(+++) OLD VOCALS NEWLY EXPLORED

Kassianí: Hymns. Cappella Romana conducted by Alexander Lingas. Cappella Records. $19.99 (SACD).

Francesco Rasi and contemporaries: Arias. Emiliano Gonzalez Toro, tenor; Louise Pierrard, viola da gamba; Thomas Dunford, theorbo; Flora Papadopoulos, harp. Naïve. $16.99.

     Listeners tend to trace Western vocal music back to the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries, the time of Claudio Monteverdi and the beginning of opera; or somewhat further back, perhaps to Hildegard von Bingen in the 12^th century. But of course the roots of Western music go back considerably earlier: Gregorian chant, although not actually created by Pope Gregory I in the 7^th century, has been around since the 9^th or 10^th. This early music has been explored at considerable length in recent years, and performers have learned historical performance practices that have made it possible to hear and enjoy the exceptional purity and beauty of these very early works. There are other pieces of that vintage, however, that are still very little known outside specific religious celebrations, largely because they were created for the Greek Orthodox rather than Roman church. One foundation of this form of music, which is in Greek rather than Latin, is the work of a 9^th-century Byzantine abbess named Kassianí or Kassia, who is a saint in the Orthodox Church (her feast day is September 7). Kassianí wrote a considerable amount of music – about 50 of her hymns survive – and also wrote aphoristic non-liturgical poetry. The excellent and expressive voices of Cappella Romana are ideally suited to introduce the music of Kassianí to a wider audience, which is just what they do in a new recording on the ensemble’s own label. Under the sensitive and knowing direction of Alexander Lingas, the members of Cappella Romana present 10 selections of Kassianí’s music for Christmas, the Lenten Triodion, and Holy Week. Included is her best-known hymn, known in English as “Lord, the woman found in many sins,” which is chanted each year at matins on Holy Wednesday. Like other works on this revelatory SACD, this hymn requires a very wide vocal range as well as sensitivity to the slow and sorrowful mood it evokes. Several of the hymns offered on this disc are world première recordings, and the disc itself is the first in an ambitious series intended to make all of Kassianí’s surviving music available in recorded form. The grace, beauty and stylistic clarity of these works come through in genuinely uplifting fashion in these beautifully balanced performances. The disc is nevertheless one whose appeal is sure to be limited because of the focus of the material, the nature of sacred choral music in our secular age, and the unfamiliar language of the hymns (although English translations are provided in the accompanying booklet). The fact that there is a limited audience for music of such beauty and uplift says far more about modern society than it does about Kassianí and her works. For those willing to open their ears and spirits to this material, the recording will bring a high level of peace and contentment, and a feeling of connection to something beyond everyday experience – exactly as Kassianí surely intended nearly 1,200 years ago.

     It is only in contrast to music such as Kassianí’s that the works by Francesco Rasi (1574-1621) seem comparatively modern. A new Naïve recording that is just as rarefied as Cappella Romana’s, but in a different way, features tenor Emiliano Gonzalez Toro sensitively exploring arias by Rasi and his contemporaries – including a number of works written for Rasi or believed to have been performed by him. The best-known composers represented on the CD are Jacopo Peri, Carlo Gesualdo, and – most familiar by far – Monteverdi, the title role of whose L’Orfeo (1607) was explicitly written for Rasi. For the music on this disc to have its full effect, it helps to understand that Monteverdi wrote L’Orfeo and other works in whole notes (semibreves) and left it to Rasi and other singers to ornament what was essentially a bare outline. Thus, modern performances of Monteverdi’s music and other works of the same time period offer material that was essentially created by two people: the composer and the singer. Understanding this context makes it even more interesting to hear the six works on this disc that Rasi himself actually created and sang (accompanying himself on the lute or harp). Historical understanding and knowledge of performance practice are also helpful when listening to the one Monteverdi aria heard here (Quel sguardo sdegnosetto) as well as the pieces by Giuseppino del Biado, Marco da Gagliano, Giulio Cassini (two arias), Thomas Dunford, Andrea Falconieri (two arias), and Sigismondo d’India. The composers’ names will likely be unfamiliar to most audiences, although several will be known to listeners with a special interest in music of the late 16^th and early 17^th centuries. Collectively, these composers represent the crème de la crème of creators of florid, elaborately ornamented arias from the early days of opera: they are largely responsible for establishing a tradition that became so closely identified with Italian music that it was not until centuries later that Respighi and others were able to reestablish significant non-vocal music with an Italian accent. The highly idiomatic performances by Toro and his accompanists make this unusual recording a treat for listeners who want to explore the byways of early opera and 400-year-ago compositional and performance styles. The audience for the recording will inevitably be a small one, but those who find the material congenial will greatly enjoy this fascinating journey into secular vocal material of the distant past, just as those interested in the Cappella Romana disc will find themselves transported into the sacred compositions and performances of an even more distant time.

