(++++) PLEASANTRIES

Grieg: Complete Piano Music. Håkon Austbø, piano; Roberto Plano and Paola Del Negro, piano four hands. Brilliant Classics. $43.99 (8 CDs). 

Dave Soldier: Symphonic Works. Prague Filmharmonic Orchestra conducted by Adam Klemens. Bright Shiny Things. $19.99. 

     Pervasive gentleness and unerring attention to detail mark the miniature piano pieces of Edvard Grieg – many of them micro-miniatures, lasting one minute or less. The eight-disc Brilliant Classics compilation of recordings made between 2001 and 2007 (solo pieces) and in 2021 (works for piano four hands) is a wonderful survey of some genuinely engaging music, all of it pleasant and none of it particularly profound – not even the few more-complex piano pieces that Grieg wrote, which were student works and/or ones that made him uncomfortable at the need to follow established forms. Grieg was a fine pianist, and of course his piano concerto – the exception that proves the rule about his attachment to small-scale forms – is deservedly hyper-familiar. But his soul, for want of a better word, resides more in the little pieces here beautifully limned by fellow Norwegian Håkon Austbø, who won the Grieg Prize in 2003 for his contributions to Grieg performance – certainly including the recording in 2001 of all 66 of the Lyric Pieces, a set of 10 groups to which Grieg added for much of his creative life, from 1866/1867 to 1901. These are assembled on the first three discs of this set and showcase, again and again, Grieg’s particular mastery of folk and folklike material (multiple pieces called Norwegian Dance and others naming specific dances); of the waltz, with which he had considerable skill (Valse-Impromptu in Book IV and Valse mélancolique in Book IX, for example); of tributes to his homeland (National Song in Book I, In My Native Country in Book III, Norwegian March in Book V, among others); and on occasion of considerable expressiveness (Erotikon in Book III, Melancholy in Book IV, Shepherd Boy in Book V). Arietta charmingly opens and closes the entire set of 66 – as a pleasant waltz at the end, titled Remembrances. And some of the Lyric Pieces are tremendously and justly popular, including March of the Trolls (here labeled March of the Dwarfs) in Book V and Wedding Day at Troldhaugen in Book VIII. Most of the remainder of Grieg’s solo-piano music is heard much less frequently – which turns out to be a shame, given the skill with which Austbø illuminates its many very fine qualities. Among the highlights are Scenes from Folk Life, the piano version of the Holberg Suite, and set after set of very short dances and folk tunes – 25 of them in Op. 17, 19 in Op. 66, 17 in Op. 72, and more. The final CD here features the Italian husband-and-wife duo of Roberto Plano and Paola Del Negro in very well-presented piano-four-hands music ranging from two symphonic pieces to two designated as waltz-caprices to keyboard versions of the two Peer Gynt suites. There is much pleasure, if little profundity, in this excellent march through keyboard Grieg, which not only paints a thoroughly engaging portrait of the composer but also shows very effectively that music need not be heaven-storming to be involving and otherwise worthwhile: earthbound these pieces may be, but they make the environment a little less mundane and a little more picturesque through their very existence. 

