Rolling Classical 2021

I guess they qualify bc Cowan is originally from Newfoundland, though he is now based in Montreal.

Listened to the Sato performance of the E major Partita - very nice. But fgti, you were joking about replacing the principal violist in the Netherlands Bach Society, I assume? Or serious??

Nice short dodecaphonic guitar piece by a Sakatoon composer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m3UEidNGpSs

But fgti, you were joking about replacing the principal violist in the Netherlands Bach Society, I assume? Or serious??

Haha I'm just determined to be the violist who nails the solo on Brandenburg 3:iii, it's always so disappointing when it happens

I'm not a Thomas Adès fan by any stretch of the imagination, but his protégé, Francisco Coll, deserves all the attention he can get. Check out his recent disc of orchestral works for Pentatone, featuring Patricia Kopatchinskaja in the post-Ligetian Violin Concerto and Four Iberian Miniatures. There's a clear, legible sense of narrative and drama in these works, which liberally synthesize late 20th/early 21st century modernist trends, the common thread being his interest in the traditional music of his native country, Spain. Really exciting stuff.

Also worth hearing, along the same lines, is PatKop's (I hate this, but it's kinda funny nonetheless) album with the Camerata Bern, featuring works by the aforementioned Coll, Veress and Ginastera.

Have heard some Veress these last couple years and am mystified why he isn’t discussed more (in three Classical Music Media Discourse).

I love what PatKop does but haven’t heard her Pierrot Lunaire and I’m a bit skeptical about it since she’s not really a vocalist.

Same tbh. The reviews I've read seem to indicate that it's a 'love it or hate it'-type deal.

WTC1 performed live by Mahan Esfahani on a custom-built harpsichord by Jukka Olikka with a carbon fibre soundboard and 16 ft stop and a historically informed well temperament. May be taken down soon-ish. I'm up to Bb minor and it's very good so far:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jtEY1kDzmHc

Eb minor sounds amazing in this temperament imo.

Listening to this long OOP 1977 record of Christina Petrowska (now Petrowska-Quilico) playing Messiaen and Debussy: https://www.discogs.com/fr/Christina-Petrowska-Messiaen-Debussy-Vingt-Regards-Sur-LEnfant-Jésus-Preludes-Book-Two/release/10419739

I found that there was finally a digital rerelease, along with a 2003 Boulez recording: https://www.navonarecords.com/catalog/nv6358/

I haven't listened to the sound of the digital version yet but I doubt David Jaeger screwed it up. The LP is fantastic so I recommend these recordings to anyone who doesn't know them.

Rerelease less than a month old.

He's been releasing a lot since COVID but this recent William Beauvais set is especially good, all solo improvisatory pieces on classical guitar: https://williambeauvais1.bandcamp.com/album/improsessions

Listening to the Boulez pieces from Sound Visionaries on NML, they sound great.

Pretty nice album of contemporary violin duos by Twin Cities composers: https://newfocusrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/113-composers-collective-resistance-resonance

Definitely on the modernist side. The notes describe the pieces better than I could atm:

The album opens with Jeremy Wagner’s Oberleitung. This is the German word for “overhead lines,” the kind that carry electricity. It is perfectly descriptive of the skittering, arachnid energy of much of the music. Wagner takes advantage of the violins as much for their percussive attacks as for pitch. After a brief opening incantation, crackling battuto and drop-bow gestures are batted back and forth between the instruments in shaped, fast-moving volleys, as if they are playing a game, creating virtuosic swarms. Wagner gives each of them room to breathe, allowing the series of gestures to speak for themselves inside the larger form.

In contrast, A Lifeless Object, Alive (Dysarthria) by Michael Duffy opens with full-throated double stops, shadowed by soft, porous wisps of sound. This gesture happens many times in the piece: it is as if the long, noise-laiden tones charge the air with sound, and the high, quiet resonances are the afterimage, or the dust settling. The emphasis here is on the grain of the sound, on the continuous morphing and layering of timbre. Layering these tones in separate registers (one violin playing very high, the other much lower) brings an additional degree of depth to the mostly slow-moving lines. Keening, slow glissandi give the piece an air of sorrowful remembrance.