(++++) STRINGS THROUGH TIME

Beethoven: Complete Sonatas for Cello and Piano. Ailbhe McDonagh, cello; John O’Conor, piano. Steinway & Sons. $24.99 (2 CDs).

Respighi: Gli Uccelli; Suite for Strings and Flute; Melodia and Valse Caressante for Flute and Strings; Serenade for Small Orchestra. Roberto Fabbriciani, flute; Orchestra Sinfonica Abruzzese conducted by Nicola Paszkowski. Tactus. $16.99.

Vivaldi: Bassoon Concertos, Volume V—RV 467, 476, 479, 481, 486, 489, and 497. Sergio Azzolini, bassoon and conducting L’Onda Armonica. Naïve. $16.99.

Eleanor Alberga: No-man’s-land Lullaby; Shining Gate of Morpheus; Succubus Moon; The Wild Blue Yonder. Navona. $14.99.

     The communicative power of string instruments is central to classical music and has been for centuries: orchestras, and even smaller ensembles, are typically dominated by string sections, with other instruments adding color and their own forms of expressiveness. So it can be a bit surprising to realize that in some forms, strings’ prominence and independence emerged rather late. Beethoven’s five cello sonatas are instructive in this respect – and also rather neatly encapsulate the three compositional periods into which the composer’s music is generally divided. Splendid new performances by Ailbhe McDonagh and John O’Conor, released on the Steinway & Sons label, show the similarities and differences among the five sonatas particularly clearly. The first sonatas, Op. 5, Nos. 1 and 2 – in F major and G minor, respectively – are essentially piano works with cello accompaniment. O’Conor strives to provide equality of interpretative standing to McDonagh, who certainly rises to the occasion when given the opportunity, but both these two-movement pieces use the cello more for tonal color (often having it double the left-hand piano part) than for thematic or structural independence. Each work has a long first movement, with a slow introduction and then a faster main section, followed by a rather peppy second movement. These sonatas are sonically somewhat overdone in this performance, with McDonagh’s Andrea Postacchini cello postdating Beethoven’s time and possessing a highly sumptuous sound, and with O’Conor performing on a sonorous modern Steinway quite different from the pianos of Beethoven’s time. The sonic beauty carries through to the third sonata, Op. 69 in A, where it is somewhat more appropriate. Here Beethoven, now in his “middle period,” composes independent material for the cello in much the same way as in his Triple Concerto of the same time frame. This means that cello and piano are much closer to equal partners than in the first two sonatas, with both having virtuosic as well as expressive opportunities throughout the three-movement work. Lasting nearly half an hour, this is the longest of the five sonatas, and in the hands of McDonagh and O’Conor, it is spun out with elegance and a kind of restrained passion that fit it very well. Equally effective, if not more so, are the fourth and fifth sonatas, Op. 102, Nos. 1 in C and 2 in D, which date to the beginning of Beethoven’s “late period” and use the instruments quite differently from the way they are used in the earlier sonatas. These are thoughtful and inward-focused works, despite their key signatures, and here there is genuine dialogue between the instruments, which often pick up and finish each other’s phrases as if ruminating on the same thoughts. The sonorous warmth of the cello and piano used here, even if not truly authentic (especially in the piano’s case), fits the emotional underpinnings of these works quite well. And McDonagh and O’Conor seem highly attuned (so to speak) both to the music and to each other: their balance is flawless, and their pacing has a natural quality that makes it sound as if these works could not possibly be played at any other tempo. The performances on this two-CD set, recorded during the unfortunately much-diminished celebration last year of the 250^th anniversary of Beethoven’s birth, clearly show how much Beethoven still has to offer performers and listeners after two-and-a-half centuries.

