Luciano Troja Revisits the Understatedly Gorgeous Piano Music of Earl Zindars
In 2010, Italian pianist Luciano Troja made an important contribution to the jazz canon with his album At Home with Zindars, a rare exploration of the music of Earl Zindars, from who Bill Evans drew for some of his more memorable material. Thirteen years later, Troja is back with an even more auspicious recording of even rarer numbers by the undeservedly obscure composer and pianist, whose connection to Evans makes sense in terms of sheer tunefulness. Troja recorded the first half solo, live in concert in 2018 at the Maybeck Recital Hall in Berkeley and finished the record a year later with a suite of his own in the studio in Italy. And the album, To New Life, is finally here for you to enjoy (you can hear parts at Bandcamp for the time being).
What’s most stunning here is how much of a Mompou-esque, eerie upper-register gleam there is in this music, often juxtaposed with moments of unselfconsciously rapt beauty, which Troja parses with care and a steady understatement. Zindars’ heritage was Armenian, and that influence comes through strongly here.
The opening track, Lullaby for Helene is a gorgeously otherworldly waltz, Troja slowly and elegantly moving from Messiaenic glimmer to a fond neoromantic ballad and back. The second number is a mashup of sorts, the ragtime-tinged Sareen Jurer into Zindars’ wife Annig’s Hokees Orrant Ee Var with its stark Armenian tinges.
Troja takes a matter-of-fact, unhurried approach to the subtly fugal tidal shifts in Dreams Are These, which perfectly capsulizes this music’s appeal. Likewise, Elsa, a waltz with some deliciously glistening, romping cadences, which could be retitled “My Favorite Uneasy Things.”
Troja makes a diptych out of Thoughts of Mine, an increasingly troubled, chromatically-fueled 1992 theme composition, and a restrained take of Mother of Earl, the swinging 1957 tune popularized by Evans.
Troja goes back to steady waltz time for Karen’s Mode with its interweave of attractive singalong balladry and thorny chromatics, with an unexpectedly scrambling midsection. Roses for Annig is kaleidoscopic, from wistful to joyously Chopinesque. The last of the concert tracks is the world premiere recording of Wissahickon Walk, a Pennsylvania tableau which Troja begins sparely and gingerly before expanding from wary rainy-day echo figures to a mysterious interlude which also features muted riq frame drum and then a rather stern, martially-tinged segment.
Troja winds up the record with his title suite, his own partita, inspired by a Zindars poem. The introduction, Rain makes an aptly picturesque segue with the Zindars material, followed by Silenced World, a return to solemn, enigmatic bell-like sonics. Part three, titled Wait has a plaintive Angelo Badalementi-esque minimalism, while the conclusion is guardedly celebratory. What an absolutely gorgeous album.
Yannick Nezet-Seguin and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe’s Beethoven Cycle: Spinning New Tales, or Just Wheels?
Conductor Yannick Nezet-Seguin and the Chamber Orchestra of Europe have had a relatively intimate Beethoven symphonic cycle set out for awhile now and streaming at Spotify. How does it compare with the gold standard, Jordi Savall and Le Concert Des Nations’ revelatory recording of the first five symphonies?
This is like a missing puzzle piece. It literally fills in the gaps. Savall’s careening yet meticulously detailed (and often rowdy and hilarious) recordings of the core Third, Fourth and Fifth symphonies will have you literally hearing things in otherwise familiar old scores that you have never heard before. The rudimentary, boisterous percussion section in the Fifth is worth the price of the whole collection.
But where Savall goes for rustic – and sometimes the jugular – Nezet-Seguin excels especially with the later symphonies. Reducing them to more manageable proportions pays whopping dividends in terms of clarity and punch. Granted, listeners who think they’re getting any realistic approximation of what Beethoven’s audiences experienced are missing the point because those few who enjoyed that privilege did so as part of a concert audience, not on their own time with earbuds in. But as orchestral sprawl has grown over the last two centuries, details get subsumed in the ether and this cycle is a welcome antidote,
You might think that Beethoven Three, Four and Five would be Nezet-Seguin’s most central focus here, but strangely that isn’t the case. The temporal liberties he takes with Five are a head-scratcher: you simply don’t mess with the most iconic classical riff of alltime. Three and Four are perfectly enjoyable and have plenty of detail to recommend them, but none with the fire that Savall brings.
