Modern Ensemble Playing To Value

The most recent disk of music by Martin Butler is a disk called American Rounds featuring the talents of the Schubert Ensemble, both as a whole and as individuals. The title piece is a four part chamber work for piano quintet and is inspired in part by American folk music but also by more modern sounding motoric rhythms. There is that open ait Copland fell in parts but it is very much its own piece and refers back to some of Butler's earlier works too. This is followed by three solo pieces that first surfaced in Butler's chamber opera A Better Place. Siward's River Song features the cello of Jane Salmon, Nathaniel's Mobile the piano of William Howard and Suzanne's River Song the duo of Howard and violinist Simon Blendis. Howard also plays another extended piece for solo piano Funerailles. The inspiration of chiming bells is clear in this piece. Butler then shows the gift for arrangement displayed by one of his mentors Berio in the two Scarlatti Sonatas which he has adapted for the quintet. here is also a berio conncion to the other substantial piece for piano quartet Sequenza Notturna, written in the month after Berio's death in 2003 and referencing in the title one of his most noted works. The final piece, Walden Snow, acts as a gentle coda for a few minutes after the Sequenza with the viola and piano winding down as it were. A thoroughly enjoyable chamber disk proving that the art lives and flourishes. It also shows the Schubert Ensemble to be one of the best currently operating in the chamber field.

Summer Afternoon Perfection

There are certain received opinions about the album Forest Flower : Charles Lloyd At Monterey. Of course, it committed the cardinal sin for many hard core jazz afficianados of being popular and selling well. The view has also come down that Charles Lloyd was a bit of a lightweight and that any interest the quartet had revolved around the soon to be stellar sidemen Keith Jarrett and Jack DeJohnette ( the fourth member was the reliable veteran Cecil McBee on bass ) Listening to it again after almost forty years, I find these views to be deeply unfair and feel that it remains a special album. They certainly seemed to hit the mood of the times of those two summers of love in 1966 / 67 but there is no pandering to a hippie crowd in the music, no psychedelia or gimmicky effects ( Jarrett's playing of the strings inside of the piano being genuine experimentation and something used much earlier by such as Cage of course )The title track itself is a long extended latin influenced piece that develops a perfect hypnotic ambience suited to a sunny Californian afternoon and capable of transmitting that afternoon into any wintry sitting room. It expands and evolves like one of those liquid glass slide projections much loved at the time. Sorcery is a Jarrett composition and is much freer but still within formal structures, while Song Of Her written by McBee is a wonderful ballad. The original album ends with East Of The Sun, a storming straight ahead deconstruction of the standard which reflects back these days from Jarrett and DeJohnette's standards trio with Gary Peacock. I would be happy for the disk to end there as the original album did but in the name of giving value for money, this disk includes a whole other album from two years later called Soundtrack. By now, some of the criticisms aimed at Forest Flower have become more valid, the quartet was being booked into rock venues with rock bands and the whole approach is cruder. Ron McLure has replaced McBee on bass and DeJohnette's drumming is much more four square and rock oriented. Jarrett's solos are still worth hearing and Lloyd still shows he had much to say on both tenor and flute but the moment of pure magic represented by Forest Flower had gone and the parting of the ways was not far off.

A Celebration Of Woman

Like many of the offerings from Jordi Savall's Alia Vox label, this is a lavishly produced concept album by his wife Montserrat Figueras entitled Lux Feminae. It takes music from the Middle Ages through to the Renaissance ( 900 - 1600 ) that pertains to the light of woman. There are seven aspects of womanhod that are considered, from the sacred to the sensual and from Christianity, Judaism and Islam ( a familiar theme of the Savall family )as well as ancient mythology. The disk follows that hybrid of early music and world music and the several talented performers appearing reflect this. here are contributions from such as Pierre Hamon on flutes, Andrew Lawrence-King on harp, Rolf Lislevand on lute and guitar, Driss El Maloumi on oud and Jordi Savall himself on viola da gamba. Montserrat Figueras's soprano is ideally suited to this repertoire with a light ethereal touch and she is occasionally augmented by a fellow soprano in her daughter Arianna and by mezzo Begona Olavide, contralto Laurence Bonnal and another soprano Tina Aagaard. Many of the songs featured are anonymous, others by little known names from Spanish or Moorish traditions and the disk is bookended by two glorious extracts from the Codex de las Huelgas.

Another Of Stalin's Victims

Nikolay Roslavets was another of those composers trying to pursue a career under the impossible strictures of Stalinist Russia. He was not as successful as more established names in doing this but the music on this disk indicates that we are the poorer for that. It is a disk by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ilan Volkov and the main piece featured is the Chamber Symphony. Only published in 2005, this is the first recording. It is almost an hour long and perhaps shares a soundworld with Schoenberg but there are echoes of others, the use of recurring leitmotifs that could be found in Shostakovich and Myaskovsky. There is a long and extremely atmospheric slow movement and the scherzo is in a wild dance form with folk tinges that may have been picked up in exile in Uzbekistan. The ecstatic feel of much of the finale shows Roslavets admiration for Scriabin and this is also apparent in the filler, a piece entitled In The Hours Of The New Moon. Contemporaneous with Stravinsky's Firebird, it also shows the orchestral palete of Rimsky-Korsakov and spotlights the playing of the BBCSSO's leader Elizabeth Layton.

