Saint-Saëns’ “Déjanire” Revived

SAINT-SAËNS: Déjanire / Kate Aldrich, sop (Déjanire); Julien Dran, ten (Hercule); Anaïs Constans, sop (Iole); Jerôme Boutillier, bar (Philoctète); Anna Dowsley, mezzo (Phénice); Monte Carlo Opera Chorus; Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo; Kazuki Yamada, cond / Bru Zane BZ 1055

Hard on the heels of their excellent recording of one French rarity, Louise Bertin’s Fausto (to which I gave a mostly enthusiastic review), Palletto Bru Zane has produced another winner: the first-ever recording of Camille Caint-Saëns’ last opera, Déjanire.

So far as I can ascertain, this was the first instance in operatic history where the orchestral music was written long before the vocal music for an opera. The story goes like this.

In 1898 Fernand Castelbon de Beauxhostes, part-owner of a newly-built arena in Béziers (southern France) which was used then, and is still used today every August, for bullfighting, also wanted to present open-air operas there. He approached Saint-Saëns with the idea of writing a score to accompany a dramatic presentation, without singing, of Louis Gallet’s epic verse-drama Déjanire to inaugurate this aspect of the arena. Based on Sophocles’ play The Trachinae, it presents the story of the great hero Hercules in a less heroic and more violent situation. After killing King Eurytus of Oechalia in Thessaly, Hercules has sacked the city intending to take Eurytus’ beautiful daughter Iole as his wife. But there’s a fly in the ointment: Hercules is already married to Déjanire. Loath to making his intentions immediately obvious, Hercules orders Philoctète, another Greek hero and a great archer, to inform Iole of his intentions, which is an uncomfortable situation because Philoctète is already her lover and she informs him that she loves him and only him. At the same time, Phénice is sent to convince Déjanire to leave Hercules, but when the hero’s intentions are revealed Déjanire tries desperately to win back her husband’s love.

When this fails, Déjanire comes up with Plan B: she gives Iole a nice little gift, a tunic soaked with the blood of Nessus. How very thoughtful of her! It turns out that, before he died, Nessus told Déjanire that his blood had “magic powers” that could make the unfaithful return, so this is what she expects to happen. What she didn’t know (and probably Nessus didn’t either) was that his blood was tainted with a terrible poison. Iole innocently passes the tunic on to Hercules as a wedding-day present. He puts it on joyfully but quickly begins suffering from an excruciating, burning pain; in agony, he throws himself into the wedding pyre and dies. Unfairly to both of his wives, the dead Hercules ascends to Mount Olympus.

Saint-Saëns was attracted by the story—he had already used the Hercules story as a basis for two of his orchestral tone-poems, Le Rouet d’Omphale and La Jeunesse d’Hercule—and was also an admirer of Louis Gallet, who wrote a new adaptation of the Sophocles play which was to be used for this occasion—but objected to having it performed in this “abominable temple of blood.” Happily, Castelbon was able to persuade the composer to at least come and see the arena for himself. He did so, and was surprised by a group of hidden musicians playing his music in his honor. Told also that the then-fatally ill Gallet would attend the premiere, Saint-Saëns capitulated, tweaked Gallet’s play a bit and set it to music. So far as I can tell, the only sung passage was the “Hymn to Eros,” sung in 1898 by one Mlle. Bourgeois (see photo below). At the premiere on August 28, 1898, conducted by the composer himself, Gallet did indeed attend although, as Saint-Saëns sadly wrote, “he heard nothing” as he was by then stone deaf.

Mlle. Bourgeois of the Paris Opera sings the “Hymn to Eros,” 1898

Yet the emotion and dramatic impact of that performance continued to haunt Saint-Saëns, and 12 years later he began setting the spoken play to sung music, turning Déjanire into a full-fledged opera which was premiered in Monte Carlo on March 14, 1911. For his cast, Saint-Saëns had singers who were among the cream of the crop in dramatic works: the great Russian-born Félia Litvinne as Déjanire, French soprano Yvonne Dubel as Iole, tenor Lucien Muratore as Hercule and mezzo-soprano Germaine Bailac (de Boria), who had already impressed the composer with her performances of Dalila in his earlier opera, as Phénice. These were BIG voices; both Litvinne and Dubel sang Wagnerian roles as well as French and Italian ones, and although Muratore never sang Wagner he was well known as a major singing actor in big roles who had learned his dramatic craft from working opposite Sarah Bernhardt.

For this recording, Bru Zane has given us the pocket-sized equivalents of these singers. Kate Aldrich (Déjanire), Julien Dran (Hercule), Anaïs Constans (Iole), Jerôme Bouotillier (Philoctète) and Anna Dowsley (Phénice) are not going to bowl you over with their power, which ideally is what this opera needs to make its best effect, but at least they can all sing, and although Aldrich reveals an unsteady wobble in her opening scene (the voice improves as the performance goes on), they are first-class musicians who give as much of themselves as they can in a studio environment.

In the end, however, it is the music that matters. Is it dramatically effective for a stage work? Is it interesting? The answers to both questions is a resounding yes. As an admirer of the Gluck-Spontini-Berlioz school of opera, which you would already have expected from his Samson et Dalila (he was virtually alone among French composers of his time who kept pushing for a revival of Les Troyens), and in addition to setting a Greek drama to music, Saint-Saëns brought his art even further forward; so much so, in fact, that prior to the premiere he wondered if audiences would respond to the music, since it was “so different” from what they expected. It certainly is. Here, Saint-Saëns played around with both harmony and rhythm, changing both on a dime when he felt like it. The music clearly has his stamp on it, but there is even greater gravitas in the choruses, sung by all males and then the women, which narrate the tale like the spoken chorus in a Greek drama. As in the case of Samson, the work almost has more the feel of an oratorio, but darker in mood than most. Also as in Samson, Saint-Saëns’ “arias” are tied to the text and the mood of the characters, except here they are sometimes quite brief. A trumpet fanfare introduces Hercules, who in his opening monologue (set to strong, strophic music) makes it clear that he feels that Juno, for some reason, has caused him to fall in love with Iole: “A reprehensible love, for which I live, for which I die!” Philoctète’s response that this causes “bitter mourning for my heart” goes over Hercules’ head; he is unaware that his friend and Iole love each other—an interesting plot twist. Here, Saint-Saëns uses the kind of “biting wind” sounds, mixed with trombones, that one heard in Berlioz’ music. Yet what impresses the listener most is the continuous line he developed, an updated version of the Gluck aesthetic. At the world premiere, his friend André Messager conducted but did so at a funereal pace, which angered Saint-Saëns to term them “stupid speeds that would put an anthill to sleep!”[1]

Conducted properly, Déjanire moves forward at a gritty, dramatic pace which makes it sound like a modern version of La Vestale. Lovers of conventional arias will surely recoil from it; it’s not quite parlando but not quite melodic in a conventional sense. They may also balk at the fact that, moreso than in Samson, Saint-Saëns made the orchestra a full partner in the drama. The orchestra in Déjanire reflects the emotional and mental state of the protagonists as they act out their well-written lines. Without even knowing or following the libretto, your ears tell you of the confusion and anguish Iole is suffering when she is told that Hercules will marry her, and this sort of psychological penetration of character continues throughout the score, the only deviation being Déjanire’s aria in the midst of her Act III duet with Hercules. Solos and duets develop and intersperse with one another in a natural, organic way, and  there is even some Wagner-like continuity of line as the music continues to develop, both lyrically and dramatically, as each act has an unbroken line from start to finish. One can glean an idea of how he accomplished this from this one score example, page four of the autograph (a printed piano-reduction of the full score can be found at https://vmirror.imslp.org/files/imglnks/usimg/3/34/IMSLP36798-PMLP81925-Saint-Sa%C3%ABns_-_D%C3%A9janire_(vocal_score).pdf):

Déjanire’s first scene is not only dramatic but, as in the best of Wagner, the shifting tempi, rhythms and harmonies—the latter reflecting some of the harmonic innovations of Debussy (but not his soft textures and slow, blurred rhythmic movement, which Saint-Saëns detested—it reflects her shifting, agitated states of mind. One of the few arias in the classic sense occurs at the beginning of Act II, where Iole reflects on her sad state:

Unlike you I do not weep for the ruined temples,
Nor the deserted palaces,
Nor the warriors fallen by the sword,
Nor our wounded pride!
I weep for my slaughtered father!
For myself, delivered
Into brutal hands!
For all out shattered hopes!

This brief excerpt from the libretto clearly reflects the excellent quality of Louis Gallet’s text, more truly poetic than usual. This, too, was an advance on earlier French opera, particularly the popular rubbish turned out by Massenet (except for his two best works, already discussed) and Thomas. It is doubtful that Déjanire would even appeal to audiences today; the majority of operagoers are not into poetry as drama or opera as dramatic poetry. All they want is high notes, arias and high excitement. But for me, it not only suffices, it surpasses my expectations.

For a light tenor who normally sings such roles as Arturo in Lucia, Alfredo in Traviata and Tamino in Zauberflöte, Julien Dran really throws himself into role of Hercules in a way I would not have expected, good as his voice is. The Hercules-Déjanire duet is one of the gems of this opera, with the music for each reflecting their inner feelings and not the other’s—another rare achievement for this excellent composer. This eventually reaches a climax as Saint-Saëns suddenly ups the tempo, adds a bass drum to the orchestra and lets Déjanire explode with rage:

I unmask you, traitor!
In vain you seek to deceive me!
Go! Not for nothing are you the son of Jupiter!
And I, like Juno, henceforth forsaken,
Can count on nothing but your betrayals!

