A New Recording of Brahms' Horn Trio with Nelsen, Bae and Kudo

When I was the managing-contributing editor for a series of cultural publications in the '90s, I used to give prospective writer-researchers a proofreading test as part of their interview. In it I had Brahms' name spelled wrong. I was a little shocked at how few candidates corrected that one. And quite pleased when there were those that DID. I came to realize that Brahms' music was not frequently a part of the educated young person's background by then. And of course I don't suppose it is now, either.

But I love Brahms. I have for some time. At this point, I've repeatedly appreciated and basked in the sublimity of most of his music and I am far the greater for the experience. For whatever reason, though, his Horn Trio in E-flat Major, Opus 40, has not been in my listening cycle. There's no good reason why that is so, except perhaps the piece demands a good French horn soloist and so there have been over the years fewer recordings of it. So I missed out. Until now, that is, with the release of a performance of same by Canadian Brass horn virtuoso Jeff Nelsen with Ik-Hwan Bae on violin and Naomi Kudo, piano (Opening Day 7384).

First off I found that the Trio is an exceptionally lyrical work. The opening Andante is ravishing, and played by the trio at hand with a gentle passion that seems totally fitting. The following Scherzo has plenty of stately brio on this recording and, I might add, some royal-hunting-horn-style panache emerges from Maestro Nelsen with an unbridled joy. At least that's what I hear. The Adagio has a lovely cantabile quality that the trio brings out quite well. And then the spirited Finale has exceptional brio and the kind of spirit that might remind one of the opening movement of Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream. It's a wonderful piece of music, wonderfully played. Jeff Nelsen sounds especially wonderful, too.

As an added bonus the group performs a trio adaptation of Mozart's Horn Quintet, K. 407. It tops off the program on another bright note.

So, dear readers, I now have a world-class performance of Brahms' Horn Trio. It is a very happy confluence of circumstances that enables me now to pull out this CD at will and play it when the mood strikes. And the mood will strike pretty often, I should think. Highly recommended.

Steve Swell with Roswell Rudd, 1996

We turn back the clocks today as those who follow the US time schedule did this past Sunday morning. Today we go back to 1996 and an album by the Steve Swell Quartet, Out and About (CIMP 116). It's a trombone summit of sorts between the leaders of two generations of avant expression. Steve Swell heads up the quartet and provides the blowing vehicles and Roswell Rudd joins that band as a key fellow front-liner. The unit is rounded out in effective fashion by bassist Ken Filiano and drummer Lou Grassi.

Maestros Swell and Rudd top the list of important players who work with the extroverted free approach to the horn. Mr. Rudd was one of the pioneers of the new thing and remains vital today; Mr. Swell has extended and built upon the over-and-out trombone approach that Rudd helped establish.

Out and About brings out the best in both. They seem to feel completely at home musically in one another's presence; they come through with excellent avant solos and double solos throughout. It's all of course serious but there is some humor there as well. Like on the number "Start Up," in which Steve has worked out a head melody using the rhythmic structure of "This Could Be the Start of Something Big," but decidedly not the pitches!

Out may not have been the first recorded meeting of the two bonemasters and they continue to get together musically, so it isn't the last. But is no doubt one of the best. It's a recording no adherent to out bonedome should forgo. A modern classic! See the Cadence link to find out more.

Morten S. Danielsen's "Donalds 09:" Punk Opera?

Let's face it. We approach any new work of music with a set of predispositions that comes out of our experiences with music we have heard and familiarized ourselves with throughout our lives. When a new work comes along that does not fit in with what we know, difficulties can arise. That explains in part the hostile reactions that historically occurred at the premiers of works that defied the expectations of listeners in that local-historical time and place. So The Rites of Spring, the Eroica, nearly all of Mahler's symphonies, as examples, met with incomprehension and hostility in their first performances. It was only as audiences began to become familiar with the music that they came to appreciate what seemed so jarring at first.

I had that reaction as I first listened to Morten S. Danielsen's opera Donalds 09 (DaCapo 8.226563).