Mementoes In Sound

This disk is described as a single, in olden times it would perhaps have been on a vinyl EP. It in fact contains a substantial 25 minute orchestral piece by contemporary British composer Richard Barrett entitled Vanity. It is performed here by the BBC Symphony Orchestra conducted by Arturo Tamayo. The piece is in three movements ( Sensorium, Memento and Residua ) which are played through in one complete span. It is a piece built on the structure of a chamber music piece with the expanded forces of the orchestra used as discrete blocks whereby whole sections play en mass as if they were one instrument. Part of the inspiration comes from 17th century still life vanitas paintings ( hence the work's title ) where each seprate detail must be exquisitely portrayed and is of equal importance to the whole and this applied here to individual and group musical conributions. The strings play an important underpinning role, occasionally moving to the foreground. There are also parts for braying brass interludes, notably trombone, while the piano and cimbalom often augment the mutltiple percussion instruments which come to the fore in the final segment Residua and give the work a continual forward momentum. The piece ends mysteriously with a brief and ghostly quote from Schubert's Death And The Maiden. A disk that repays repeated listening where more detail and structure is revealed.

More Homespun Values

Another disk evocative of the open spaces of the American west and showing the acceptable face of the region with honest homespun values and gimmick free well crafted musicianship. It is a disk called The West Was Burning by Martha Scanlan, another for which the term Americana was suitably coined some years back. The disk features a mix of more or less solo acoustic sings and those with a small band backing containing exemplary playing from the likes of ex Band member Levon Helm on drums together with his daughter Amy. Multi instrumentalist Dirk Powell handles many of the chores, with fiddle and banjo being well to the fore and understated support coming from pedal steel and dobro. Most of the songs are self penned by Scanlan although there is a cover of Bob Dylan's Went To See The Gypsy and a fine country instrumental Call Me Shorty. There is an obvious gospel feel to Get Right Church but the overall mood is one of gentle resignation and delight in simple beauty and companionship. The live recording of Seeds Of The Pine is a standout with fine banjo accompaniment and there is no hint that it is a live concert recording until the applause burts in at the end. The title track and Up On The Divide could be looked upon as keynote tracks and the disk finishes with the moving and spiritual hymn Ten Thousand Charms.

Touching The Spanish Soul

In a recent BBC Radio 3 Building a Library feature, this disk was considered to be the pick of recordings of Manuel De Falla's El Amor Brujo. It is by the Orchestre Poitou-Charentes under the direction of Jean-Francois Heisser and it is a performance of the full masque, complete with dialogue and with the central part sung by flamenco artist Antonia Contreras, De Falla was a flamenco enthusiast who did much to ensure the continued health of that art form and it was always his intention that the work be performed in this way, albeit that he also arranged an orchestral suite and it is often sung with a regular soprano soloist. The recording quality is superb, the orchestra capture the idiom of the piece perfectly and the whole is wonderfully atmospheric. The disk comes with two substantial fillers. Heisser himself plays the piano piece Fantasia Baetica which owes an obvious debt to Debussy but which provides a perfect interlude between El Amor Brujo and a second masque, El Retablo de Maese Pedro which relates the trashing of an unfortunate entrepreneur's puppet show by a delusional Don Quixote. The sound world has similarities to El Amor Brujo but perhaps without the same memorable melodies and this time with standard operatic soloists in soprano Chantal Perraud, baritone Jerome Correas and tenor Eric Huchet.

See Naples And Make Music

The chamber music of 17th and 18th century Naples is an area of early music where research is only beginning to unearth items of quality and interest. The ensemble Accordone, led jointly by the inimitable voice of Marco Beasley and by harpsichordist Guido Morini, are mining this field and do so to great effect on this disk entitled Il Settecento Napoletano. The ensemble is completed by violin, cello, archlute, guitar and theorbo. The seven works featured here consist of five chamber cantatas featuring Beasley and two instrumental sonatas, one for two violins and continuo by Matteis and another for three violins and continuo by Ragazzi. As can be gathered, these are hardly household names, composers of the cantatas include Porsile, Rubino and Liguori with the only well known name being Alessandro Scarlatti. Guido Morini himself also contributes a song cycle which is a pastiche of the Neopolitan style. The Liguori piece is a charming Nativity song but the other four vocal pieces all tell of the treachery and perfidy of love as well as the joys. They are not profound texts, more playful and in the form of court entertainment. The sonatas are charming baroque settings and the whole disk has a feelgood factor supplementing superb musicianship.