Later, singing with Philoctéte, Hercules rationalizes his love for Iole by singing that since he shed her father’s blood, he “owes her a husband’s support.” This, too, is set to music that reflects the ambiguity of his thoughts and actions. But the whole score is admirable in this way. Although their composing styles were quite different, I wouldn’t be at all surprised to learn that at least the choruses in Déjanire influenced Igor Stravinsky when he wrote Oedipus Rex; there is a certain raw energy in the choruses of the latter that mirror what one hears in Déjanire. There’s also a certain terseness in this music that sounds like a predecessor of the Stravinsky opera; despite its being four acts, the music flies by swiftly. Even the slow sections, conducted properly as they are here, do not drag—and then there are the biting winds in the orchestration, which also prefigure Stravinsky.

Act IV is the most pastoral and lyrical, opening with ballet music in the Prelude before we move into the initially serene love music for Iole and Hercules; but once he puts on the tunic of Nessus and begins feeling his body tortured, so too does the music reflect this. It ends in a blaze of torment.

I would say that Déjanire, with a good cast and conductor such as this, would certainly impress a modern audience whose minds are open enough to accept something different, except that I’m scared to death that the idiot stage director would dress them in underwear and create stage sets that look like an inner-city slum. (Don’t laugh; they’ve already done this to La Vestale, in both France and Belgium.) Happily, in this splendid new recording we can enjoy the theater of the mind and stage our own production based on what we hear, which is powerful yet elegant.

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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[1] Quoted in the booklet of the Bry Zane recording.

Naxos’ New “La Favorite”

DONIZETTI: La Favorite / Annalisa Stroppa, mezzo (Léonor de Guzman); Javier Camarena, ten (Fernand); Florian Sempey, bar (Alphonse XI); Evgeny Stavinsky, bs (Balthazar); Edoardo Milletti, ten (Don Gaspar); Caterina de Tonno, sop (inès); Alessandro Barbaglia, ten (Un seigneur); Teatro alla Scala Chorus; Donizetti Opera Chorus & Orch.; Riccardo Frizza, cond / Naxos 8.660549-51

Donizetti’s1840 opera La Favorite, often considered his finest and best-integrated work, came about as the result of bad luck, yet oddly enough he was able to create a fairly effective piece of musical drama. Originally, he had been writing L’Ange de Nisida as his second work for Paris, not at the Opéra but for the Théâtre de la Renaissance, but its director, Anténor Joly, suddenly declared bankruptcy in May 1840. In a letter, Donizetti complained that since L’Ange de Nisida was only good for that theater, he had been shafted by this “lamebrain” director (“ciuccio assaje”) who spent money like water. Donizetti then began work on Le Duc d’Albe, but the Paris Opéra stepped in and commissioned a new opera to be written pronto; the catch was that director Léon Pillet insisted that it have a prominent role for his mistress, mezzo-soprano Rosine Stoltz. Donizetti thus abandoned Le Duc d’Albe and borrowed heavily from L’Ange de Nisida to create La favorite, but also included music from an old, unfinished opera buffa, Adelaide, including Inés’s Act I aria “Doux zephyr,” Alfonso’s Act II cabaletta “Léonor, mon amour brave” and the final concertante scene of Act III, “Ô ciel!…De son âme.” He wrote the entire final act in three to four hours, excepting the cavatina and part of a duet, which were added at the rehearsal stage!

Because of these factors, La favorite was sometimes dismissed as a “pastiche” opera unworthy to be taken seriously. This was a major mistake, however, for somehow or other Donizetti created a lyric masterpiece in which scene followed scene with unerring musical and (often) dramatic sense. Arturo Toscanini, for one, considered it such, particularly the last act which he said contained not one false note.

Another reason why the opera is often dismissed is that the plot is considered to be too confusing. It is not confusing, it is complex, and there is a difference. In fact, I find it rather ironic—perhaps a subtle shot at Pillet—that the main character, the “favorite” of King Alphonso XI, is herself a mistress, thus Rosine Stoltz was singing to type.

In fact, one of the most fascinating aspects of the plot is that it actually de-sanctifies the Catholic Church in a way that was quite embarrassing in its time. Balthazar (bass) is the chief monk in a monastery as well as—get this—the father of the Queen of Castille. So already we have a question of ethics involved. A young monk, Fernand, confesses that he has fallen in love with a beautiful but unknown woman who he spotted. He remains faithful to his God but wants to leave the monastery to seek her out; Balthazar, the pot calling the kettle black, angrily sends him on his way, warning him of the dangers of the outside world.

Fernand finally finds his lady, learns that her name is Léonor and confesses his love for her, but doesn’t really know who she is. Léonor’s lady-in-waiting Inés leads him to her; Léonor says that they can never marry, but hands him a document to help him in the future. She leaves as the King arrives and Fernand discovers that the document is a commission in the army. As a soldier in Alphonse’s army, Fernand proves his bravery and helps him win control of Alcazar. The King wants to divorce the Queen in order to marry Léonor, but knows that will incur the wrath of his father-in-law, Balthazar, who may turn the Church against him. At a ceremony presenting a medal and honors to Fernand, Alphonse asks him to name his reward for his bravery. Fernand asks to be allowed to marry the woman who inspired his bravery; as he points to Léonor, the King is aghast, but sees this as a way out of his dilemma. He orders Fernand to marry Léonor within an hour; Léonor hastily sends Inés to give Fernand a note explaining who she really is, but Inés is arrested before she can do so. Learning only after the wedding ceremony that she is the King’s mistress, Fernand breaks his sword, leaves Léonor and returns to Balthazar and the monastery.

But there is a twist to this story. The Queen eventually dies of heartbreak and grief, her body sent to the monastery for her father/head monk to give the funeral service. Léonor also arrives, in a state of exhaustion, and faints in front of the cross. Fernand initially rejects her but, moved by her love and sincerity, decides to love her again, but too late. Spent from hunger and exhaustion, Léonor dies in his arms.

On this richly textured plot full of conflicted characters, Donizetti lavished his greatest and most complete music. La favorite and its Italian relative, La favorita (not entirely the same music, but close enough), are essentially symphonies for voices. The sung recitatives are few, but no matter. The whole story is told in ariettas, duets, scenes and arias of such subtle complexity that no less an auditor than Richard Wagner transcribed the entire score in three instrumental arrangements, one for piano, the second for flute, and the third for a violin duo. Thirty-nine years later, Italian composer Antonio Pasculli wrote a double concerto for oboe and piano based on themes from the opera. Yet the work fell out of favor in theaters, mostly because there was less actual stage action than in Lucia. La favorite was much more of a psychological-musical drama, and that didn’t sell well to action-oriented audiences.

The orchestral prelude to Act I is brooding and very well written, using a brief two-voiced fugue at the beginning and taken very slowly although with occasional outbursts by the strings and brass. The second half is fast-paced, but still in the minor with rapid, unexpected key changes both up and down. It’s a brilliant start to a brilliant opera.

The ring of a church bell introduces the first scene in the monastery. Here the music is in the major, but quite stately; there is none of the “whoop-de-doo” quality that affected the opening scene of Lucia. The monks sing a stately and moving melody before Balthazar and Fernand enter, exchanging sung recitatives to orchestra, but with tempo changes and sudden surges in tempo here and there. Rameau and Gluck would have been proud of him for writing like this, and even the sudden appearance of Fernand’s aria “Une ange, une femme inconnue” does not disrupt the mood because it is a serious aria with sincere words set to surprisingly dignified music…and it is not entirely an aria, because Balthazar sings the first line and interjects another in the middle. Following this, Donizetti does resort to some fast Italianate rhythms for a bit, but then slows down as Balthazar expressed his displeasure and tells Fernand to just go and leave.

One could give a moment-by-moment description like this of the whole opera, but listening to and absorbing what Donizetti did here is a greater experience than just reading about it. This is music that is not just “pretty,” but truly beautiful because it contains dramatic truth. Aside from the ballet music—not his fault or choice—there is nothing that sounds a false note or seems out of place in La favorite. Even the charming, pretty music which introduces Inés, just prior to Fernand meeting Léonor for the first time, makes sense because this is supposed to be a picnic for the wealthy.

With that being said, I feel the need to point out how clever Donizetti was in writing the King’s music as warm, loving, and compassionate, even though he is cheating on his wife and trying to figure out a way to banish her so he can marry Léonor. This makes him an ambiguous character; for all his sexual machinations, he appears to be, at base, a good man, clearly not a Nero, and this in itself is an interesting moral dilemma presented by the music. It is also very difficult to sing Alfonso properly; the baritone must have a good dramatic sense for the big scenes, but also a melting legato and a well-supported half voice for all the long, lyric lines he is called upon to produce. And, of course, there is Léonor herself, who at heart is a good person who feels betrayed by Alfonso. At one point she sings to him:

Do you think that I’m happy? Good heaven!
When I left my father’s castle, poor deceived girl,
Alas! I thought that I was following a husband!

Alphonse (tenderly): Ah, be quiet!

Léonor: In these solitary woods which can hardly conceal the King’s mistress,
I am fully aware of your court’s contempt for you…
In your palace, my poor soul sighs,
hiding its grief under gold and flowers;
God alone sees it, under my cheerless smile,
my withered heart swallows many tears.

It is to Donizetti’s great credit that these lines, and many others, are set here to music that accurately reflects their meaning and not some happy tune with bouncy rhythms.

Interestingly, we never see or hear the Queen; for all we know, she may have been a shrew, and the King married to her due to politics rather than love.