     By the early 20^th century, composers were sometimes using strings, with contrasting instruments, to look back as well as forward – as Respighi did repeatedly in works derived from earlier music. Thus, the small-orchestra suite Gli Uccelli (“The Birds”) uses strings, complemented by a modest number of winds and brass plus a celesta, in an unusual form of Impressionism: the five movements draw on works by Bernardo Pasquini, Jacques de Gallot, Jean-Philippe Rameau, and Jacob van Eyck to celebrate birdsong while trying to portray avian activities in music. It is a fascinating notion, a work in which obviously imitative material is drawn from music of the 17^th and 18^th centuries but transformed, through skillful orchestration, into a work that definitely has the sound of its own time period (1928). Yet by the time of Gli Uccelli, Respighi had been down the transformative road before, not only in the first two suites of Antiche arie e danze (1917 and 1923) but also in even earlier works. The brief Serenade for Small Orchestra of 1904 is one example that is heard moderately often – and it has an interestingly Russian sound, surely influenced by Respighi’s studies with Rimsky-Korsakov. Slightly melancholy throughout, with the clarinet lending emphasis to the strings and providing contrast to them as well, the piece is pleasantly introspective – and very well played on a fascinating new Tactus recording featuring Orchestra Sinfonica Abruzzese conducted by Nicola Paszkowski. Even more intriguingly, the disc also includes two pieces of a similar type that here receive their world première recordings: Suite for Strings and Flute (1905) and Melodia and Valse Caressante for Flute and Strings (1902). These are works that show multiple influences, all filtered through Respighi’s well-wrought use of strings with woodwind contrast (flute in these cases). Melodia and Valse Caressante opens with a touch of Russian sound but in the balance of the first movement, and throughout the second, has more of a French turn-of-the-century flavor. And the Suite for Strings and Flute, against all odds, sounds positively Viennese: the start of the first of its four movements sounds astonishingly like the music that Franz Lehár was writing at precisely the same time. Here the string complement is at its warmest and most romantically, even erotically engaging, and as the suite proceeds from Badinage through Valse, Berceuse de Noël and a final enthusiastic Furlana, Respighi shows repeatedly just how well, even in this early work, he understood the emotive power of strings and the effectiveness of providing them with contrasting touches from instruments such as, in these cases, the flute.

     It is a different woodwind, the bassoon, that complements and contrasts with the strings in the 66^th Vivaldi Edition release from Naïve. This is the fifth disc in the series to be devoted to Vivaldi’s bassoon concertos, and its seven concertos bring to 33 the total number recorded in the overall sequence. The two minor-key works here – RV 481 in D minor and RV 497 in A minor – have particularly interesting first movements: RV 481’s is positively mysterious and more inward-focused than is usual in Vivaldi’s concertos, and RV 497’s is highly operatic in its dramatic unisono opening, followed by a full stop that is genuinely disconcerting. Actually, there is something special about every one of these concertos: one thing the Vivaldi Edition shows again and again is that the canard about Vivaldi’s concertos all sounding alike because of their fast-slow-fast structure simply fails to acknowledge the composer’s tremendous creativity within the basically similar arrangement of movements. The alternation of tutti and soli in the first movement of RV 467 is delightful, as is the scurrying start of the finale of RV 476. The central Largo of RV 479 shows the bassoon in particularly warm guise, while the similar tempo in RV 486 gives the instrument more of a singing quality. And the finale of RV 489 is positively ebullient. These are just some of the highlights of a CD that features absolutely first-rate playing and conducting by Sergio Azzolini – and a wonderful string ensemble, assured and historically informed, in L’Onda Armonica. Both bassoon and strings can be unashamedly playful from time to time in these concertos, and that is all to the good, showing how serious music-making can be a great deal of fun for performers and audience alike. Like so many Vivaldi Edition discs, this one is revelatory of a side of the composer that until recently remained very little explored. It also explores some less-known sides of the bassoon itself: far from being the comical instrument that it became in later years, here the bassoon is a full-fledged, fully capable woodwind whose ability to amuse is just one element of its charm – which also includes considerable lyricism and, in Vivaldi’s writing, a mixture of drama and emotional intensity.