The Voice Of The North

The Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir under the direction of Paul Hillier completed their sampling of selected survey of the choral work of contemporary composers from the region with Baltic Voices 3. I've already posted about the first in the series and hope to catch up with the second in due course, chronology has never been my strong point. There are some names here that I am familiar with ( Saariaho, Tuur and Gorecki )while the others are totally new to me ( Gundmundsen-Holmgreen, Augustinas, Mazulis, Bergman and Martinaitis ) Three pieces are premiered on the disk with composition dates ranging from 1969 to 2003. The disk is mainly acapella with the exception of the folk like The Stomping Bride by Augustinas which has harpsichord, recorder, viola da gamba and percussion accompaniment and Meditatio by Tuur which benefits from the particiaption of the Rascher Saxophone Quartet. The other works cover a variety of styles from the theatrical Saariaho, the almost spoken singspiel of Bergman, the bouncy and rhythmic Martinaitis and Mazulis and the elegiac Gudmundsen-Holmgreen and Gorecki. The texts set range from the folk to the sacred to the poetic. It goes without saying that the choir's singing throughout is outstanding, showing great control, feeling, clarity and empathy with the music.

When Friends Fall Out

One heavily hyped anniversary year out of the way and the BBC embarks on another. I don't think that it will be such blanket coverage but the first BBC music magazine cover disk of this year is a 200th anniversary offering for Schumann. There are two works featured, the Konzertstuck for Four Horns and Symphony No 4. The performance of the Konzertstuck is from a 2007 Proms concert given by the BBC Philharmonic conducted by Sir Charles Mackerras with horn soloists David Pyatt, Michael Thompson, Martin Owen and Cormac O Haodain. Schumann originally wanted a pair of valveless horns and a pair of what was then the newly invented valve horn. I'm not sure if this performance complies with that but it is a lively enough interpretation. Symphony No 4 ( Performed here by the BBC Phil this time under Gianandrea Noseda ) was heavily revised by Schumann, it would have been his second symphony but was withdrawn, worked on and eventually submitted as the fourth. These revisions were to some extent at the behest of Clara and when many years later Brahms sanctioned a publication of the original ( which he preferred ) it led to a spectacular falling out with Clara. This performance is of the familiar revision. I find it a powerful suymphony ( this is the only recording I have of the work ) and don't understand the dismissal of most of Schumann's orchestral output in many circles.

Deserving Of A Wider Audience

Tin Pan Ballet is a disk of music from the mid-nineties by British composer Martin Butler and performed by the ensemble Lontano conducted by Odaline de la Martinez. Butler noteably studied with Berio but other influences on his music style have been folk and particularly jazz. The title piece is for the unusual lineup of flute, trombone, piano, cello, synth and percussion. It is a dance piece that shows jazz tinges and the cohesion of a string quartet. Bluegrass Variations is for solo violin, played here by Ruth Crouch. The bluegrass style is buried but discernible in this piece, which was written as a test piece for a violin competition with the aim of being stylistically as opposed to technically challenging. Jazz Machines is more overtly jazzy than the title work and is for flute, clarinet, piano, cello, viola and vibraphone. Perhaps just a touch of Zappa in there somewhere. A standout piece for me is On The Rocks, for solo piano and played here by the composer himself. Butler is an accomplished pianist when time allows and this work he describes as an attempt at a synthesis between cocktail jazz and Debussy. The final piece on the disk is a kind of marimba concerto entitled Going With The Grain, in which the core Lontano lineup of flute, clarinet, violin, viola and piano are joined on marimba by Richard Benjafield. Part of the aim is for the whole ensemble to sound like one giant marimba. With the marimba being the instrument of choice for certain American minimalists, there is a danger of that influence coming through but it is only really discernible in the brief final movement. A varied and enjoyable introduction to an approachable and worthwhile contemporary composer's work.

Old Timey But Fit For Our Times

In simpler times it would have been folk or country. Now things need rebranding so is it Americana or Old Timey ? I would label it simply as homely, honest and sincere. What I am talking about is a disk by Kim Beggs called Wanderer's Paean. Kim Beggs hails from the Yukon region of Canada and there is that feel of wide open spaces and the urge to travel, with the bittersweet melancholy that often carries. She has an affecting and unusual voice, a world weary and wise sounding little girl. Most of the material on the disk is self written with a couple of bluegrass standards. The instrumental lineup is largely acoustic with a few tasteful amplifications to slide and pedal steel guitar on a couple of tracks. Important to the project is producer and multi-instrumentalist Bob Hamilton. Banjo, dobro, mandolin and violin are also prominent. The title track is a standout as is Lips Stained Red. Lay It All Down is more poppy with a great hook, Heartache Shoes is bluesy and moving. The bonus track Shipyards' Song is politically and environmentally motivated decrying big business and globalisation. You'll get a good warm feeling from giving the disk a try.