     Grieg’s piano music blends the classical world with that of folk music; other composers seek different blendings. Dave Soldier (born 1956) mixes classical material and jazz, with a few other elements thrown in along the way. “Soldier” is the stage name used by neuroscientist David Sulzer, whose mixture of careers is at least as interesting as his melding of musical forms. A recent Bright Shiny Things release of orchestral works shows Soldier paying tributes left and right to people and places while scattering forms of various types willy-nilly around the Prague Filmharmonic (sic) Orchestra under the capable direction of Adam Klemens. One piece here, Jaleo, was originally for piano, a fact that is not at all obvious from the skillful orchestral arrangement (in which Klemens assisted). The work pays tribute to two of Soldier’s musical influences, but it is scarcely necessary to know that in order to appreciate its rhythmic and sonic fluency. There is also a piece here with a folk-tradition connection: SamulNori, which is tied to Korean farmers’ music – but, again, knowing that fact is unnecessary for enjoyment of the effective orchestral arrangement, which portrays a coastal storm in some formulaic sound painting mixed with some unexpected and clever percussion use. The most-extended work on this disc is Stuff Smith’s Unfinished Concerto: Music Starts When Words Leave Off, a piece whose unwieldy title unfortunately forces listeners to figure out what it is all about. The reason that is unfortunate is that the music is quite capable of standing on its own as a one-movement violin concerto (with the solo part very adeptly played by Curtis Stewart). The piece is a tribute to jazz violinist Stuff Smith (1909-1976) and is an expansion of music that Smith wrote; Soldier turns it into a full-fledged, multifaceted modern violin-and-orchestra exploration with far fewer overt jazz elements than might be expected from its provenance (except in its rousing final minutes). It is an impressive work that is played here with considerable panache – the centerpiece and highlight of the CD. The disc also includes six comparatively short pieces from Aventuras, originally a collection for saxophone and piano. Although scarcely Grieg-like, they reflect Soldier’s surroundings and compositional milieus in much the same way that Grieg’s piano works reflect his. Thus, El Amanecer mixes the influence of an Argentine song with bird calls – the latter included because Soldier heard them when writing the music. Rahsaan is the first name of the multi-instrumental performer for whom Soldier wrote it; its use of microtones differentiates it from most of the other music on this CD, and its focus on having the orchestra produce sounds reflective of some of those made by alto saxophones gives the work an esoteric underpinning that does little to enhance its overall effect – which it produces without a study of its background being needed. New York Bars at Dawn is a rhythmically unsettled meander through city streets after a touch too much libation, attractively amusing (and amusingly attractive) through its combination of quarter-tone technique with an attempted waltz that almost immediately becomes cartoonishly inept. Albayzin, another place-focused piece, is intended to paint a musical picture of an area of Granada, Spain, with a very long history; it simply has a somewhat exotic nocturne-like sound. Kumiho is a nine-tailed Korean fox demon, and here yet again the music goes beyond what it intends to portray, with some effectively percolating writing for solo horn (played by Jan Vobořil) displayed against an orchestral background that actually communicates very little of the demonic but instead provides an aural canvas against which the horn sounds stand out. And Lorette Velvette, a two-minute trifle titled for and dedicated to a specific punk-rock singer, proves to be music of a rather romantic bent, with touches of acerbity but none of the intensity that its inspiration would lead an audience to anticipate. Virtually all the works on this disc are in fact better than their titles and do not require knowledge of their reasons for being in order to be appreciated and enjoyed. The “back stories” may lend additional emotional resonance, if not exactly depth, to these pieces, but like Grieg’s piano works, the orchestral ones by Soldier displayed here bring listeners pleasure and invite their involvement in strictly musical soundscapes whose foundational elements need not be explored unless one truly desires to do so – the opposite of the case with much contemporary music, which insists that audiences study extramusical matters in order to get the keys (so to speak) to the music itself. Soldier’s titles surely have meaning for him, but these pieces would come across just as well if they simply bore designations of tempo or form – or their emotional content.

(++++) A CONFLUENCE OF CONTRADICTIONS

Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner: Love Life. Quirijn de Lang, Stephanie Corley, Themba Mvula, Justin Hopkins; Orchestra and Chorus of Opera North conducted by James Holmes. Capriccio. $29.99 (2 CDs). 

     A fascinating journey from the past to the past that was designed as a trip from the past to the present – and ironically is turning out, in some ways, to be just that – Kurt Weill and Alan Jay Lerner’s Love Life is in some ways as much of an oddity now as it was when it came to Broadway in 1948. Subtitled A Vaudeville in Two Parts – not a play, not a musical, not an operetta, but a “vaudeville” – the production managed 252 performances from October 7, 1948, to May 14, 1949, and brought a Tony Award for Best Leading Actress in a Musical to Nanette Fabray. But it was scarcely a big success, and it divided critics and audiences alike by its forward-looking but rather peculiar approach to both love and life. Indeed, its title would be better as Love/Life, with a slash between the words, because it is all about the difficulties and interrelationships of the two concepts and the tightrope walk needed to try to maintain both – and it ends with a literal tightrope walk of the central couple, with the curtain falling on an ambiguous scene in which it is not clear whether the two will or will not succeed in meeting in the middle and, even if they do, whether that meeting will be a happy and lasting one or not. 

