ALBUM REVIEW: Missy Mazzoli’s Vespers for a New Dark Age

Posted on March 30, 2015 by maestrobeats

by Jill Kimball
These days, there’s not much room for mystery. Thanks to technology, we can learn someone’s whole life story on the internet before a first date. We can walk the streets of far-flung cities without leaving the couch. There’s even a machine that connects with our brains and sketches out visual scenes from our dreams.

Composer Missy Mazzoli wonders whether there’s still room for the supernatural in our increasingly technological world, which she calls a “new dark age.” She explores that question in her latest album, Vespers for a New Dark Age.

In the last Dark Ages, we marveled in the mystery of a higher power and prayed in music-centered vesper services at church. Mazzoli’s album places the traditional vesper service in a 21st-century context, using contemporary poetry instead of liturgical readings, and mixing electronic music with human-powered sounds, including vocals by Roomful of Teeth, instrumentals by her orchestra Victoire, and percussion by Wilco drummer Glenn Kotche.

The resulting sound is wonderfully otherworldly, borrowing the best aspects of liturgical choral music, avant-garde electronica, and new age, and tying them all together. One of Missy Mazzoli’s greatest strengths as a composer is her ability to paint a unique, vivid musical picture, and she has certainly done that here.

Another of her strengths is finding original, incredibly thought-provoking text to set to music. Here, she has set excerpts of pointedly secular poems by Matthew Zapruder, which juxtapose oddly but beautifully with the rigid structure of a musical church service.

Zapruder clearly believes our gradual departure from the rituals and mysteries of religion is directly related to advancements in technology. He dismisses as archaic the idea that his thoughts and actions have cosmic consequences. Yet he still acknowledges that there’s some comfort in believing in the supernatural, especially in difficult times. (“Come on all you ghosts, / we need you, winter is not / through with us.” And, “I know you can hear me / I know you are here / I have heard you cough / and sigh.”)

Over the course of eight movements, the sounds of three ethereal vocalists combine with a few instrumental musicians and a bit of electronically-produced mixing to ask a question: what happens when spirituality meets technology? The answer is fuzzy, but some things are certain: In this age, we’re less inclined to accept mystery. But when life gets hard, or when we’re so mired in technology that we forget about human relationships (“I need things / no one can buy / and don’t even know / what they are”), we’d still like to believe there’s something out there that’s bigger than us.

That something doesn’t necessarily have to be a deity. It could just be a great piece of music…like this one.

ALBUM REVIEW: Ólafur Arnalds’ “The Chopin Project”

Posted on March 23, 2015 by maestrobeats

by Rachele Hales

Ólafur Arnalds popped up on my radar in 2009 when he started a project of writing a new composition every day for a week and immediately made each one available online. The compositions were later officially released in the collection “Found Songs.” He did not undertake the same experiment for his latest release, The Chopin Project, instead teasing his fans with mysterious updates via Twitter along with his coconspirator/barefoot pianist extraordinaire, Alice Sara Ott. For Arnalds fans the waiting was agony, but all good things…

As a youngster playing in hardcore/metal bands, Arnalds frequently visited his grandmother and was exposed to classical music in her home. “She would always make me listen to Chopin,” he writes in the liner notes, “if it had been my parents forcing classical music down my throat at that time in my life I probably would have puked on their face. But, I guess out of respect for my grandmother, I always listened with her and slowly it started to grow on me.” After his grandmother passed away the Chopin-shaped fragment of his heart was aching to be expressed.

All Chopin recordings sounded the same to him. With nearly all classical recordings focused on capturing a perfect performance and using technology to process that performance into something so polished it no longer feels authentic, Arnalds questioned why technology itself was never used as part of the interpretation. “Why can’t the microphones, the room – the sound – also be a performer? Why would all of these factors need to stay invisible? And why would a ‘good’ classical piano sound naturally have to be the silvery, brilliant concert grand sound that we have on classical recordings today [when] we know that pianos of the 19th century sounded so very different?” Armed with a pocketful of excellent questions and a mission to break the norm, he partnered with Ott and together they explored Reykjavik searching for vintage recording equipment, unusual pianos, and venues that would act as performers themselves in Arnalds & Ott’s interpretations. Then came the recording.