Instead, it’s Six through Nine where Nezet-Seguin and the orchestra provide a most welcome antidote to the contention that Beethoven was on autopilot by the time he wrote these, and that they’re mere plush entertainment for the era’s mercantile and financier classes. In the Sixth, Nezet-Seguin’s clarity and balance emphasizes a robust foundation of strings, keeping the high winds from floating away on a bubble. The carefree and unhurried courtly dance of a second movement gets a little airy angst to keep the focus sharp. The big shivery rainstorm toward the end of the third is a sudden and rewardingly jarring interlude in contrast to the warm sunset scenery on the way out.
A seriousness comes out in the striding opening movement in Seven, conspicuously absent from most other recordings of the symphony. To Nezet-Seguin’s infinite credit, he sticks with intensity that throughout a wary but insistent second movement. Conversationality typically comes into clearer focus in smaller-scale recordings like this, notably in the fourth movement, which echoes the vigor of the Savall recordings most strongly.
The version of the Eighth Symphony here harks back to the first two, emphasis on frequent individual voices popping up amid the comfortable, Haydnesque nocturnal lustre, with punchy winds in the second movement and momentary stormy shivers in the third as entertaining diversions.
The premise of a chamber orchestra version of Beethoven Nine may be a bit of a stretch: it’s hard to imagine the composer objecting to any attempt to further enrich the layers of this sonic mille-feuille. But Nezet-Seguin and the orchestra validate their choice with a particularly lithe, dynamically understated first movement, richly bracing baroque cadences in the second and vividly fond lyrical balladry in the third before the fireworks kick in.
Obviously, in nine symphonies worth of material from an acclaimed conductor and chamber orchestra, there are other levels of detail too innumerable to fit into a single digestible review. All this is meant to point you in the direction of the most noteworthy pieces of the puzzle, but there are so many more, and most of them are worth seeking out.
Simon Leach Plays a Stunningly Modulated Organ Recital at St. Patrick’s Cathedral
It’s good to have the mostly-weekly series of organ concerts at St. Patrick’s Cathedral back again. It took a long time for the church to complete the renovations on the organ there, but in the couple of years leading up to the 2020 lockdown, there were some memorable concerts in that space. Yesterday’s performance, by Simon Leach, was a rewarding continuation of that tradition.
He opened by premiering The Call to Care for Creation, by his wife Helen Leach. It was a shapeshifting, dynamic, sometimes rippling, sometimes strikingly anthemic piece in the Romantic tradition, with a precise, triumphantly spiraling coda
Next he tackled Bach’s Pièce d’Orgue, BWV 572, rising quickly from a lilting, understated introduction to a literally imperceptible build into a resolute, similarly subtle yet powerful forward drive, a march arising from a single casual stroll. Leach continued with an unrelenting power and a sleekly turbulent, impeccably modulated conclusion.
Taken out of context, the Cantabile from Franck’s Trois Pièces pour Grand Orgue was an airy and persistently uneasy change of pace. Where Leach had pursued the preceding piece relentlessly, he pulled back on the reins and let the wistfully wafting, often bittersweet passages in this one speak for themselves.
He closed by launching with a bang into a stampeding take of Dupré’s Prelude & Fugue in B Major, from his Trois Préludes et Fugues, Op. 7. Rapidfire lefthand/righthand fugal moments quickly gave way to concise, brightly translucent chordal riffage, Just as he had done with the Bach, Leach found the piece’s internal swing and rode that with a sine-wave consistency and clarity, at least where the composer’s rhythm was steady. When it wasn’t, he parsed the dynamics for a mutedly cheery chorale before elevating to a clenched-teeth, stabbing intensity.
The next organ concert at St. Patrick’s is April 30 at 3:15 PM, with Clayton Roberts in the console playing works by Bach, Dupre, and David N. Johnson. Admission is free. The sonic sweet spot is in the center pews about three quarters of the way toward the back of the church, where you can watch on one of several video screens.
The Catalyst Quartet Release Another Batch of Delicious Rediscoveries
The Catalyst Quartet are in the midst of a herculean project, resurrecting the work of undeservedly obscure Black American composers. At this point in history, it looks like we’ve finally reached the moment where the racist divide-and-conquer originally conceived to justify the slave trade has been pushed back under the rock from which it crawled. So the time has never been more ripe for rediscoveries like these. While the sinister forces who astroturfed CRT and BLM may be doing their best to weaponize the legacy of artists like Coleridge-Taylor Perkinson, William Grant Still and George Walker for a different kind of divide-and-conquer, we mustn’t conflate those schemes with the artists. There are so many breathtaking moments in those composers’ music, and nobody knows that better than violinists Abi Fayette and Karla Donehew Perez, violist Paul Laraia and cellist Karlos Rodriguez.
