ALBUM REVIEW: ORBIT: Music for Solo Cello (1945-2014)

Posted on August 17, 2015 by maestrobeats

What do Jimi Hendrix guitar solos, György Ligeti sonatas, Shakespeare sonnets, and Spanish sarabandes all have in common? Each of them appears in one form or another on cellist Matt Haimovitz’s latest release, “Orbit: Music for Solo Cello (1945-2014).”

Sprawling in scope, “Orbit” is a three-disc compilation of music for solo cello featuring works by over 20 contemporary composers, 15 of whom are still living. The ambitious solo album is also one of the first releases on the new Pentatone Oxingale Series. This innovative new project is a collaboration between the Dutch classical music label PENTATONE and Haimovitz’s own trailblazing artists’ label Oxingale Records, which he created in 2000 with his partner in life and music, composer Luna Pearl Woolf.

Clocking in at a hefty 3 hours and 45 minutes, the album features solo works that Haimovitz initially released on Oxingale as five thematic albums: “Anthem” (2003), “Goulash!” (2005), “After Reading Shakespeare” (2007), “Figment” (2009), and “Matteo” (2011). The album also includes two newly-recorded works: Philip Glass’s “Orbit” and a new arrangement by Woolf of the Beatles’ “Helter Skelter.”

Over the course of three discs, Haimovitz takes the listener on a musical odyssey through time and space, from minimalism to maximalism, tonal to atonal, folk to avant-garde, abstract to narrative, and everything in between.

The album begins with the title track, Philip Glass’s “Orbit.” Warm and achingly tender melodies evolve softly over the course of this seven-minute solo work, and Haimovitz crafts each note gorgeously.

He tackles a very different style of contemporary classical in his performance of Luciano Berio’s “Sequenza XIV,” a virtuosic piece with mesmerizing rhythms inspired by Sri Lankan drumming. Haimovitz bows, plucks, taps, twangs, slides, scrapes, and soars through a number of extended techniques before settling into silence.

Another memorable moment on the album is György Ligeti’s Sonata for Violoncello Solo, a piece Haimovitz worked directly with Ligeti himself to learn. The piece’s modal melodies and Hungarian profile make clear the influence of Bartók and Kodály, and Haimovitz brings out the complex polyphonic counterpoint beautifully. It is followed by a performance of Du Yun’s “San,” a piece which weaves musical fragments of Eastern mysticism and meditation into a mesmerizing yet haunting sound world.

Haimovitz also takes a crack at some contemporary popular music: the album includes his own cello arrangement of Jimi Hendrix’s famous “Star-Spangled Banner” performance at Woodstock. He snarls, growls, and wails through the Hendrix classic so convincingly that you’d almost expect him to have a whammy bar hidden somewhere on his cello. Haimovitz also takes on the Beatles’ loud, wild, and raunchy proto-metal anthem, “Helter Skelter.”

Over the course of disc two Haimovitz glides through the dramatic and dense melodies of Elliott Carter’s “Figment” (Nos. 1 and 2), the ethereal whispers of Salvatore Sciarrino’s “Ai Limiti Della Notte,” and the gorgeous cantabile lyricism of Luigi Dallapiccola’s “Ciaccona, Intermezzo e Adagio.”

But the most sentimental piece on the album is Woolf’s “Sarabande.” Derived from the Baroque Spanish dance form, the piece is also named after Haimovitz and Woolf’s child, who was lost mid-term in utero. The poignant and pensive work is both delicate and passionate, and Haimovitz brings it to life with remarkable timbral detail.

The third disc features three suites inspired by literature. The first is Ned Rorem’s “After Reading Shakespeare,” a suite in which each movement is based on a quotation from a Shakespearean play or sonnet—and the nine movements explores the romance, beauty, and balance of Shakespeare’s poetry without using a single word.

Inspired by Rorem’s work, Haimovitz commissioned two new suites based in literature by Pulitzer Prize-winning composers Paul Moravec and Lewis Spratlan. Moravec’s “Mark Twain Sez” takes the witty words of Mark Twain as the basis for an eight-movement exploration into the human condition, exploring themes of dreams, love, humor, insanity, mystery, and more.