“Verses” is our introduction to the album. It’s a new composition by Arnalds that borrows from Chopin’s “Piano Sonata No. 3 (Largo),” which immediately follows as track 2. You know how when you were in junior high sometimes you bought a new album that you loved so much you didn’t even want to tell anyone about it? You just locked your door and stayed in your bedroom all night, lying in your bed, reading the liner notes, listening to the album over and over? “Verses” is exactly like that. It is intimate and sad with the trademark Arnalds atmosphere and makes you just want to stay inside journaling for hours and hours.

The entire album has that quality – it’s just one glorious, delicate piece after another. From the gentle shoosh-shoosh in “Reminiscence” (during which there’s a point where you can even hear a performer taking in breath) to the distant chatter and rainfall heard in “Nocturne in G Minor,” the recordings make the listener feel close to the piano – in the same room, even – and so very close to the music. Several tracks use Chopin as a jumping off point, which turns the album as a whole into a dreamlike story arc you wish would never end.

Be sure to purchase this album if you like what you hear!

ALBUM REVIEW: Michael Gordon’s “Dystopia”

Posted on March 9, 2015 by maestrobeats

by Maggie Stapleton

Of all the modern late 20^th and early 21^st century repertoire out there, it can take a lot to stand out. Bang on a Can co-founder Michael Gordon’s Dystopia succeeds, particularly in two of the areas Second Inversion loves to focus on – rethinking the past and paying homage.

The title track is one of many collaborative projects between Michael Gordon and filmmaker Bill Morrison. They all encapsulate the aura of cities (Los Angeles as the focus here) and in all of these works the music is composed first and the film is conceptualized to fit the score. Bill’s video combines new and old footage from the streets of Los Angeles, as far back as some 1898 footage by Thomas Edison! Here’s an excerpt, courtesy of Cantaloupe Records:

Even without the film, Dystopia provides a “choose your own adventure” visual experience. I recommend you press play, close your eyes, and let the expansive color palette create a journey – whether it’s 90mph traffic ride through LA, a ride on a New York City subway, a motorcycle ride on winding mountain roads. The possibilities are endless.

It truly is a ride that is full speed ahead for eight and a half solid minutes, winds down for a few minutes, and revs back up, ebbing and flowing (like traffic and bumps in the road that slow us down. Flat tire? Overheated engine? We’ve all been there..) throughout the piece.

Gordon combines sounds and textures that offer freshness to the orchestral repertoire. He “explores the gray areas between harmony and dissonance,” which comes to me as enhanced, nuanced, and varied sounds for the orchestra. It’s the most exciting and engaging 30 minutes of music I’ve experienced in a long time.

Many composers pay tribute to those who have inspired or taught them. Gordon says, “Beethoven’s brutish and loud music has always inspired me… At the time it was written, it was probably the loudest music on the planet.” Rewriting Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony was a commission from the Beethovenfest Bonn in 2006 and Gordon utilized one element from each of the original symphony: “From the first movement, I couldn’t resist working with the huge barbaric opening chords. From the second movement, I took the divine and other-worldly theme, adjusting it slightly so that when it ends, it is in a key one half-step higher. The theme continues to cycle around and slowly spirals up. From the third movement, I lifted the background accompaniment and brought it to the foreground. From the fourth movement I used the main theme.”

This homage to Beethoven is so curiously engaging. The retained elements are very apparent from the first chord, which is totally a “fooled ya!” moment as it meows down to dissonance. Throughout the entire piece, the push & pull and transformation of the themes and harmonies fight my ears to hear Beethoven’s original in Gordon’s re-write. It’s as if the notes were tossed up in the air with excellent care, floating and mingling with one another, crisscrossing to land in brand new worlds of musical excitement. I highly recommend this mind-bending piece for an eyebrow-raising, intriguing listening experience.