     Emotional intensity in strings and the instruments that contrast with them is a big part of many contemporary approaches to chamber music, such as the four works of Eleanor Alberga (born 1949) on a new Navona CD. The disc opens and closes with pieces for violin and piano: No-man’s-land Lullaby (1997) and The Wild Blue Yonder (1995), both played by Thomas Bowes on violin and Alberga on piano. The other two pieces here are for string quartet plus one other instrument; both pieces are performed by Ensemble Arcadiana (Bowes and Oscar Perks, violins; Andres Kaljuste, viola; Hannah Sloane, cello). Shining Gate of Morpheus (2012) features Richard Watkins on horn; Succubus Moon (2007) has Nicholas Daniel on oboe. Although the pieces were composed (and recorded) over a 25-year period, they clearly share some characteristics. The two single-movement quintets contrast peaceful scenes with ones that are considerably more intense, using the strings for quiet and reflective settings and the contrasting solo instruments to lead the music into more-disturbed realms. Thus, Shining Gate of Morpheus has the string quartet portray the gentleness of sleep, which is then disturbed and confused by the world of dreams, in which the horn figures prominently. Succubus Moon, somewhat similarly, contrasts lunar and nocturnal tranquility – dreamy in its own way – with more-intense material representing frightening creatures of the night, the oboe taking the lead in this element of the work although the strings too take part in it. As for the violin-and-piano pieces, they show quite clearly how far the string-plus-piano combination has come since Beethoven’s time: the instruments are absolute equals, each leading parts of the material and accepting a subsidiary role elsewhere, each equally engaged in emotional reaching-out and both equal in establishing and sustaining the changing moods of the music. No-man’s-land Lullaby is unsettling and mildly dissonant at first, then increasingly disturbed and intense – no surprise, inspired as the piece is by the horrors of World War I. Even without knowing the work’s provenance, listeners will be swept into its sound world, which strongly contrasts more-relaxing material with elements that are unsettling to the point of unpleasantness. Alberga’s use of silence and near-silence is notable here, the music’s quiet passages being as emotionally fraught as its loudest ones. The Wild Blue Yonder again uses the two instruments in equivalent if not always precisely equal roles, the importance of the work’s title here being less apparent and not particularly crucial for experiencing the music: this is a work in which fragmentary material appears tentatively and uncertainly, in one instrument or the other, joining bit by bit at times and then separating again, with climactic cacophonous sections rapidly dropping into a kind of near-silence that here and elsewhere is used so carefully that it becomes a hallmark of Alberga’s style. Somewhat unusually for contemporary music, all four of these pieces make sense at their given lengths of 10 to 14 minutes, being neither truncated nor overextended: each has elements of a tone poem whose exact story may be unclear but whose arc of presentation, communicated by strings enhanced by the presence of other instruments, comes through to fine effect.

(++++) FIVES AND OTHER NUMBERS

Mahler: Symphony No. 5. Orquesta Filarmónica de Málaga conducted by José María Moreno Valiente. IBS Classical. $15.99.

Shostakovich: Symphonies Nos. 5 and 9. Concerto Budapest conducted by András Keller. Tacet. $24.99 (SACD).

Handel: Concerti Grossi, Op. 3 and Op. 6. Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin conducted by Bernhard Forck and Georg Kallweit. PentaTone. $24.99 (3 CDs).

     Most classical-music lovers will think immediately of Beethoven if someone says “the fifth symphony,” but of course Beethoven’s is not the fifth – and the number five has some associations with other composers that are also very noteworthy (so to speak). Mahler’s Fifth, the midpoint of his symphonic oeuvre, is the first work in which he moved beyond the Wunderhorn connections that had previously been pervasive in his symphonies. Shorter than his Second or Third, longer than his First or Fourth, Mahler’s Fifth is a work of such varying moods and approaches that the composer stated that it was in three parts: the first two movements; the third; and the fourth and fifth. That is very much the way José María Moreno Valiente handles Mahler’s Fifth with the Orquesta Filarmónica de Málaga in a new recording on the IBS Classical label. In some ways, this is not a very idiomatic performance: it lacks both the bite and the considerable string warmth to be found when the music is played by the top German and Austrian orchestras. But now that Mahler’s music is so much a part of the classical mainstream – a status unthinkable until the 1960s – there are more and more ways to present it, and this one is quite intriguing. The first two movements are the least convincing here, with the opening trumpet tattoo less acerbic than it can be and the funeral march somewhat less Wie ein Kondukt than in the best performances. The storms of the second movement are also a bit on the tame side, although the actual playing is first-rate. The symphony’s second part – the third movement, with its highly prominent French horn passages – is considerably more effective, presented with rhythmic clarity and paced well (Mahler worried that conductors would take it too quickly; that is not the case here). And the symphony’s third part is very fine indeed: the Adagietto is played with straightforward beauty, without overdone attempts at warmth and without trying to downplay its very deliberate naïveté, while the concluding Rondo – which has simplicity of its own – is presented with bounce, optimism, and even a touch of humor that neatly counterbalances the extreme seriousness of the symphony’s first part. This is a very well-considered and nicely played version of a Fifth that is highly significant in its composer’s ongoing symphonic development, building effectively on what came before while taking Mahler’s musical thinking in new directions.