The album comes to a close with Spratlan’s four-movement “Shadow,” a surreal musical reflection which takes the symbolist poetry of Rimbaud to a whole new world.

Because in the end, the musical possibilities for solo cello are about as numerous as the stars in the sky—and Haimovitz puts them all into “Orbit.”

Matt Haimovitz and Christopher O’Riley, from our field trip to the Tractor Tavern in Seattle on February 2, 2015

ALBUM REVIEW: Seattle Symphony “Dutilleux”

Posted on August 10, 2015 by maestrobeats

by Maggie Molloy

The Seattle Symphony is no stranger to contemporary classical—earlier this year they earned a Grammy Award for their breathtaking recording of John Luther Adams’ innovative masterpiece “Become Ocean.” Over the years they have garnered international acclaim for their innovative programming, commissioning of new works, and extensive recording history—and they’re certainly not slowing down anytime soon.

The Seattle Symphony’s latest contemporary classical endeavor is a three-disc, multi-year recording project of all the orchestral works by the late French composer Henri Dutilleux. This August, they are releasing Volume 2 of “Dutilleux,” featuring a studio recording of the violin concerto “L’arbre des songes” (“The Tree of Dreams”) with violinist Augustin Hadelich and gorgeous live performances of “Métaboles” and Symphony No. 2 (“Le double”).

Under the directorship of French conductor Ludovic Morlot, the Symphony brings passionate virtuosity and drama to Dutilleux’s vividly colorful orchestration. In fact, Dutilleux’s refined ear for aural color and texture has led many to characterize him as the principal heir of Debussy and Ravel in the line of influential French composers. His music extends the legacy of these earlier composers while also adding a little more bite; his music’s rhythmic verve, dramatic urgency, and unapologetically frequent use of dissonance show clear ties to Bartók and Stravinsky.

But like the Impressionists, Dutilleux was also very inspired nature. His five-movement “Métaboles,” written in 1964, takes its title from the Greek metabolos, meaning “changeable.” Dutilleux cited the primary inspiration for the piece being the constant flux and ceaseless flow of nature—the ongoing transformations and metamorphoses of organic life.

The piece unfolds in five connected movements which musically imitate these evolutions. Each of the first four movements features a different family of instruments—woodwinds, strings, brass, and percussion—allowing the Symphony to fully showcase its incredible breadth of musical talent. From the straining sonorities of the first movement to the sweet lyricism of the second, from the jazzy brass of the third to the pointillist palpitations of the fourth, the Symphony passes through each transformation seamlessly. The wildly chaotic fifth movement brings the entire orchestra back together in a bold and thunderous finale.

Next on the album is Dutilleux’s 1985 violin concerto “L’arbre des songes” (“The Tree of Dreams”) featuring violinist Augustin Hadelich. Dutilleux strays from the typical three-movement concerto form, instead opting for four movements connected by three interludes. Hadelich flies furiously up and down the fingerboard through each of the four distinct movements, showcasing his stunning technique and beautiful tone.

The first movement is rich with gorgeous, long-breathed melodies that shoot straight up into the stratosphere. The second movement skitters and jitters across restless rhythms before transitioning to the wistful and rhapsodic dream that is the third movement. The piece ends with a wildly theatrical fourth movement that showcases Dutilleux’s brilliant orchestration and bold style. Each of the wide-ranging movements are connected by strikingly imaginative interludes—listen for the third, in which Dutilleux actually composed an episode that is meant to sound as if the orchestra is tuning and warming up!

“All in all,” Dutilleux wrote in a preface to his score, “the piece grows somewhat like a tree, for the constant multiplication and renewal of its branches is the lyrical essence of the tree.”

Evolution is a key theme of Dutilleux’s “Le double” symphony as well. He strayed from the standard symphonic procedure of juxtaposing musical themes, instead creating his symphony from the variation and transformation of short musical ideas. He also made innovative use of the orchestral timbres: within the full ensemble he created a smaller group of 12 instruments—oboe, clarinet, bassoon, trumpet, trombone, timpani, harpsichord, celesta, two violins, viola, and cello—creating in a sense two orchestras, hence the title “Le double.”