For a Michael Gordon bonus, I would be remiss without redirecting you to our in-studio performance by Bang on a Can All-Star, Ashley Gordon:

ALBUM REVIEW: “MONTAGE: Great Film Composers and the Piano”

Posted on March 2, 2015 by maestrobeats

by Maggie Molloy

As award season comes to a close, film composers tend to fall out of the limelight—they collect their sparkling Oscars and, presumably, they return to their studios to begin work on their next major motion picture film scores. But what do these famous composers do on their days off from the movie set? What music do they write after the credits stop rolling?

Renowned concert pianist Gloria Cheng asked just that.

Cheng invited six of today’s most prominent film composers to create new music for a relatively unfamiliar medium—solo piano. In doing so, she stripped away the glamorous movie stars, the booming studio orchestra, and all the Hollywood movie magic to reveal who these composers are deep down as their most honest and intimate selves.

(purchase the album here!)

Her new album, titled “Montage: Great Film Composers and the Piano” is a collection of solo piano works by esteemed film composers John Williams, Randy Newman, Bruce Broughton, Alexandre Desplat, Michael Giacchino, and Don Davis. Collectively, the composers have amassed 72 Oscar nominations and nine wins (so far).

“All of these composers are so well-known for writing film music, but I knew there was an inner composer inside of all of them that just was dying to write music for the sake of writing music,” said Cheng. “That’s what I was curious about—what’s inside of them?”

The result is an album of piano music with subtle cinematic hints and a whole lot of heart.

The album begins with Bruce Broughton’s “Five Pieces for Piano,” a set of short character pieces each with its own distinct personality. At the center of the composition is a set of charming (and sometimes jazzy) variations on a catchy pentatonic theme. The surrounding pieces experiment with dense musical textures, punchy rhythms, energetic runs, and at times, tender lyrical melodies. Needless to say, it shows quite a different musical side of Broughton than you may have heard in his adventurous, wild Western-tinged “Silverado” score.

The second piece is Michael Giacchino’s “Composition 430.” Perhaps best known for his work in movies like “Star Trek” (the 2009 version), “Up,” “Ratatouille,” and a slew of other Pixar films, Giacchino’s solo piano piece captures a similar element of enchanting adventure and whimsical childhood nostalgia.

As one might expect, “The Matrix” film composer Don Davis’s contribution to the album is somewhat more mathematical (and perhaps even metaphysical) in nature. His piece, titled “Surface Tension,” uses a carefully calculated formula as a starting point from which he explores a narrative arc of increasing and decreasing tempo, dynamic, and pitch range.

French composer Alexandre Desplat’s “L’Étreinte” (from his “Trois Études”) shows unmistakable Impressionist influences, with its artfully blended harmonies immersing the listener in a beautiful, dreamlike wash of sound that flows sweetly from beginning to end. It should come as no surprise that Desplat is the composer behind charming, whimsical films like “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” and “Moonrise Kingdom.”

What is perhaps more unexpected is John Williams’s contribution to the album, “Conversations.” With a dizzying number of Oscar nominations (and wins) for movies like “Jaws,” “Star Wars,” “E.T.,” and the first three “Harry Potter” films, most listeners would probably expect Williams to spin out some type of catchy, theatrical theme. Instead, the four-movement piano work is something of a concept piece exploring a series of imagined conversations between various historical figures from different eras. The result is every bit as dramatic and idiosyncratic as the film music Williams is known for—but just a little bit jazzier.

The album comes to a close with Randy Newman’s soulful and sincere “Family Album: Homage to Alfred, Emil and Lionel Newman,” a five-movement work written in memory of his famous film composer uncles. Each movement is a short anecdote, a small glimpse into the sparkling glamour and sweet nostalgia of old Hollywood. The pieces match Newman’s trademark style: simple, sweet, and charmingly poignant (and certainly reminiscent of his work in “Toy Story,” “Monsters, Inc.,” and other Pixar films).

And of course, Cheng performs each piece with exceptional imagination and artistry, bringing each character to life with sincerity and technical prowess—and proving that the music of these famous film composers is not just for the movie theatre.