Their next concert is on April 24 at 7:30 PM as part of the monthly Music Mondays free concert series at Advent Church at 93rd and Broadway on the Upper West Side, where they’re playing works by Florence Price as well as new arrangements of old spirituals, and a new setting of Langston Hughes’s poem, Kids Who Die. It’s a neighborhood institution: get there at least fifteen minutes before showtime if you want a seat.
The quartet’s latest record in their ongoing Uncovered series is the third volume – streaming at Spotify – which opens with Perkinson’s succinct three-movement String Quartet No. 1, “Calvary.” He was an interesting guy: a jazz pianist and one of the first Black American symphony orchestra conductors, who also did some memorable arranging for Marvin Gaye in the late 60s. The quartet launch into the allegro first movement with a steely focus, weaving a counterpoint around a terse oldtime gospel-flavored riff. Diffusely reflective figures, in the same vein as the Debussy string quartet, give way and then mingle with a bouncy forward drive fueled by Rodriguez. Perkinson’s subtle rhythmic shifts, up to an almost aching crescendo from the violins, are a treat.
The gospel allusions grow more distant in the adagio second movement, spiced with delicate pizzicato accents, fleeting pauses and a persistent, wistful reflection drifting on the wings of simple echo phrases. The allegro vivace conclusion is exactly that, with a muted, lilting joy that finally swoops down out of the clouds in a jubilant glissando from Fayette. It’s a translucent, fun piece that should be heard more frequently.
Next up is another terse triptych, William Grant Still’s Lyric Quartet. The use of simple, catchy blues-infused phrases and variations is similar to the album’s first piece, the group picking up with a Dvorakian blend of Americana and Eastern European chromatics in the first movement, an otherwise rather wistful portrait of a plantation – one would assume without slaves!
Movement two, a Peruvian mountainscape, is summery and even more minimalistically crafted. The third movement, presumably a portrait of an American pioneer encampment, captures an optimistic bustle as well as some deliciously fleeting chromatics.
The concluding and most challenging piece is the best-known one here, George Walker’s String Quartet No. 1. There’s a vivid, achingly Bartokian quality in the precise chromatics and sudden swells of the first movement. The molto adagio second – often played as a standalone Lyric For Strings – echoes Samuel Barber and gets a rewardingly meticulous, insightfully dynamic interpretation from the ensemble. Stormy striding motives juxtapose against moments of wary reflection in the concluding movement. Like the first two volumes in the Catalyst Quartet’s series, this has as much historical value as it does as sheer sophisticated entertainment.
Jazz on a Spring Afternoon in the Financial District
It may have been lunchtime, but Winard Harper and Jeli Posse conjured up a hot, crowded Jersey City jazz joint atmosphere at St. Paul’s Chapel downtown earlier today. One of the most evocative, erudite, extrovert drummers around for more than a quarter century thought aloud about how to bottle that energy into a single hour, then said the hell with that and went well over time. The crowd was a lot more sizeable than usual and everybody seemed grateful to stick around.
He kicked off the show with a long, mighty press roll, a big regal cymbal splash, and the band suddenly found themselves in a languid, expressive take of Ellington’s In a Sentimental Mood, fueled by Nick Masters’ expansive piano and Anthony Perez’s tersely percolating bass. Harper immediately felt the room and kept a delicate swing going with his brushes. He had extra rhythm this time out: tapdancer AC Lincoln, plus Gabriel Roxbury on djembe, alongside guitarist Charlie Sigler, who built to a tantalizing flurry in tandem with the bandleader.
Next up was a Harper original, possibly titled Sajda, the drummer getting it rolling with a lively, intricate solo on his balafon, dueling with the tap and djembe rhythms that bounced off the walls. Piano and guitar joined in emphatically and then backed away before the horns – Ted Chubb on trumpet and Anthony Ware on tenor sax -ran a steady, stabbing Afrobeat riff. There was restrained joy in Harper’s solo over a majestically rippling piano backdrop and a devious false ending, winding down to a misterious brook at the end.
The band shifted between cloudbursting High Romantic piano and bluesy swing from the horns in the third number, Cedar Walton’s Holy Land, with a gruff, no-nonsense sax solo while Harper shifted the landing zone around. A bubbling trumpet solo, a tap solo with some artful allusions to what a full drumkit would do, and a determinedly clustering guitar solo fueled a big coda. From there the band swung through a similarly purist, blues-infused piano solo, a brisk, incisive bass solo punctuated by some judiciously juicy chords and then Harper doing his own tap imitation up to a big vortex of beats.