Written in 1959, the piece is reminiscent of a modern-day concerto grosso, but unlike the traditionally Baroque form, in “Le double” the smaller ensemble acts as a mirror or ghost of the larger one, creating a fascinatingly complex and richly textured musical panorama.

“I endeavored to avoid the stumbling block of the somewhat archaic form,” Dutilleux said. “The 12 musicians of the smaller orchestra considered separately do not constantly play the role of soloists; it is the mass they form that constitutes the solo element. This mass does not merely confront and dialogue with the larger formation, but at times fuses with, or superimposes itself upon the latter, leaving ample opportunity for polyrhyhthmics and polytonality.”

The Seattle Symphony dances with precision and grace through the dense textures and intertwined solos of the first movement, the delicately colored timbres and haunting lyricism of the second, and finally the convulsive rhythms and fascinating orchestration of the third. The piece ends with a deeply contrasting passage of slowly changing sonorities which spread up and down the orchestra’s pitch range before settling into a serene silence.

And after the full album’s 75 minutes of mesmerizing harmonies, remarkably complex rhythms, and brilliantly colored orchestral textures, that silence sounds beautifully crafted.

ALBUM REVIEW: Some Places Are Forever Afternoon by Wayne Horvitz

Posted on August 3, 2015 by maestrobeats

by Maggie Molloy

“When you start to write, you carry to the page one of two attitudes, though you may not be aware of it,” wrote the Pacific Northwest poet Richard Hugo. “One is that all music must conform to the truth. The other, that all truth must conform to music.”

Hugo was a proponent of the latter. The quote comes from “The Triggering Town,” his 1979 book of lectures and essays on poetics. Throughout the essays he advocates an approach to poetry based on “triggering” subjects and words. According to Hugo, triggering subjects help the poet enter into the realm of the imagination—they enable the poet to explore, to seek the unknown, and to create without limitation.

This unique notion of triggering was one of the things that inspired Seattle-based composer and pianist Wayne Horvitz to explore Hugo’s poetry through music. His latest album, titled “Some Places Are Forever Afternoon,” is a collection of 12 instrumental compositions inspired by Hugo poems. There is one major difference, though: Horvitz uses no words.

“This was something entirely new for me, to accept this concept that it’s not the poem at all—there are no words in it,” Horvitz said of the project. “But it is some kind of reincarnation musically of the poem.”

The album features a musical amalgamation of two of Horvitz’s quartets: the jazz troupe Sweeter than the Day and the contemporary classical chamber group the Gravitas Quartet. On the album, Horvitz plays piano, organ, and electronics alongside cornetist Ron Miles, bassoonist Sara Schoenbeck, cellist Peggy Lee, guitarist Tim Young, bassist Keith Lowe, and drummer Eric Eagle.

Each piece unfolds slowly and patiently, much like Hugo’s poetry. Borrowing from jazz, classical, electronic, and improvised musical styles, Horvitz evokes the frayed landscapes, the rural stillness, and the compressed images present in much of Hugo’s work.

“[With this record] I was a little more willing to let the ideas develop in a certain way, to let each phrase lead quietly to the next phrase—because he does that a lot in his poems, they unfold slowly in a really beautiful way,” Horvitz said.

Each piece gets its title from one of the lines in a corresponding Hugo poem—whichever line triggered Horvitz. As for the album’s title track, “Some places are forever afternoon” is a line from a poem which appears at the end of the album.

“Words are the same as music,” Horvitz said. “You love a phrase and it gets stuck in your head and you want to hear it again. That’s the way I felt about that line—I just wanted to hear it over and over again.”

From the melancholy calm of “Money or a story” to the moody dissonance and despondency of “you drink until you are mayor,” each piece comes from a different place, a different story, a different poem.

Many of Hugo’s poems were inspired by small towns and odd places he visited—seemingly dreary dwellings where he found a sparkle of inspiration. Horvitz’s “those who remain are the worst” embodies a slow and contemplative atmosphere with soft, soulful glimmers of hope shining through the cornet and guitar solos. “Nothing dies as slowly as a scene” is brimming with Americana nostalgia, at times even evoking the groove of a jukebox before the scene burns out.

