John Wilson Loves English String Music

BRITTEN: Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge. BRIDGE: Lament. BERKELEY: Serenade for Strings. BLISS: Music for Strings / Sinfonia of London; John Wilson, cond / Chandos CHSA 5264

God love the Brits, they’re nothing if not loyal to their homegrown talent. Whether it be a composer, conductor, pianist, violinist, soprano, tenor or musical saw player, no one does it better than a Brit. And only Brits now how to play British music.

Here John Wilson honors four of his countrymen’s music for string orchestra, and happily much of the music is excellent. We start out with one of young Ben Britten’s finest and most important early works, his Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge. Chandos really likes this work; there are other recordings of it in their catalog by Ronald Thomas. Yuli Turovsky (the one I already own) and one of just the “Romance” from this piece taken from the Turovsky recording.

Wilson’s performance is a very good one, on a par with Turovsky’s if a bit more romantic in feeling. (That’s another thing about the British: they’re still madly in love with Romantic works.) Nonetheless, Wilson also creates a nice feeling of mystery in the soft music following the loud opening chords, and the Sinfonia of London clearly knows how to deliver this mood. The “March” is also quite lively, with a nice rhythmic swagger and a slight undercurrent of menace, and the orchestra really gets into the “Aria Italiana” with zest and a nice sweep. Indeed, the whole performance is excellent though not, to my ears, superior to the Turovsky one.

The very brief (3:47) Lament by Britten’s teacher, Frank Bridge, is a surprisingly forward-looking piece though it was written in 1915, and it, too, is played with excellent atmosphere by the London Sinfonia. By contrast, Lennox Berkeley’s Serenade for Strings, though good music, misses greatness but is a very entertaining piece along the lines of Prokofiev’s First Symphony without Prokofiev’s cleverness and interesting twists and turns. It has just enough modern chords in it to be interesting without turning off an audience craving harmonic resolution and, like most of Berkeley’s music, is well crafted.

Interestingly, Sir Arthur Bliss’ Music for Strings from 1935 is more modern though not edgy; it is more in line with the Britten piece than the Berkeley, even though Bliss was 12 years Berkeley’s senior. This is really interesting, creative music with inspired and quite unexpected twists and turns, The first-time listener really won’t be able to predict, from the themes played, where the music is going or how it will be developed—for me, always the mark of an interesting composer. And it’s not that I have a lot of Bliss in my collection. I really don’t. but I do have his mid-1940s Piano Concerto as played by Solomon and it, too, is an original and outstanding work. So perhaps Bliss should be a composer more on my radar.

As in the cases of all the preceding music, Wilson’s conducting is spot on and the orchestra’s playing is committed and lustrous. All in all, then, a really fine CD even if the Berkeley piece isn’t quite on the level of the other three works.

—© 2021 Lynn René Bayley

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Vänskä’s Mahler Tenth

MAHLER: Symphony No. 10 / Minnesota Orch.; Osmo Vänskä, cond / Bis SACD-2396

Finnish conductor Osmo Vänskä has been recording the Mahler Symphonies for Bis. Of those already released, I was particularly fond of his version of the Seventh, which has pride of place in my collection of Mahler symphonies alongside that of Rafael Kubelik with the New York Philharmonic (a live performance only issued by the Philharmonic themselves).

I’m very fussy about the Tenth; it’s not a symphony that everyone does equally well. I wasn’t even really happy with Michael Gielen’s recording, and my readers know how much I like and respect Gielen’s work overall. I own the Eugene Ormandy recording, which is a good but not (for me) a great performance, because it is one of the very few made of the first Deryck Cooke reconstruction, but my favorite performance of all time is the one by Mark Wigglesworth with the BBC National Orchestra of Wales. This, believe it or not, was a freebie given away many years ago when BBC Music Magazine was attaching recordings of live BBC performances to their magazine on a monthly basis. In my view, Wigglesworth got everything right in this symphony, from the melancholy feeling of the opening “Adagio” to the last notes of the finale. Just am FYI, Vänskä uses Cooke’s third performing edition of 1976, which is generally considered to be the best.

The famous opening “Adagio” is judged and played exactly right, deep in feeling without overdoing the drama or distorting the music. (By the way, Gielen made a separate recording of the “Adagio” that was markedly superior to his performance of the same movement in his complete recording.) But he certainly does drag out this first movement to an astounding 26:21, and yes, there were moments in the performance where I felt that he let the music sag a bit much.

The second-movement scherzo is played at a good clip, and Vänskä tries to bring out the grotesque humor in the music, but somehow falls just short. Granted, Ormandy wasn’t the most exciting conductor in the world, but he was very good and he was particularly fond of the Mahler Second in addition to being the first to record the complete Tenth, and even he gets a bit more out of this scherzo than Vänskä does. Mind you, it’s not a bad performance, but it’s not quite a great one. It just has the sound of a really good run-through at rehearsal, not a performance where the music catches fire.