He introduced his old boss Dr. Billy Taylor’s Capricious with a misty clave before the horns supplied a balmy cha-cha, and eventually a carefree conversation as the cymbals steamed up the windows – metaphorically speaking, anyway. Abdullah Ibrahim’s Water From an Ancient Well was next, Harper reminiscing about playing a two-week stand with the pianist at the old Sweet Basil. Masters set a glistening mood, Harper introducing a sotto-voce clave for the horns’ fond harmonies and a soulful, low-key, Sonny Rollins-ish solo from Ware.
They stuck with a latin rhythm but picked up the pace significantly with a racewalking take of a Harper original to wind up the show with blazing sax and trumpet solos, and a lustrously chordal solo from Masters, the bandleader spinning but resisting the urge to knock down the walls. They wound up the afternoon out with a swaying, somewhat muted gospel-infused triumph,
The next jazz concert at St. Paul’s Chapel is April 24 at 1 PM with drummer Jerome Jennings and jazz poet Naomi Extra‘s Get Free Collective; admission is free. And Harper has resumed his weekly Friday and Sunday jazz jams at Moore’s Lounge at 189 Monticello Ave in Jersey City.
Organist Kenneth Corneille Plays Fascinating Baroque Rarities and a 20th Century Showstopper
Earlier today organist Kenneth Corneille played an individualistic program of baroque rarities and a 20th century gem on the magnificently versatile organ at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. First on the bill was Bach’s Fantasia & Fugue in A Minor, BWV 561, which he delivered very uptempo with unusually bright registrations, lightning-fast righthand clusters and practically a sprint in places. It was impressive to hear him play it at this velocity and build a cyclotron of cascades. Adrenalizing, to say the least, and the small crowd who’d come out for the recital loved it. What might have been lost in the stampede is open to interpretation.
Next on the bill were five transcriptions of songs by eighteenth century composer and Notre Dame organist Médéric Corneille (a relation, maybe?). A beefy, striding folk ballad, Brillantes fleurs (Shining Flowers) was next. Dure loi du péché (unpoetic translation: The Penalty For Sin Is Harsh) came across as a steady hymn with flourishes as Sweelinck might have given it, bolstered by extra power on the low end. Number three, titled Grand Dieu (Great God) was a processional with the occasional trilling ornament.
The younger Corneille played Si vous avez beaucoup (If you have a lot) over a stern, catchy pedal figure: it was the most Bach-inflected of the songs. He then switched to more subdued colors for Une éternelle inquiétude (Eternal worry), the most sophisticated of the bunch. subtly building to a flicker of a fugue. And then it was over.
Corneille closed with legendary improviser McNeil Robinson’s 1980 composition, Dismas Variations, opening it like a bulkier, less overtly macabre take on what Jehan Alain did with his Trois Danses. A fiery, portentous rise decayed to airy textures that grew more Messiaenic, Corneille establishing a calm, conversational ambience before another attack-and-lull.
His lickety-split, occasionally dissonant exchanges descended once again into hazy resonance. The conclusion was classic, counteriutuitive Robinson, chuffing rhythmic bursts intermingled within an increasingly enveloping, all-stops-out atmosphere that gave way unexpectedly into tremoloing phantasmagoria and ended completely unresolved.
The next organ concert at St. Patrick’s is on April 23 at 3:15 PM with British organist Simon Leach playing works by his wife Helen Leach as well as Bach, Franck and Dupre. Admission is free: these performances start precisely on time and usually don’t go far beyond the half-hour mark.
Brilliant, Distinctively Dark Discoveries and an Old Favorite with the MSM Symphony Orchestra
Last night at Manhattan School of Music, guest conductor Leonard Slatkin returned to lead the MSM Symphony Orchestra through a program with pervasive if sometimes allusively dark and phantasmagorical overtones: without a doubt, music that resounds in the here and now.
They opened with Cindy McTee‘s Timepiece for Percussion, and String Orchestra. The orchestra quickly danced their way into its proto-Bernard Herrmann motives, alternately playful and menacing, interspersed with moments of sleekness. Quickly, the orchestra rose toward a furtive rhythm, to a tensely pulsing clave with portenous answers between inquiring brass and cynical strings, and flourishes that echoed the evening’s centerpiece, Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring. It was a delightfully cinematic, apt curtain-raiser.
