A Colorful, Expressive, Minutely Jeweled New Album From Pianist Kariné Poghosyan

Pianist Kariné Poghosyan has received plenty of ink on this page, both for her spectacular technical prowess as well as her sensitivity to content. Her latest album, simply titled Folk Themes and streaming at youtube, is a characteristically eclectic and insightful playlist.

She opens with Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s six-part Valse Suite. It’s almost comical to look back to 2019, a time when the African-British composer’s incredibly forward-looking, individualistic work had been largely consigned to the organ demimonde. Let’s hope future generations associate him with the Romantic tradition – Dvorak is a good comparison – rather than the odious CRT fad which ironically may be the reason behind his well-deserved if unlikely resurrection.

Poghosyan begins with a spacious and playful approach to the opening A minor movement  with her usual stunning, crystalline articulacy and a wide dynamic range. Did a later composer steal the Andante in Ab for the jazz ballad These Foolish Things? From Poghosyan’s blend of wistfulness and sheer force, that seems possible.

There’s Rachmaninovian gravitas and surprise in the third quasi-waltz in G minor, while the fourth in D minor gets a rewardingly pouncing interpretation befitting its occasional Near Eastern allusions and blend of sternness and vivacity. No. 5 in Eb is more reflective and Chopinesque; the final piece, in C minor gets restrained savagery in the chordal chromatics and an even greater, fond restraint in the pensive moments. It’s about time these little gems made their way back into the canon: we’re lucky we have Poghosyan reveling in their detail.

Next on the bill are four Grieg Lyric Pieces. To the Spring follows a matter-of-factly triumphant tangent, while March of the Gnomes reveals how much unabashed fun the creepy little guys can have, at least from Poghosyan’s perspective. She mines The Minuet “Vanished Days” for equal parts drama and cheery reflection, then gives the Wedding Day at Troldhaugen a welcome, fleet-footed, verdant atmosphere: these circumstances are anything but pompous.

Poghosyan has always advocated for composers from her Armenian heritage, and includes a couple of alternately stark and lively, chromatically bristling miniatures from Komitas Vardapet’s Six Dances for Piano. She saves the fireworks for last with four big crowd-pleasers by Liszt. The counterintuitive goofiness and carefree, dancing flourishes in the Hungarian Rhapsody No.12 are a revelation but no big surprise considering Poghosyan’s meticulous, line-by-line interpretive skill.

There’s also a lingering delight in her leaps and bounds through Rhapsody No.6: the descending cascades about four minutes in are sublime. And she finds the inner swing in a brisk, animatedly conversational take of Rhapsody No.7. She closes the record with the Rhapsodie Espagnole, ranging between a wide-eyed soberness and fiery, clustered phrasing. It’s been a fun ride keeping up with Poghosyan and her penchant for inhabiting everything she sinks her fast fingers into.

Advertisement

Mark Pacoe Commands the Power of the Organ at St. Patrick’s Cathedral

Among the many reasons for guarded optimism that this city is slowly healing from the traumas inflicted over the past three years is the sudden resurgence of concert traditions that were put on ice in March of 2020. One that was badly missed was the semi-regular series of organ and choral concerts in the magnificent, reverb-heavy sonics at St. Patrick’s Cathedral. Mark Pacoe, who was one of the few and the brave to still be playing for audiences as late as the winter of 2020, delivered an eclectically welcome program there on the mighty Kilgen organ on Sunday afternoon

He opened with the Prelude from 20th century composer Paul Creston’s Suite for Organ, a steady, bright, unabashedly Romantic processional with a catchy, anthemic pedal melody amid a torrential swirl, to a matter-of-fact all-stops-out conclusion.

Next on the bill was a 2021 piece, Jason Roberts‘ Prelude & Fugue on the iconic Umm Kulthumm anthem Eta Omri, Pacoe quickly rising from an enigmatic introduction to a pouncing chase sequence punctuated by disquieting lulls. It’s not particularly Middle Eastern-tinged, but it’s an increasingly harried showstopper, quite possibly a reflection on our times.