Within this mellifluous lyric setting, we may indeed wonder at the tenor’s propensity to sing as many forte high notes as he does. I’m getting ahead of myself a little here, but this was because Fernand was created by Louis-Gilbert Dupréz, the first tenor in operatic history to sing all of his high notes from the chest, even up to the high C, thus creating a mania for tenor high notes that, unfortunately, has never left us. Granted, there’s a great visceral thrill to hearing such things, but visceral is all it is; and, as I’ve tried to explain over and over to a certain opera buff I know, belting out high notes may be dramatic from the standpoint of momentary excitement but it’s not drama. What is dramatic is a scene that is usually cut right after Alfonso and Léonor sing their meltingly beautiful duet, “Dans ce palais.” This is the superb dramatic scene “Bientôtj;aurai brisé” in which Alfonso suddenly explodes with rage against the Queen who keeps him from marrying her. Léonor is worried about the Church’s reaction, but Alfonso doesn’t care; when he promises to make Léonor his queen, she recoils in horror: “Oh never! No, never!” But Alfonso goes even further, threatening to make his courtiers who mock her “tremble before you.” By omitting this important scene, the listener fails to understand the power-mad man beneath the suave vocal lines of his previous music.

As for the last act, set in the monastery, it opens with an organ solo which leads into the orchestral prelude, one of the few times an additional prelude to an act was used in those days. Balthazar sings, then the chorus; Donizetti’s one error here was in making it a mixed chorus. The monastery would only have a male chorus, but at least the music is dignified and not pop-oriented. Fernand’s famous aria, “Ange si pur” (“Spirto gentil” in the Italian version) fits into the fabric of the score like a hand in a glove; so, too, does Léonor’s entrance, which is quiet and dignified, not announced with a load of coloratura fireworks. The orchestration behind her, with low notes from the cellos against soft, pizzicato violins, is also highly effective. The organ returns, now ushering in a fully male chorus singing softly, although the sopranos return once again. Perhaps this was a coed monastery. The music becomes more agitated, but stays in the minor—and again, it is dignified music befitting the sad, tragic feeling of this final meeting with Fernand. Even when the tempo increases to match the dramatic situation, there is a unity in both mood and musical construction. Even when, later on in their duet, the music suddenly jumps into a faster rhythm, the minor key is maintained and the rhythm is not a cheap dance piece. Maintaining dignity in their music was not something the Bel Canto Boys were very good at, but for whatever reason, Donizetti pulled it all together in this shining jewel amidst the scrap heap of works from this period.

Like most bel canto operas, the demands on the singers is great: all of the principals must not have just good voices, but a perfect cantilena, firm tone, even voices throughout their registers and, in this case, communicative powers in order to project the drama. In his opening scene, Alfonso XI must also be able to sing grupetti and even a quick trill. All of this makes La Favorite difficult to cast in our modern era, when good vocal quality is considered and afterthought.

In reviewing the present recording, we start with the good. Tenor Javier Camarena is an excellent Fernand and bass Evgeny Stavinsky a very fine Balthazar. Riccardo Frizza conducts well, and the performance is note-for-note complete, including such niceties as variations for the tenor (normally not sung) in the second verse of his first aria, “Un ange, une femme inconue” in addition to the little scene that follows Alfonso’s second-act cabaletta, “Léonor! Mon amour brave” (also normally not sung) as well as that all-important scene, “Bientôt j’aurai brisé,” of which this appears to be the first recording. Although soprano Caterina de Tonno (Inés) has an overripe vibrato, her voice is pretty and, for the most part, firm.

That is the good news. The bad is that of the three most important roles, both Alfonso XI and Léonor are very badly served. Baritone Florian Sempey has an utterly ghastly voice: poor tone production, a consistently annoying, uneven vibrato (although, believe it or not, he does manage a trill in his opening scene), a strangulated high range and an inability to sing legato. Moreover, due to his consistently forced tone production, he cannot sing anything below a mezzo-forte, which completely ruins his cavatina “Léonor, viens, j’abbandonne.” Why he was chosen for this major production when Mattia Olivieri, the most outstanding modern exponent of this role (listen to his Dynamic recording of a few years ago), could have been procured is beyond my understanding. Mezzo-soprano Annalisa Stroppa is a perfect match for Sempey, which is not a compliment. She, too has a ghastly flutter in the voice, in her case an uneven one, and her tone production, too, is strangulated, buried in the throat. What are voice teachers putting into the heads of their charges nowadays? And do they really think that voices as horrible as these are fit to be heard in major opera productions? Unfortunately, for me, these are rhetorical questions for which I have no answer.

The best performance of La Favorite in French is the one with Elīna Garanča (Léonor), Juan Diego Florez (Fernand), Ludovic Tezier (Alfonso, a bit overloud in his soft music but mostly outstanding), Eva Liebau (Inés) and Carlo Columbara (Balthazar), conducted by Roberto Abbado, which can be found on YouTube by clicking HERE, but it is not note-complete. Therefore you will need to at least get that important scene, “Bientôt j’aurai brisé,” from this recording, despite the awful singing. My recommendation is to wait until Presto Music is selling this recording, since they usually allow you to buy individual tracks and not the whole thing. Pay your money for this scene and splice it into the Garanča-Tezier performance. It’s a bit jarring to go from outstanding singing to such ghastly vocal noises, but you really cannot do without it.

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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Dark Music for Basset Horn & Clarinets

LUMINOS / LUYTENS: This Green Tide. 5 Little Pieces.* SLATER: Around the Darkening Sun.^# PERT: Luminos. C. FOX: This Has Happened Before. ^# LIZ JOHNSON: The Space Between Heaven and Earth. COWIE: Heather Jean Nocturnes^#  / Ronald Woodley, basset-hn/*cl/^#bs-cl; Andrew West, pno / Métier 77118

This unusual new release features music by six very fine but oft-ignored modern British composers, of whom my two favorite are Elisabeth Luytens and Edward Cowie. Perhaps the most unusual thing about this program, aside from the music itself, is the use of the basset horn, a sort of monstrous relative of the alto clarinet. It is pitched a fourth lower than a B-flat clarinet, is extremely long, has an angled mouthpiece as well as a bell that is bent upwards. This, in itself, gives the music a strange quality.

The Green Tide is a strange, sad piece in a minor mode which Luytens develops with her characteristic care and sensitivity, at times exploiting the basset horn’s quirky-sounding ranges to produce off-key dissonances. Yet the core of the music is tonal if rather forlorn, the outpourings of a soul trapped in its own sort of tide with nowhere to go. It seemed to me the musings of a lost soul trapped in a world they do not control and yet cannot escape from. Angela Slater’s Around the Darkening Sun is no more cheerful, and in fact sounds like a sequel to the Luytens piece except that the tempo is a bit quicker, the piano part a bit more forceful, and the basset horn somewhat busier.

Morris Pert’s last name has no correlation to his piece Luminos, which in itself has no correlation to the dark, menacing world he created here. By this time I came to understand that the album’s title is just a word some PR director came up with, as there is really very little on this CD that is luminous in the sense of the word I am familiar with. Yet, oddly, the tempo picks up, the volume increases, and Pert does one thing that Luytens and Slater did not do, and that is to develop his theme more fully.

Christopher Fox’s This Has Happened Before is indeed a prophetic title, as there is still no sun, no moon, no stars in his own bleak panorama. The one difference here is that the work is scored for four multitracked bass clarinets. Luytens’ 5 Little Pieces for Clarinet are no jollier in harmony but a bit less fatalistic in mood, for which I was grateful. The second of these is actually a bit upbeat in tempo if not in harmony or overall feeling. The “Pastorale” (No. 4) does try to be jolly in a bitonal way, and “Declamatorio” really is rather upbeat, the first such piece on the CD, but that’s about it.

We really do reach a point of “luminosity” in Liz Dilnot Johnson’s The Space Between Heaven and Earth, particularly in “Winter” but also in “Spring” (resolutely tonal, for once). “Summer” (surprisingly perky for a change!) and even “Autumn” Quite a change from the previous sections of the CD; but for me, the highlight of the entire disc was Edward Cowie’s little suite of Heather Jean Nocturnes—for once, music that is not only interesting but without a specific emotional agenda. Here the music almost continually shifts moods as it is developed. These are pieces that the mind can follow with pleasure; they are interesting and engaging. I won’t spoil the discovery of these excellent pieces for the reader, but they clearly have a bit more meat on their bones. There are even some jolly rhythmic passages in “Sun and Moon Dancing” that, all by themselves, pick up the otherwise dour mood of the album.

A mixed bag, then, but at least Métier wisely chose to conclude this program with the two most upbeat and interesting works of those presented here.

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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Charles Lloyd’s New Album

THE SKY WILL STILL BE THERE TOMORROW / Defiant, Tender Warrior. The Lonely One. Monk’s Dance. The Water is Rising. Late Bloom. Booker’s Dance. The Ghost of Lady Day. The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow. Beyond Darkness. Sky Valley, Spirit of the Forest. Balm in Gliead. Lift Every Voice and Sing. When the Sun Comes Up, Darkness is Gone. Cape to Cairo. Defiant, Reprise; Homeward Dove (Charles Lloyd) / Charles Lloyd, t-sax/fl/bs-fl; Jason Moran, pno; Larry Grenadier, bs; Brian Blade, dm / Blue Note, no number; available for streaming on all platforms (Spotify, YouTubeMusic, Amazon Music, iTunes Store, Tidal, GoBuz, Pandora, Deezer)

Having nothing interesting to review, I decided to check out new jazz releases online. Most of what was there were the usual suspects: uninteresting modern instrumentalists whose music went nowhere and whispery female “jazz” singers who think they’re hip but can’t hold a candle to the greats of the past (even the more recent past like Dena DeRose or Diane Krall).