Autochrome Lumière by Joshua Musikantow is a work infused with nostalgia. Fittingly, a more traditional, melodic style of playing is often in the fore here. The music meanders slowly, talking outside of time. The end of the first movement seems to slide up and away, pianissimo, like a memory vanishing. In the second movement, one violin takes the melodic foreground while the other slides in and out of the background with multiple commentaries, whether a waltz beat, or pecking battuto bows, or tapping on the body of the violin. The final movement speaks vividly, in tangled, vexed phrases. It brings to mind the poem that accompanies Musikantow’s piece:

...I contemplate how the dramatic, percussive hang up
is not possible with mobile phones.
You need a landline.
You need a phone with weight; a phone with spiral cords you can twirl
anxiously;
a phone you can hold in the nook
between
your head and your collarbone,
almost as if playing the violin.

Sam Krahn’s piece Resistance/Resonance starts with satisfyingly meaty scratch tones from one violin and microtonal ornamentation and double stops from the other. The music is pulled back and forth between these two poles; resistance and resonance, noise and pitch. Krahn cultivates engaging music that bridges the two, with gorgeous bent double stops and emotional friction between the two voices . The violins are both attracted and repelled by each other, sometimes standing apart playing without any regard for one another, and sometimes coming together, hovering just outside of consonance.

Difficult Ferns by Adam Zahller is highly microtonal, and heavily ornamented. The piece moves forward on tiny, highly specific changes in rhythm, pitch, and color. The two violins sometimes seem as two projections of the same image, shimmering and wavering through small differences in pitch or rhythm. Zahller creates shadowy, ghostlike images by asking the player to use harmonic touch in the left hand, transforming mid-range pitches into very high, unstable auroras of sound. Much of the music is very quiet, encouraging the listener to lean in and focus more closely on the changes, and saving the louder end of the auditory spectrum for intense moments.

The closing work on the recording, cistern . anechoic . sonolucent by TIffany M. Skidmore is inward-looking, understated. The music floats languidly, slowly moving like a jellyfish in calm water. Like the Zahller, it too explores the quiet range of the instruments, with only a few gestures stepping forward out of the shadows, only to recede again. The mood is one of soulful contemplation. The most arresting part occurs at the very end, when, having placed heavy mutes on the strings to further dampen the sound, the breathing of the two musicians become audible.

Musikantow is a former grad school colleague but I like his piece a lot.

RIP

https://www.cbc.ca/music/r-murray-schafer-composer-writer-and-acoustic-ecologist-has-died-at-88-1.5404868

RIP

Now that I've finally caught up with my 2021 playlist, my classical faves so far look something like this:

