former lovers re-encountering each other after being separated for years. The piano part reflects the varied moods of the poems to a greater extent than do the vocal settings, which are on the formulaic side. The intent is clearly to present the varying moods of what-might-have-been compared with what-turned-out-to-be. However, the tender material relating to the forgone relationship is less effectively captured than are some rather sarcastic elements, and the inevitable wistful conclusion – the longest song – is rather dour and protests too much in its attempt to present heartfelt emotion: being loud is not equivalent to being convincing. 

     In addition to Brown presenting his own material, other musicians offer three Brown works on this CD. Pas de trois (2025) is a three-movement work performed by the members of SPA Trio, for whom the piece was written. Here the vocal elements are taken from poetry by D.H. Lawrence, Rita Dove, and Brown himself. The material, especially Lawrence’s, is subtler than the texts by Shinners, if not ultimately very communicative beyond personal referents. Brown intends the words and music to reflect the dedicatees – the movements are called “Piano,” “The Violist,” and “Soprano” – but this self-referential (and self-absorbed) approach is less than fully convincing. What works here is the instrumental sensitivity, for instance in the viola pizzicati at the start of the third movement. Relationship (2018) is a five-movement duo for clarinet and viola that was commissioned by Osmo Vänskä and Erin Keefe, who perform it here. More overtly modernistic than most of Brown’s music, the work is interestingly filled with at-times-overdone exclamations and squeaks and plucks and such; its variegated techniques ultimately lead to a bouncy folk-infused and rather undanceable dance movement that, happily, seems not to take itself too seriously. Twelve Blocks for Piano (Four Hands) and Poetry, which dates to 2021, is Brown’s tribute to the two people who perform it here, Jerome Lowenthal and Ursula Oppens. They not only play piano but also recite poetry in French and English – all beneath a title reflecting the distance that Brown walked to see them during the COVID-19 pandemic. This is far too rarefied and specific a set of circumstances to communicate effectively to anyone not already involved in Brown’s intimate life – indeed, the music seems designed mostly as a personal experience for Brown, Lowenthal and Oppens themselves, although some of the non-verbal material is engagingly, even entertainingly pianistic. As a whole, this CD does a good job of being a tribute to various people and factors in Brown’s personal world but is considerably less adept at reaching out beyond him and his close acquaintances. The instrumental pieces, especially Relationship, are on the whole more convincing than the ones including vocal elements. 

     Moe’s pianism is at the service of three of the six works on his New Focus Recordings CD, including the very short (less than one-minute) Like diamonds, we are cut with our own dust. The piece, written in 2014, simply repeats five notes, then six and seven, giving a sense of the flow of water. The intent is to reflect slow erosion, but it is not necessary to know that in order to absorb this miniature, since composers have used similar approaches to indicate water flow for hundreds of years. Moe also reflects something akin to erosion with Scree Slope (2019), whose personal element draws on the feeling of stepping up on a hiking trail and then sliding back down – but, again, knowing the underlying reasoning beneath the piece is not necessary to absorb its sense of forward motion that then reverses. In this case, the work continues for almost five minutes, which is longer than necessary to make its point – although it does come to a kind of revelatory conclusion at the end that seems to indicate that the slipping and sliding have been worthwhile. Moe plays digital piano on Rowdy Sarabande, a 2024 work that initially bears a passing resemblance to the Baroque dance but soon descends into intense and rather chaotic sounds made possible by using 19-tone equal temperament for the instrument. This sort of extension of technique and aural quality is typical in avant-garde music and is always an acquired taste – the feeling here, a common one in music of this sort, is that the composer is self-indulgently engaged in intellectual experimentation for which an audience is not, strictly speaking, even necessary. This CD also includes two piano works performed by Solungga Liu. The title Alternating Currents implies something electronic, but this 2020 piece actually is non-electronic and uses a non-modified piano. It basically involves alternating notes played by the pianist’s two hands, with regular rhythms interrupted by occasional interjections that range from single exclamations to trills and other decorations. Now This (2017) could as well, perhaps better, have been called “And now for something completely different,” echoing the Monty Python phrase uttered at an abrupt shift in topic. Moe is doing something akin to what the Monty Python troupe did, but without humor: the work’s title is intended to reflect the two-word phrase used in news reporting when an entirely different story is about to be presented. In practice, this means Moe creates a series of completely disconnected segments of varying mood, technique and sound, then presents them without any discernible effort to provide continuity or any type of connection until, at the end, a few elements return. Knowing the “news” connection certainly helps listeners understand what Moe is doing here, but on a strictly musical basis, it is unnecessary, since it is clear from the piece itself what is happening: disjointed material is presented for a considerable period of time (13 minutes), with a bit of this and that eventually returning. Moe also has a significant real-world connection for the all-capital-letters-titled WHERE DO YOU SEE YOURSELF IN 5 YEARS: the title of this 2023 work is a typical job-interview cliché question. This is the one piece on the CD for multiple instruments: the New York New Music Ensemble includes flutes (Emi Ferguson), clarinets (Adrián Sandi), violin (Karen Kim), cello (Chris Finckel), and piano (Stephen Gosling). At 16½ minutes, this is the longest work on the 50-minute CD, but is built with the same sense of disconnectedness and rhythmic variation employed in Moe’s shorter pieces. The timbral variation made possible by use of multiple instruments helps keep the music interesting, and the periodic inclusion of taped interview questions (including the one in the work’s title) makes the piece’s intent and non-musical connections explicit. There is a touch of mechanistic rhythm to indicate the machine-like nature of business, and there are some overt if unsurprising instrumental reactions to some questions, such as an intense outburst after being asked whether the person being interviewed handles stress well. All in all, WHERE DO YOU SEE YOURSELF IN 5 YEARS has numerous clever elements in addition to some unexceptional instrumental writing. Because the music’s inspiration is integrated into the work itself, audiences can respond without having to, in effect, pre-study the piece’s provenance to understand where it is coming from. This is a significant plus and helps make the piece enjoyable to hear once, even if the work goes on somewhat too long and ends (no surprise) ambiguously. Whether listeners will want to replay WHERE DO YOU SEE YOURSELF IN 5 YEARS is, however, another matter. Indeed, the staying power both of Moe’s disc and of Brown’s is likely to depend on how closely an individual is personally attuned to these composer/performers. Close members of Brown’s inner circle are the only people likely to find that his works resonate with them; Moe casts a somewhat wider net, but in most of his pieces as well, it helps a great deal to know how he thinks and what elements of his music are designed to call up which specific extra-musical events, thoughts and feelings.