Surprisingly Subtle Shades of Grand Guignol for Halloween

Murky piano, distantly tolling bells, ominous low brass and an operatic singer. Sounds like Halloween, right? Today’s release day for David Hertzberg‘s one-act opera The Rose Elf – streaming at Spotify – and that’s how it opens.

That overture rises with an eerie tinkle of piano to a cold stop. The narrative draws on a Hans Christian Andersen fable which reads more like the Brothers Grimm. Samantha Hankey sings the part of the Elf, with Andrew Bogard, Sydney Mancasola and Kirk Dougherty in double roles. Robert Kahn conducts a chamber ensemble behind them with meticulous menace.

Phantasmagorical upper-register piano over hazy strings is a big part of the picture, as are Hankey’s agitated flights to the heights. Stark cello! A doomed, foggy baritone voice! Pregnant pauses! Are we having fun yet, Lurch?

What distinguishes this from classical heavy metal cliche is Hertzberg’s enigmatic sense of melody. This music lingers and doesn’t move around much despite numerous dynamic shifts beneath the singers’ full-blown angst: it’s the High Romantic from a somewhat calmer five thousand feet. Richard Strauss’ Death and Transfiguration and Charles Gounod are points of comparison, as are Stravinsky and Prokofiev at their most predictably carnivalesque. Euntaek Kim, the ensemble’s emphatic, dynamic pianist makes the icily glimmering, marionettish parts count. And percussionist Bradley Loudis also excels in a richly suspenseful, colorful performance.

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Innovative Piano and Vibraphone Tunes From Miki Yamanaka

Today’s installment concerns vibraphonist and pianist Miki Yamanaka’s Human Dust Suite album, streaming at Bandcamp. She takes inspiration for the record’s five-part centerpiece from Agnes Denes’ famous 1969 black-and-white photograph, which shows what’s left of a corpse after it’s been cremated.

Full disclosure: the suite is on the quiet side and far more of a celebration of being alive than anything overtly macabre. Take the opening segment, Brain, a warmly bounding piano theme propelled by the circling grooves of bassist Orlando le Fleming and drummer Jochen Rueckert, saxophonist Anthony Orji providing balmy ambience overhead.

The fleeting second part, Hatsu is centered around hypnotic twin riffs from both vibes and piano over an insistent drumbeat. As she often does throughout the record, Yamanaka opens and closes the unsettled, low-key, pulsing part three, Tummy, on vibes and switches to piano in between; Orji’s terse solo matches the pensive atmosphere.

Feet Go Bad First is a similarly moody, modally-tinged number punctuated by dancing bass solos. The suite’s conclusion, Party’s Over begins even more darkly but quickly rises to a brisk swing with tight, purposeful solos from Orji and the bandleader.

The album includes six other tracks, most of them on the thoughtful side and characterized by unexpected shifts from light to dark or the other way around. The opening number, Pre School has a rapidly strolling groove, pointillistic piano from Yamanaka and calm sax from Orji. The album’s most epic tune, March, is a jazz waltz, Orji rising to bubbly heights after a sober intro from Yamanaka, who follows a similarly triumphant, lyrical tangent afterward.

First Day of Spring begins as a tender ballad but gains momentum and gravitas on the wings of Yamanaka’s incisive chords. O 2017 is a brief, strolling pastoral theme with overdubbed piano and vibes.

After the Night is the album’s strongest and darkest track, Orji lighting the way warily over Yamanaka’s circling, moody phrases; then she completely flips the script, fueling a long upward drive. She winds up the album with the genially shuffling Berkshire Blues: western Massachusetts hill country seems to suit her just fine.

A World Premiere From 1716 and Other Lively Entertainment From Augusta McKay Lodge

One of the most electrifying aspects of Italian baroque music is the degree of improvisation involved. As in much of Middle Eastern music, dynamics and embellishments are typically left to the individual soloist. A listener has to dig deep into the liner notes of violinist Augusta McKay Lodge’s new album Corelli’s Band: Violin Sonatas by Corelli, Carbonelli, Mossi – streaming at Spotify – to discover that those interpretations are hers. And she matches that impetuous energy with depth.

Lodge has a lithe, strikingly nuanced touch, a flair for the dramatic, a colorful vibrato but also a finely attuned sense of the music’s emotional context. And if you think that every worthwhile piece from the 18th century has already been recorded, guess again!