ALBUM REVIEW: Yolanda Kondonassis and Jason Vieaux’s “Together”

Posted on February 23, 2015 by maestrobeats

by Maggie Molloy

Photo Credit: Laura Watilo Blake

The harp may be among the oldest musical instruments—dating back to at least as early as 3500 BCE in Ancient Mesopotamia—but that doesn’t mean an old instrument can’t learn new tricks.

Renowned classical harpist Yolanda Kondonassis recently joined forces with Grammy Award-winning classical guitarist Jason Vieaux to record an album of new music which pushes beyond the limits of simply classical. The album, titled “Together,” explores the vivid colors and rich textures of contemporary repertoire for harp and guitar by showcasing works by five composers from diverse musical backgrounds.

(Purchase on Amazon or iTunes)

The result is a vibrant program of music which travels seamlessly from lush melodies to simple folk dances to Argentine tango and even the modal tonalities of traditional Asian music. Some of the pieces even use unique harp effects such as pedal glisses, whistles, harmonics, “washboard” strumming, and percussive knocking on the soundboard.

“Contemporary effects are becoming far more common in today’s harp writing as composers try, I think, to search for new ways of expressing the harp idiom,” Kondonassis said. “In my opinion, the best harp writing occurs when the effects enhance the musical ideas and seem natural. It’s also up to me to make the effects sound seamless in the context of the music.”

The duo’s distinctive instrumentation allows their sound to blend and contrast, creating a wide variety of musical textures and timbres.

“I think a well-written piece by a composer who understands the two instruments will create great blend, contrast, dialogue, color—everything that makes chamber music work,” Vieaux said. “It’s really there in the compositions—we just have to bring it out.”

The pieces also provided a unique opportunity for each musician to explore new colors within their own instrument. Kondonassis even got the chance to add some pizzazz to an otherwise angelic pizzicato instrument.

“As a harpist, I’ve always been obsessed with trying to make my sound as warm as possible. It’s so refreshing for me to play off Jason’s warmth sometimes and be the spice, the acidic texture in the mix for a change,” Kondonassis said. “Sound-wise, I really opened up on this recording in ways I’m not sure I have before.”

The album begins with a performance of Argentine composer Máximo Diego Pujol’s four-movement “Suite Mágica,” a charming and romantic piece which takes much of its style, rhythms, and musical forms from the Argentine dance tradition. A guitarist himself, Pujol’s piece fuses elements of the classical idiom with vibrant Latin influences, transitioning flawlessly from gentle, lyrical melodic lines to vivacious rhythmic patterns.

The piece is followed by a beautifully contrasting work: Spanish composer Xavier Montsalvatge’s “Fantasia.” Amazingly diverse in its rhythmic and melodic content, the piece creates a dynamic and strikingly poetic conversation between the two instruments. The three contrasting movements illustrate an eclectic exploration of whimsicality and drama, occasionally even venturing outside of traditional tonal harmony to keep the listener hanging on every note.

The duo switches gears for Alan Hovhaness’ Sonata for Harp and Guitar (“Spirit of Trees”), an ethereal five-movement work which explores themes of nature, mysticism, and meditation. The piece’s frequent use of modal tonalities reflects the composer’s interest in traditional Asian music and philosophy, an influence which gives his music a tranquil, calming quality.

The album also includes two world premiere recordings of works commissioned by Kondonassis and Vieaux: Gary Schocker’s “Hypnotized” and Keith Fitch’s “Knock on Wood.” Schocker, a harpist himself, was inspired by the diverse musical textures made possible by pairing a string instrument capable of using vibrato with one that is not. His five-movement suite explores the vast possibilities of this unique instrumentation, ranging from lively, enchanting motifs to long, lush, and lyrical melodies.

Fitch’s “Knock on Wood” is probably the least traditional composition on the album. As the title suggests, the piece incorporates a wide range of percussive and rhythmic effects, making it a fascinating and fully captivating exploration of the sonic diversity of guitar and harp.

The composition is the perfect ending to a truly innovative album, offering a dazzling glimpse into the vast musical possibilities of this instrumental combination as Kondonassis and Vieaux continue their collaboration.