Ian Farrington‘s variations on Amazing Grace, from 2017, were somewhat quieter but similarly animated, with frequent, jaunty blues riffage. Pacoe closed on a redemptively familiar note with the final two movements from Jean Langlais’ Suite Française. Pacoe played the Voix Céleste with a restless, relentless airiness, enhanced by a pace that seemed on the brisk side. That continued in the finale as he punched in with a redemptive, precise, gusty power.

The next free organ concert at St. Pat’s is on April 16 at 3:15 PM (these shows start right on time) with Ken Corneille playing his own songs plus works by 18th century French composer Médéric Corneille, and contemporary American composer and improviser McNeil Robinson

Novus NY Deliver an Auspicious Performance of New and 20th Century Classical Works

Back in the spring of 2017, there was a fantastic series of concerts of new classical music staged by Trinity Church at their smaller and older sister edifice, St. Paul’s Chapel a couple of blocks to the north. This blog covered several of those performances. Why would events from so far in the past be newsworthy now?

Considering that we lost three years of our lives in the time since, everything in the mirror seems closer than it is. But in keeping with what seems to be a very auspicious trend, there’s a similar and arguably even more ambitious festival going on at the chapel, with lunchtime shows continuing through May 4. At 1 PM, there’s jazz on Mondays, organ music on Tuesdays, Bach choral and instrumental works on Wednesdays and contemporary classical on Thursdays. This past Thursday, a subset of Novus NY treated a tiny audience to a diverse, sometimes spellbinding program that bodes well for what’s in store for the rest of the spring.

Flutist and ensemble leader Melissa Baker explained to the crowd that this year’s theme is empathy, something that the powers that be in this city did their best to crush beginning in March of 2020. It wasn’t clear how this was reflected in the music on the bill, which ranged from wary and harrowing to thoughtfully drifting.

The ensemble opened with the world premiere of Brad Balliett‘s Quintet For Piano and Winds. Gershwinesque swing with dissociative microtones from the lower reeds – the composer himself on bassoon, Benjamin Fingland on clarinet and Stuart Breczinski on oboe – quickly gave way to a tense muddle and then a rise from spacious floating motives to some jaunty pageantry where Baker and horn player Laura Weiner could flurry a little. There was a welcome payoff at the end of a long, anthemically swaying crescendo where pianist Daniel Schlosberg relished the chance to pounce on some icy, glittering, microtonally-tuned upper-register chords and nonchalantly breathtaking downward cascades. From there he continued with an disquieting, emphatic attack, the winds wafting a distant unease.

The quintet marched through persistently troubled trills to a lull punctuated by icepick piano accents and then a rather stern drive out that left no easy answers. What a breathtaking piece of music! As enjoyable as the rest of the program was, it was anticlimactic.

But there were plenty of rewarding moments. Two more contiguous partitas provided opportunities for the group to flex very diverse skillsets. In a small handful of Valerie Coleman‘s Portraits of Langston suite, for flute, clarinet and piano, Baker and Fingland playing dynamically shifting blues-inflected phrases over Schlosberg’s assertive chords and accents. The slow tectonic shifts and gentle Scheherezade whirls of Joan Tower’s Island Prelude made a moody contrast, at least until the wind-and-horn quartet kicked in with a series of animated flights and pulses.

And Louise Farrenc’s expansive, warmly Beethovenesque Sextet in C minor, Op. 40, with Schlosberg’s invitingly consonant melody rippling through nocturnal swells and the winds’ countermelodies, wound up the concert with a cocooning elegance.

Fun With New Pieces From the New York Composers Circle

Anyone who thinks contemporary classical music is stuffy wasn’t at the National Opera Center last night for a slate of new compositions from the far-reaching New York Composers Circle. The program was diverse, and picturesque, and sometimes ridiculously funny. Yet there were sublime moments as well.