But then, suddenly, here was this blast from the past: 85-year-old Charles Lloyd, the only surviving member of the old guard who were there when hard bop turned into more modern, free jazz who is not, like Sonny Rollins, retired. A contemporary of Ornette, Coltrane, Adderly and Kirk, a man who still remembers Billie Holiday and Booker Little when they were still alive and performing. A saxist who somehow hit the big time in the mid-1960s with a band that included Keith Jarrett on piano, but then fell into oblivion by the mid-1970s when fusion, which he never liked and wouldn’t play, took over the jazz world for more than a decade. A survivor and, as this outstanding album proves, still a vital creator. Someone for whom “social justice” in music was not an issue to shove down people’s throats, but simply a means to an end. In short, one of the great creators of this music we call jazz who is still creative.

According to the short notes on Blue Note’s website:

Unsettled by the state of the world in 2020, Charles Lloyd began conceiving a musical offering in the form of a new studio recording featuring…a quartet that would be a first-time convening of four distinctive voices with the legendary saxophonist… A majestic body of work that finds one of the most significant musicians of the 20th and 21st centuries still at the peak of his powers.

The six new compositions on this album are The Water is Rising, Late Bloom, The Ghost of Lady Day, Sky Valley—Spirit of the Forest and When the Sun Comes Up, Darkness is Gone. Of existing Lloyd compositions featured here, Lift Every Voice and Sing is one of the more recent, having been recorded in 2021 on the compilation album Relief: A Benefit for the Jazz Foundation of America with Gerald Clayton, Marvin Sewell, Harish Raghavan and drummer Eric Harland.

How can I put this in words? Lloyd’s “new” quartet is both modern and traditional.  The names are, to be honest, unfamiliar to me, but the way they play is very much in keeping with some of the 1960s pioneers who were active during Lloyd’s heyday. And the best part of all is that Lloyd didn’t have to update his style one bit to play with these younger musicians because it was a truly great style even back in the mid-1960s. True, there is more reflection and a bit less fire here than of old, but fire isn’t everything. Lloyd can still improvise more creatively than many a young buck I’ve heard in recent years, and there is a bit more free form to his music now than there was then. On most tracks, he really just breathes into the tenor sax, producing a tone less lush but just as intimate as the one Ben Webster made famous, and it this intimacy, combined with his still-inspiring creativity, that makes The Sky Will Be There Tomorrow a masterpiece. He still takes chances and his drummer (Brian Blade) plays amorphic rhythmic patterns behind Lloyd, Moran and Grenadier. Interestingly, Moran’s playing is the simplest and least complex on this set; he is more of a mood-setter, sometimes playing licks that Lloyd has just played on the saxophone but more often reacting to what Lloyd is playing. Bassist Grenadier has brief spot solos but for the most part is supportive of both Lloyd and Blade.

Among this album’s many highlights is Monk’s Dance, which opens with Moran playing a surprisingly complex solo in which he uses Monk-like harmonies but otherwise sounds more like Bill Evans in timbre and technique, yet the saxist sounds a great deal like Coltrane during the time when he played with Monk at the Five Spot (1957), creating his own idea of Trane’s “sheets of sound” and succeeding in doing so. Late Bloom is a brief (one minute long) flute duet on which Lloyd double-tracked himself on flute and bass flute; despite its brevity, it is one of the most beautiful things on the entire album, acting as a lead-in to Booker’s Dance, a tribute to the great but short-lived trumpeter Booker Ervin, who would surely have been one of jazz’s most profound influences on the music had he survived longer. On this track, the bass and drums lay down some incredibly complex rhythms and Grenadier takes another excellent solo, but it is the “old man” who continues to amaze us, playing an extended improvisation in which he subdivides the time while still creating an extremely interesting new line.

You can tell that Lloyd is a player who came up in the same era as Coleman and Coltrane, yet he never really imitates them so much as he channels some of their ideas. By the mid-‘60s,he had evolved his own style and he still uses it, but here it is presented in a sort of distillation of his earlier self: calmer, not trying to knock you out with his “brilliance,” yet ever and again amazing you with his powers of improvisation. The Ghost of Lady Day, in fact, is so good that what he plays is a continually evolving line of music that has no hesitation or uncertainty about it; it just leaves you in awe of his powers and, in the last third when he ramps up the volume, his ability to communicate without trying to steamroll the listener. Nearly every young saxist today should listen to this album; it is an object lesson in how to be creative while still projecting your own style.

Another good example is The Sky Will Still Be Here Tomorrow, where he definitely channels Ornette but still sounds different from him while pianist Moran seems to be channeling Cecil Taylor without trying to copy him—at least until about a third of the way in, when a steady, funky beat suddenly evolves, into which Moran falls in, later playing the bridge of his solo in double time while Grenadier and Blade creatively work around the beat; then things return to a steady four as Lloyd returns, this time doing double-time backflips on the tenor. But this entire track is a marvel in which the music keeps changing.

Beyond Darkness is actually a “tune” in the sense of a memorable one, with Lloyd back on flute while Grenadier lays down a steady 3 behind him and Moran—but more of a relaxed 6/8 than a real 3 in the waltz sense. Yet, really, none of the tracks on this album are uninteresting, not even the open-rhythmed ballad Sky Valley, Spirit of the Forest, because there is always something going on with the harmony and/or rhythm. Lloyd didn’t come from a jazz generation that believed in the music as a soporific for people with hurt feelings. If you felt alone, it wasn’t time to cry in your beer. It was time for you to reflect on yourself and your life. Wake up and smell the coffee. And, as it so happens, as this piece evolves it very gradually increases in tempo and volume until you reach a place where you wonder how exactly they made this happen. Just call it “jazz magic.” Later still, as the tempo and intensity die down, the music changes yet again.

Regardless of Lloyd’s age or even his previous accomplishments, and despite the fact that most of the pieces on this album are not new, The Sky Will Still Be There Tomorrow is clearly one of his great albums. The separate pieces in it do not quite make a “suite,” and yet in a way, they do. and every moment on this remarkable album is as good as the one preceding and following it. The overall vibe, even at the busiest and most creative moments, is always warm and inviting. Lloyd seems to want to give this big musical hug to everyone in the world and let them know that, if they just look within themselves for strength and self-assurance, everything is going to be all right. You don’t really NEED other people to make your life complete. They’re nice to have, but you are your most important friend and resource.

It is rare nowadays that one discovers a masterpiece such as this, particularly from a musician of Lloyd’s age (if they’re still playing at all), but this is clearly one of them. Unfortunately, it’s a sign of the times, as I predicted in my book Spinning the Record: although this album bears the Blue Note insignia and is released under their aegis, it is not available as a physical CD but only on streaming platforms. Making it into a CD is up to you.

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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Marina Tarasova Plays Weinberg

WEINBERG: Concertino for Cello & String Orchestra.* 24 Preludes for Solo Cello / Marina Tarasova, cel; *Music Viva Chamber Orch.; Alexander Rudin, cond / Northern Flowers NF/PMA 99131

WEINBERG: Solo Cello Sonatas Nos. 1-4 / Marina Tarasova, cel / Northern Flowers NF/PMA 99132

Italian cellist Mario Brunello has just recently released his recording of the Weinberg Solo Cello Sonatas on Arcana, which is supposed to be available through Naxos, but since it’s not up for streaming on their Naxos Music Library website, I decided the hell with it and went searching for another recording.

That’s how I bumped into Marina Tarasova, and I’m glad I did.

Tarasova first studied at the Gnessin School where so many outstanding Russian musicians started out, then at the Moscow Conservatoire with Professor Nataliya Shakhovskaya. She has won awards in the international competitions of Prague, Florence and Paris as well as the laureate of the Tchaikovsky competition in Moscow. In addition to these Weinberg discs, she has also recorded the J.S. Bach Cello Suites for Divine Art and French cello suites of Lalo, Koechlin and Pierné for Brilliant Classics. Many years ago, Northern Flowers was a tiny independent label out of Russia that had minimal circulation in the West, but as a reviewer (at that time) for a major American classical magazine I was lucky enough to snag a rare recital disc by the little-known (outside of Russia) and vastly underrated pianist Vladimir Nielsen. Happily, Tarasova’s recordings are made in pretty good digital sound and, thankfully, have had decent worldwide distribution.

Quite aside from her list of awards, which mean absolutely nothing to me (a lot of excellent technicians who are not artists receive prestigious competition awards nowadays), what impressed me was the rich, beautiful and full-bided tone that she elicits from her instrument. Indeed, it has a warmth that reminded me of Casals in his prime, perhaps even a bit like Mstislav Rostropovich, a friend of Weinberg’s who gave the world premiere performance of this cello Concertino. I have his performance of it on CD, and can attest that Tarasova’s reading is nearly as good in its own way. I say “in its own way” because although both cellists possess a warm, rounded timbre. Rostropovich’s was a bit more cutting and masculine in profile whereas Tarasova emphasizes warmth and technique over strength. This doesn’t mean that her performances are in any way weak or insufficient; on the contrary, they have great tensile strength in addition to warmth, only that the extra added “push” that Rostropovich had on the cello was something unique to him.

In fact, the richness of her tone reminded me a great deal of the great British cellist Colin Carr, who I was lucky enough to hear in person (I wrote a profile on him several years ago on this blog). I don’t know if her sound is quite as huge as his—Carr has the biggest timbre I’ve ever heard on a cello—but her artistry is fully equal to his. One of the things that really struck me when listening to the Concertino was how much Tarasova made the second movement sound “jazzy.” I’m not sure if this was Weinberg’s intention—he was never a composer who seemed to have an inclination towards jazz rhythm in any of his other pieces—but it certainly works.