Lodge opens the album with a world premiere, Giovanni Mossi’s Sonata No. 9, op. 6. With its opening prelude centered around a gorgeously melancholy, melismatic riff that recurs with some tasty chromatics in the fourth movement, it’s on the serious side. And it’s a triumph for Lodge, with her rapidfire triplets in the second movement and her almost breathlessly fleeting pauses in the third. Throughout the album, a supporting cast including Elliot Figg on harpsichord, Doug Balliett on violone, Ezra Seltzer on cello and Adam Cockerham on theorbo and guitar play elegantly alongside her.

Giovanni Stefano Carbonelli is arguably even more obscure than his contemporary Mossi, but his music deserves to be far better known. His Sonata No. 10 comes across as Vivaldi Jr., its stately opening giving way to a brisk ballet of counterpoint down a circular staircase. Stark guitar/violin contrast dominates the third movement, then the group wind it up with a jovial bounce.

Arcangelo Corelli, whose highly ornamented violin style inspired both of these lesser-known composers, is represented by his Sonata No. 3, op. 5, a springboard for Lodge’s quicksilver cadenzas and griptite staccato alongside the rest of the ensemble.

She goes back to Mossi’s catalog for Sonatas No. 1 and 3 from his op. 1 book. The group dig in with unexpected vigor for for the former’s brooding yet meticulously agitated introduction, plaintively Vivaldiesque exchanges and flurries. They give the latter a colorful but more expansive approach.

Lodge winds up the album with Carbonelli’s lilting Sonata No. 9, a showcase for her sensitivity of attack, particularly in the somber processional of a first movement, the shivery embellishments of the second and the melancholy waltz that winds it up. Pop a cork on the barolo, but savor the moment: don’t overindulge like the robber barons whose salons were where this music probably debuted, and who probably weren’t paying much paying attention.

Vast Rapture and Playful Scrambles From Brilliant, Individualistic Pianist Eunyoung Kim

Pianist Eunyoung Kim plays improvised music that draws as much on 20th century and contemporary classical music as it does jazz. Her technique is daunting, and she has a rare fluency for orchestrating on the spot. Themes and variations are big with her, as are close harmonies. She flirts with twelve-tone ideas without being tying the knot with them. Her new album, Earworm – streaming at Bandcamp – is like nothing you’ve ever heard before.

The first number – each of the album’s tracks is untitled – has a steady, playfully dancing rhythm with hints of swing, tango and the baroque disguised behind close harmonies. If Louis Andriessen played jazz, it might sound something like this.

Track two is a vast, otherworldly, minimalist soundscape, akin to Federico Mompou at a tenth the speed, maybe. Kim returns to playfully rhythmic mode with the tune after that, an increasingly thorny series of curlicuing phrases and variations that grow more murky and hypnotic.

Track four reflects the spacious minimalism of track two, but more somberly and intricately: it brings to mind Satoko Fujii’s most brooding solo work. Blippy, leapfrogging phrases and staccato insistence mingle in the piece after that, down to a striking interlude fueled by stern quasi-boogie low-register work.

Track six begins as a synthesis of the bounciness and the moody minimalism that Kim has been shifting between so far; then she romps toward Monk and gospel music. She finally goes under the piano lid for her seventh improvisation, a momentary return to somber stillness.

With Kim’s steady, bracing modalities and steady, incisive attack, track eight reminds of Keith Jarrett’s 1960s work. Next up, Kim clusters and jabs with breathtaking speed and articulacy: that she waits this long before cutting loose with her chops testifies to her commitment to making a statement rather than showing off.

The album’s tenth track is increasingly hypnotic variations on a wry, loopy modal phrase. Kim closes the record with an approximation of a Monk-ish wee-hours ballad. Like all the albums on the new Mung Music label out of Korea, this was recorded live to a vintage Tascam cassette recorder before being digitized.

A Subtle, Elegantly Evocative Suspense Film Score From Disasterpeace

Composer Richard Vreeland, a.k.a. Disasterpeace’s orchestral score to the film Under the Silver Lake – streaming at Bandcamp – is a clinic in picturesque, suspenseful new classical composition. The themes are simple, even minimalist in places. Lush, distantly anxious or murky, close-harmonied strings, ambered woodwind/string textures and clarinet/bass contrasts are just a few of the interesting tropes here. There’s a lingering ominousness, delicate ambience punctured by sudden, yet often remarkably subtle figures or percussive accents. Moments of lively activity are infrequent and striking when they appear: the hushed ambience grows quieter and more sinister as the suspense rises toward the end. Featured instruments range beyond the usual orchestral lineup to include pennywhistle, icy electric guitar played through a vintage analog chorus pedal, and what could be either a cimbalom or a prepared piano,

There’s also a jaunty little ragtime strut and a delightful 60s pop hit. And a pointless cover of another hit from that era, a cheesy, orchestrated “R&B” number and a wretched pair of songs from the low point of REM’s career. Beyond that, this is an album will keep you at the edge of your seat for a long time: there are a total of 34 tracks here.

