Sunday, March 9, 2008
The makeup of a chamber ensemble, the mind-set of a rock band: This is a description that applies to more and more contemporary music groups. The Kronos Quartet paved the way in 1971; the Bang on a Can All-Stars (which includes an electric guitar) took things up another notch. And today genre-busting is the norm for new music ensembles, from the relatively conservative Eighth Blackbird (which won a Grammy this year for "strange imaginary animals") to So Percussion (which like many of these groups has just formed its own label, shhh Productions). The following are some notable new releases by artists from contemporary ensembles old and new.
-- Anne Midgette
Terry Riley: "The Cusp of Magic." Kronos Quartet and Wu Man, pipa.
You don't need to eat peyote buttons to appreciate "The Cusp of Magic" -- though it probably wouldn't hurt. The opening and closing movements of this fascinating work by California composer Terry Riley are based on Native American peyote rituals, and the music in between -- at turns luminous, frightening and unbearably lovely -- shimmers with the elusive delicacy of a dream. Performed by the Kronos Quartet (which commissioned the work), "Cusp" takes its title from the summer solstice, and evokes those transitional moments in life when the sharp edges of reality become blurred, and anything seems possible.
Riley has grown in recent years from a minimalist to a little-of-everything-ist, and in "Cusp" he incorporates singing, a synthesizer, children's toys, a drum and the traditional Chinese "pipa" lute (played here by Wu Man) to bend and blend musical genres with protean ease. The effect is, in a word, magical: You have the sense of being swept into a surging ocean of memory, where lullabies float up over mysterious drones, nervous waltzes twist suddenly into quirky little marches, and nothing is ever quite what it seems. But the music never descends into runaway eclecticism: Riley's touch remains both sure and deft throughout, and the effect is powerful.
-- Stephen Brookes
Michael Gordon: "Van Gogh." Alarm Will Sound, Alan Pierson, conductor.
Ubiquitous in New York this season, the omnivorous group Alarm Will Sound plays everything from Steve Reich to Aphex Twin, the indie electronic artist whose music was the focus of their last CD. For this album, they turn to a composer who, if not the granddaddy of their brand of contemporary groove, is at least one of its uncles: Michael Gordon, one of the three founders of the composers' collective Bang on a Can.
The work they chose, "Van Gogh," dates from the days when Bang on a Can was still establishing its identity; it was first performed in New York in 1991, conceived as a video opera with visuals by Elliot Caplan. With text drawn from the letters of Vincent van Gogh to his brother, it is at once a dramatic narrative, tracing the artist's life from youth through misunderstood creativity to madness; an artistic manifesto; and a young piece struggling with its own naivete.
Gordon's music has the groove of pop and the driving rhythmic patterns of minimalism; this piece explodes with puppylike energy as he strives to fuse the two. Leaner and rawer than more recent works like his large-scale "Decasia," it's a good arena for Alarm Will Sound, which has an engagingly puppylike energy of its own. Since the ensemble has experience to burn -- its members began playing together as students at Eastman in 2001 -- one has to assume that the moments of sloppiness in the performance are intentional. It's not cool to be too polished -- particularly when singing. Straddling the line between opera and pop song, the piece reins in its three vocalists, demanding a boy-soprano straightness from Sarah Chalfy and reducing the tenor, Matthew Hensrud, to adolescent baying. Still, this is an eminently listenable piece by and for artists engaged in a process of creative development.
-- Anne Midgette
"Walled Gardens": itsnotyouitsme (Caleb Burhans, Grey McMurray). "NOW": NOW Ensemble (Nico Muhly, et al.).
Indie-rock darlings such as Joanna Newsom, the Decemberists and Sufjan Stevens have been capturing attention for their forays into the orchestral world, but there's another crop of artists pushing back toward them from inside the classical music paddock. They are creating as-of-yet nameless categories of musical evolution, and some recently established a home for themselves with New Amsterdam Records.
The composers and musicians who appear on the label's two debut releases hold degrees from institutions such as Yale and Juilliard, and it may only be because of these associations that the discs are gaining notice from the classical music press. The four compositions on "Walled Gardens" from the duo itsnotyouitsme (Caleb Burhans: electric violin, voice, loops; Grey McMurray: electric guitar, loops) draw quicker comparison with Sigur R¿s than Steve Reich, though the latter's rhythmic patterns clearly get a nod during the disc's final track. The album isn't particularly original, but Burhans and McMurray pack quite a bit of thoughtful, ambient musing into its 33 minutes.
Setting up shop closer to the classical camp is the outstanding seven-member NOW Ensemble's debut, "NOW." Composers Nico Muhly, Patrick Burke, Mark Dancigers and Judd Greenstein, also the label's director, provide repertoire plenty deep enough to be dredged on multiple passes without crawling up inside its head so far it misplaces its soul. Though several of the compositions play their game out a bit too long, Greenstein's "Folk Music," with its cycles of flute, piano, clarinet and electric guitar, proves to be a disc highlight, as is Nico Muhly's "How About Now," which stands apart for its less weighty approach to the ensemble's colors.
New Amsterdam has separated itself from the usual classical roster with slicker packaging and a social-networking-style Web site that takes the music consumer far beyond just the recordings. The impact of such endeavors is still too young to judge, but the experiment is necessary and long overdue.
-- Molly Sheridan
Philip Glass: "Songs and Poems for Solo Cello." Wendy Sutter, cello.
It's a sad fact that sometimes a critic fails to appreciate a piece fully the first time through. When Wendy Sutter, the cellist from the Bang on a Can All-Stars, gave the world premiere of Philip Glass's "Songs and Poems for Solo Cello" at the Baryshnikov Arts Center in New York a year ago, I quite liked it. Hearing it again on recording -- the piece has been released as a slender (43-minute) CD on Glass's own label, paired with "Tissues (from Naqoyqatsi)" -- I found it not merely pleasant, but gripping.
Glass has always been both prolific and uneven, turning out pieces that are sometimes excellent, sometimes apparently written on autopilot. But "Songs and Poems" maintains an unusual degree of directness and warmth. Digging into the lower registers of the instrument, it takes flight in handfuls of notes, now gentle, now impassioned, variously evoking the minor-mode keening of klezmer music and the interior meditations of Bach's cello suites. There's little mere repetition here, and when it comes, it means something: like the rocking gestures of the seventh and final song, a kind of wistful balm to soak up the intensity of what has preceded it.
Sutter's performance contributes not a little to the intensity; that this piece is deeply personal (she and Glass are a couple) comes through loud and clear in the tanglings of her bow, the throaty richness of her tone. But "Tissues," a group of pieces written for Yo-Yo Ma, while not as strong as "Songs and Poems," suggests that Glass has a natural affinity for cello. On this recording, the instrument seems to respond to his demands in a way that the human voice has never quite been able to.
-- Anne Midgette
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