As for the cello preludes, these are their first recordings so I have no other frame of reference to judge her performances by, but since I know her Concertino performance to be first-rate I’ll take my chances and say these are probably definitive readings. Since there exists a photo of Tarasova with Weinberg’s widow, I’d say that she has a pretty good idea of what he wanted in these works. Typically of Weinberg, they are stylistically varied and at times (such as No. 7) rather quirky in construction. His music always did defy easy categorization, and these works are no exception. This Prelude No. 7 also shows the listener how fluid Tarasova’s technique is; like my all-time favorite cellist, Emanuel Feuermann, she makes “the rough places plain.” Everything sounds so easy that you never get the idea that learning these pieces were a strain on her; in fact. Prelude No. 8 is, if anything, even more technically difficult than No. 7, but of course what I listen for is not technical difficulty but whether or not the music is creative and interesting, and it clearly is with its fast bowed single notes alternated with rapid passages and bitonality in the progress of the piece. Indeed, from No. 7 onward, these Preludes seem to get more and more difficult to play, but you’d never know it from the way Tarasova handles them. Her goal is music-making first and foremost; the technical challenges are for her just something to be overcome and then forgotten about. My kind of musician! And this attitude clearly serves her well when she reaches a prelude that is more expressive than technical, such as the moody, rather ominous-sounding No. 11. Listening to the entire series in one sitting, in fact, shows this set of preludes to be one of the more expressive things Weinberg ever wrote for the cello. Preludes No. 13 & 14, in fact, may well be the quirkiest things I’ve ever heard written for that instrument by a composer who came up in the 1940s.

The bottom line is that whatever her tonal or stylistic resemblance to Rostropovich or Carr, Tarasova is her own woman. Since these are the only three albums I’ve seen of hers, I can’t say whether or not she performs any other “modern” music besides Weinberg, but at least we have these and they are utterly magnificent.

As for the solo cello sonatas, I had only previously heard No. 1 in a recording by Josef Feigelson on Naxos 8.572280; the rest of that CD is filled out with Weinberg’s Solo Cello Preludes (this was their second recording) and the Rhapsody on Moldavian Themes played by conductor Vladimir Lande and the St, Petersburg State Symphony Orchestra. Feigelson recorded the latter three Solo Cello Sonatas on a separate Naxos disc. Although Feigelson is a good cellist, he is not as colorful and imaginative as Tarasova; just compare the second-movement “Andante” of the first sonata for an example of what I mean. Feigelson plays the whole movement in the same dynamic and volume level, Tarasova not only introduces several shifts of volume, but plays it quicker as well as with many rhythmic inflections which “lift” the music. A good comparison is the first movement of the second sonata, which Feigelson plays with good feeling but Tarasov leaves him in the dust. But is this according to the score? I have no way of knowing, since I cannot access any Weinberg scores online, but I will say that, compared to other highly-touted recordings of his music in other genres, the feeling rings true. That’s all I can say; it appeals to me very strongly on an emotional level. What I cannot say is whether or not Tarasova’s dramatic inflections are her own feelings superimposed on the music or simply a more dynamic reading. I can tell you that her Bach Cello Suites are certainly unique: she takes the titles of the dance movements—gigue, sarbande, menuet etc.—quite literally, making the cello dance through the music as well. It must be remembered, however, that Bach only gave these movements general tempo descriptions. There were no metronomes in his day, thus there are no metronome markings, thus individual interpretation can be used as much as one likes unless it distorts the phrasing of the music. Of course, there will be some listeners who argue that Tarasova’s rapid Bach Suites are a distortion of the music; but the bottom line is that she is an excitable and energetic interpreter by nature. (Interestingly, no one complains when Bach is taken too slowly because they find that kind of playing “forthright,” “serious” and “within proper bounds.”) Again, I would assume that since Tarasova knows Weinberg’s widow that she had some idea how that composer wanted his music to go. A reviewer for Gramophone said that if forced to choose just one set of the sonatas he would go with Feigelson because he lets the music speak for itself without adding these kind of inflections. There is certainly something to be said for this approach; you can make your own decision by comparing both recordings. I will say, however, that I clearly prefer Tarasova’s recording of the 24 Preludes to Feigelson’s because she makes those pieces sound exciting and varied, which is the opposite of what Feigelson does with them. The choice is up to you.

 —© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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Scott Marshall’s Solitude Suite

THE SOLITUDE SUITE / What Would Eddie Do. Optimism. Frugal Fuguel. Points of View. The Monk Trane. Reflections. Conversations. Solid Dude Debate. That’s Better (Scott Marshall) / Scott Marshall, t-sax/s-sax; Kevin Turcotte, tp/fl-hn; Mike Downes, bs; Terry Clarke, dm / SMT 006, self-produced CD, available at http://www.scottdouglasmarshall.com

This interesting album, scheduled for release on March 22, features the playing and compositions of Canadian tenor saxist Scott Marshall who, at least on the cover of this album, looks like a staid college professor who has suddenly discovered the jazz life. (You may draw your own conclusions from that statement.) The publicity blurb for this CD draws attention to the fact that Marshall’s quartet has no piano or guitar to supply chords to any of these selections. but rather depends on the interaction of the trumpet, saxophone and bass. Of course there have been numerous such groups in jazz like this, the most famous probably being the original Ornette Coleman Quartet, but the point is well taken.

In fact, although this quartet’s musical aesthetic is more in the tradition of Mingus than Coltrane, there are some similarities here. Although Mike Downes is not as powerful or dominant a bassist as Mingus (no one really is), he does possess a rich tone that anchors the group in such a way that he almost makes his instrument sound like a sort of funky “ground bass” in the classical sense. If I judge correctly, only the first chorus of What Would Eddie Do is written out; the rest of the track sounds completely improvised to me. Also of interest is Marshall’s tenor tone, warm and a bit “wheaty”-sounding, more of a throwback to Lester Young than any of the tenor icons who succeeded him (Rollins, Coltrane, etc.). This opening piece also has a bit of a Latin feel to it without overdoing that aspect of the rhythm. It’s a wonderful introduction to this suite.

Optimism is a more traditional 4/4 swinger on which Marshall switches from tenor to soprano saxophone. His soprano playing is also warm and mellow, in this case similar to the way Johnny Hodges played soprano (for those of you who have heard Hodges on soprano…he stopped playing it in the mid-1940s). Complementing Marshall’s warm sound on his instruments is Turcotte’s trumpet and flugelhorn playing. As an improviser, Turcotte generally tends to stay away from pure “flash,” which I really liked. His improvised solos have good musical structure and direction, much like Shorty Rogers. (I only make these comparisons to allow the reader to understand how their playing struck me, not to lay all that heavily into the musicians they sound like. For all I know, Marshall may never have heard Hodges on soprano and Turcotte may not be familiar with Rogers’ playing.)

Marshall’s music is primarily tonal and melodic, and this is a welcome relief to me from all these modern jazz musicians whose originals have pep, complex chords and edgy rhythms but no not stay with one. Although none of these pieces are earworms, they clearly have nicely crafted melodic lines under which the harmony supplied by the bass and/or the other horn creates a warm, inviting feeling. Downes’ bass solo on Frugal Fuguel (a strange spelling for “fugal”!), though not busy or flashy, shows that he understands the tune and can contribute when called upon to do so.

Because Marshall’s mind works well within a melodic framework, his ballad Points of View is not only well crafted but also, like most of the music here, enjoyable. In fact, the entire enterprise has such an inviting sound that playing this disc without identifying the musicians in a blindfold test would probably have the listener guessing someone from the 1960s rather than today, yet the music doesn’t really copy anyone from the past. Mingus may be the closest, as I said earlier, but even Mingus’ music often had a very different vibe from Marshall’s.

Probably the best way I can describe this album is as “stress-less jazz.” This doesn’t mean that there is no rhythmic or musical tension within each track, only that there is an obvious amount of affection put into each and every tune and this communicates itself to the listener. The music is complex enough to engage the listener’s intellect yet just simple enough to allow pure enjoyment to take over in the listening process. Perhaps there is no better example of this than The Monk Trane. Some listeners may feel that both Monk and Coltrane have been “smoothed out” in what emerges as a cool jazz swinger, yet Marshall’s tenor solo here is far and away his most complex on the entire album, and Turcotte’s playing here contains a hint of Clark Terry. It’s hard to describe in words, really; in fact, even if I transcribed these solos, you’d really have to hear the way in which they are played in order to grasp the warm, inviting feelings they generate. Downes’ solo bass ends it quietly, in the middle of nowhere.

Some of this music was written during the pandemic, particularly Reflection. Although it is a pleasant piece, it was my least favorite on the album because it just consists of a few whole and half notes played to a simple and largely static chord pattern, but I know there are listeners out there who respond to this kind of music better than I do. It also goes on far too long. Fortunately, there’s more of the album to come and some of the ensuing music is quite good, although to my ears Conversations was just a medium-tempo version of Reflection except for Turcotte’s and Marshall’s superb solos.

Things pick up again on Solid Dude Debate, the funkiest piece on the record with its swaggering beat and little luftpausen here and there. Although a slow piece, I felt there was a bit more substance to That’s Better with its stately melodic line first played by the bass. In toto, a very warm, pleasant and often creative album with a couple of down moments.