In the “Purgatorio,” despite the use of SACD sound, the string section has a mushy sound that I found unattractive. This may be Vänskä’s fault, however, and not that of the sound engineers. And it is here, in particular, that the performance falls flat interpretively. And in the finale, the tympanist sounds really into his part, as do the low brass instruments who create a nice , ominous ambience, but the rest of the orchestra does not sustain this feeling or carry it forward.

Sorry, but the Empress of Mahler is just not impressed. It’s a good read-through but no more than that.

—© 2021 Lynn René Bayley

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The Invisible David Angel Emerges

OUT ON THE COAST / ANGEL: Out on the Coast. Wig. DIETZ-SCHWARTZ: Alone Together. ANGEL: L’Ilo Vasche. Ah Rite! Wild Strawberries. ELLINGTON: Prelude to a Kiss. MANDEL: Hershey Bar. DAVIS-RAMIREZ-SHERMAN: Lover Man. ANGEL: Between. Leaves. Deep 2. Moonlight. Out on the Coast 3. STRAYHORN: A Flower is a Lovesome Thing. DUKE: Autumn in New York. ARLEN: This Time the Dream’s on Me. ANGEL: Latka Variations. Love Letter to Pythagoras. Waiting for a Train Part 2. Dark Passage. L.A. Mysterioso / The David Angel Jazz Ensemble: Jonathan Dane, Ron Stout, tpt/fl-hn; Scott Whitfield, tb; Jim Self, tuba/bs-tb; Phil Feather, a-sax/s-sax/pic/fl/al-fl; Gene “Cip” Cipriano, a-sax/s-sax/cl; Jim Quam, t-sax.cl; Tom Peterson, t-sax/fl/a-fl; David Angel, t-sax/cond; Bob Carr, bar-sax/bs-cl; Stephanie O’Keefe, Fr-hn; John Chiodini, gtr; Susan Quam, bs; Paul Kreibach, dm / Basset Hound Music BHR102-18

When I first received this album for review, and read about how great and important a musician David Angel is, I was left scratching my head. David Angel? Who is this guy? I’ve been following jazz, casually since 1959 and seriously since 1965, and I’ve never heard of him.

Well, it turns out that this was partly by design. According to Wikipedia, Angel, who was born in 1940, learned to play clarinet, saxophone and flute, and was playing in Latin bands while still in his teens and, believe it or not, traditional jazz with such old-timers as Kid Ory and Johnny St. Cyr (both members of Louis Armstrong’s Hot Five back in 1925-26). After going to Westlake College of Music and Los Angeles City College, he began marketing himself in Hollywood as a musician, writer and arranger. David Rose hired him, and he went on to write music for such TV shows as Bonanza, Lassie, The Streets of San Francisco and the comedy programs of Jerry Lewis and Red Skelton as well as that of singer Andy Williams. On the side, he played with Woody Herman and Art Pepper as well as working as a studio arrangement writer, often uncredited. This, he said, was by design, since he “didn’t want to go to meetings or parties or have to schmooze. All I had to do was write music and that was what I wanted.”  In 1967 he was asked by the album’s producer to write arrangements for the rock band Love’s album Forever Changes, now considered a classic of that genre.

From the late 1960s onward, he led regular rehearsals in L.A. for the David Angel Big Band, but mostly for recording sessions; once again, he and they rarely performed in public, even though the band included some big-name musicians. He has continued to maintain a career as a music teacher and lecturer at Los Angeles and Pasadena-based schools, though he also taught for 15 years in Europe, particularly in France and Norway but also in Russia after the fall of the Soviet Union. He also joined the composition faculty at the Lucerne University of Applied Science and Arts. So he has definitely been around the block, just not in anyone’s spotlight. As Brad Dechter says in a blurb inside the album, “David Angel is quite possibly the best composer you’ve never heard of and most definitely the kindest soul you could ever meet.”

And here he is, again not in public but on a recording, in this case a 3-CD set made in January 2020, just before the Covid-19 pandemic hit. According to the liner notes, written by album producer Jim Self, “This group is not so much a big band, but a 13-piece jazz chamber ensemble. Every chart has extensive space for jazz solos. I like to describe his stuff as ‘Gil Evans meets J.S. Bach’—let that sink into your mind!…With all 13 instruments playing contrapuntally (much of the time), the music can become intense!”

My impression of the opening selection, Out on the Coast, was not so much that of Gil Evans per se—Evans generally wrote for ensembles to play in creamy blends, not in counterpoint to each other—so much as some of those big or medium-sized band charts written by Gerry Mulligan and Shorty Rogers. As for the contrapuntal/classical side of the music, it put me in mind of the Dave Brubeck Octet of the late 1940s. But since most modern-day jazz lovers have never heard of, let alone heard, the Mulligan and Rogers band charts or the Brubeck Octet, their frame of reference automatically leans towards the one name they do know, Gil Evans.

Incidentally, in addition to the names I’ve just mentioned above, some of this writing also put me in mind of Charles Mingus in the early 1950s, during his “cool school” period, when he was using such musicians as Lee Konitz and was strongly influenced by Lennie Tristano, whose small band recordings also seem to be lost to history. (This is what I mean when I say that latter-day jazz musicians and particularly latter-day jazz critics should actually study the history of their music before making snap judgments on what is “innovative” or “original.” You’d be quite s’prised by all the stuff that’s already been done before.)