Frank Martin’s Concerto for 7 Wind Instruments, Timpani, Percussion, and String Orchestra made a good segue. Similarly, Slatkin led the orchestra briskly into a balletesque, allusively chromatic swing with a vivid, broodingly inquiring Nicholas Fitch bassoon solo at the center of the allegro opening movement. From there, Hajin Kil’s searching oboe led them down from a moment of suspicious pageantry to more austere territory.
The second movement began as somber ballet, eerie close harmonies in a balletesque tiptoeing rhythm before the brass kicked in, cynically. Strings and brass developed a quasi-flamenco-tinged forward drive, down to a suspensefully tiptoeing Scheherzada lull punctuated by an even more wary Cameron Pollard horn solo.
The third movement gave way to insistent, tense riffing around the central flamenco theme, the horns answering from around the hall with an equal tension. Timpanist Zachary Masri’s coolly striding solo launched a steady, ineluctably marching crescendo spiced with high woodwind flourishes, toward a coda that offered an unexpected triumph. Kudos to the MSM faculty for resurrecting this.
Their take on Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring turned out to be more of a controlled demolition than feral folk explosion after a long Russian winter. The initial calls were muted and enigmatic within an ambience that was absolutely pillowy. Likewise, Slatkin kept the orchestra on a tight leash, with meticulously puffing accents in contrast to spritely wind cadenzas. Was he setting the bar on the quiet side for the sake of enhancing future pyrotechnics? Uh, maybe.
The group took an unexpectedly dusty and then light-fingered, swinging rise to a cyclotron swirl, with more blue-flame simmer than fullscale conflagration on all sides. A teasing lull with precisely choreographed flutes drew a heavy duty truck crush from the percusssion and low brass. Yet the call-and-response after that gave way to a strikingly smooth swing – making the gnashing monsterwalk and danse macabre afterward all the more effective for its relative calm.
Slatkin led with a woundedly plush pulse from there to a mere whisper before the spirits began flitting up into the picture on the wings of the flutes again. The iconic unleashed-maidens theme seemed more stage-managed, less pagan than other orchestras have played it in the last few years, maybe due to the demands of training. Or maybe Slatkin had something new to tell us about this piece, from the misterioso slink on the way through a stabbing, stiletto coda.
There are plenty of upcoming public performances at Manhattan School of Music this month. One intriguing program features their choral ensemble singing works by women composers including Meredith Monk, Melissa Dunphy, Ysaÿe Barnwell, and Tammy Huynh on April 19 at 8 PM at the Ades Performance Space at 130 Claremont Ave. The concert is free; take the 1 to 125th St. and walk back uphill.
Cellist Amanda Gookin Plays a Harrowing but Guardedly Triumphant Solo Show at Roulette
Survivors of child abuse are like the unjabbed. They walk among you, unnoticed, steeled in what Catherine Austin Fitts calls the “refiners fire,” but scarred for life. At her solo show this past evening at Roulette, cellist Amanda Gookin channeled equal parts resilience and numbed horror as a child abuse survivor herself.
She asserted that she had few childhood memories, and from those she shared with a near sold-out audience, it’s easy to understand why. The daughter of a troubled woman who could sing Brahms beautifully but was crippled by what appears to have been serious borderline personality disorder, Gookin began the show seated on the stairs to the stage. With a steady calm, she read a revealing letter to an unnamed sister, mentioning their shared depressive tendencies. She would reprise that letter at the end of the concert: its authorship came as no surprise.
From that introduction, she picked up an amplified frame drum with ball bearings inside and took a slow stroll through the audience to the soundboard and back, as hypnotic waves washed over the crowd. Perhaps this attested to the push and pull of abusive relationships from a child’s point of view.
On one hand, Gookin’s parents had the means to send her away to Bible camp in Texas during the summer. But then her mother found her Jesus diary, discovered her daughter’s entreaties for parental healing, and that was the end of that. As Gookin told it, Wilton, Connecticut in the early 90s was a tough place to be a kid from the one home on the block where the ambulance or police cruiser would be a regular presence. The moment where she recounted a friend’s mother trying to get her to open up about her feelings, late one evening on a quiet staircase, was unaffectedly shattering.
And yet, years later, when her mother died of cancer, Gookin was overwhelmed with grief, and was quick to acknowledge how codependency is a double-edged sword. It was rewarding to hear how she was finally able to move on emotionally.
From the music, Gookin clearly conquered those demons, even as they sometimes wafted to the surface, in a tightly wound, rather minimalist electroacoustic performance. With her own spoken-word between-song segues, it wasn’t always clear where one composition ended and another began. The first piece, by Pamela Z, was a blend of spoken word chopped and cuisinarted through a mixer while Gookin layered shivering, muted harmonics and subtle ambient textures.