     Certainly the relationship of Sam and Susan Cooper is lasting and at least somewhat, or somewhat intermittently, happy. The show’s conceit is that the two have been together, without aging, from 1791 to 1948 – traveling through the changes in the American social fabric of 1821, 1857, 1894 and the 1920s before arriving in the “present day” of 1948 for the entire second act. Actually, the show starts in 1948 as well – with a magic act in which Sam and Susan are shown symbolically between the two words of the title, with Sam suspended in midair and Susan cut in half by the magician’s trick. This opening scene is bookended by the eventual tightrope walk – the two scenes involving Sam and Susan in performances-within-the-performance that, in the rest of the show, include a large number of small but important roles within the “vaudeville” concept that appears in the title of the totality. 

     Intellectually clever but emotionally bereft, Love Life tries to contrast the solid family values that Sam and Susan represent – along with their two children, Johnny and Elizabeth – with the societal stressors that toss the adults hither and thither and eventually bring them to divorce and then to discovery that things are not any better when they are separate than when they are together, so maybe they ought to be together after all if they can balance and move carefully on that symbolic tightrope. 

     The difficulty with the show is that the supposedly ideal, peaceful life of the Cooper family in 1791 – shortly after the United States became a nation – is, frankly, boring, musically speaking; and it is naïve in the extreme from a dramatic point of view. Sam and Susan are just not very interesting people, although the show picks up a surprising degree of relish because of 2026 being the 250^th anniversary of the establishment of the United States and the assertion of its ideals. Actually, the Opera North production recorded live for the two-CD Capriccio release dates to 2025, but it reflects interestingly if unintentionally onto events of 2026. And to the credit of this British opera company, the accents and pronunciations of words are American, which matters in this context. The staging – described in detail in the accompanying booklet, which also includes a partial libretto consisting of everything spoken or sung on the recording plus summaries of material not on the CDs – appears to have been very thoughtful and clever, and the whole release would probably work better as a DVD than in non-visual CD form. But the underlying conceit, that the Coopers live their lives while interspersed “vaudeville” elements comment on all the societal changes that affect and ultimately shatter their marriage, is certainly clear enough on these discs. 

     The show’s conceptualization is much more interesting than its central characters. It is vaguely opposed to American-style capitalism – the very first “vaudeville” is mildly sarcastic about “Progress,” the second about “Economics,” and so on. But there is none of the bite that Weill’s work had in The Threepenny Opera and The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny – which come from an earlier time than Love Life and which were built around the words of Bertolt Brecht, who had far stronger and more-intense left-wing attitudes than the rather mild and modest ones of Lerner (indeed, they were so strong that they eventually led to a permanent split between Brecht and the more-moderate Weill). Love Life does not offer Weill’s best music, although his determination to do his own orchestrations – the exception rather than the rule in Broadway productions – was a good one, adding much more flavor than there might otherwise have been in “Women’s Club Blues,” the Jazz Age material, the “Green-Up Polka” and other numbers. The foundational notion of ordinary people trying to live ordinary lives while commentary numbers (sung by unnamed ensemble members; think of Non-Player Characters in contemporary video games) swirl around them seems very modern indeed, and gives Love Life a pointedness that it would otherwise lack. And the Opera North cast is really excellent. Quirijn de Lang and Stephanie Corley sing very well and seem well-settled together, if lacking in romantic sparks – which would seem out of place in this story anyway. Themba Mvula is show-stealingly effective as the Magician at the show’s start and the Con Man/Interlocutor in its final scene, in which he offers Sam and Susan several illusions to make them happy – including one of Susan finding “Mr. Right,” a fairytale notion that long predates Love Life and persists to the present. And one “vaudeville” singer, the Hobo, is especially fine in Justin Hopkins’ first-rate presentation of “Love Song,” a high point of the show. Another musical high point, the “Modern Madrigal” that introduces the second part of Love Life, is so good that it creates a feeling of what might have happened if the rest of the score had been at its level. 

