A New Recording of Schoenberg's String Quartets Three & Four

Sometimes it seems that Arnold Schoenberg's music is talked about more than it is performed. He of course revolutionized modern music with his 12-tone composing practices, but the body of music he created transcends the merely technical and approaches the sublime.

His last two string quartets give the listener luminously brilliant examples of the composer's mature artistry. And the versions recently recorded by the Fred Sherry String Quartet (Naxos 8.557533) are quite nearly definitive.

The quartet's attention to detail and nuance, and their crisply precise yet spirited phrasings of the contrasting sections bring out the poetically expressive qualities of both works.

This release includes as a bonus a rendering of Schoenberg's "Phantasy for Violin with Piano Accompaniment," very ably performed by Rolf Schulte and Christopher Oldfather on violin and piano, respectively.

This is volume 12 of Robert Craft's Schoenberg series. It is highly recommended.

The Present Music Ensemble Tackles Pieces From the Day-Before-Yesterday

There was the beer that made Milwaukee famous and now there's the chamber ensemble that... well, no, it probably wont make Milwaukee famous. But it will put Milwaukee on the map for lively, edge-of-tomorrow concert classical music. I refer to Present Day, ably led by conductor and artistic director Kevin Stalheim. Look to their new release Graffiti (Innova) for why that is so.

The ensemble performs three compositions of this past decade. All three are by somewhat lesser-known composers but are in no way lesser in terms of impact. First up is Elena Kats-Chernin's "Village Idiot," a composition squarely situated within the minimalist camp. What's interesting though is Elena's melodic inventiveness. Themes arise out of previous ones in ways that get and maintain listener interest. Each kernal of melodic material is well considered, well voiced, and distinctive to the ear. There are both moments of rhythmic drive and more largo-esque passages to break up the blocks of sound. I might venture to say that Kats-Chernin goes about solving the problem of the pianissimo, slower section bugaboo that minimalist compositions either ignore or do not always successfully address. "Village Idiot" integrates the loud and the soft, the slow and the fast so that one does not get the feeling of let-down one sometimes encounters when the intensely motoring sections segue to those that are less so. The thematic material develops linearly with sufficient complexity and musical merit to stimulate the ear. There is repetition, of course, but on a number of levels: 1.) as short-cell motivic activity, and 2.) as wider arches, paragraphs and chapters if you will, of thematic material. It's an intriguing piece and the performance is superb.

Randall Woolf's "Motor City Requiem" begins with a sample of a Motown vocal juxtaposed with piano and strings, then goes on to present music that seems to look back with a kind of nostalgic regret on past glories of the Detroit musical scene and, by extension, the heyday of the city. If this composition does not quite have the sheer dynamism and excitement of "Village Idiot," it does provide an interesting interlude between the more substantial first and last works.

This brings us to Armando Luna's "Graffiti." Luna breaks the piece into 13 short, interconnected movements named for (and inspired by) a vast diversity of musical stalwarts. There's Haydn and Bach, and Bartok, Honegger and Schnittke, for example, but there's also Chic Corea, Dave Brubeck and Benny Goodman.

"Graffiti" exemplifies a current trend: a new kind of organicism that goes beyond eclectic "this and that" sorts of juxtipositions and instead speaks eloquently with a musical language that takes from classical traditions, modern traditions, minimal cyclicism and jazz vitalism, as well as vernacular music of all kinds. It makes all into one. And of course it's not just that Amrmando Luna does it. He does it with a grandly gestural sweep of real encompassment and ingenious musical bricolage. The best of the joiners give the finished result the appearance of a patina of longstanding wholeness, even though the putting-together has just occurred. "Graffiti" has that naturalness, that feeling of inevitableness. This music is not a Frankenstein's monster of stitching and patching. It is a complete music being, to stretch the metaphor a bit.

One should definitely give "Graffiti" a close listen. It gives a vivid picture of part of what's "new" in new music. And it does it with performances that are very close to breathtaking.

New Music from Mario Diaz de Leon

Composer Mario Diaz de Leon ignores the boundaries between modern concert-classical, electronics, free improvisation, metal and noise. His recent Enter Houses Of (Tzadik) shows this clearly, albeit with the emphasis on the first two categories. It is a music that has a narrative flow. What he ends up with is all his own.

For this recording a nine piece chamber-oriented group, the International Contemporary Ensemble, matches sonorities with de Leon's electronic manipulations of timbre. The pieces juxtapose related musical events in ways that keep the ear refreshed.

Winds, strings, and percussion-piano, respectively, tend to occupy the forground at various points, with the electronics often entering the blend to create sprawling amalgams. De Leon seems to conceive of the music as moving event-blocks. The focus is on the achievement of distinctive sonorities that have an improvisational looseness but a keenly contrasting brilliance of sound design. They mark the time passing like various cloud formations drifting across the horizon on a briskly windy day.

This is not music that overwhelms. It invites you into its world and then does not hurry to express everything it has to say. That takes time. In the end the visit is worth the trouble.