The sequence of reactions went something like the following.

First listen: Oh, yeah? Who told you you could make music like that? Second: Hmm...there's something to all this craziness. Third: I LIKE this but I don't understand what it is. Fourth and Fifth: I think I understand what the composer is doing and see the unique musical-dramatic logic involved, as much as it is clearly articulated. I have come to be drawn, odd as some of it is, to the recurring motifs and emotional-structural arch of the piece taken as a whole.

There are plenty of "crazily avant" CDs out there but Danielsen has a particular flair to his avantness that is ultimately appealing. But we need to start over at the beginning. Danish composer Morten S. Danielsen did not live to complete this opera, presumably his last work. It is a work with a certain sort of punk cockiness to it, which seems to be one of his trademark stances. It revels in the flippantly outrageous/funny-deadly serious edge of expression. This is one of the factors that makes it especially unusual and interesting, at least to me. Apparently Danielsen was a sort of Kurt Cobain-ish tortured and self-destructive soul. His music seems to reflect that.

The plot/libretto to Donalds 09 is disjointed and somewhat opaque. There are three Donald's, one a woman. The opera is a kind of bildungsroman of them trying to articulate who they are or are not. And ultimately the three Donalds seem to be three personalities contained in one person. Rather than a "coming of age" journey, though, the characters seem more to be in the process of "coming apart." Ultimately it is the sound worlds which bring these struggles alive that make the work so intriguing to me.

The unusual combinations of distinct musical sound colors and their masterly repetition-development-appearance-disappearance truly set Donald 09 apart from other avant works of its type. Some of the salient sound events that weave in and out of the work: an ensemble of what sounds like bell ringers, concrete and pure electronics, an electric punk-rock band, two distinctive electronically altered vocals, conventional operatic vocals, small-group chamber or solo piano accompaniment, baritone sax obligatto passages, choral ensemble, recitation, a child's squeaking rubber duck (?), vocal duets with altered and unaltered voices, and the climactic sequence that I wont even attempt to describe, except to say that it seems to prefigure the composer's own death and it haunts the aural memory long after it is played.

I don't know what the future holds for Donalds 09 in terms of its reception. I do know that it is a profoundly moving, even disturbing work that presents a sound world and libretto so idiosyncratic unprecedented yet so compelling that it surely should not be ignored by anyone who wants to embrace what is new and interesting today. It may be a milestone. Or a madman's self-indulgent ravings. Or both. We've seen that before. Don't miss this one if you want to overturn your preconceptions of what opera can and should be.

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.

Burton Greene Trio "Ins and Outs," 2005

Burton Greene to me is always interesting. He was a pioneer of the avant jazz scene in the early sixties and he keeps it strong. I've taken the liberty (as I do sometimes) of covering something that is not the flavor of the month here, since it was recorded in 2005. Good music should not be subject to the demands of clock time. Ins and Outs (CIMP 345) certainly should not be.

It's a trio date that came at the end of a larger group session and so has a relaxed loose quality. Burton Greene's piano is joined by the Schuller brothers--Ed on bass, George on drums. The three together make for excellent chemistry.

Half the pieces performed by the trio are covers of lesser known songs; the other half are Greene originals. In all cases there is a loosely outbop approach. Heads are stated, usually with a regular rhythmic thrust, and then the music can get freely loose and out of strict time, with all three implying the song structure but most definitely on the outside track. Ins and Outs makes for an apt title, then.

Ed Schuller has developed into a bass player that can have great presence in an ensemble and also solo with musically substantive flair. George's drumming is the right combination of pulse and freedom. And Burton is in his element. He is utterly distinct and has been for years,

You may have missed this album but if you like Burton Greene you should definitely check it out. It also would interest anyone who wants to get into modern piano trio jazz that melds the avant with the directly accessible. It's a nice combination and deserves a hearing. Check the Cadence link on this page for the CIMP site.