Alberto Posadas – Veredas
Alpaca Ensemble – Rehnqvist & Lindquist
Anna-Liisa Eller – Strings Attached
Bára Gísladóttir & Skúli Sverrisson – Caeli
Behzod Abduraimov – Debussy, Chopin, Mussorgsky
Béla Bartók – Bluebeard’s Castle (S. Vörös, M. Kares, Helsinki Philharmonic Orchestra, S. Mälkki)
Clara Iannotta – MOULT
Claudia Chan – Thoughts About the Piano
Daniele Pollini – Schumann, Brahms, Schoenberg
Danish String Quartet – Prism III
Ensemble Organum & Marcel Pérès – In memoria eterna
Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir & Kaspars Putniņš – Schnittke, Pärt
Felix Mendelssohn Bartholdy – String Quartets op. 44 Nos. 1 & 2 (Minguet Quartett)
Ferenc Snétberger & Keller Quartett – Hallgató
Francisco Coll – Violin Concerto; Hidd’n Blue; Mural; Four Iberian Miniatures; Aqua cinerea
Georg Friedrich Haas – Ein Schattenspiel; String Quartets Nos. 4 & 7
Guillaume Dufay – Le prince d'amours (Ensemble Gilles Binchois, Dominique Vellard)
György Kurtág – The Sayings of Péter Bornemisza (Tony Arnold & Gábor Csalog)
James Weeks – Summer
Jean Rondeau – Melancholy Grace
Johann Sebastian Bach – Well-Tempered Clavier (Piotr Anderszewski)
Johannes Brahms – Sonatas op. 120 (Antoine Tamestit & Cédric Tiberghien)
José Luis Hurtado – Parametrical Counterpoint
Kassiani – Hymns (Cappella Romana, Alexander Lingas)
Lars Hegaard – Octagonal Room
Ludwig van Beethoven – Complete Piano Concertos (Krystian Zimerman, London Symphony Orchestra, Simon Rattle)
Ludwig van Beethoven – Missa solemnis (René Jacobs, et al.)
Ludwig van Beethoven – Violin Sonatas, Vol. 2 (Frank Peter Zimmermann & Martin Helmchen)
Maacha Deubner & KAPmodern Ensemble – Bessonnitsa
Marc Monnet – En pièces
Michaël Jarrell – Orchestral Works
Olga Neuwirth – Solo
Paul Lewis & Steven Osborne – French Duets
Ramón Humet – Light
Richard Barrett – binary systems
Robert Schumann – Complete Piano Trios, etc. (Trio Wanderer)
Sam Hayden – Becomings
Scott Wollschleger – Dark Days
Thibaut Roussel, et al. – Le Coucher du roi. Musiques pour la chambre de Louis XIV
Toshio Hosokawa – Works for Flute
Trio Hélios – D’un matin de printemps
Trondheim Soloists – Shadows’ Dream
Vadim Gluzman – Beethoven, Schnittke
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart – Mozart Momentum 1785 (Leif Ove Andsnes, Mahler Chamber Orchestra)

Just saw that Hewitt is streaming live from Wigmore Hall rn:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ECxLZNYjJW4

(Art of the Fugue)

I really need to listen to that Anderszewski WTC on your list, pom, since this year i got acquainted with his Mozart+Schumann fantasies album and it floored me; now my favorite rendition of the Schumann Fantasie. The Tiberghien Brahms and Andsnes WAM are also on my listen pile.

To my great surprise the New Yorker has published a piece on Herbert Blomstedt. Surprising because he is a truly great conductor in more the Pierre Monteux mold - excellence that's hard to hang a tag on. NYer publishes very good classical writing from time to time but I would expect them to cover people like Rattle or FX Roth or like Celibidache-type weirdos rather than somebody like Blomstedt. Yay NYer!

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/08/30/the-most-vital-conductor-of-beethoven-is-ninety-four

Anderszewski’s disc of WTC sélections is indeed worth your while, as are all of his other recordings (many of which are devoted to Bach).

And yes, that piece is most welcome. Blomstedt 4evah!

Finally found some uninterrupted time to listen to Moult today. It's quite something. Haven't broken much down but the timbres and textures are interesting and pleasing and it all feels like it flows intuitively or at the least constructs an ambient space, despite the relative lack of pitched material. Beguiling atmospheres in the titular composition.

The Anderszewski Bach disc is the excerpts from WTC2? I've been listening to that on NML. It was sounding great today, all the lines and thematic material very clear and the recording itself very pleasant.

Yes, that’s the one. Glad you liked the Iannotta btw.

I somehow just noticed that the finale of Haydn's Piano Sonata in G Major, Hob. XVI/G1, and the first movement of the G major Sonata or Divertimento Hob. XVI/11 are exactly the same.

https://yarnwire.bandcamp.com/album/tonband

Have you ever experienced sound melting through your headphones? Maybe you’ve heard real-time spectral disintegration of an air raid siren? What about purposeful deformation of the natural order of sound itself?

that's almost exactly what I wuz thinking! I do like this new Yarn/Wire recording though. They've also played on the new Annea Lockwood release that came out yesterday as well.