“I like to imagine what people’s lives are like,” Horvitz said of his compositional process. “And that’s exactly what Hugo did. He’d go into a town and hang out in a café or a bar, and he wasn’t concerned with his poetry being accurate, he was just concerned with where his imagination went. But he took inspiration from the people he saw and the places he went—and I think that’s something we have in common.”

Horvitz’s “in some other home” brings to mind a rustic, rural landscape—a quiet and unassuming gem of a town. A gently glimmering piano riff opens this charming and sweet little tune before the piece leisurely wanders through a string of solos.

The longest piece on the album is “The car that brought you here still runs,” a piece inspired by Hugo’s most famous poem, “Degrees of Gray in Philipsburg.” The piece drifts through a delicate opening chorale before shifting through free jazz improvisations and chamber music stylings. Listen for the charming piano and cello theme about halfway through—Horvitz counts it as one of the loveliest moments on the album.

But there are plenty of memorable moments on this record; each piece is brimming with nostalgia for both real and imagined landscapes. Although according to Hugo, the music is more important than the reality anyway.

“Besides,” Hugo wrote, “If you feel truth must conform to music, those of us who find life bewildering and who don’t know what things mean, but love the sounds of words enough to fight through draft after draft of a poem, can go on writing—try to stop us.”

ALBUM REVIEW: ‘Clockworking’ from Nordic Affect

Posted on July 27, 2015 by maestrobeats

By Jill Kimball

What is it about Iceland? From Björk to Ólafur Arnalds to Jón Leifs, the 320,000-person country seems to churn out more fantastic and original music per capita than any other country on Earth. And with the latest album to come out of the country—whose population, it should be noted, is half the size of Seattle—we have a few more reasons to celebrate this Nordic land.

In many ways, Clockworking, the new release from the ensemble Nordic Affect, couldn’t have come from any other country. The music is dotted with the very Icelandic sounds of rushing winds, hummed folk music, and above all, the beautifully stark sounds of silence. The album is characterized by pleasant repetition and meditative simplicity, an accurate musical reflection of life in Iceland’s quiet, cold and wild towns. Listening to Clockworking made me feel like I was the only one in the world one minute, but like a tiny drop in a vast ocean the next.

My absolute favorite thing about Clockworking, aside from the fact that every name in the liner notes ends in –dóttir, is that it’s all about women. Nordic Affect, the performing ensemble, is a small group of females who play on harpsichord, viola da gamba, and other period instruments. On top of that, all five of the composers featured on the album are female. Today, women make up less than 15% of the world’s living composers; perhaps hearing this album will inspire more women to become composers themselves and turn those statistics around.

The album’s opening track is also its namesake, Clockworking. If you like Sigur Rós, you’ll like this piece, too; it possesses a similar beautiful simplicity. Composer María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir (of the group amiina) does a wonderful job integrating a constant but unobtrusive clock-like pulse into the texture of the work. The instruments may be Baroque and the mood focuses on the passage of time, but the music is timeless.

The next three pieces focus on an interplay between real-life noises and instrumental sounds. In 2 Circles, composer Hildur Guðnadóttir chose to examine a musician’s close relationship with her instrument, which is why you’ll hear the composer herself humming along with the notes she plays on her cello. The lovely, intimate work was recorded in the middle of a chilly Iceland winter, and I swear I could feel the wind howling outside as I listened. In From Beacon to Beacon, composer/guitarist Hafdis Bjarnadóttir recorded the sound of the breeze outside a local lighthouse in midsummer and used it in this piece, which she describes as an imagined musical conversation between two lighthouses. I was just as interested in the simple sound of the blowing wind between musical phrases as I was in the beautifully random ping-ping of the harpsichord. And in INNI, “Musica da Camera,” the sound of an infant’s gentle murmuring mingles with a buzzing baroque violin.

Composer Hafdis Bjarnadóttir records the sound of the wind near an Icelandic lighthouse.

If Shades of Silence illustrates anything, it’s that “silence” is a relative term. The only actual silences present in the piece are at the beginning and end. The rest is what some might deem white noise: a viola da gamba’s bow gently scraping along a string here, fingers plucking a few strings there. After a few minutes, I considered the sounds of the piece as good as silence; like the gentle sounds of keyboard typing or the rustle of papers at work, I’d grown accustomed to hearing it in the background.