High-Voltage Piano/Bass Duels and Conversations From Eunhye Jeong and Minki Cho

Pianist Eunhye Jeong’s previous album The Colliding Beings was an epic live recording of ancient Korean pansori themes reinvented as free jazz. Her latest album, Abyss, is a series of duo improvisations with bassist Minki Cho, streaming at Bandcamp. It’s somewhat less expansive: no 25-minute songs this time around.

There’s a persistent good cop/bad cop dynamic between the steady, purposeful bassist and the restless pianist. Unearthly tones, whether keening in the harmonics of the upper registers or the stygian lows, come to the forefront in the duo’s first number, Head Sea. Jeong goes under the piano lid before she moves in, hard, on the piano’s low midrange, while Cho bows and then holds the center, motorboat riffs against a scurry.

Purple Beans has flitting piano accents against a calmer, more circular bass center. The two coalesce, then diverge tensely through a series of tritones, Jeong growing more frantic until Cho centers the music.

Surface Tension begins with churning, rattling atmospherics, Cho running loopy bass variations as Jeong hammers and circles; this time it’s her turn to break the spell. Thumbnail Sketch, the closest reference to swing here, begins with jaunty lowrange flourishes and insistence from the piano against steady bass. The two musicians rise to a coy parody of fanfare and then an anvil chorus which finally gives way to a deadpan, stern conclusion.

Kindred has funkier rhythms, some particularly explosive moments from Jeong and also an unexpectedly icy, terse duet midway through. The closing number, Dokdo 1696 is built around minimalist, suspenseful variations on an octave bass riff, up to some tasty Messiaenic upper-register piano and another anvil chorus, Cho playing voice of reason again. The album also includes a couple of spacious solo bass miniatures.

Haunting New Sounds From an American Transcendentalist and a Mumbai-Born Jazz Chanteuse

You probably wouldn’t think that one of the world’s most unpredictable pianists would be the first choice for a lot of singers. Au contraire – Ran Blake loves playing with singers and has made many albums with them. Blake personifies the film noir esthetic. His most noir-centric album in this century with a vocalist remains the 2012 cult classic Camera Obscura record with Sara Serpa. He’s also done spine-tingling work with Dominique Eade. And he’s worked with Christine Correa before: their new duo album, When Soft Rains Fall – streaming at Spotify – really brings out the best in both artists , a high point in their long-running collaboration.

It’s amazing how they completely reinvent a bunch of old standards: the two improvise at such a high level that everything on the record might as well be called an original. Correa’s bittersweet, weathered approach to I’m a Fool to Want You, the album’s opening track, is a perfect foil for Blake’s sudden yet sagacious shifts from minimalist blues, to furtive Messiaenesque ice, to his own saturnine gleam.

The two open For Heaven’s Sake as anything but a love song, but they warm it up quickly, even if Blake remains more gremlin than imp. Correa narrates The Day Lady Died as Blake takes this grimly imagistic 1959 Manhattan tableau into a cold, revealing Weegee light with shadows just outside.

The two reverse roles in You’ve Changed, Blake’s steadiness in contrast to Correa’s stricken vulnerability. She matches the shift between Blake’s insistent chimes and muted murk im You Don’t Know What Love Is, then the duo bring an apt phantasmagoria to The End of a Love Affair: breakups are the creepiest thing in the world!

They remake For All We Know with circling, Saties-esque menace: tomorrow truly may never come for all we know. Blake is unsurpassed at lowlit, close-harmonied miniatures, Big Stuff being the latest in a long series.

The bitter quasi-Rachmaninoff chords that open Get Along Without You Very Well – the key to the album – speak volumes, as does Correa’s cynical delivery. Blake plays a clinic in implied melody in Violets For Your Furs – he really makes you think you’re hearing a bluesy ballad – then goes under the lid, literally, behind Correa’s haggard angst in Lady Sings the Blues.

Blake’s insistence contrasts with Correa’s guarded hope against hope in But Beautiful, a dynamic they revisit to an extent in Glad to Be Unhappy, although she’s more vividly cynical in the latter.

Their take of I’ll Be Around – not the Howlin’ Wolf classic – is the album’s most spaciously brief number. They close it with It’s Easy to Remember, where Correa takes centerstage with an a-cappella intro. After all these years, Blake remains best known for his shattering, classic collaboration with the late, great Jeanne Lee, The Newest Sound Around, but he hasn’t stopped finding newer ones. And there’s more where this came from, including a collaboration with another darkly cinematic pianist, Frank Carlberg.