^^^

the opening two piano/percussion pieces on this are fucking immense imo

Long concert by Emmanuel Jacob Lacopo (DMA student at McGill) from yesterday with a lot of interesting material. A mix of classical guitar and electric guitar + fixed media, with pieces by Florence Price, Meredith Monk (five pieces I think), Thomas Flippin, Ulysses Kay, Shelley Washington, Tania Léon.
https://fb.watch/8guIxqFwc7/

This album of solo piano pieces by Nordic composers, played by Ieva Jokubaviciute (d/k how to pronounce that), could be an aoty contender. Really hits the right intersection point of compositional integrity, approachability, and complexity and progressivism: https://sonoluminuslabel.bandcamp.com/album/northscapes

https://yarnwire.bandcamp.com/album/tonband

The sample track - the first movement of Poppe's Feld - is fantastic! Great colours and energy.

This is pretty cool, a string quartet by Vijay Iyer meant to be played attacca after an unfinished fragment by Mozart, that takes the final motif as its starting point:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LPOPQEJacY

https://anothertimbre.bandcamp.com/album/ballad

some new (old) Linda Catlin-Smith that I rather like.

“We’ve never dated before, but I wrote you this symphony about my vivid fantasies of our love and lust, how I drugged myself and dreamed I killed you, and how you then joined me in a diabolical witch orgy. Want to go out?” 🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩🚩

— Dr. Annika Socolofsky 🏳️‍🌈 (@aksocolofsky) October 16, 2021

Lol. Never liked the Symphonie Fantastique but not necessarily because of the story.

I probably am most likely to listen to Liszt’s solo piano arrangement of the fantastique these days tbh

Berlioz was genuinely nuts

RIP Bernard Haitink

https://www.bso.org/brands/bso/features/remembering-bernard-haitink.aspx

Listened to a ton of his live recordings today (live is where he really excelled IMO)

Very much contemporary, and not for everyone, but I just purchased and am listening to this for the first time and it is immense, expansive, and sort of frightening in a Deep Listening way. Like if Oliveros listened to black metal. two double bassists, one electric and one acoustic. Really intense and beautiful! I really love it.

https://sonoluminuslabel.bandcamp.com/album/caeli

I finally listened to the whole thing. I really like the sound, and it is really satisfying in doses, but I'm not sure I need over 2h of it, as there's not much variety. (Maybe it needs to be heard in higher quality?) What's going on compositionally? It mostly feels improvised to me.

Fantastic album of contemporary piano music, often with preparations or extended techniques: https://newfocusrecordings.bandcamp.com/album/kerm-s

Sund4r, I'm not totally certain, but it does seem like Caeli is mostly improvisatory. Both musicians involved also have their feet in the jazz world, so I think there's some overlap.

I do think that it has its repetitive side, but I treat it more as a drone or deep listening record to be left on, with my focus moving in and out as I please/am able.

Listening to Gregson's "Patina" right now. It's lovely, a bit mannered, but wow these strings are richer than butter. Enjoying it.

Makes sense, in many ways, but the Gregson record reminds me a bit of Jon Hopkins. It's beautifully composed and arranged and recorded, but almost feels a little *too* on the nose. Which can sometimes be a great balm, to be honest.

New Emily Shaw album is great classical guitar, all pieces by women composers, ranging from new microtonal fretless guitar music by Amy Brandon to a transcription of Baroque keyboard music by Elisabeth Jacquet de la Guerre, with idiomatically appropriate improvisation: https://open.spotify.com/album/5a96ZYU8ChI5oiLvN41aDa?si=EA0S3vhZQ8CDAIrL4sYC3g

That makes sense re Caeli btw, table.

https://wildup.bandcamp.com/album/julius-eastman-vol-1-femenine

the first of a 7 volume Julius Eastman anthology performed by the Wild Up collective.

beautiful

it's a stunner!

This is just the thing.

I was at a live performance of Femenine by Wild Up and it was a high pint of my life no exaggeration. By then end I felt elated and cleansed and was in tears. The picture on the record cover is apropos.