ALBUM REVIEW: The Debussy Effect from Kathleen Supové

by Maggie Molloy

Debussy’s music has a certain effect on people—a quiet way of enveloping the listener in its chromatic waves and cloudy washes of color. It’s a captivation that is difficult to put into words exactly; it’s almost as though his music softens the surrounding world and transports its listener into a hazy memory.

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New York-based pianist and performance artist Kathleen Supové explores our collective fascination with Debussy in her newest album, The Debussy Effect. No stranger to new music, Supové has carved out a name for herself in New York and far beyond as an artist who is continuously pushing the boundaries of creation, composition, and even costume in classical music.

Perhaps best known for her performing enterprise the Exploding Piano, Supové’s performances consistently feature cutting-edge new music paired with electronics, video, costumes and theatrical elements, visuals, speaking, and even choreography. The Debussy Effect, though perhaps more introspective and impressionistic in nature, boasts every bit as much personality.

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For this two-disc album Supové enlisted the talents of six composers to create brand new works inspired by Debussy and written for solo piano or piano with electronics. The resulting music spans the gamut from Gamelan to ragtime, bowed piano to ambient atmospheres, musique concrète to sound paintings, a sprinkle of stride piano—and a whole lot of sparkling virtuosity.

 

The album opens with Joan La Barbara’s “Storefront Diva, A Dreamscape,” inspired not only by Debussy but also by journals of artist and sculptor Joseph Cornell. Scored for piano and sonic atmosphere, the piece unfolds like an oceanfront dream, the hazy piano melodies twinkling amidst a tangle of bells, breath, chirping birds, ocean waves, Tibetan cymbals, and surreal storm clouds. Short flurries of bowed and plucked piano string embellishments blend the raw timbres of the piano right into the natural world around it.

It’s followed by a more cinematic (but no less dreamlike) take on Debussy: Matt Marks’ “Dr. Gradus vs. Rev. Powell.” The piece is a duel, of sorts, between Debussy’s virtuosic “Doctor Gradus ad Parnassum” and the 1955 film noir The Night of the Hunter. Lofty piano melodies dance amidst patches of Debussy’s harmonies and time-stretched clips of Robert Mitchum with Lillian Gish singing “Leaning on the Everlasting Arms.”

Eric Kenneth Malcolm Clark’s “Layerings 3” evokes the living, breathing nature of Debussy’s works: the piece layers a number of different recordings of Supové performing and interpreting the piece in full—and never the same way twice. When superimposed on one another, these distinctive recordings blend into an entire kaleidoscope of sound, the piano melodies ringing and reverberating in ever-changing harmonies and rhythmic textures.

Randall Woolf’s “What Remains of a Rembrandt” explores the elusiveness of Debussy’s music—the way it floats dreamily from one idea to the next, drawing from sources as wide-ranging as Indonesian Gamelan, early jazz, and in this case, ambient electronica. Supové’s nimble fingers dance up and down the piano keyboard in gorgeous washes of sound which valiantly defy all traditional Western notions of structure and musical form.

An electroacoustic storm gathers in Annie Gosfield’s four-movement “Shattered Apparitions of the Western Wind,” a piece which combines fragments of Debussy’s dramatic piano prelude “What the West Wind Saw” with musique concrète recordings of Hurricane Sandy, which struck New York while Gosfield was composing the work. The two sound sources are intertwined and electronically morphed, creating an eerie soundscape that oscillates between tumultuous winds and ghostly silences.

Daniel Felsenfeld’s “Cakewalking (Sorry Claude)” takes a more lighthearted approach: in three short movements he deconstructs Debussy’s famous Children’s Corner classic, “Golliwog’s Cakewalk,” and turns it into a brand new swirling, twirling jazz tune with cheeky references to the original.

The album draws to a close with Jacob Cooper’s “La plus que plus que lente,” a twinkling dreamscape which incorporates time-stretched fragments of Debussy’s dazzling waltz “La plus que lente.” Supové’s fingers glide effortlessly across the densely textured piano melodies, each note sparkling like a star amidst a glittering night sky.

In fact, the whole album glistens. Supové brings personality, precision, charisma, and boundless creativity to each work, crafting a distinctly 21st century dialogue with the unforgettable work of Debussy. Equally at home in the soothing, calming color washes as she is amidst the stormy, chromatic chaos, Supové pays tribute to Impressionist master while also exploring the furthest reaches of his musical influence.

The effect Debussy has on listeners is difficult to describe—but this pianist just may have put her finger on it.

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ALBUM REVIEW: Utah Symphony’s “Dawn to Dust”

by Geoffrey Larson

It’s always tremendously exciting when we get a premiere recording of American works for orchestra, but this release has me especially enthralled. Utah Symphony and Thierry Fischer present an immaculately conceived performance of works by three of our most prominent composers of the moment: Augusta Read Thomas, Nico Muhly, and Andrew Norman.