But Angel is clearly a lover of cool school arranging, producing blends that are creamy and not screamy. No one is trying to compete with anyone else in this band; it’s an ensemble unit and, yes, the writing can be and is often quite complex, as in the second piece on this album, Wig. Here the polyphony is quite dense, particularly in its first three minutes, and there are some elements of Latin rhythm that creep in here and there. Angel also uses some interesting harmonies in this piece without ever really going too far “outside.”

The solos played within these pieces are fairly conservative, but all of them fit into the surrounding material in such a way that they continue the musical narrative rather than departing too far from it. This, too, put me in mind of the Shorty Rogers charts as well as the early George Russell arrangements for his Smalltet that included a young Bill Evans on piano. In Wig, there’s a nice chase chorus between Jonathan Dane on flugelhorn and Tom Peterson on tenor sax that actually acts as a cods to the piece—a brilliant idea.

Alone Together, a classic pop tune by Jim Dietz and Arthur Schwartz, gives one a good idea of how good Angel is as an arranger. He has so completely rewritten this song that it is only partly recognizable; bitonal chords pit the trumpets against the trombones when they play together. As Self points out in the notes, this song has “a rare 14-bar ‘A’ section—but always feels natural to me.” One of Angel’s great gifts is his ability to make one listen carefully to every bar of the music. There’s something interesting going on all the time, but little if any of it sounds forced or unnatural. L’Ilo Vasche, written about a French cow that monks in the old days used to go to to get their milk and butter. Angel says he used the baritone sax to play the cow’s “theme,” in part because “I identify myself with the baritone sax.”

I should point out that although there is a great deal of counterpoint going on in this music, it is not really as dense structurally as J.S. Bach’s music. There are no two- or three-voiced fugues, merely short four-to-eight-bar passages where the counterpoint becomes somewhat dense, but of course for the majority of jazz listeners this can be quite a challenge to absorb depending on your musical background and how much and what kind of jazz you’ve been exposed to.

Indeed, those jazz listeners who live or die for the jazz solo per se may be disappointed…not because the solos aren’t good (they are, and consistently so) but because they “feed” into the surrounding material. But so what? That’s exactly what Bix Beiderbecke did way back in the 1920s, Lester Young and Benny Goodman did in the 1930s, and most of Duke Ellington’s sidemen did for most of their careers. And perhaps not too surprisingly, Gene Cipriano’s alto sax solo on Ellington’s Prelude to a Kiss channels Johnny Hodges, who played on Duke’s original record. Perhaps it is in this tune, a classic that I think every jazz fan knows, where one can appreciate Angel’s arranging skills and how much he pours into a score without seeming ostentatious. If you open your ears, you’ll hear all the complexities in this chart, yet everything flows together and sounds natural. John Chiodini also plays an excellent guitar solo on this one.

Ah Rite! is a rare swinger for this edition of the Angel band, a piece that harks back to pre-bop jazz. As jazz historian Michael Zirpolo has pointed out, most modern jazz has its own sort of beat and it’s NOT a swinging beat, but here is a wonderful exception. The somewhat R&B feel you hear in the repeated staccato sax chords behind Dane’s first trumpet chorus put me in mind of the kind of licks that the old Bunny Berigan and Lionel Hampton big bands played. There’s almost, but not quite, a hint of shuffle rhythm to this one as well, and Scott Whitfield plays a trombone solo that I think is an instant classic. It’s just so imaginative and original. And surprise! Angel himself plays one of the tenor sax solos here (the next-to-last one, and I think he’s also involved in one of the chase choruses). So The Legend emerges as a player, too.

Wild Strawberries qualifies as a ballad, but a very richly composed and texturally complex one, similar to some of Billy Strayhorn’s pieces for the Ellington band. Like Strayhorn’s music, it has a pop music bias but with fluid chords flowing underneath the surface. Hershey Bar opens with a cute contrapuntal figure, not quite a theme, before moving into the melody proper. Oddly, I felt that this piece, despite its counterpoint and Latin-rhythm break, leaned more towards a “Tonight Show band” feel than most of the other pieces, but it’s another well crafted piece, nicely played.

We now move to CD s, which opens with Between. This is a bit less complex than some of the material on CD 1; though well written, the theme is not a strong one and the harmony a bit more conventional. Angel’s arrangement of the classic ballad Lover Man is as rich and innovative as his chart for Alone Together, with strange close harmonies beneath the melody line played by Tom Peterson on tenor. Interestingly, Angel admits that he cribbed a bit of Gil Evans’ arrangement of this song written for the Claude Thornhill orchestra. And an Angel original, Leaves, is a complex jazz waltz that alternates with bars written in 4: sometimes a waltz, and sometimes not, and you’ll have fun counting the beats and figuring out which is which. Strayhorn’s A Flower is a Lovesome Thing shows again Angel’s respect for this great innovator of the early 1940s. Here he juxtaposes a French horn, playing straight, against a bit of growl trumpet and some harmonic touches of his own. Chiodini has another excellent guitar solo on this one, too, and there’s a nice passage for the two flutes.