     The Fifth served a very different purpose for Shostakovich. For years, it was one of his most popular symphonies, perhaps the most popular of all, thanks to the way its first three movements encapsulate his compositional style, while its fourth offers straightforward triumphalism without the overt gloss of Socialist Realism so dear to the rulers of the USSR. But Shostakovich’s famous statement that the work was “the reply of a Soviet artist to just criticism,” it became increasingly clear, was made under duress and out of fear, and that led to considerations of subtexts and ironies within the Fifth – and the possibility that it did not in fact reflect the composer’s thinking as either musician or human being (in contrast to the suppressed Fourth). This led to a decrease in performances and caused many conductors to try to force the work’s bright finale into an ironic mode, often through a tempo so slow that the Allegro non troppo designation came much closer to an Adagio by the end. Thankfully, it now seems that conductors – some conductors, anyway – are willing to perform Shostakovich’s Fifth as written and let listeners decide for themselves what to make of it. András Keller does just that in an exceptionally fine-sounding and excellently played Tacet recording featuring Concerto Budapest (the new name of the Hungarian Symphony Orchestra). Given Hungary’s fraught relationship with the USSR and, more recently, with Russia, it may come as something of a surprise that the musicians handle this symphony with such strength and commitment. But that is just what they do: the expansive first movement, astringent Scherzo, and broad and intense Largo are excellently paced and played, and the finale – taken most definitely at a speed in the Allegro realm – rings forth in triumph and brilliance of orchestration, none of which will prevent the audience from wondering what exactly Shostakovich was trying to say here, and what he was trying not to say. The answer to the second part of that question may be found not so much in the Fifth of 1937 but in the Ninth of 1945 – a much shorter symphony, though in five movements rather than four, and one whose poised absurdity and unexpected turns of phrase show the depth of Shostakovich’s disillusionment with the USSR and its rulers in a way that the Fifth (in any interpretation) never quite does. Keller and Concerto Budapest handle this work quite wonderfully, allowing it its moments of apparently lighthearted humor while permitting the underlying sarcasm of a supposed celebration of the end of World War II to come through at every turn. After the large-scale wartime Seventh and Eighth symphonies, Shostakovich’s Ninth is in many respects downright peculiar – and a great deal more approachable than its two predecessors. Pairing the Fifth and Ninth (and never mind any inevitable thoughts of the difference between Beethoven’s Fifth and Ninth) makes this a thoughtful recording as well as one that thoroughly plumbs the intricacies and uncertainties associated with both of these works.

     It is the number six rather than five that is prominent in much 18^th-century (and early 19^th-century) music, since works were often released in groups of half a dozen. Sometimes two sixes – that is, two half-dozens – appeared together. This explains the Op. 3 and Op. 6 Concerti Grossi by Handel, now available in splendid recordings on PentaTone, featuring Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin conducted by Bernhard Forck (Op. 6) and Georg Kallweit (Op. 3). The earlier set of these marvelously effervescent concertos is something of a mishmash, having been assembled by the publisher with little if any input from Handel himself. As a result, Op. 3 – which is sometimes referred to as a set of oboe concertos, given the prominence of that instrument in many movements – has works of very disparate character, ranging from a two-movement one to two that are in five movements. This many years after the publication of Op. 3 in 1734, the works’ provenance scarcely matters, but their many delights remain, and the 20-or-so-member ensemble (augmented as needed for the movements with recorder, flute and/or bassoon) plays every concerto with tremendous style and panache and what sounds like great delight. Indeed, the works really are delightful, even though many partake of pastiche (including movements reused from operas), and one – the two-movement No. 6 – is really an organ concerto. The Op. 3 concertos’ forms vary, with more or less focus on a solo instrument: some leave the overall impression of what we usually think of as a concerto, while others more closely resemble Baroque suites. Much the same is true of the Op. 6 concertos, whose publication had a distinct pecuniary edge to it: one reason Handel reused so much of his music in altered form (sometimes unaltered form) was that he could present it in different contexts and make more money from it than he would be using it for a single purpose. Thus, the Op. 6 concertos could function as standalone works in concerts – both professional and amateur – and could also take the place of overtures to operas or oratorios, or be used as transitions or “intermission pieces” within stage works. The Op. 6 concertos are all in multiple movements – from four to six – and contain some unusual designations, including Largo e piano, Polonaise, Larghetto e staccato, Musette, Hornpipe, and Siciliana. Individual movements can be as short as 40 seconds or as long as six minutes. Yet Handel’s characteristic style, the marvelous balance he creates among the instruments, and the verve and skill with which Akademie für Alte Musik Berlin re-creates the music, all help the distinct elements hold together wonderfully well. The sheer joy of music-making is what comes through most clearly in this very fine three-CD set, which passes along a large helping of that joy to listeners – through all the thrice six concertos presented here.