Zwilich, Three Decades of Music for Piano and Orchestra

I was exiting a concert by a prominent orchestra a few years ago when I overheard an elderly woman remark to her companion, "Shostakovich is all well and good, but he's no Beethoven." I was momentarily taken aback. These things are going on in that listener's mind despite the years that separate the two composers, and now despite the years that separate us from either of their worlds. How can you come to appreciate any modern composer if you have to filter their music through one of the masters of a much different era and style? One answer might be found in the music of Zwilich.

Right, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich. She belongs to that rather rare category of modern composers who have gained acceptance and even popularity for a pretty large group of otherwise possibly indisposed concert music listeners. And yet there is nothing condescendingly ingratiating to be found in her music. What there is about her music, though, can be seen pretty clearly in her Millennium Fantasy (Naxos 8.559656), which features three substantial works for piano and orchestra, one each from the last three preceding decades.

The music, as in the cases of Aaron Copland and Leonard Bernstein (and of course George Gershwin), has a genuinely "American" feel to it. And it's a shade on the populist side of things. The "Millennium Fantasy," for example, is based on a folk song Ellen's grandmother sang to her, "Wayfaring Stranger" if I am not mistaken. Zwilich interweaves the folk theme in the dialog between piano and orchestra like a recurring memory intrudes at various points when, say, one is drifting off to sleep. It testifies to her fertile inventiveness and total mastery of the compositional mode that the folk melody fits right in with other more modern sounding motifs.

Another example is the "Peanuts Gallery for Piano and Orchestra" from 1996. Each movement portrays a particular character from the popular comic series, in a lighthearted but musically enriched way.

Even her most "serious" work on the program, "Images for Two Pianos and Orchestra" (1986), devotes each movement to a particular painting, in each case by a woman artist. So there is a literal program to reassure a sometimes wary audience that all these modern sounds "mean" something.

Regardless of all that, it is Zwilich's music that wins the day. There is a fluency and ease of expression to her music that encourages acceptance of the modern idiom in which she works. So as I listen to this very enjoyable Naxos release, I am thinking that this music should find an even larger audience. The Naxos budget price, the fine performances by the Florida State University Orchestra and the three piano soloists, the substantial yet accessible Zwilich scores, all this should be well-received out there in musicland. And for me, someone who can ride with pleasure to the nether worlds of the most modern utterances that could be conceived, I do not find her populistic tendencies in the least off-putting. That is in part because she is such a gifted composer. The music wins out, no matter where you stand on modernism. It's too good to be subjected to factionalism. And this recording is a delight to hear. Repeatedly without a doubt.

Tenor-Bari Matt Garrison Scores with "Familiar Places"

I try to listen with open ears to anything I am sent. In the case of players with whom I am not very familiar, I never know what to expect. Pleasant surprises are not especially frequent, but gratifying when they come. One such surprise came with a new CD by Matt Garrison, a young tenor-baritone player. Familiar Places (D Clef 152) shows his compositional and playing abilities to good advantage. It's a large group with seven horns (Matt plus, among others, Claudio Roditi on trumpet/flugel, Michael Dease, trombone, and Sharel Cassity, here on flute). Then there's a rhythm section/second line of guitar, piano etc.

Everybody sounds good here, but it is the quasi-Blue-Note-like arrangements of the horns and Matt's playing that grab me especially. These are mostly Garrison originals. He writes for horns quite well. It's that lush cushion of voicings that you may be familiar with from some of the choice early-mid-sixties albums by guys like Wayne Shorter, Herbie Hancock, Art Blakey, Hank Mobley and such, but updated with some contemporary wrinkles so that it sounds fresh.

Matt Garrison plays a slightly cool, clean sax line that impresses me as being not entirely capable of pigeonholing. That's very good, of course.

All in all the music has that contemporary-meets-classic-Blue-Note-mainstream feel that Amina Figarova also is working within (see this blog for some of her music). Both do it very well.

More than nice, this is a very coherent and enjoyable disk. Matt Garrison has a voice that I hope will continue to be heard in the years to come. I am quite impressed with his music.