My cousin, who listened to this CD with me, admitted that the music was well crafted but compared it to top-rate popular music. She evidently wasn’t listening quite as intently as I was, but since she has a bias against jazz orchestras as a rule (to her, even the great Goodman and Andy Kirk bands of the 1930s were “pop music”), I took her comments with a grain of salt. Certainly, I heard very little relating to pop music in Deep 2,with its complex harmonies and allusion to Latin rhythm, and although the principal melody of Moonlight could probably be turned into a pop tune, the harmonic writing works against its being easily absorbed by average listeners, particularly when the tempo picks up at the three-minute mark and a bit of a samba beat is woven in. And again Chiodini contributes an excellent, swinging solo, as does trombonist Scott Whitfield.

The album’s title tune is a catchy, lilting piece in medium swing tempo; this could indeed pass for a pop tune, albeit one dressed to the nines in Angel’s beautifully crafted score. Autumn in New York is yet another evergreen transformed by Angel’s personal style.

CD 2 opens with the Latka Variations, named with tongue in cheek after potato pancakes. It’s another nice, medium-tempo swinger, nothing pretentious albeit with nice voicing and yet another Latin-styled interlude in the middle section. This one belongs to the soloists, Peterson on tenor sax and Jim Self on tuba. Lots of moving parts in this chart, particularly a little after the five-minute mark when they all start moving towards each other, almost in hocket style. It ends on an unresolved chord. This Time the Dream’s on Me is yet another rewrite of an old song, this time instantly recognizable from the first bar. Dane plays an excellent trumpet solo, followed by Whitfield on trombone; later on, they duet for a bit, followed by Jim Quam on tenor.

I could go on about the remaining five tracks on this album, but that would only spoil the experience of discovery for those who acquire this set, and acquire it you should. This is clearly one of the better cool jazz sets of this or any other year.

—© 2021 Lynn René Bayley

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Lee Konitz’ Memorial Album

LEEWISE / HANSEN: Partout.¹ DIETZ-SCHWARTZ: Alone Together.² GREEN-HEYMAN-SOUR: Body and Soul.³ LUNDIN: Leewise.¹ KONITZ: JesperLee.⁴ SubcounsciousLee.⁵ PeggyLee.³ AllanLee.⁷ JensLee.² LACY: Skygger.⁶ STERN: Pazzenger.⁸ CARMICHAEL-PARISH: Stardust ⁸ / Lee Konitz, a-sax/s-sax with: ¹JAZZPAR All Star Nonet: Jeff Davis, tp; Allan Botchinsky, tp/fl-hn; Erling Kroner, tb; Niels Gerhardt, bs-tb/tuba; Jens Søndergaard, s-sax/a-sax/bar-sax; Pete Gullin, t-sax/bar-sax; Butch Lacy, pno; Jesper Lundgaard, bs; Svend-Erik Nørregaard, dm. ²Konitz, a-sax R channel; Søndergaard, a-sax L channel; ³Peggy Stern, pno; ⁴Lundgaard, bs; ⁵Botchinsky, Stern, Lundgaard, Nørregaard; ⁶JAZZPAR Nonet w/Birgitte Frieboe, voc; ⁷Botchinsky, fl-hn; ⁸JAZZPAR Nonet, Stern repl. Lacy, pno / Storyville 1018477 (live & studio: Copenhagen, March 27-29, 1992)

This album of earlier material from 1992 was being prepared by Storyville Records in conjunction with Lee Konitz when the legendary alto saxist died of complications from Covid-19 in the spring of last year. Thankfully, he made it to the ripe old age of 92 and had been contributing to the jazz scene since he first emerged as a major alto sax star in 1947, playing with such legendary jazz greats as Lennie Tristano and Charles Mingus. My favorite quote of his was, “Bird [Charlie Parker] came up to me one day and said he liked me because I didn’t try to play his shit. I didn’t have the heart to tell him that the only reason I didn’t was that his shit was too hard for me!”

On this album he’s accompanied by the JAZZPAR All Star Nonet, mostly in full but sometimes just by one or a few members. Konitz’ trademark sound, similar to that of Paul Desmond but a little drier in tone, is recognizable at every turn. To my ears, the JAZZPAR Nonet plays with a superb ensemble blend but seems to me somewhat bland and doesn’t swing particularly well. Their beat is, for me, too reminiscent of several of the German cool school musicians and bands of the early 1950s, when they had grasped the harmonic particulars of then-modern jazz but still couldn’t feel the beat properly. As in most cases (but not all), this fault starts with the rhythm section, and neither pianist Butch Lacy, bassist Jesper Lundgaard nor drummer Svend-Erik Nørregaard seem to know how to play a loose jazz beat, either singly or together, and this feeds up into the brass and reed ensemble.