Pianist Markus Kaitila opened the evening with David Picton‘s Sonata, which in the beginning threatened to be merely a doctrinaire, abruptly shifting twelve-tone piece punctuated by lots of space – or vice versa. But then, Kaitila hit a memorably icy, glacially paced interlude which grew to an unexpectedly fanged, marching attack and back, an ascending series of quasi-tritones and then an artful approximation of major-on-minor phantasmagoria. Precisely articulated, increasingly menacing cascades followed until Kaitila brought the next-to-last movement full circle with a careful, weighty composure. The final one could have been a total reprise of the first until a series of emphatic, surrealistically leapfrogging figures. It was as deep as it was devious.

Kevin McCarter‘s Responding Variations turned out to be a conversational duo played by Artie Dibble on viola and Lillian Copeland on oboe. It was a fun, puckish piece, sometimes following a baroque-inflected tangent, otherwise a sequence of brief, wry exchanges, pensively airy passages or jaunty harmonies.

Up next was Debra Kaye‘s Submarine Dreams, performed by Mary Barto on bass flute and Troy Rinker, Jr. on bass. Kaye had been unable to find any extant duo piece for these two instruments, so this may have been a world premiere on more than one level. The two followed a swaying 4/4, then diverging as Rinker put down his bow for a minute and beat out a rhythm on the bass body. A subtle interweave followed with more goofy percussion and then an allusively Indian, misterioso flute theme over low-key bass pedalpoint.

Pianist Nataliya Medvedovskaya debuted her lively, idiomatic Ragtime suite, “The most American composition I’ve ever written,” she grinned. The opening movement was a tongue-in-cheek, cartoonish take on a familiar genre; the second was closer to the fondness of a Scott Joplin piece like Solace. The third was more exuberant and Gershwinesque.

Katie Thomas played Ukrainian composer Olga Victorova’s Fung Hoan, the Magical Birds – based on an ancient Chinese mating myth – solo on violin. Although there were vivid, leaping motives and evocative, sometimes acidically expressive evocations of birdsong, there was no distinctive Asian quality. The drama of the courtship grew more optimistic as boy bird (or maybe not boy bird) grew more confident and drew bird #2 into the dance.

Tamara Cashour‘s original intention with her Two Short Pieces was to combine the highest and lowest orchestral instruments. Ultimately, she opted for solo works instead. Barto trilled her way through the first one on piccolo. Harry Searing followed, steady, thoughtful and serious on contrabassoon for the second: to the composer’s credit, she managed to avert the trap where a device like a fanfare or a jovial stroll can get unintentionally droll if you take it far enough down the scale.

Pianist Anthony de Mare seized the moment to max out the laughs, playing and narrating Timothy L. Miller‘s Two Settings of Ogden Nash Poems, the first a vaudevillian satire of early 20th century bankster excess. The night’s lone trio piece was David Mecionis‘ Trio in Two Parts with an Interval Between, for oboe, viola and bassoon. Just where that interval was located was beside the point. The partita may have been written as a commentary on the past thirty-five months of hell in New York, as Mecionis alluded to the audience. Dibble wandered pensively while Copeland and Searing harmonized, sometimes with subtle dopplers. The three diverged, reconvened with a persistent unease, paused and then resumed, tentative accents amid a general melancholy with the oboe gradually moving to the forefront. Searing’s solemn resonance amid shivers from the viola gave way to a disquieted, triangulated stroll; the three musicians ended it on a decidedly unresolved note.

Thomas and Kaitila closed out the concert with another piece by a Ukrainian composer, Andrey Bandura’s Spring Sonata. This particular spring was a plaintive one, the piano eventually rising to a steady, glistening series of brooklike phrases as Thomas sailed warily overhead. Kaitila worked his way upward toward an ice storm and then down to a gritty crescendo, Thomas holding the center resolutely. As the work went on through a couple of seemingly rather cynical, dancing themes, it brought to mind Bartok’s more acerbic Mikrokosmos miniatures. It’s definitely music for our time: maybe not Springtime for Zelensky, but it’s hard to imagine much optimism coming out of that part the world these days.