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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Ivo Perelman, Truth Seeker

TRUTH SEEKER / Truth Seeker. Devotion. Mystical Vibration. Spiritual Growth. Ubiquitous Light. Life’s Meaning. Intuition / Ivo Perelman, t-sax; Mark Hellas, bs; Tom Rainey, dm / Sluchaj Fondamenta, no number

Truth Seeker is a follow-up to Ivo Perelman’s last album, Intuition, using an identical instrumental lineup bit in this case, American rather than British musicians. The two albums, however, are sort of bookends, here following up on Intuition’s use of a more flowing legato and less percussive approach to free improvisation. Perelman is still his recognizable self although he now tends to limit the number of times he goes squealing into the upper register. His playing is, however, more inherently rhythmic than in his earlier days and, paradoxically, even more abstract.

What my ears told me, however, was a different kind of interaction between the three musicians than those on Intuition. On that earlier CD, bassist Barry Guy and drummer Ramon Lopez were highly sensitized to every phrase and every note within each phrase that Perelman played. Here, bassist Mark Hellas and drummer Tom Rainey tend to operate as a unit, their plying tied together in the way that most bass and drum combinations play within a trio format, sometimes with Hellas playing bowed rather than plucked bass but still generally operating in a tight interaction with Rainey. This is not a criticism, merely a description of how they operate behind Perelman. There are moments when this seems to work very well, but others where, it seemed to me, the Hellas-Rainey duo was on their own page, separately from Perelman. It almost sounded as if the bassist and drummer had received Perelman’s pre-recorded tenor solos and then overdubbed their response to it.

Whatever the case, there are more moments on this CD where Perelman reverts to his more chaotic early style, before the years in which pianist Matthew Shipp gently but firmly chiseled away at his wildness to tone him down a bit and move him in the direction of actual linear construction. Oddly, those moments in which the support musicians seemed to be operating the most abstractly, as on Devotion (where only Rainey is heard for the first minute), that things worked better in terms of bringing Perelman into a more musically cohesive discourse. Of course, since these are all spur-of-the-moment free compositions, there was probably no way for the trio to do much in the way of predetermination, but that’s how it worked itself out. Even when Perelman plays in his extreme upper register, Devotion is easier on the ears because of its greater flow and linear construction; although he does explode with rage about two-thirds of the way through, he wraps things up playing some gorgeous soft passages on his tenor.

In the opening of Mystical Vibration, Hellas and Rainey play much more closely to the style that Guy and Lopez used, and as a result, this track worked extremely well. Perelman thrives on metric clashes and subdivisions, which is what his rhythm section provided him with here; there was even a point where Hellas plays arco bass so high up in his range that it sounds more like a viola, followed by a passage in which he intuitively finds the right chords to play, bowed again, on his instrument. He is clearly a virtuoso. Rainey, in the meantime, is all over the place on his drums, and this, too inspires Perelman. Even when the saxist goes into altissimo, he doesn’t scream quite so much and at one point actually tries to play a continuous line rather than a stabbing sequence of staccato notes.

To a certain extent, this CD reminded me of the live session that alto saxist Paul Desmond played with the Modern Jazz Quartet in the early 1970s. They started out sounding like the MJQ with Guest Artist soloing in his own space and his own style, but about two-thirds of the way through the concert Desmond fit into their musical concept so seamlessly that you’d think he had been playing with them for years. Despite a few awkward moments that continued to crop up, this trio sounded more comfortable with one another the longer it went on. Spiritual Growth, for instance, opens with bowed bass chords in a sort of drone style into which Perelman enters in a plaintive mood, which I happened to like quite a bit, before both pick up the tempo to an incredibly fast pace in irregular meter with Rainey joining in on the snare. Yet after this tense moment, things relax again as Perelman moves into his lower register playing an actual theme albeit with some high-register squeals. This leads into one of the most chaotic and least structured passages on the album, which I did not like, before settling back down again. Apparently, their spiritual growth includes a few “get me the hell out of here!” moments.

And so this album goes. The bottom line is that I only liked part of Truth Seeker whereas I liked almost all of Intuition, yet at the same time I admit that the good outweighed the more abrasive passages.

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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Verdi’s Misunderstood Masterpiece

Giuseppe Verdi had his 1849 opera Luisa Miller, the first of his operas taken from a play by Friedrich von Schiller, produced at the San Carlo Opera in Naples, but he had such bad experiences dealing with their management that he vowed never to write another opera for them—and he didn’t, despite originally writing Un ballo in Maschera ten years later for that house (he withdrew it from them for the premiere). In writing Miller, Verdi had to compromise greatly in his desired composition style in order to please the plebian public there, thus neither he nor the audience were thrilled with it. Miller received a decent reception at its debut, but slowly but surely waned in popularity until it was no longer performed.

Interestingly, the opera that Verdi originally offered to San Carlo as a sequel was to be based on Victor Hugo’s Le Roi s’Amuse—an opera, as we know, that he did eventually write and named Rigoletto—but he decided not to pursue it at the time. Instead, he approached his publisher, Giulio Ricordi, with the idea that he write an opera based on Shakespeare’s King Lear with Salvatore Cammarano as the librettist, but by June of 1850 he realized that the subject was beyond Cammarano’s abilities and so withdrew it. In its place, he settled on another subject that attracted him, Émile Souvestre’s novel Le Pasteur d’hommes, which the author had converted into the play Le Pasteur, ou l’Evangile et le foyer in collaboration with Eugène Bourgeois. According to Wikipedia,[1] this was a bold choice since it was “a far cry from the melodramatic plots Byron and Hugo: modern, ‘realistic’ subjects were unusual in Italian opera, and the religious subject matter seemed bound to cause problem with the censor [although] the tendency of its most powerful moments to avoid or radically manipulate traditional structures bas been much praised.”

For this work, realizing that Cammarano could only do good work with stock melodramas, Verdi turned to the more literate Francesco Maria Piave, who did good work for him. (Why he didn’t switch t Piave for Re Lear remains a mystery.) But of course there were problem with the censors; as the premiere, suggested for Trieste, approached, Verdi was ordered to change the title character from a Protestant minister to a “sectarian.” In addition, the final scene, one of the finest Verdi ever wrote, had to be changed from Stiffelio reading a passage from the New Testament in which Jesus forgives a woman’s adultery to something much more banal and not referring to a Biblical excerpt. Verdi and Piave had no choice but to accept these changes, thus the premiere took place as scheduled on November 16, 1851, but both composer and librettist were so angered by these changes that they felt that there was no point to Ricordi trying to stage the opera elsewhere unless they could restore some of its original meaning—which was forbidden. Angered, Verdi gave up on Stiffelio, later turning it into a “crusader opera” titled Aroldo six years later.

Verdi’s autograph score wasn’t discovered until late 1992, after which a new critical performing edition was prepared by mid-1993. This is the version that has been used in performances ever since, but most of the changes from the version familiar to opera lovers since the early 1970s are in the text, not the music itself, which is virtually identical. Thus if an earlier recording of this opera is superior dramatically to one of the newer ones, it can be listened to as long as you have a copy of the amended libretto and can imagine the different words being sung.

Yet appreciating the innovations in Stiffelio depends on your having an understanding of Verdi’s musical style in 1850. He was finally emerging from his “galley years,” but despite scoring a few hits with Ernani, Nabucco and Macbeth, he had yet to write an opera with overwhelming popular appeal. This was due, in part, to the fact that at age 37 he felt he had established himself enough to write an opera more or less on his terms although, of course, he had to include a certain amount of “bouncy” music to please the masses. Thus Stiffelio was a test piece for him, the chance to write an opera mostly on his own terms but with some “ear candy” in it to gain popular success.

The contemporary drawback of Stiffelio was that although the music was lyrical, none of it was memorable. In the case of the more serious set-pieces, this was done by design, but in failing to write the kind of music that would appeal on a larger scale to those audiences who wanted Tunes to Hum on the way out of the theater, as Verdi did in Ernani, Stiffelio was doomed to fail. Learning his lesson, he made an effort to include memorable tunes in all of his following operas, which he did—sometimes to the detriment of dramatic function, but he did not do this in Stiffelio, which contains some of his most sophisticated music prior to Don Carlos. Thus it really didn’t matter how much the censors crippled its dramatic impact; it would never have been a “hit.”

The plot is only a bit convoluted. Compared to Il Trovatore, it is fairly straightforward, but being based on a French play which probed the psyche of the protagonist—one might call this the first psychological opera in the Italian style—and not a knee-jerk emotional reaction for revenge, this, too placed Stiffelio outside the operatic conventions of its day. But of course Italian opera singers of that period were clearly out of step with the subtleties of the plot, in which the only attempt at death was that of Stankar, Lina’s father, deciding to kill himself because she had disgraced him in the eyes of his peers and his church. Here, again, we have a conflict of style, in this case the crux of my book, dramatic style; and there is no better indication of this than the etched drawing on the title page of Verdi’s piano-vocal score, in which Stiffelio is clearly in a “Get-thee-behind-me-Satan!” pose while Lina is kneeling at his feet, supplicating for mercy. It’s such a corny stereotype on what passed for “drama” in the Italy of Verdi’s time that it says far more than I could about how primitive the concept of drama-in-music was back then.

Since the conventions of his time demanded it, Verdi opens Stiffelio with an orchestral prelude, but a very long one that isn’t very interesting throughout. It does, however, have a few interesting features, such as the playing of flutes and pizzicato strings in double-time counterpoint to the stately melody played by a solo trumpet, a tune which is broken up quite startlingly by a dramatic outburst by the strings and brass, but then he has to spoil this effect by suddenly moving into one of his peppy oom-pah tunes. This frustrating need to entertain his audiences will pop up again throughout the first act, and there is nothing in the plot to suggest that such moments are appropriate, let alone necessary.