(+++) THINKING ORCHESTRALLY

Marius Constant: Turner; Brevissima; 103 Regards dans l’eau. Riverside Symphony conducted by George Rothman. Divine Art. $18.99.

Robert Pollock: Romance-Fantasy; Cygnature Piece; Entertwined; Metaphor for guitar; Chamber Setting #2; Revolution; Metaphor for vibraphone. Furious Artisans. $16.99.

Prisma, Volume 5: Music for Orchestra by Lawrence Mumford, Kevin McCarter, Samantha Sack, Alexis Alrich, Anthony Wilson, Katherine Saxon, and William Copper. Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Jiří Petrdlík and Stanislav Vavřínek. Navona. $14.99.

      The symphony orchestra remains the ne plus ultra for tonal color and communicative potential using the widest variety of sound worlds and combinations. As a result, composers continue to search for new ways to use symphonic forces for a large variety of expressive purposes – and to make a great number of points with, to and for listeners. Those points are not necessarily made in traditional concert halls: some very fine and classically trained composers are known primarily for their contributions to popular culture – Dimitri Tiomkin and Bernard Herrmann for films, for example, and Marius Constant (1925-2004) for a single work for television: the theme for The Twilight Zone. But there is considerably more to Constant than that: his ballets still garner occasional performances, and his symphonic works, on the basis of a new Divine Art release, are certainly worth the occasional hearing. The three pieces performed by the Riverside Symphony under George Rothman have very different intentions. Turner (1961), as its title is intended to indicate, is inspired by the paintings of J.M.W. Turner (1775-1851). The first movement reacts to Rain, Steam and Speed (1844) with a suitably atmospheric portrayal; the second to Self-Portrait (1799) with a focus on drama; and the third to works including Windsor Castle from the Thames (1805) and Windsor Castle from the River (c. 1807) in a style mixing the impressionistic with the suitably magisterial. Listeners unfamiliar with the specific Turner works to which Constant is reacting will hear well-proportioned music whose connections to particular topics are less than obvious. Brevissima (1992) is a more-interesting work: an entire four-movement symphony boiled down to a mere 10 minutes. The rather scattered-sounding Scherzo, placed second, is the most unusual movement; the concluding Passacaglia funèbre is the most intriguingly structured. The piece is, in truth, somewhat too compressed, hinting at the symphonic rather than actively seeking it. But, like Constant’s music in general, it shows a fine command of orchestral forces. The longest work on this disc is a four-movement violin concerto from 1981 called 103 Regards dans l’eau (“103 Poetic Celebrations of Water”), featuring violinist Olivier Charlier. Two slow movements frame two faster ones here, the violin making its primary points mainly in its top register and the work as a whole coming across as rather self-indulgent and self-consciously “modern” in sound. It is an interesting piece but not a particularly engaging one, although, again, the writing for orchestra – and for the solo instrument – is impressively self-assured. The CD offers more insight into the composer than audio recordings usually do, because it also contains video material: a discussion of the music with Rothman and archival footage of Constant, with all the video formatted for computer playback. This additional quarter-hour of material certainly broadens the scope of the almost-hour-long audio portion of the disc, although really, the music needs to speak for itself rather than through the video – and it does so, telling listeners that Constant was a skilled if perhaps not highly innovative composer who handled orchestration with considerable ability even though the underlying ideas and sounds of the works heard here are not particularly original.

