Second Inversion’s Top 5 Album Reviews of 2016

Posted on December 28, 2016 by maestrobeats

You can count on Second Inversion for Album Reviews of the latest and greatest new releases. These are the top 5 most popular reviews of 2016!

#5: Jessie Montgomery: Strum (Azica)

The album combines classical chamber music with elements of folk music, spirituals, improvisation, poetry, and politics, crafting a unique and insightful new–music perspective on the cross-cultural intersections of American history. And while this album may just be the beginning for Montgomery, “Strum” certainly echoes with possibility. – Maggie Molloy

#4: Northwestern University Cello Ensemble: Shadow, Echo, Memory (Sono Luminus)

As the album continues onward from the Rachmaninov through the Mahler, it becomes clear that the Ensemble has achieved their purported goal of using the cello to express textures of dark and light, bring to life sounds and images from another time, and finally to aid listeners in revisiting their own histories. It does indeed provide a fascinating, haunting individual experience to those who are up for a little soul-searching. – Brendan Howe

#3: Contact: Discreet Music by Brian Eno (Cantaloupe Music)

As performers, Contact makes the music their own—and as listeners, so do we. With precision, patience, and the utmost reverence, Contact recreates Eno’s ambient masterwork as an echo chamber of circling motives and mismatched musical textures. Each ripple of the repetitious melody is a perfectly crafted piece of the larger pattern, a discreet but unique little gem in and of itself. – Maggie Molloy

#2: Boston Modern Orchestra Project: Mason Bates’ Mothership (BMOP/Sound)

Part of what makes this music great is its versatility: it’s at home in so many different settings, from the venerated orchestral concert hall, to the sweaty dance club, to your living room on a Tuesday night. – Geoffrey Larson

#1: Pink Floyd: “Wish You Were Here” Symphonic featuring Alice Cooper with the London Orion Orchestra (Decca)

Fans of Pink Floyd will definitely enjoy the musical fantasia of Wish You Were Here Symphonic. Those who are less familiar with Pink Floyd will also find a lot to love in this recording. You listen to this album for the symphonic arrangements and in every way they deliver.

This was Smith’s first go at producing an album by himself and I’d call it a great success. I hope to hear symphonic versions of Pink Floyd’s other classics in the future. Hint hint, Pete Smith. Tell us, where will you go from Here? – Rachele Hales

ALBUM REVIEW: Northwestern University Cello Ensemble’s Shadow, Echo, Memory

Posted on August 15, 2016 by maestrobeats

by Brendan Howe

Inspired by his profound love for his new bride, Alma, Mahler saturated his Adagietto (the fourth movement of his Fifth Symphony) with his love of obsession and conflict. If you haven’t yet heard it performed by a world-class institution, I would recommend watching a clip of Leonard Bernstein and the Vienna Philharmonic perform the Adagietto so you get a sense of just how high the bar has been set with regard to the movement’s emotional capacity and execution.

For non-expert groups performing the masterpiece, walking the line between musical expression and self-indulgence often proves an impossible challenge. The Northwestern University Cello Ensemble, however, delivers a sublime performance that showcases both the work and the magnificent capacity of the cello to express the ineffable as the capstone track from their latest album, Shadow, Echo, Memory.

Shadow, Echo, Memory

The Adagietto rounds out the album’s emotional exhibition of the cello as well as its theme of capturing specific moments in larger contexts. Shadow, Echo, Memory was recorded by a total of 45 current students and 15 highly successful alums of Northwestern’s Bienen School of Music, under direction of the celebrated cellist and educator Hans Jørgen Jensen.

It is a collection of 19^th, 20^th, and 21^st century music written and arranged for cello ensemble. The well-established idea of the cello’s unique ability to match the range and timbre of the human voice plays a large role, as Fauré’s Après un Rêve, Rachmaninov’s Vocalise, Ligeti’s Lux Aeterna, and contemporary composer Zachary Wadsworth’s Three Lacquer Prints are all arrangements of vocal works. What makes this album stand out, however, is the Ensemble’s ability to combine technical excellence with poignant depth (Kernis’ Ballad, Mahler’s Adagietto) and conceptual clarity (Wadsworth’s Three Lacquer Prints, van der Sloot’s Shadow, Echo, Memory) in a moving and accessible fashion.

The opening track of the album orients the audience solidly on the conceptual end of the spectrum. The vocal group The Esoterics had commissioned Wadsworth for a piece to premiere in October 2012, and he began fleshing out an idea he’d been contemplating – while poetry and music are narrative forms of art that share the characteristic of changing over time, the relationship between visual art and poetry (and accordingly, music) is both far less tangible and underrepresented.

In order to rectify this oversight, Wadsworth found inspiration in a collection of Amy Lowell’s verse poems on Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints, written between 1913 and 1919 (the three pertinent poems are reproduced in the album booklet). Wadsworth was struck by the elegance with which Lowell captured single moments through the inferred context of her words while ultimately respecting their static nature.

Wadsworth took this string of artistic influence one step further by writing one vocal vignette each using the Lowell poems Temple Ceremony, A Year Passes, and A Burnt Offering. The pieces mold and elongate Lowell’s lyrics to lend valuable time and perspective to the motionless, print-inspired experience.

Adding a fourth artistic interpretation to the woodblock-poem-chorus dynasty already in play, the NU Cello Ensemble recorded arrangements of Wadsworth’s Three Lacquer Prints, removing the restrictions of language in favor of the familiar, interpretive qualities of cello music.

NU Cello Ensemble

Roland Pidoux arranged Fauré’s Après un Rêve with similarly emancipatory results, achieving a surreal dreamscape with eight cellos that would be unattainable with piano accompaniment. Van der Sloot’s titular track, Shadow, Echo, Memory, goes the furthest back into human history of all the pieces, drawing inspiration from Ice Age cave paintings. It opens with a spectral, water-droplet percussive quality, which feeds into the wide range of the unknowable creativity of the ancient mind – anxious slides, centered resolutions, fitful exclamations, and intense darkness.

VIDEO PREMIERE: Northwestern University Cello Ensemble presented by Sono Luminus

Posted on July 6, 2016 by maestrobeats

by Maggie Molloy

To many people, the cello is the most human of all musical instruments. Similar in range and timbre to the human voice and held closely against one’s body, the cello is known for its rich, warm tone and deeply intimate, expressive musical voice.

But the Northwestern University Cello Ensemble takes that analogy one step further: their new album Shadow, Echo, Memory on Sono Luminus features an entire choir of cellos performing contemporary works arranged and written for cello ensemble—some of which were originally conceived as vocal compositions.

In anticipation of the new album, which is out July 29 and available for pre-order now, we’re thrilled to present the premiere of the ensemble’s brand new video for composer Zachary Wadsworth’s mysterious and ethereal “Three Lacquer Prints”:

The original choral composition takes its lyrics from Amy Lowell’s Lacquer Prints: a series of poems inspired by Japanese Ukiyo-e woodblock prints. Like Lowell’s poems, Wadsworth’s musical setting paints a picture of these printed scenes, with each movement wordlessly conveying its own vibrant and dynamic musical ideas.

northwestern-university-cello-ensemble

Shadow, Echo, Memory is the debut album of the NU Cello Ensemble, a group comprised of current and former cello students at Northwestern University’s Bienen School of Music. Led by cello professor Hans Jørgen Jensen, the group performs and records works by classical and contemporary composers.

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

Posted on August 17, 2015 by maestrobeats

by Maggie Molloy

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.”