Fortunately, the opening scene with Jorg, an old minister, contemplates the Bible and Stiffelio finally arrives back from his self-imposed exile. Dorotea, the cousin of his wife Lina, tells him that a boatman has been looking for him; Stiffelio knows it must be Walter the boatman, who told him about a stranger jumping from a window of the castle in what was probably a secret liaison with a woman. Walter has recovered the man’s wallet but Stiffelio, not wanting to get involved in such a slimy affair, throws it into the fire without looking at it. Lina and Raffaele, however, look alarmed; her father, Stankar, immediately guesses that they are the clandestine lovers. Raffaele tells Lina, who is quite anguished, that he will set a secret meeting with her, sending a message locked inside a copy of Klopstock’s Messiah. All of this music is set to appropriately grave, dramatic music, Jorg’s monologue underscored by bowed basses and viola tremolos, but bouncy music greets Stiffelio’s arrival. Nonetheless, there is considerable musical variety in this opening scene, including some nice sotto voce sung counterpoint which indicates something going on under the surface. Most interesting is Stiffelio’s ensuing aria, “Vidi covunque gemere” (“Everywhere I saw virtue”) which, rather than being a straightforward aria with repeating strophic lines is actually a duet in which Lina continually interrupts and interacts with him: [2]

There is considerable musical and rhythmic variety in this “aria,” which I consider to be one of Verdi’s very finest, catching the shifting moods of the protagonist and the meaning of the words extremely well—even a moment when he suddenly stops and completely changes the mood from a contemplative legato melody to a stretta. Though set to fast music, this section is not shallow music; it keeps shifting between major and minor, even when Lina re-enters for a few bars. It is something that Verdi never repeated in any of his later operas, at least not to this extent and certainly not in such an imaginative way. Towards the end, Stankar, too, enters for a few lines to make this duet a trio, and this moves without a pause to a stretta for Lina alone which again morphs without a break into a lovely and plaintive aria in which she asks God to forgive her sin; and this, in turn, leads into a scene in which Stankar suddenly appears, catching her reading a letter which he demands to see. Yes, some of this music is in Verdi’s oom-pah style, but here it suits the drama, and he keeps interrupting both the rhythmic flow and the tonality with sudden shifts of key, meter and tempo. If this still sounds to some ears a bit too Traviata-like, one must remember that at this point not only had Verdi not written that opera but in fact had not seen or heard any of Wagner’s mature works. He was still building on the foundation of Donizetti, but doing so in a much more creative manner with truer dramatic feeling.

Yet the highlight of this act is the eight-minute finale which, following a chorus celebrating the return of Stiffelio to their midst, includes all of the principals whose thoughts and spoken words continually crisscross each other, often with exquisite (vocal and instrumental) counterpoint. Jorg, suspecting Federico to be Lina’s seducer, tells this to Stiffelio, who picks up Klopstovk’s Messiah and asks Lina to open it with her key; the message falls out, which Stankar quickly picks up and rips to shreds. Stiffelio. furious, yells at Stankar for this action, Lina begs him to respect his old age and Stankar covertly challenges Raffaele to a duel. This scene is almost as complex, and as good, as the Act I finale of Don Giovanni by Mozart, a composer who Verdi admired greatly and often used as a touchstone in composing his own works. And just to prove the point, here are extended score excerpts from this scene:

The second act begins with an excellent, pensive aria by Lina, wandering in the cemetery and seeking comfort at her mother’s grave; the introductory music, played by celli and the violas, is moody and restless; the music is more varied and interesting than Amelia’s aria “Ecco l’orrido campo” in Un ballo in Maschera, but the somber mood is broken by Lina’s silly and superfluous cabaletta. When Raffaele arrives, she asks him to give back her ring, which he refuses to do. Here,. Stankar arrives with two swords; handing one to Raffaele, he challenges him to a duel, secretly hoping he will be killed defending his daughter’s honor. Raffaele initially refuses because Stankar is an old man, but eventually starts dueling him. Stiffelio arrives and tries to force them to make peace, but when he clasps Raffaele’s hand, this angers Stankar to the point that he tells Stiffelio the truth: this is his wife’s seducer. Although this is fast-paced music, it suits the words and the dramatic mood excellently, using counterpoint and other devices to pit Lina’s voice against the other three. In a fit of rage, Stiffelio picks up the sword and starts to attack Raffaele, but the sound of voices singing inside the church, awaiting words of comfort from their minister, stop him in his tracks.

At the outset of Act III, Stankar is holding a letter from Raffaele to Lina asking her to join him in flight. Unable to live with this, Stankar decides to shoot himself, but Jorg tells him that Raffaele has been caught and will soon be brought before Stiffelio for judgment. Surprisingly, however, Stiffelio places Raffaele in an adjoining room where he can overhear his conversation with Lina. He tells her that he will grant her a divorce if that is what she really wants, reminding her than their marriage certificate is not legally binding because he married her under his assumed name when he was hiding out from his enemies. Much to his surprise, Lina begins to cry and reveals that Raffaele had taken her by force against her will, but then threatened to blackmail her if she refused to continue seeing him; her love for Stiffelio has not changed. Enraged, Stiffelio cries out for Raffaele’s death. Stankar suddenly emerges from the other room, his sword dripping with blood; having overheard everything, he realized that his daughter was a victim and not a willing accomplice in adultery, thus he killed Raffaele rather than himself.

The final scene of the third act is yet another great moment for Verdi as Jorg advises Stiffelio to find comfort in the Bible. The latter faces his congregation, opens the Bible and reads the passage in which Jesus forgives an adulterous woman, thus granting Lina her pardon before all of his flock. Here the music is solemn, beginning with an organ playing hymn-like music as the congregation begins singing “Do not punish me, Lord, in your anger,” with Stankar begging God’s forgiveness for avenging his daughter’s honor and Lina, singing almost continual soft, leaping octaves to the words “I place my trust in you, o Lord, have mercy.” This foreshadows the “La vergine degl’angeli” scene from La forza del Destino but is shorter and, in a sense, more dramatically effective. The tempo doubles when Jorg and Stiffelio enter, but not to the point of sounding silly. Stiffelio intones the Biblical passage over soft bass pizzicato and high, sustained organ notes. The opera thus ends in dignity, as well it should.

Unfortunately, several critics reviewing this opera from its revised edition described it as mostly garbage except for one or two scenes. They missed the forest for the trees. Considering where Verdi was, musically and dramatically, in 1850, Stiffelio is a masterpiece. Some of the complaints stemmed from the claim made that the role of Stiffelio was a precursor of Otello. ?Insofar as the voice type it is written for, that is true. For the first time, Verdi wrote not for a high tenor who could sing trills, runs and high Cs, some in head voice and some from the chest, but for a heavy lyric tenor bordering on the dramatic—probably to differentiate him from Raffaele who, though a secondary character, is really a very important one which must be sung by a good vocalist.

Perhaps this is a reach, but I couldn’t escape the feeling that some of the best music in Stiffelio may be some of the rejected Re Lear music, such as that first-act aria that turns into a duo and then a trio. There’s just something very sophisticated about much (but not all) of the score that convinces me that this may be so. In any case, Stiffelio is clearly an unjustly neglected and underrated opera that deserves greater exposure.

Although the preferred modern recording of it features a cast of excellent singers—Roberto Aronica as Stiffelio, Guanquin Yu as Lina, Roberto Frontali as Stankar and Gabriele Magnioni as Raffaele—it is conducted much too fast and quite glibly by young Andrea Battistoni, who seems to confuse this music for that of Ballo in Maschera. Even the more dignified moments in the score are rushed through, and this unbalances and cheapens the dramatic quality of the music. Therefore I recommend the 1978 recording with José Carreras (Stiffelio), Sylvia Sass (who brings an almost overwhelming sympathy and poignancy to Lina), Matteo Managuerra as Stankar and the excellent tenor Ezio di Cesare as the villain Raffaele, conducted beautifully by the late Lamberto Gardelli, although the Battistoni performance, which is also available on DVD, is worth seeing because it is a beautiful, traditional production in which the characters look like what they are supposed to be, early 19th-century Protestants, not Nazis or modern-day guys wearing backward baseball caps and hip-hop fashion. But you need to hear this opera by any means possible in order to appreciate what an excellent work this really is.

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stiffelio

[2] Source: https://vmirror.imslp.org/files/imglnks/usimg/1/10/IMSLP24547-PMLP55371-Verdi_-_Stiffelio.pdf

Ernesto Cervini’s “Canadian Songbook”

A CANADIAN SONGBOOK / Skeletons (James Hill). When I Fall (Steven Page-Ed Robertson). If, Then. Stuck Inside (Ernesto Cervini). Clumsy (Raine Maida-Arnold Lanni). Aureola (Allison Au). The Inertia of Complacency (William Carn) / William Carn, tb; Tara Davidson, a-sax; Joel Frahm, t-sax; Adrean Farrugia, pno; Dan Loomis, bs; Ernesto Cervini, dm / TPR Records TPR-017-2

Scheduled for release on March 8, this marvelous CD is the latest from Toronto-based drummer-composer-bandleader-music promoter Ernesto Cervini, whose work I’ve praised often in the past. On this disc he reworks tunes by Canadian songwriters who, of course, are generally unfamiliar to us Americans. This, of course, means that I have no frame of reference to appreciate how his imaginative and complex arrangements relate to the original songs, since I have no idea who James Hill, The Barenaked Ladies or Allison Au are (though I think I did review an Allison Au CD once), but in the big picture it doesn’t really matter because jazz is an art form unto itself…plus, three compositions presented here are by members of Turboprop, Cervini and trombonist William Carn.