The album concludes with Sleeping Pendulum, another work by María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir that had already received an honorary award at the time of this CD’s release. It’s another focus on timelessness, a study in how the music we hear today echoes decades and centuries of music that came before it. The piece begins with a simple interplay between a violin and some tinkling bells, but later it becomes all about strings, with a violin interjecting short, high trills above a foundation of slowly morphing sustained chords.

Clockworking is one of those albums that stands on its own sans explanation but that becomes all the more meaningful after you’ve read the liner notes. The album provides a great excuse to put down the phone, step away from the keyboard, and escape pixelated life for a while. Turn the volume up, close your eyes, and do absolutely nothing but listen. Every single one of this album’s 45 minutes deserves your undivided attention.

ALBUM REVIEW: “Nature” by The City of Tomorrow

Posted on July 20, 2015 by maestrobeats

by Maggie Molloy

Dating back to the Late Stone Age, the conch shell was among the earliest musical instruments—and while wind instruments have grown and transformed a lot over the course of the last 20,000 years, they have always had maintained an intimate connection with nature. Throughout history, composers have used the rich tone color of wind instruments to imitate the chirping of the birds, the spraying of the sea, or the rising of the sun.

Even today, contemporary musicians are finding new ways to explore this unique musical relationship between wind instruments and nature—in fact, the contemporary wind quintet City of Tomorrow devoted their entire debut album to doing just that.

Comprised of flutist Elise Blatchford, oboist Stuart Breczinski, clarinetist Camila Barrientos, bassoonist Laura Miller, and horn player Leander Star, City of Tomorrow is committed to much more than just music. The one-of-a-kind quintet merges elements of contemporary classical and experimental music with themes of environmentalism and humanism. Through their music they offer new perspectives on current social and political issues ranging from environmental destruction and war to the everyday injustices of living in the Digital Age.

Their new album, titled “NATURE,” explores the evolution of humanity’s relationship with nature through works by four contemporary composers. The album considers nature through the lens of 18th- and 19th-century Romantic ideas of the Sublime: the overwhelming brilliance of the natural world surrounding us and our inexorable vulnerability in its presence. The album also serves as the first installment of a three-disc set that will musically trace the progression of nature from the Romantic era to the apocalyptic.

The first piece on the album is David Lang’s “breathless,” a work which illustrates the ceaseless flow of nature through delicately circling motives in each instrument. The soundscape moves slowly and steadily forward with a minimalist aesthetic, each wind instrument gently layered over one another in prismatic, ever-changing rhythmic patterns.

Next on the album is Luciano Berio’s “Ricorrenze.” Italian for “recurrences,” the piece explores the delicate balance between order and chaos in nature. The work begins with soft, unison D’s in every instrument before growing into swirling layers of virtuosic melodic lines. The dazzlingly diverse range of tone colors makes the piece’s connection to nature palpable—in fact, Berio himself compared the quintet to a seed being sown and gradually maturing into a plant bearing vibrant fruit.

City of Tomorrow jazzes things up with their performance of “…a certain chinese cyclopaedia…” by Denys Bouliane. Inspired by a fantastical encyclopedia of real and imaginary animals depicted in a short story by Jorge Luis Borges, the piece crafts a musical taxonomy cataloguing the infinite variations of bebop. The piece is a colorful collage of frenetic melodic fragments which offer an abstract interpretation of the evolution of bebop jazz.

The concluding work on the album is “Music for Breathing” by Nat Evans, a piece which is rooted in traditionally Eastern understandings of nature. The piece crafts an organic, often meditative illustration of the natural world through guided improvisation, solo spotlights, extended techniques, and even the use of conch shells and stones. Inspired by the rituals of the Yamabushi Buddhists, the piece at times blurs the line between musical instruments made by man and musical instruments found in nature.

Each piece on “NATURE” is its own exquisite flower, a beautifully unique impression of nature’s rich tone colors and ever-changing musical textures. And City of Tomorrow breathes new life into each work through their imaginative musical interpretation, skilled rhythmic precision, colorful tonal palette, and above all, their unparalleled artistic ambition.

This is one wind quintet that is sure to leave you breathless.