     Conductor James Holmes is a Weill specialist, and it shows in his snappy handling of the orchestra throughout the performance. Opera North’s orchestra does a great job with the genre-shifting score – Weill here makes up in musical selectivity what he lacks in snap and bite. The singing by the chorus, and by chorus members called on for individual roles in the various “vaudeville” sections, is excellent. This is the first recording of Love Life: labor troubles meant that there was no original-cast recording of the 1948 production. Like elements of the story itself, that fact of labor unrest and dissatisfaction gives Love Life, which in many ways is very much of its time, a sense of 21^st-century relevance and meaningfulness. Retrospectively important in its design, elements of which significantly influenced later musicals, the show is less than outstanding because it does not feature Weill's best music or any particularly effective social commentary – with the "good" scenes being rather dull, and with Sam and Susan being not especially distinctive or interesting. Lerner wrote the book for the show; he and Weill did the lyrics together; but the focus on staging, which gives Love Life its distinctiveness, seems to have taken up more of the creativity of the creators than the development of a genuinely engaging story. Still, if it is hard to love Love Life, it is not difficult to admire it intellectually and to appreciate its exploration of the daily duality requiring choice, and balance, and the eternal tightrope walk between the personal portions of life and those that are societally determined.

(+++) SMALL-SCALE AND MODERN

Allison Loggins-Hull: Chamber Music. AVIE. $19.99. 

Noah Meites: Chamber Music. New Focus Recordings. $20.99. 

     It is a commonplace in contemporary composition to say that it is much harder to get a second or third performance of a new work than to get a first one. Music may get heard once in a “new music” context or at a festival, but it has to prove its worth quickly in order to receive repeated hearings and perhaps eventually move into the realm of almost-standard repertoire. The more complex performance requirements are, the more musicians they require, the more difficult it is for a work to establish itself; and this is one reason many contemporary composers turn their attention to chamber music, whose more-limited scale makes it easier to program and, hopefully, re-program. A new AVIE disc featuring works of Allison Loggins-Hull (born 1982) shows some of the ways in which a sensitive modern composer approaches smaller-scale material. The six works on the CD come in a variety of forms and require a variety of performers, but all share a characteristic common in contemporary music: the pieces are intended to reflect or comment on extramusical matters, and it is necessary for an audience to know what those issues are for the music to be fully effective. Patchwork is for viola (Eliesha Nelson) and cello (Brian Thornton). It is supposed to portray a long-term romantic relationship – the identification of these two songful instruments with the partners is clear enough – and reflects the ways matters evolve over time. The intertwining of the instruments is what makes the work attractive; this is actually the one piece on the CD that can be enjoyed without being required to pay close attention to its intended foundational meaning. Matters are different in Can You See? This is for a larger chamber ensemble, with Loggins-Hull conducting flute (Jessica Sindell), horn (Jesse McCormick), violins (Katherine Bormann and Zhan Shu), viola (Nelson), cello (Thornton), bass (Maximilian Dimoff), and percussion (Thomas Sherwood). The piece is one of those “America is far from perfect” bits of obviousness intended to show that the reality of life in the United States does not live up to its ideals, and its history is at best a checkered one. Ho-hum: neither the work’s pseudointellectual gloss nor its rather ordinary sound is particularly engaging, although some of the percussion elements are interesting. Homeland is for solo flute, played by Joshua Smith. Flute is also Loggins-Hull’s instrument, and she writes knowledgeably for it. As in the previous work on the disc, this one uses The Star Spangled Banner as a touchstone for what is intended as commentary on a nation falling short of its ideals – in this case based on the aftermath of a hurricane and various sociopolitical circumstances surrounding it. That is a lot of freight for a solo-flute piece to carry, and the work does not really connect meaningfully with its intended nonmusical themes. It does, however, sound quite good in its own right, and sustains well and without fussiness throughout its modest length. The Pattern is for flute (Sindell), clarinet (Georg Klaas), violin (Jason Yu), cello (Thornton), piano (Daniel Overly), and percussion (Sherwood). Yet again, it is supposed to be about something societal, in this case racial injustice, which it displays through considerable racket and dissonance that never quite disappears even in quieter sections. Certainly the work is disquieting and never quite resolves in any positive musical way, but neither does it connect with its reason for being unless listeners pre-study the composer’s reasons for creating it – a common issue in contemporary music that is intended to reflect societal matters. Kalief is another piece intended to comment on injustice, this time in the case of a teenager named Kalief Browder, who was arrested for a crime he did not commit and kept in solitary confinement for 700 days; two years after his release, he committed suicide. The case has been made into a TV miniseries and on that basis may be familiar to some potential listeners, but it has to be known to the audience for Loggins-Hull’s work to have any effect. The short piece (3½ minutes) is for clarinet (Klaas) and piano (Overly) and is somehow supposed to suggest that if Browder had been white, he would have been treated differently – which may or may not be the case, but which is in no way apparent from anything in the music. Once again, the work is well-crafted and makes some solid musical points, but those are not what Loggins-Hull wants it to do – she expects it to be a work freighted with a massive sense of racial imbalance and injustice, and it simply is not. The CD concludes with Shine, for soprano (Laquita Mitchell), flute (Loggins-Hull herself), viola (Nelson), and piano (Overly). The text by U-Meleni Mhlaba-Adebo celebrates light-despite-darkness in unsurprising ways (“we shine bright / even in dark spaces” is said repeatedly) and with multiple clichés (“inside & outside the lines,” “we lift / each other / up,” “oceans of our tears”). The expressions are unexceptionable and the musical accompaniment unexceptional; the vocal line dips into and out of intelligibility. The work sustains more uplift than the intentionally gloomier societal-commentary pieces on the disc, but is less musically involving than some of them. In her balancing act of social consciousness with music-making, Loggins-Hull shows throughout this release that she is a skillful composer but only a commonplace thinker and analyst of societal rights and wrongs. 