But it’s not just the ensemble as a whole that doesn’t swing, it’s the individual members as well. Listen, for instance, to the alto sax duet Alone Together in which Jens Søndergaard’s too-strict beat even makes Konitz sound stiff. But come to think of it, Konitz does sound stiff on this entire session. Never once does he loosen up and play with the kind of joie-de-vivre you hear on his recordings from the late 1940s through the early 1980s. In a certain sense, time had passed him by, although I recall hearing him in the company of American jazz musicians who could really swing during the 1990s, and in that environment he sounded just fine.

With that being said, I was impressed by Leewise, Jesperlee, PeggyLee et al as music; they’re complex, interesting, and exactly the kind of pieces that made Konitz’ name. On SubconsciousLee, one of the pieces he created while with Tristano, Allan Botchinsky plays an excellent, really swinging flugelhorn solo, and it seemed to me that pianist Peggy Stern helped to wake up the otherwise stodgy rhythm section. In each of these selections with his name at the end, Konitz sounds far more inspired than in the group settings—and yet, on Pazzenger, where Stern replaces Lacy on piano, the band jumps much better.

Skygger has a pretentious, whispery vocal by one Birgitte Frieboe, and isn’t as good as the surrounding material. The album closes with a warm, autumnal rendition of Hoagy Carmichael’s old chestnut Stardust, and this, too, finds Konitz in fine shape.

My verdict, then, is that this is an interesting but sadly uneven collection. The first three tracks and Skygger are weak and don’t swing, but the rest of the album is excellent. I wish I could be as positive about the whole thing, but such is life.

—© 2021 Lynn René Bayley

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It’s Grigori Frid Time!

FRID: Phädra. Quintet for Piano & Strings / Elisaveta Blumina, pno; Vogler Quartet / Capriccio C5389

Grigori Frid (1915-2012) was a Russian/Soviet composer best known for his opera The Diary of Anne Frank, but all I had heard prior to this release was his orchestral music, which I liked very much (see my review from June of last year). Here we have two of his large chamber works recorded for the first time by the excellent Russian-born German pianist Elisaveta Blumina  and the Vogler Quartet.

As I said in my earlier review, his music is often compared to that of Shostakovich but to my ears is closer related to Ligeti or Weinberg. It is moodier than Shostakovich and uses more unusual chord positions, producing a fluid line and harmony. In Phädra, written in 1985, we being with a viola drone as the pianist plays repeated E-flats, the drone then turning into a theme. I’m not certain whether or not the lean sound of the quartet is intentional in this piece or if they’re just used to playing older stuff with straight tone, but it creates a rather weird sound. Eventually the viola plays quadruple-time figures around the piano and other strings, but this recedes back into the environment of the opening. Towards the end of the first section, Frid presents us with a strange chord—then suddenly, the music goes back in time to 18th-century form and harmony for the “Court Music,” which lasts more than six minutes, but at the 1:16 mark he suddenly indulges in more modern harmony for color, then transposes upward as the piece becomes more and more complex. He was one strange composer! Towards the end of this section, both the melody and harmony disintegrate into overlapped modern chords.

The third section, “Catharsis,” is completely modern in sound and scope, again creating a strange and melancholy atmosphere. One thing that I found interesting about this piece was that the piano part is really more of an accompanist than a full participant, contributing for color and rhythm but seldom getting involved in the development. Then all of a sudden, at the 4:06 mark, the piano begins playing a strongly syncopated double-time series of single notes which run from the bass range into the treble as the music becomes more agitated. But then it’s back to the slow, melancholy mode once again when we reach the epilogue, which simply fades away into quietude.

The Piano Quintet, written four years earlier (1981), is equally mysterious and melancholy, here using close atonal chords almost from the start. The development is equally as slow, and almost painful-sounding, as in Phädra. These are clearly not among Frid’s jolliest works. Some of the patterns are repeated here, as the piano suddenly begins playing agitated, single-note lines in the midst of this first movement, but here it stays fast until the 6:09 mark when it slows down again. Oddly, it is in the third, slow movement (“Lento”) that the tempo picks up again, not too much but certainly livelier than the preceding and following material.

Although I did not find these pieces to be quite as stunning as the orchestral works, they are obviously the product of an original and creative musical mind, excellently played and recorded.

—© 2021 Lynn René Bayley

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The Russian Jazz Tango Queen

OBLIVION / PIAZZOLLA: Fuga y Misterio. Oblivion. La Muertye del Angel. Libertango. STAMPONI: Flor de Lino. LAURENZ-CONTURSI: Milonga de Mis Amores. Como dos Extraños.* LEGUIZAMÓN-PÉREZ: Si Llega a Ser Tucumana. DAMES-SANUINETTI: Nada.⁺ PETERSBURSKI: To Ostatnia Niedziela. COBIÁN: Nostalgias / Yulia Musayelyan, fl/*bs-fl/⁺voice; Maxim Lubarsky, pno; Fernando Huergo, bs; Mark Walker, dm / Zoho Music ZM 202104

Ordinarily, this is the kind of CD I just pass by without listening. Tangos, whether classical or jazz, don’t really appeal to me except once in a blue moon, and for the most part I consider Astor Piazzolla’s music to be pretentious and lacking in real content. But one listen to the first track on this CD, and I was hooked. Ladies and gentlemen, let me tell ya, Yulia Musayelyan really kicks butt!!!