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Augusta Read Thomas’ Eos is subtitled Goddess of the Dawn, a Ballet for Orchestra, and presents a tableau of Greek gods and goddesses. It’s interesting to note her remarks in the liner notes, where she mentions her compositional process involves standing at a drafting table to connect with the feel of dance. The opening movement Dawn is immediately spellbinding. It subtly evokes Copland’s Quiet City at the outset, with its spare textures and timid groups of repeating notes, eschewing the richness of Ravel’s Dawn from Daphnis and Chloe. It doesn’t last long, however, as we are soon taken on a playful journey that is a true concerto for orchestra. Utah Symphony really wows in Augusta’s music: the way challenging runs pass through the entire orchestra with perfect precision and ensemble is truly something for the ears to behold, and the Soundmirror recording team has produced a wonderfully balanced and transparent capture of the performance for Reference Recordings.

Nico Muhly’s Control is also helpfully subtitled, and the Five Landscapes for Orchestra that he explores are all impressionistic representations of Utah’s stunning natural landscape. He mentions oblique references to Messiaen’s Des canyons aux étoiles, and I actually hear a lot of Messiaen in this music, from commanding brass chords that stand like massive pillars of rock to gamelan-like rhythms of pitched percussion. It’s a fascinating work, such a far evolution from Muhly’s earlier minimalist-influenced textures, although this DNA partially forms the rhythmic backbone of Beehive. It’s interesting that the fourth part, Petroglyph and Tobacco, reminds me of Copland’s most muscular, swashbuckling populist works; it’s portraying stone-carving, rock-painting, and a Ute song that was used when begging for tobacco, a distinctly different viewpoint than Copland’s American West.

Andrew Norman’s Switch is a percussion concerto that seems to follow in a creative line from Play, his earlier work that “explores the myriad ways musicians can play with, against, or apart from one another.” In this work, the percussionist appears to control the action of the orchestra like an insane puppeteer, which certain percussion instruments setting off licks one part of the orchestra, and so on. It never ceases to surprise, enthrall, or sound less than tremendously difficult. It’s an incredibly symphonic work that seems to be successful in a purely shock-and-awe way, a work that clearly says “look what a modern orchestra is capable of.” Haydn would have been terrified.

ALBUM REVIEW: Similar Motion by Momenta Quartet

by Maggie Molloy

Philip Glass, Arthur Kampela, and Claude Debussy all in one place? A momentous occasion, to be sure—or rather, a momentous quartet.

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The Momenta Quartet’s debut album “Similar Motion” features works by all three of these influential and idiosyncratic contemporary composers. And while on the surface these composers have almost nothing in common, hearing their pieces in succession reveals surprising connections. Each composer creates his own unique and utterly mesmerizing sound world from relatively minimal musical materials.

Additional connections are revealed through the mission and vision of the Momenta Quartet, which takes its name from the plural form of momentum—suggesting four individuals in motion toward a common goal. The group is comprised of violinists Emilie-Anne Gendron and Adda Kridler, violist Stephanie Griffin, and cellist Michael Haas.

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Known for its eclectic and adventurous programming, the Momenta Quartet is committed to celebrating and broadening the repertoire and responsibilities of a 21st century string quartet. They accomplish this not only through championing contemporary works, but also through collaborating with living composers, serving residencies at schools around the country, advocating for the musical avant-garde of developing nations, and most recently, through their newest annual tradition: the Momenta Festival.

The quartet’s new album is another manifestation of this mission, highlighting the depth and breadth of contemporary classical sound worlds too seldom explored.

The first of these sound worlds is Glass’s 1969 composition “Music in Similar Motion.” Originally composed for his band, the Philip Glass Ensemble, “Music for Similar Motion” is an open score which can be performed by any group of instruments—on this album, Momenta presents the first ever all-string recording of the iconic work.

For a composer who once spent three years studying counterpoint with the French music instructor extraordinaire Nadia Boulanger, Glass does something surprisingly counterintuitive in this piece: he has all five parts moving in the same direction, and in constant rhythmic unison. Violinist Cyrus Beroukhim joins the Momenta Quartet to bring the piece to life in all its shimmering string glory.

Informed by his interpretation of rhythmic structure in Indian music, the score consists of 34 numbered melodic fragments with an indeterminate number of repeats cued by one of the performers—thus allowing a flexible duration and a refreshing sense of freedom for the musicians to lose themselves in the dizzying trance. Momenta performs the work with precision and drama, crafting an infectious 15-minute homage to the master of minimalism.