Cervini, being a virtuoso drummer, begins with the rhythm, which he is adept at dividing and subdividing as each piece goes along. This is immediately apparent in the opener, Skeletons, which has a highly irregular beat in the opening chorus. When the bridge arrives in 4, he presents us with overlaid instrumental textures using the trombone and two saxes before returning to the irregular meter; when the solos begin, Cervini himself continues to play complex subdivisions of the beat beneath the straight 4 of the soloists. It’s sort of a hectic twist on the kind of subtle-yet-complex work that Luzia von Wyl is doing over in Switzerland. If this is the future of jazz, I’m all in on it.

Each member of this band is a virtuoso instrumentalist and an interesting improviser, although for the most part Dan Loomis restricts his bass playing to a supporting role. Turborop’s saxists use a pure, vibratoless sound, which at times gives their playing great poignancy even when that is not entirely intended. When I Fall opens with Loomis’ bass more prominently recorded, though we quickly learn that what he is playing is really a countermelody to the theme, which is stated by Carn, whose trombone playing has a burry, slightly funky sound similar to that of Jimmy Knepper. Then a surprise, as Loomis plays a solo of his own (minimal and spacey rather than busy) while the cool reeds provide whole notes as a background. In this piece, it almost sounds as if Cervini is creating a true “sound picture,” eliciting a certain imagery as the musicians play. Frahm takes a surprisingly funky solo, giving his playing a gritty edge yet sounding like no other tenor saxist of my experience. He subdivides the rhythm within his solo in a most interesting manner; later on, he throws in a few Coltrane-like “sheets of sound” but does not stay there, wrapping up his improvised solo in nice fashion. Interestingly, the opening theme of this tune reminded me of Georgia On My Mind.

If, Then is a Cervini original based on a computer science course he took in high school. Its somewhat abstract form, both rhythmically and melodically, nonetheless eventually congeals into a complete theme statement, though sounding somewhat computer-generated in its own odd way. Irregular meter also shows up in this one—as Cervini describes it, 5/8 with the bridge in many different time signatures, a different one for every bar—yet the band handles it so easily you’d think they could play it in their sleep. Farrugia is the first soloist up, followed by Frahm and, later Tara Davidson, playing very high in the alto sax’s range and sounding almost like a soprano.

Stuck Inside, another Cervini original, starts with a very complex and convoluted introduction before settling into a surprisingly nice medium-tempo swinger with a REAL MELODY, the kind you can remember. (When was the last time you heard any modern jazz group play a piece like this?) Cervini himself uses a lot of brush work on this one with occasional snaps of the snare drum, proving that he can indeed channel his inner Jo Jones when he feels like it. In the liner notes, Cervini explains that this was written as a reflection on the Covid-19 pandemic, but for once we have a jolly, life-affirming piece (like von Wyl’s latest CD, Lockdown Circus) rather than the usual slow, drippy, sad-sounding music that others wrote to reflect their pandemic experience.

Clumsy was apparently a big hit record for the Canadian rock band Our Lady Peace, but after the initial theme statement Cervini has fun playing around with the rhythm, though not as much as in other tracks, using nice open chords for the two saxes and trombone. Cervini states in the notes that his first idea was to create a 12/8 feeling. As the tenor sax solo progresses, one can indeed feel the rhythm behind it becoming more complex. Our Lady Peace may be a rock band, but Cervini transforms this tune into a real soul jazz swinger. The piece ends on an unresolved chord.

Allison Au’s Forest Grove also opens with some rhythmically complex figures, to which it returns now and then, but at least half of the theme statement is in a swinging, uptempo 4, as are the solos. This one is a rather less complex arrangement than the others on this album, but it’s great fun to listen to. The album ends with Carn’s The Inertia of Complacency, another Covid-era tune but also not a cry-fest. It has an interesting line and, like so many of the tunes on this album, an irregular meter which the group plays easily and in stride (although there is a break in 4). In and out of different meters we go, but always in a smooth, fluid manner as this piece floats across your mind.

This is a wonderful album of jazz pieces in various moods and meters. The sheer aspect of its musical diversity would put it high on my list of jazz releases so far this year…but I’ll bet you that Down Beat, Jazz Times and All About Jazz will either ignore it or give it faint praise.

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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Brinckman Plays Contemporary Flute Music

FUKUSHI: Dawn Brightens the Day of Mortals Robed in Purple.¹ KHUMALO: Zeusze.² BARTON-BRINCKMAN: Sonus Redux: And the Wave Rolled Back.³ BRINCKMAN: Taniwha. A Cracticus Fancie. KHUMALO-BRINCKMAN: Wade Through Water.² STACEY-BRINCKMAN: You Never Come Out the Same.² KORDE: Tenderness of Cranes / Tessa Brinckman, fl/a-fl/bs-fl/contrabs-flpic/Baroque fl/prepared piano/perc; ¹Caroline Delume, gt; ²Kathleen Supové, pno; ³Todd Barton, Buchla / New Focus Recordings FCR 396

 Tessa Brinckman is a contemporary flautist-composer who appears, from her photo, to be in her 50s, yet I had never heard of her previously. And small wonder. She doesn’t play Mozart Flute Concerti or cute little French pieces on her instrument. She plays edgy modern pieces using bitonality, atonality and microtonality—all “poison” words in the classical music business, whose goal it is to spread pleasant tunes and conventional harmony across the globe.

Indeed, her musical tastes as well as her spotless technique are easily the equal of such more famous flautists as the (mostly conventional) James Galway and (equally experimental) Tara Helen O’Connor, and even O’Connor isn’t all that well known, either. Yet ironically, there is beauty and even sensuality in several of these pieces, including the opening Dawn Brightens the Day by Norio Fukushi, evidently a Japanese name (although possibly Japanese-American) and thus a descendant of the rich Asian flute tradition. Despite the lack of a set tonality through most of this piece, the musical progression is logical and it contains a brief but lovely melody in the middle. I was particularly fascinated by the playing of guitarist Caroline Delume, who makes her instrument sound more like a lute and, in a few spots, like a kalimba. I wonder if that was the composer’s direction or just how she felt the music as she played it. Running 12 minutes and seven seconds, this is the longest piece on the CD; to be honest, I felt it was too long, tending to repeat itself (at least in mood and general feeling if not in actual notes) as it wore on.

By contrast, Andile Khumalo’s Zeuste is fairly short (2:21). It is tightly and compactly constructed, with a brisk, running melodic line played by the flute while the piano uses mostly single notes and brief staccato chords to accompany it. Although not tonal, this piece sounded modal to me and by contrast with the first piece, it ends too soon, in the middle of a phrase.

Yet perhaps the most arresting piece on the album is Sonus Redux, a collaboration between Brinckman and Todd Barton, who plays the odd-sounding Buchla, an electronic synthesizer invented in 1963 that I had never heard or heard of before. Here, Brinckman multiple-tracks herself on the multiple Baroque flutes (read: recorders) she plays along with prepared piano. Some of the effects created on the Buchla include impressions of a tape running backwards. Most of this music falls into the category of ambient sounds; there is minimal development going on. It is more like layered music than music that evolves through variations.

But if you think this is strange, wait until you hear Brinckman’s own Taniwha. Here she multiple-tracks herself on piccolo, flute, alto flute, bass and contrabass flutes in addition to something called the Horomona Horo. This, I learned online, is an array of percussion instruments which stem from the Maori tradition, yet the music is far more abstract than any Maori music I’ve ever heard before (as well as more syncopated and including a few microtonal slides). In time, this piece, too, becomes quite syncopated—sort of a cross between jazz and World Music. In any case, it is entirely unique.

The Andile Khumalo-Brinckman piece Wade Through Water again fuses Eastern musical ideas and modes with modern Western classical harmonies, but this piece flows more easily and is more emotionally appealing, less purely cerebral than the opening number. You Never Come Out the Same turns out to be an entirely syncopated piece with a loping sort of beat in which both th flute and piano explore short motifs, some of which congeal into themes and some of which don’t: you just “never come out the same.” Personally I liked this piece best of all because of the rhythm as well as the head games it plays with the listener. About a third of the way through, the tempo slackens, the steady rhythm stops, and we get some bizarre effects played by Brinckman on prepared piano; then a fairly quiet passage with just a whisper of sound in the background before Brinckman re-enters, this time on the flute against the accompanist’s prepared piano. Hey, it’s always good to be prepared for anything! At one point, Supové’s prepared piano sound like a car motor starting up…then, believe it or not, we return to the funky syncopated beat of the beginning, now somewhat modified and occasionally accelerating in tempo.

Shirish Korde’s The Tenderness of Cranes is another Oriental-sounding piece, this time for solo flute, moving around in themes, rhythm and harmony throughout its 11-minute duration. I felt that this piece, too, overstayed its welcome; a few minutes of tender cranes is about all I can handle, particularly since there are spots in this piece where Korde repeats short motifs ad infinitum.

Unfortunately, the album ends with a piece so abstract that I couldn’t follow it and didn’t have a clue what it was about other than magpies and cordon-waddle-doodle (words spoken by some unidentified male voice) while Brinckman plays her own waddle-doodle on the piccolo. Well, cordon-waddle-doodle to you too, dear. Oh yes, Elizabeth is dead now, too, and the farm’s still there. Mortgage corporations couldn’t give it away, but the magpies are singing. Who cares?

Overall, however, an interesting olio of new pieces in different styles. You certainly can’t accuse Brinckman of not being adventurous!

—© 2024 Lynn René Bayley

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