She was born in Russia but makes her home in Boston, where she attended the Berklee College of Music. Interestingly, the rhythm section on this CD is comprised of Berklee faculty members, which probably accounts for the zest and energy of these performances. And the album starts out with a jazz-tango-fugue…what could be better? Next to Musayelyan herself, the star of this recording is pianist Maxim Lubarsky, whose playing mirrors and enhances her own.

Like all flute players, classical or jazz, Musayelyan has a limited dynamic range; it’s the nature of the instrument, but she makes the most of the dynamics she can control. No, she doesn’t swing as hard on the flute as Lew Tabackin did, but few jazz flautists were ever in his class and she certainly swings enough. The second piece on this album, Héctor Stamponi’s Flor de Lino, is a tango in 6/8, something you rarely encounter, and here you come to appreciate the seamless interaction of bassist Fernando Huergo and drummer Mark Walker, who play together as one instrument. But yes, keep listening to Lubarsky and the way he listens intently to what Musayelyan plays and picks up where she leaves off, completing and embellishing her musical thoughts. The two of them also seem to be of one mind, and when you combine them with the seamless rhythm backing, you have something really special.

Piazzolla’s Oblivion is not a particularly good or interesting piece of music, but the quartet make it an effective bridge between Flor de Lino and Pedro Laurenz’ Milonga de Mis Amores. The milonga isn’t quite a tango, but it is a cousin, generally danced at a quicker tempo and without pauses. This one starts out rather slowly, but Musayelyan suddenly increases the tempo and we’re off to the races. Musayelyan sings on Como dos Extraños, and her Spanish pronunciation is surprisingly idiomatic (though she doesn’t have much of a voice). With La Muerta del Angel, Musayelyan and her little band kick things into high gear once again, with excellent results.

The album ends with Piazzolla’s most famous piece, Libertango, in a lively arrangement that highlights the counterpoint. For lovers of this kind of music, this disc is a must-have.

—© 2021 Lynn René Bayley

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Alastair White’s “Fashion Opera”

WHITE: Robe / Clare Kanter, mezzo (Rowan the Mapmaker); Rosie Middleton, mezzo (Neachneohain/EDINBURGH); Sarah Parkin, voc (Beira the Soldier/EDINBURGH); Kelly Poukens, sop (Storyteller); Jenni Hogan, fl; Ben Smith, pno / Métier MSV 28609 (live: London, August 6, 2019)

The casual reader may be forgiven if he or she thinks from the album cove pictured here that this album is called “White Robe.” It is not. This is a “fashion opera” called Robe written by Scottish composer Alastair White, whose work is influenced by “technology, science, politics and materialist philosophy,” according to Wikipedia.

The synopsis, quite brief as opera plots go, is stated thus in the booklet:

In a society where the difference between the real and the virtual is no longer meaningful, a powerful new being threatens the stability which holds these worlds together. Two elders, Neachneohain and Beira, convince the young cartographer Rowan to complete a terrible task: descend into the mind of the superintelligence EDINBURGH and map this creature so as to grant its desire – to become a living city, teeming with human life and activity. Witnessing visions of the awful realness of life beyond cyberspace, Rowan agrees – plunging into its depths: a strange, abstract world of data and dream.

Thirty years later, Rowan and EDINBURGH have fallen in love, have lived their lives together. Though every morning she awakes with no memory of the past, Rowan has almost completed the map that EDINBURGH desires. But into this map Rowan has woven something else: something hidden, silent, unsaid. As these rifts in the structure undo causality itself, she must answer the question: what exactly has she created? And what does it have to do with this strange, otherworldly figure who sings the red song of a forgotten city – of an ancient, poisoned ROBE…

Although the opera is in English, there is a full libretto printed in the booklet. This is helpful since the singers have muddled diction and, when you can make out words, they do not pronounce them properly. At the very beginning, for instance, the soprano starts out singing “Last night,” and she can’t even pronounce the word “last” properly, singing it as “Lost night.” So right off the bat you know you’ve got enunciation problems, and they don’t get any better once she leaps up into her high register, where not a single word is clear.

The music starts out quite lyrical and even tonal, albeit unaccompanied, but when the singer shoots into the high range one realizes that she is singing extended chord positions that lie just outside of the tonality. A few ominous piano notes end in a bizarre chord before the singer re-enters; from this point on the music becomes much stranger. Yet the music exerts a strange, hypnotic influence on the listener. Eventually a flute is heard inserting some soft, repeated Cs above the piano and soprano as the music develops slowly. After a while, these Cs become slightly distorted, leaning a microtone flat before returning to absolute pitch.

Because most of the singers are women and their timbres sound surprisingly alike, it’s difficult to tell when one stops singing and another begins, hence another good reason for having the libretto. Although the sparse accompaniment of flute and piano is all you get to support the vocalists, I have to say that I greatly prefer this to electronic noises. Sorry, but electronic “music” holds absolutely no appeal for me; on the contrary, it wreaks havoc on my nervous system and is actually painful for me to listen to.