     The longest work on a New Focus Recordings release of music by Noah Meites (born 1982) strains the bounds of chamber music: it is for no fewer than 19 instruments – plus four voices (two sopranos and two altos). Called Counting, the piece is more conventionally avant-garde than the works by Loggins-Hull and is much more concerned with pure musical matters. It is immersed in the pop-music world as well as that of classical music, and includes gestural material from keyboard, electric guitar and other instruments more closely associated with Prince (whose music Counting partly reflects) than with traditional chamber works. Meites tries very hard to keep the piece interesting at its considerable length (19 minutes), and if he does not quite succeed – the interjections and repeated contrasts of sonority become unsurprising after a while – he does show considerable skill in balancing the potentially unwieldy ensemble. There is a definite extramusical connection to Counting: the vocal soloists sing words from Jeremy A. Schmidt’s 2011 poem Censuspeak, which juxtaposes Census Bureau words and bits of the U.S. Constitution to attempt societal commentary. But the ensemble’s size and Meites’ approach to the instruments mean the nonmusical matter never really becomes the focus of Counting, and that is all to the good: what interest the work sustains has more to do with its elaborate instrumentation and rhythmic diversity than with anything in the verbiage. The six other pieces on the CD are more modest in scope. Cadere (a sextet performed by Brightwork New Music) is a mainly texture-focused piece whose use of pitched percussion is noteworthy. Sonance for two pianos (played by HOCKET: Sarah Gibson and Thomas Kotcheff) is one of those experimental-keyboard-sound pieces of which some modern composers are enamored: it stops and starts and stutters and alternates between regular and irregular rhythms and pace to no particular purpose. Fracture Mechanics for four saxophones (played by the New Thread Quartet) moves from sonic haze to frantic activity and back again, with intermittent elements of quiet and intensity. To Whom Shall I Tell My Grief is a set of two pieces for viola (Linnea Powell) and piano (richi valitutto, spelled without capital letters). The movement titles are similar – “Restlessly” and “Agitato” – but the actual music differs somewhat, the first movement dipping into longer lines after a disconnected opening while the second bounces around in both instruments without any apparent sense of direction or intentionality beyond the staccato. The CD ends with Voyager Golden Record for septet and fixed media electronics, its performance attributed to LA Signal Lab. Like Counting but unlike the other works on the disc, Voyager Golden Record reaches for specific extramusical meaning, its title referring to the Voyager probes’ deep-space exploration and its content including recordings related to the program, notably the words “the only home we have.” Unsurprisingly, the work seeks a sense of musical weightlessness and ethereality as it moves toward a kind of peaceful uplift. It does require knowledge of its referents to be fully effective, but has a clearer connection to its foundational inspiration than Counting or the societally focused works of Loggins-Hull. Over time, it is the inherent musicality of all these new pieces – not their attempts to force audiences to accept and endorse their composers’ thoughts beyond the realm of music – that will determine whether they receive ongoing programming placement and recording or simply become some of the heard-once-and-abandoned detritus of the avant-garde.