Often Gookin would begin a piece or an interlude with the hum of singing bowls, or the creepy, music box-like timbres from a set of wind chimes. Gentle rainshower sonics dripped behind her spare, midrange cello washes as she spoke of a “body submerged in the cloud,” rising to a frenetic, chopping peak.
On a Jessie Montgomery composition, she slammed out a steady, hypnotic series of chords before veering into hazy harmonics and then an aching, microtonal cadenza where she finally veered off into a crazed cello-metal coda.
Throughout the rest of the night, stark octaves, fleeting harmonic accents, the occasional anxious wail and a crescendo into a fragmented evocation of madness figured in turn throughout works by Sarah Hennies, Camilia Agosto and Seong Ae Kim. A concluding piece by Inti Figgis-Vizueta included a paraphrase of I’m in the Mood for Love, simple chords and a spare, elegaic, spacious melody that grew more anthemic with glissandos, eerie trills and raga-like riffage.
The next concert at Roulette is quite similar if perhaps not as personally devastating. On April 12 at 8 PM, singer and sound artist Muyassar Kurdi leads an improvisational electroacoustic trio tracing the lineage of the Arab diaspora. You can get in for $25 in advance.
Colorful, Relentlessly Entertaining, Linguistically-Inspired New Compositions by Eric Nathan
One of the most deviously entertaining recent projects in new classical music is Eric Nathan‘s epic double album Missing Words, streaming at New Focus Recordings. The composer takes inspiration for this colorful collection of vignettes and longer pieces from Ben Schott‘s Schottenfreude, a philosophical satire of the German propensity for interminable compound nouns. In turn, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, American Brass Quintet, cellist Parry Karp and pianist Christopher Karp, the International Contemporary Ensemble, the Neave Trio and finally, Hub New Music have as much fun playing this stuff as the composer obviously did writing it.
It’s a series of tableaux and character studies which range from the vividly cinematic to occasionally cartoonish. Sirens are a recurrent trope, as are pregnant pauses and trick endings. Some of the more otherworldly harmonies look back to Messiaen; the more circular passages echo Philip Glass. The series of miniatures at the end are more acerbic and somewhat less comedic – other than the obvious but irresistibly mangled Beethoven quotes.
The opening number, Eisenbahnscheinbewegung (Railway-Illusion-Motion) makes colorful use of dopplers and train-whistle sonics. Herbstlaubtrittvergnügen (Autumn-Foliage-Strike-Fun) has jaunty trombone flourishes echoed by violins. There’s balletesque bustle and a surprise ending in Fingerspitzentanz (Fingertips-Dance) and mini-fanfares grounded by diesel-engine low brass in Missing Words – what’s missing is the operative question.
Nathan spaciously and rather cautiously approaches the strangely intimate acrylic smell of a new car interior, i.e. Kraftfahrzeugsinnenausstattungsneugeruchsgenuss. Rollschleppe (Escalator-Schlep) is as persistently troubled as you would expect from a portrait of somebody who can’t take the stairs – and yet, the piece has a persistent determination. Life in the slow lane really is where all the action is!
Mundphantom (Mouth-Phantom) is a Scooby Doo conversation. Speaking of ghosts, the Straußmanöver (Ostrich-Maneuver) is performed by a seriously phantasmic bird. Schubladenbrief ((Desk-Drawer-Letter) seems to depict a letter stubbornly resisting an opener, but when the envelope finally get slit, its contents suggest its sender is recounting a wild ride.
Dreiecksumgleichung (Triangle-Reorganization) is built around a flashy violin solo and concludes with a lively flute-driven jig. By contrast, the wry, bracing dawn interlude Tageslichtspielschock (Daylight-Show-Shock) will resonate with any musician dreading a gig at an early hour.
Arguably the funniest piece here, Ludwigssyndrom (Ludwig’s-Syndrome) is a tongue-in-cheek, brief piano concerto with rapidfire, ostentatious cascades and a ridiculously good riff joke that’s too good to give away. The steady upward stride of the piano in Watzmannwahn (Watzmann-Delusion) is also pretty priceless.
The only one of the ensembles on the record who have a New York concert coming up are the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, who are Stern Auditorium at Carnegie Hall on April 15 at 8 PM, playing works by Andrew Norman, Lei Lang and Lisa Bielawa, the latter with the composer on vocals. The venue says you can get in for $21.
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