The piece is followed by a much more thematically complex (though much lesser-known) work: Kampela’s 1998 composition “Uma Faca Só Lâmina” (“A Knife All Blade”). Originally composed as part of Kampela’s doctoral dissertation at Columbia University, the piece’s title takes its name from a poem by the Brazilian constructivist poet João Cabral de Melo Neto.

Kampela expresses the visceral urgency and poignant sorrow of this famous poem through his use of extended techniques and cluttered musical textures. The piece is something like organized chaos: claustrophobic, overwhelming, and inescapable—but at the same time unimaginably meticulous.

In fact, the score for the piece begins not with the music itself but with three pages of detailed performance notes. Within the piece’s five continuous movements, Kampela leaves no musical idea unexplored: quarter tones, harmonics, extended techniques, bouncing bows, left-hand pizzicato, percussive elements, metric modulation, and a whole array of new articulatory techniques make up just a few of the piece’s musical idiosyncrasies—and Momenta doesn’t miss a beat.

Debussy’s String Quartet in G Minor, Op. 10 provides a melodic reprieve from the intensity and rhythmic showmanship of Kampela’s piece, though the piece is no less virtuosic in its textural effects. Written in 1893, the piece was one of Debussy’s first major successes as a composer, showcasing his unparalleled ear for timbral color. With a mere four string instruments, he manages to craft a shimmering soundscape filled with glistening colors and vivid textures.

And although each of the four movements takes on a different character, all of them are connected through reoccurring musical themes and broader influences, such as the art of the French Impressionists and the music of the Javanese gamelan. Momenta is equally at-home in these softly blended sonic landscapes, gliding through each movement with graceful fingers and heartfelt expression.

In the end, Glass, Kampela, and Debussy represent three very different realms of classical music. But as contemporary innovators and artists, each composer crafts his own enigmatic and idiosyncratic sound world, fully immersing the listener in the music of the moment.

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ALBUM OF THE WEEK: Lou Harrison’s La Koro Sutro

by Rachele Hales

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“Old Granddad” sounds like something you might ask a bartender to mix up, but it’s actually what you get when you manipulate scrap metal, trash cans, and oxygen tanks into a percussion instrument played with baseball bats.  Given its resemblance to a gamelan it is often also referred to as an “American Gamelan,” but I think we can all agree that “Old Granddad” is a much cooler name.  It was built by Lou Harrison and his partner William Colvig and is heard throughout Harrison’s Suite for Violin with American Gamelan and La Koro Sutro.  So what does this thing sound like, anyway?  I’m so glad you asked!  Pretty much like gongs and chimes, turns out.

 

Harrison’s Suite for Violin with American Gamelan opens with a haunting folk melody before morphing into what Harrison calls “stampedes” in recognition of the “lively and unrelenting rhythms” used to reflect Balinese dance.  The final Chaconne of the suite brings the entire piece to a peaceful, dreamy conclusion.  Harrison successfully fuses his strong Asian influence with a Western compositional attitude in this suite, and the CD only gets sweeter from here.

La Koro Sutro is the second piece on this album and translates from Esperanto as “The Heart Sutra,” which is one of the most beloved and famous sutras of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition and describes the path one must take to achieve the pure distillation of wisdom (Nirvana).  Harrison’s use of Esperanto, the most widely-spoken constructed language in the world, is a clear social and political statement reflecting his hope for a united world and the transcendence of ethnic & national boundaries.

While the suite on this disc is lovely, this reviewer was utterly captivated by the title track La Koro Sutro, largely because of the astounding choral performance by The Providence Singers.  The warmth and precision they bring to this recording cannot be overstated, especially in “5a Paragrafo” where, in the text, The Bodhisattva (enlightenment being) reaches total tranquility & euphoria and will stay there forever.  Do I understand Esperanto?  No.  Am I educated about Buddhism?  Not really.  But I learned what pure bliss sounds like the moment “5a Paragrafo” hit the 1:30 mark.  On their website The Providence Singers describe the selection this way: “It is in a six-note B-minor scale — the E-natural is left out as it would be out of tune in justly tuned syntonon diatonic.”  Since I don’t know what any of that means I can only describe it as…  glowing.

La Koro Sutro concludes with a return to the original Sanskrit text and heavy emphasis on the deeper sounds of Old Granddad (created by whacking oxygen tanks with baseball bats – don’t try it at home!) as well more of the gorgeous plinking heard throughout the entire sutra.   Lou Harrison said that “making an instrument is one of music’s greatest joys,” and this reviewer is very grateful for his contribution.  La Koro Sutro is a rewarding album for patient listeners and makes me want to bring 1995 back so I can just lay on my floor and listen to it all day.

Go here to purchase the album, performed by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Gil Rose!