One problem with Robe, however, is that much of the music, even when it changes in the vocal line and/or accompaniment, sounds very much alike. All of the development is in the piano accompaniment, which becomes quite complex, staccato notes in the bass and loudly sprinkled wide-spaced passages played in the right, sounding much like the avant-garde jazz pianist Cecil Taylor. Because the piano part becomes so complex, I can’t really say that the music is repetitive per se, but it tends to stay in one space for long periods of time and doesn’t have any harmonic variety, being largely confined to one atonal scale.

But we’re talking about a recording which only gives us the audio element. It’s quite possible that Robe is much more effective as an audio-visual theater piece, meant to be seen as well as heard. Of course, all opera fits that description, but in a modern work like this I believe that the visual element is of great importance.

Thus I would not be too hard on Robe without having seen a production of it, even though the music as such does not paint any sort of picture or projects any sort of feelings other than those of the edginess of modern music. In other words, it is interesting but wears thin as a strictly aural experience.

Yet the singers all have fine voices despite their struggles with English diction and our two accompanists, flautist Jenni Hogan and pianist Ben Smith, play with energy and conviction. To make a generalization, I found the score very interesting in places but not altogether convincing as an opera without the visual side of it. Had the singers’ diction been much better, I’m sure I would have enjoyed it more. I find it very tiring to keep reading a libretto when listening to a work that’s purportedly in my own native tongue. Even if I were watching a stage performance, I’d have to have supertitles in order to understand what the heck they were singing.

Anyway, that’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

—© 2021 Lynn René Bayley

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Clare Hammond Plays Variations

VARIATIONS / SZYMANOWSKI: Variations on a Polish Theme. LACHENMANN: 5 Variations on a Theme of Schubert. BIRTWISTLE: Variations from the Golden Mountain. ADAMS: I Still Play. COPLAND: Piano Variations. HINDEMITH: Variations. GUBAIDULINA: Chaconne / Clare Hammond, pno / Bis SACD-2493

British pianist Clare Hammond plays here a variety of piano variations by Polish, German, British, American and Russian composers of the 20th century. Four of these composers are still alive: Helmut Lachenmann, Harrison Birtwistle, John Adams and Sofia Gubaidulina.

We start with an early work written by Karol Szymanowski when he was only 22 years old. The style is more along the lines of the French impressionists; he had not yet discovered Scriabin, and Stravinsky was still on the horizon in 1904. The theme is also much more melodic than one has come to expect from this composer. Hammond presents a nice balance between lyricism and energy in her playing; her articulation is excellent, and everything flows naturally. The final “Allegro vivo” is especially impressive.

Lachenmann’s piece is a bit deceptive since it is based on Schubert’s Eccosaise D. 643, but immediately in the first variant we hear a much more modern approach to harmony, and in the second variation, though he reduces the tempo considerably, the harmony is even further removed from Schubert’s milieu. I found this to be a really fascinating piece, full of surprises and great imagination. Indeed, the music becomes slightly denser with each succeeding variation. The Birtwistle Variations from the Golden Mountain are equally modern in harmony, and here the composer uses space between the notes to create suspense.

By contrast, John Adams’ I Still Play is a relatively simple piece: simple in its choice of theme, simple in construction and simple in harmony. It’s nice, but scarcely on the same high level of the preceding works, though Hammond plays it well. According to the notes, Adams describes this piece as “Satie meets Bill Evans,” but to my ears the music is not very much like Satie and clearly lacks Evans’ swing.

I was, however, delighted to hear Hammond play Copland’s Piano Variations from 1930, when he was still an interesting modern composer and before he cribbed old American folk tunes to create his music. This is a nice, thorny piece, full of interesting dissonances and built around a four-note motif that isn’t quite a melody. I would even go so far as to say that this is the best piano work by Copland I’ve ever heard—it even has a touch of George Antheil in it—and Hammond plays it superbly.

By contrast, Paul Hindemith’s variations, originally the second movement of his first Piano Sonata, is almost conservative in style for this very severe modern composer, and Hammond infuses it with a welcome lyricism.

The final work on this disc, Sofia Gubaidulina’s 1956 Chaconne, is one of the most severe pieces I’ve ever heard written for piano. Its spiky, edgy harmonies simply do not allow for comfortable listening at any point in the piece, though if one divorces the top line from the chords one will find that it is fairly lyrical except for the bitonal middle section. The music is also quite baroque in the classic sense of the word, meaning ornate, in its virtuosic development. By the 3:25 mark, we are clearly in very complex and virtuosic territory, far removed from the 18th-century concept of a chaconne. Hammond tears into it with astounding energy and perfect balance between her two hands. It is a genuine tour-de-force.

Except for the Adams piece, this is an extremely interesting album, one that holds your interest from first note to last. Brava, Clare!