Why a Symphony From 1935 Matters More Than Ever

The events of 2020 under the lockdown are eerily similar to 1935. By then, the Nazi campaign of genocide had begun, with the mass murder of disabled and cripped people, all of them euthanized by the German medical establishment. Here in the US, the President recently announced a deal with the huge pharmacy conglomerate Wallgreens to kill off residents of nursing homes with the Bill Gates needle of death. When are the general public going to wake up? Eighty-five years ago, Europe didn’t until it was too late to stop the Nazi war machine. If that historical precedent holds true, we are in trouble. As Pastor Martin Niemoller famously recalled, “Then they went after the Jews. Then they came for us.”

Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 4 was premiered in 1935, by an earlier version of the BBC Symphony Orchestra. Martyn Brabbins, lifelong champion of the Romantic tradition, conducts them in this latest recording, which hasn’t hit the web yet. If there was specific content or narrative in his music, the composer usually made that very clear, and he didn’t do that in this case. Still, this symphony is chillingly a reflection of its time, and in that sense, a cautionary tale.

As this storm gathers momentum, chromatics that stop thisshort of frantic cede to restlessly circling, gusty variations that rise with an increasing unease: hindsight may be 20/20, but it’s impossible not to read rumors of war into this. Brabbins immediately dims the lights for the comforting nocturne that morphs out of it: could this be a reflection on the momentary honeymoon between wars for the English people?

Likewise, a stalking pulse from the strings rises to enigmatic lustre, persistent disquiet disappearing in favor of twilit serenity in the second movement; yet it ends broodingly. A darkly bristling, distinctly Russian-tinged dance opens the third and transforms into a march in the last movement, albeit with suspiciously sarcastic humor. Again, Brabbins pulls the orchestra for a comforting lull, which doesn’t last. The Beethovenesque series of false endings grow more and more foreboding, to the point where the impact remains long beyond the final, seemingly sardonic blast of low brass.

Where is the 2020 counterpart to this troubled masterpiece? Probably still being written. The operative question is whether we’ll ever be able to hear it. In the UK in 1935 it was legal for an orchestra to perform in front of an audience..

This album opens with Vaughan Williams’ radically different “Pastoral” Symphony No. 3. As inspired by World War I gravesites as by the English countryside of the composer’s youth, it’s one of the quietest pieces in the symphonic repertoire, at least before the explosion of spectral music in the early 1980s.

The first movement comes across as sleepy time for heroes –an update on the wave motion the composer explored in his Sea Symphony – along with vast Dvorakian vistas. Maybe that influence explains the minor blues riff that anchors one of the main themes. The gentle, steadily ratcheting counterpoint introduced in the first movement comes further to the forefront in the more stark, spare, folksy second one. Alan Thomas’ long, restrained, distantly troubled trumpet solo is the highlight here.

Heroes wake up vociferously as the third movement gets underway, larks quickly ascend to the trees and some bustling and strutting ensues – yet quietly. Soprano Elizabeth Watts animatedly brings back the blues riffs over an almost imperceptible stillness to introduce the conclusion, rising to disorienting, fragmentary exchanges before the serene intertwine of the first movement returns. From there Brabbins meticulously leads the slow rise to a momentary triumph and descent into nocturnal content and contemplation, Watts adding celestial lustre at the end.

The record is also noteworthy for including the world premiere of Vaughan Williams’ previously unpublished cantata Saraband “Helen,” a setting of a Christopher Marlowe text about Helen of Troy. Brabbins’ arrangement is sober and understated; tenor David Butt Philip sings expressively over the increasingly bittersweet sweep of the orchestra and choir.

A Chilling Live Recording of a Poignantly Resonant Michael Hersch Suite

With recording studios officially off limits to large ensembles, and musicians for all intents and purposes unable to earn a living playing concerts with large groups, many classical artists have been sifting through the archives for live recordings made before the lockdown. One harrowing gem among them is composer Michael Hersch’s I Hope We Get the Chance to Visit Soon, streaming at Bandcamp. The centerpiece is a fifteen-part suite recorded live at the Aldeburgh Music Festival in 2018.

The concert begins with a new version of an earlier piece for voice, violin, and cello, …das Rückgrat berstend (German for “bent back”), a setting of a Christopher Middleton poem. The concert’s two sopranos, Ah Young Hong and Kiera Duffy alternate German and English phrases over keening overtones from strings and winds which slowly rise to sudden, sharp peaks and then subside, or burst and then vanish. it’s a vivid portrait of madness.