     Robert Pollock (born 1946) is more determined than Constant was to evoke a highly personal sonic world, doing so not only in ensemble pieces but also in material for two performers or just one. A new CD on the Furious Artisans label makes this point through seven works created by Pollock from the mid-1970s through 2007. The most-recent piece, written for guitarist William Anderson and pianist Joan Forsyth and performed by them, is Romance-Fantasy, which features highly complex rhythms and some typically contemporary attempts to extend the sound of the participating instruments (including making the guitar into more of a percussion instrument than it actually is). Cygnature Piece (1997), played by the Cygnus Ensemble (flute, oboe, violin, cello, guitar and mandolin), consists of two movements labeled “Mysteriously” and “Dance,” the first not particularly mysterious and the second not really dancelike despite some passes at fluidity. Entertwined (2001) for two guitars (Anderson and Oren Fader) juxtaposes the instruments in some interesting ways and creates a more-varied sound palette than might be expected, although it does not sustain well enough to justify its 12-minute duration. Metaphor is offered two ways, for guitar (Anderson) in a 1995 version and for vibraphone (Nathaniel Lee) in a 1996 setting. Aside from the obvious differences of sonority between the pieces, the guitar version has greater forward momentum, the vibraphone one a greater sense of stasis, featuring extensive use of overtones. The longest work here is the three-movement Chamber Setting #2 (1980), played by the New Jersey Percussion Ensemble (xylophone, vibraphone, marimba, and enough percussion to keep two players busy). The actual sounds of the instruments are pleasant enough and are often well-combined, and there are some interesting effects (such as the use of drums at the start of the second movement); there are also some ho-hum and overdone modernistic elements (such as the spoken words and groaning sounds in that movement and elsewhere). The earliest piece here is Revolution (1976), featuring the Cygnus Ensemble in a different configuration from the one used in Cygnature Piece: here there are violin, contrabass, flute, clarinet, bassoon, horn, marimba, guitar and percussion. The instrumental mixture gives this work the greatest opportunity for aural variation and interesting combinations, but Pollock does not take any significant advantage of the very wide variety of available sounds, instead producing a thoroughly typical-for-its-time-period work that stops and starts intermittently and never quite goes anywhere in particular. Certainly Pollock, like Constant, is adept at scoring; but unlike Constant, Pollock never seems, at least in these pieces, to have any real point to make or to give any potential audience a specific reason to engage with the material.

     Listeners interested in how various contemporary composers try to reach out to audiences may want to consider Prisma, Volume 5, from Navona. Like anthology disks in general, this one showcases multiple ideas and approaches and is likely to offer some material that will appeal to fans of modern orchestral works – but is unlikely to proffer a full CD of enjoyment, simply because the works differ from each other in so many ways. Lawrence Mumford’s Adagio: Of Times and Seasons is actually paced a bit quickly by the Janáček Philharmonic Orchestra under Stanislav Vavřínek; it sounds a bit like music accompanying scene changes in a movie. Kevin McCarter’s All Along is mostly a series of contrasting sounds, speeds and moods – a bit disorganized, but often pleasant. Samantha Sack’s A Kiss in the Dark is not particularly reflective of its title, but does employ the instruments for a sense of emotional striving. Alexis Alrich’s Bell and Drum Tower, a tone poem exploring the towers built in ancient China and used for those instruments as a method of time keeping, goes beyond the strictly imitative to convey impressions of the varied circumstances that could have occurred within cities as the bells and drums marked the hours and days. Anthony Wilson’s 3 Flights of the Condor is a stages-of-life piece intended to parallel the bird’s flights during its lifetime with human experiences of growth and maturity over time – and it is the most-effective work on the disc in using the full orchestra for its warmth and lyrical potential. Katherine Saxon’s Nunatak is lyrical as well in its tonal description of ice fields and rocky outcrops. William Copper’s This Full Bowl of Roses, Part III, based on a Rainer Maria Rilke poem, is an interesting combination of Baroque form (the fugue) with a modern compositional technique created by the composer – a technique, interestingly enough, that listeners do not have to know or understand in order to make a connection with the music (a very good thing, and one all too often missing in contemporary composition). The orchestra handles all the music adeptly, with Vavřínek conducting the McCarter, Saxon and Copper works as well as Mumford’s, and Jiří Petrdlík leading the ensemble in the pieces by Sack, Alrich and Wilson. All the pieces on the CD show considerable compositional skill in terms of the handling of a large ensemble, with the effectiveness of musical narrative by Alrich, lyricism by Wilson and Saxon, and the mixing of old forms and new techniques by Copper being particularly noteworthy.