—© 2021 Lynn René Bayley

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Fomina Sings Medtner

MEDTNER: 6 Poems by A. Pushkin. 5 Poems by Tyutchev & Fet. 4 Songs, Op. 45. 7 Lieder, Op. 46 / Sofia Fomina, sop; Alexander Karpeyev, pno / Chandos CHAN 20171

Sofia Fomina, described in the notes as a “rising star soprano” noted for her Pamina in Die Zauberflöte, sings here a collection of Nikolai Medtner’s  musically interesting and technically challenging songs. Despite the fact that Ekaterina Levental is in the process of recording all of Medtner’s songs for Brilliant Classics, I thought I would investigate this disc.

Fomina has an attractive but very Slavic-sounding soprano voice with a light flutter-vibrato. She is also a very good interpreter, getting into the words of the songs (all lyrics, thank goodness, printed in the accompanying booklet) and thus projecting the emotions strongly. Pianist Alexander Karpeyev is a sensitive accompanist with an excellent technique, but to my ears he didn’t quite connect with the emotion of Medtner’s songs as well as Fomina did.

I did, however, note a few features of Fomina’s singing that raised questions. One is that she seems to have an extremely small, or narrow, range of volume available to her. The difference between her piano and her forte is not enough to make a real impression on the listener. Whether this is due to her technique or simply because she has a very small voice, I do not know, but I found this to be an impediment in certain songs such as “Spanish Romance” where a wider dynamic range is necessary to convey the song to its fullest extent. For an example of what I mean, try to think of Elly Ameling singing the “Abscheulischer” from Fidelio, It just wouldn’t work.

In addition, Fomina sometimes pushes her small voice too hard, as in “Arion,” which causes a shrill and not a silvery sound. I can foresee that if she continues to use her voice this way, it will not last more than five years before serious strain and possibly a wobble will creep in.

Yet there is the music and the words, and both are served well. The harmony of the ninth song, titled simply “Impromptu” (to lyrics by Fet), is extremely modern for its time. An interesting alternative to the Levental series, then. Considering the paucity of Medtner song recordings, one more is certainly welcome and as I say, Fomina handles the texts of the songs with great skill.

—© 2021 Lynn René Bayley

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The Al Muirhead Quintet Live

ROLLINS: Tenor Madness (2 tks). YOUNG-WASHINGTON: (I Don’t Stand a) Ghost of a Chance. BROWN: Joy Spring. MUIRHEAD: Intermission Song.* A Time for Cal. EVANS-LIVINGSTON: Mona Lisa. MANDEL-MERCER: Emily. GIUFFRE: Four Brothers / Al Muirhead, bs-tpt/tpt/*voc; Kelly Jefferson, t-sax; Reg Schwager, gtr; Neil Swainson, bs; Jesse Cahill, Ted Warren, dm / Chronograph Records (no number) (live: Edmonton & Vancouver, 2018)

We here in the U.S. continue to learn a lot about the Canadian jazz scene, particularly of those musicians who mostly stayed in their home country. One such is Al Muirhead, a bop trumpeter from the 1950s born in 1935. That would make him no less than 82 or 83 years old at the time of this live session in Edmonton, which is astounding for a brass player. Even more astounding after such a long career is that this was his first live recording.

But by God, Muirhead delivers, as does his extremely lively quintet. What sounds like a trombone on the first track is actually Muirhead playing bass trumpet, which he sticks with through most of this set. His solo, though not modern in the sense we think of today, is still well thought out. His tenor saxist, Kelly Jefferson, is also very fine, and thank goodness guitarist Reg Schwager plays in a jazz style and not a rock style. Even more surprising, he is not one of those wimpy jazz guitarists who play as if they’re afraid the strings might break if they swing too hard on the instrument. He has a wonderful sound, more like George Barnes or Charlie Byrd than like many modern players.

In fact, this entire quintet synchro-meshes brilliantly albeit, as noted above, in what is now considered a retro style. But after hearing so many young bucks attempt to sound “different” by playing squeals and blats, it’s nice to hear real jazz without pretension or artifice. On Ghost of a Chance it is Jefferson who states the them and plays the first solo. His tone is flat and tubular in the Sonny Rollins-John Coltrane mold, eschewing any hint of vibrato, and his two choruses are very well shaped and created. Muirhead follows, again on bass trumpet, for a half chorus before we return to Jefferson for the close.

The whole quintet really gets into Clifford Brown’s evergreen Joy Spring. This is home cookin’ for someone like me, and I loved every second of it, particularly Jefferson’s solo, though Muirhead’s is good as well.

On Mona Lisa we finally hear Muirhead switch to regular trumpet, and he plays superbly for a man his age, with a nice tone and good lip control. I don’t think I’ve ever previously heard a jazz performance of this gorgeous song, but I thoroughly enjoyed this one, particularly Swainson’s highly imaginative solo.

But the whole set is fun to hear. The quintet is laid back and creative from start to finish, and if I haven’t mentioned the rhythm section—which includes two different drummers because these were in fact two different sets recorded at two different times—it’s only because they are solid timekeepers who avoid flash but know how to keep the music sounding light and airy. Bassist Neil Swainson plays in a light and airy style as well, taking a solo here and there in addition to also buoying the rhythm.

Well worth checking out.

—© 2021 Lynn René Bayley

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