The album’s central suite interchanges texts from correspondence written by Hersh’s friend Mary Harris O’Reilly alongside poetry by Rebecca Elson, each author a woman who died young from cancer. Hersch, a cancer survivor himself, has explored this theme before, notably in his macabre End Stages suite. In a sense, this is a sequel, although the texts add poignancy as the narrative traces O’Reilly’s inevitable decline.

A troubled, microtonal haze punctuated by gloomy piano sets the stage for a quick diagnosis and a good prognosis which soon evaporates. High harmonics linger ominously while bustle and turbulence emerges below, only to disappear. Arioso hope against hope breaks down into calm, but only fleetingly, and then sheer horror ensues with the singers at the top of their range. The sweep of the orchestration grows to a pained, often wistful grandeur as the suite nears the end. As a portrait of uncertainty and terror – not to mention a chronicle of ineffective new drugs failing to help the critically ill – it matches anything the lockdowners have thrown at us this year.

A brave and important work for the inspired ensemble of clarinetist Raphael Schenkel, bassoonist Cody Dean, alto saxophonist Gary Louie, pianist Amy Yang, violinists Meesun Hong Coleman and Anna Matz, violist Joel Hunter, cellist Benjamin Santora and bassist Piotr Zimnik, conducted by Tito Munoz.

Fearlessly Individualistic, Counterintuitive Classical Hits From Pianist Khatia Buniatishvili

By oldschool record label standards, releasing an album of greatest hits from the classical canon guarantees yourself a pretty wide audience. The theory is that most of the crowd who will buy it doesn’t know anything beyond the standard repertoire and can’t differentiate between interpretations. From a critical perspective, this kind of album invites disaster, a minefield of crushing comparisons to every great artist who has recorded those same pieces over the past century. How does pianist Khatia Buniatishvili‘s new album Labyrinth – streaming at Spotify – stack up against the competition? Spoiler alert: this is a very individualistic record. And that’s a very good thing.

Consider the opening number, Deborah’s Theme, from the late, great Ennio Morricone’s score to the film Once Upon a Time in America. Buniatishvili plays it with such limpidness, such tenderness, such spaciousness that plenty of listeners could call it extreme.

Then she tackles Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1: so easy to play, but so brutally challenging to figure out rhythmically. Buniatishvili gives it just enough rubato to avoid falling into the trap so many other pianists have, taking the easy way out and turning it into a maudlin waltz. This is haunting, and revelatory, and augurs well for the rest of the record.

Other pianists approach Chopin’s E Minor Prelude with a nervous, scurrying attack. Buniatishvili lets it linger in a ineffable sadness before she chooses her escape route. Again, it’s an unorthodox path to take, but once again she validates her approach. The Ligeti etude Arc-en-ciel, one of the lesser-known works here gets a similar treatment, its belltone sonics exploding just when not expected to.

Not all of the rest of the record is this dark. Her piano-four-hands take of Bach’s Badinerie, from Orchestral Suite No. 2 in B minor, BWV 1067 with Gvantsa Buniatishvili is a clenched-teeth romp. Yet the Air on the G String gets reinvented as a dirge: the first instinct is to laugh, but then again the choice to play it as Procol Harum actually works. She does the same with Scarlatti later on.

Buniatishvili builds baroque counterpoint in an increasingly crushing take of Rachmaninoff’s Vocalise: probably not what the composer envisioned, although there’s no arguing with the logic of her dynamic contrasts. She follows a deviously ragtimey arrangement of Serge Gainsbourg’s La Javanaise with a haphazardly pummeling and then luxuriant version of Villa-Lobos’ Valsa da Dor, which also works in context.

The pairing of French baroque composer Francois Couperin’s circling, delicately ornamented Les Barricades Mystérieuses with a Bach ripoff of a famous Vivaldi theme is an even whiter shade of pale. Fans of 20th century repertoire are rewarded with richly lingering version of Part’s stark Pari Intervallo and a hauntingly enveloping performance of Philip Glass’ I’m Going to Make a Cake (from the film The Hours).

There’s also an opulent interpretation of the well-known Brahms Intermezzo, Liszt’s nocturnal Consolation (Pensée poétique) and another Bach piece, the brooding Adagio from the Concerto in D minor, BWV 974. Oh yeah – there’s another famous thing here that clocks in at 4:33. Don’t let that lead you to believe that the album’s over yet. Stodgier classical music fans will hear this and dismiss much of it as punk rock. Let them. Their loss.