(++++) BACK AND FORTH, FORTH AND BACK

Jia Has a Dog Problem. By Stephanie Ellen Sy. Illustrated by Isabella Kung. Kokila. $18.99. 

     The title here tells only half the story, the second half being “Charlie Has a Kid Problem.” The total tale is Stephanie Ellen Sy’s clever balancing act about the unexplainable but nevertheless very real fear that a little girl has of dogs – and the equally unexplainable but nevertheless very real fear that a dog has of children. It is the way the two fears are shown in parallel, and the unexpected way they are resolved at the same time, that gives this book its charm – of which it has a lot. 

     The underlying premise here is that “unjustifiable” fears are every bit as real as ones rooted in reality. Helpful adults specifically ask Jia – and helpful dog friends specifically ask Charlie – whether anything has actually happened that would justify their fears. The answer in both cases is no; but the fears remain and are no less real for being irrational. 

     The dual protagonists have their own ways of trying to avoid what scares them. Before going outdoors, Jia wears kid-designed armor: oven mitts, leg guards, elbow pads, a helmet and goggles, plus a baby bib “to protect her favorite dress from dribbly drool.” The getup is imaginatively shown in Isabella Kung’s illustrations, which at the same time show Jia’s imagination working overtime as she thinks about how dogs just might “EAT HER WHOLE” if she is not suitably protected. As for Charlie, when his human, Lucy, says it is time to go out, he figures out multiple ways to be as uncooperative as possible until he eventually ends up on his belly doing passive resistance and she has to drag him out the door. 

     Inevitably, Jia and Charlie, who live in the same apartment building, are going to meet, and they do, when Charlie and Lucy are in an elevator that stops on the floor where Jia is waiting, causing her to run away as the elevator door opens and shout “TAKING THE STAIRS!!” What follows is Kung’s most-amusing illustration, in which Jia and Charlie both reimagine the unexpected encounter and think of the terrible things that could have happened, from the pup growing horns and charging to the child running wild and spinning the little dog around. 

     Jia and Charlie meet again, fearfully, outside the building, when something surprising happens: Charlie thinks Jia’s hands smell from cookies and Jia notices that Charlie’s fur looks soft. A bit later, momentarily left to look at each other, the two have the same fear reactions – initially to each other and then, suddenly, to a fast-arriving thunderstorm that quickly drenches them both and forces them to seek shelter together, since the only dry place nearby is a sidewalk bench under which they both crawl. The immediacy of the storm threat forces the two together, literally: as the downpour continues, “they inch closer and closer” until they are side by side awaiting the reemergence of the sun. And when the storm ends – the two-page wordless drawing of Jia and Charlie with a big bright rainbow in the background is the book’s most inevitable illustration – the girl and the pup have started to develop a bond that quickly strengthens to such a point that Jia accepts Charlie’s leash from Lucy and everyone walks home together, even getting into the elevator as a group despite encountering a different dog and a boy there. Clearly this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship on which both protagonists will build in the future – and clearly, for young children and the adults who will enjoy reading Jia Has a Dog Problem with them, this is a roadmap for confronting and coping with kids’ real-world fears. 

     Sy’s story has some narrative holes in it, notably the fact that Lucy, who has left Charlie tied to a fire hydrant while she goes into a store, does not come out to look for him when the storm starts and in fact does not show up at all until the cloudburst ends. Kids are likely to worry about that if they notice it – and many will. Also, Jia’s parents are nowhere to be found in the story – the people concerned about her fears are her friends and adult neighbors. Still, the absence of family is a way of showing just how alone Jia feels when trying to cope with an inexplicable but very real fear that is based not in reality but in imagination. When imagination and reality eventually meet, the pleasantly upbeat outcome is one that, while not guaranteed in real life, certainly makes Jia’s world – and Charlie’s – richer and more enjoyable, not to mention tastier and softer.