The New York Composers Circle have been staging performances of new works by their many members just about monthly. Their next one, featuring several electroacoustic works, is on March 27 at 7 PM at the National Opera Center at 330 7th Ave, just south of 29th St.

Leonard Slatkin Leads a Shattering, Careening MSM Symphony Orchestra Shostakovich Performance

Back at Manhattan School of Music last night for their Symphony Orchestra’s performance of George Walker’s Lyric for Strings and Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5. Student orchestras are like minor league ballclubs: champions one year, basement-dwellers the next as the stars graduate to the majors. From an audience perspective, you take your chances.

Here, guest conductor Leonard Slatkin went for a very precise interpretation of Walker’s brief, melancholy overture. A steady syncopation through circling motives reached a stern coda and then fell away abruptly. You could call it a more vigorous update on the Barber Adagio.

Five minutes in and it was clear that this class was playing for an honors grade.

There was a visceral electricity in the auditorium prior to the performance of Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 5. This one was his response to the Soviet censors who couldn’t wrap their simple minds around his increasingly sophisticated sound world and wanted to silo him into a style they could make sense of – and, in a primitive 1937 style, surveil. It almost worked.

Classical music in Russia being an enduring pop culture phenomenon, the public’s enthusiastic reaction to the symphony probably saved the composer’s life at a time when Stalin was murdering his colleagues.

Slatkin – who looked none the worse for the physical problems that had sidelined him for a time with the Detroit Symphony – led the ensemble into the first movement tentatively, to a sad, windswept milieu, tiptoeing to sudden swells. Student orchestras seldom negotiate dynamics like this so subtly, with wary winds, harrowingly icy strings and spare brass. It was interesting to watch how even here, Slatkin was restless and wanting to cut loose, but didn’t. at least until his pianist signaled a warning and then they went into battle on a tight leash.

The venomous sarcasm of the march that followed only benefited from the group’s haphazard stumble into it, then the increasing horror as they sealed the counterpoint, through the series of bellicose crescendos that followed. Nikolas Rodriguez’s evocatively searching flute – leitmotif for the millions murdered by the communists – gave way to Naoko Nakajima’s plaintive violin to close out the first movement.

The danse macabre that opened the second had a deliciously understated but withering sarcasm, the orchestra nailing Slatkin’s stark contrasts between lush brass and icepick strings, There was more wounded bitterness than depleted horror as the third movement unwound, from tentative to determined and beaten down but bent on revenge. In 1937, the Russians wanted a reprieve from the Soviet regime; in 2023, the world wants reparations from the oligarchs, the Wall Street geeks and the Silicon Valley velvet mafia who engineered the plandemic.

The level of detail downward from there, flickering and fluttering, was meticulous and cinematic to the nth degree, evoking empty storefronts and desolate graves…and eventually a grim resistance. The reflective, shivery, low string-fueled crescendo brought to mind Ravel, but also Shostakovich’s even more haunted later works. Harpist Isabel Cardenes chose her spots in this grim spotlight with a delicate but weighty intensity.

Before the concert, Slatkin expounded at length at how different conductors had tackled the conclusion, and quickly answered that question with a defiant, brisk pace that pushed the orchestra to a ragged limit. But the effect paid off, driving home Shostakovich’s satire of Stalinesque pageantry. The lull after the opening martial bombast was all the more impactful for the nuanced, grimly dancing interplay between strings, winds and brass. From there, the aching, haunting, rootsy Russian theme and variations rose to something of a compromise, a semi-concealed raised middle finger to authoritarianism. The audience exploded seconds later.

There are a ton of unrestricted public concerts at Manhattan School of Music (the students reciprocate for an appreciative audience). The next are a series of concerto performances on Feb 13 and 14. And for lucky Detroiters, Slatkin is leading the DSO in a performance of Tschaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet Overture, the world premiere of Anna Clyne’s Glasslands, and this Shostakovich symphony on Feb 18-19. You can get in for $25.

A Stormy, Thrilling Carnegie Hall Return For Kariné Poghosyan

Wednesday night at Carnegie Hall, pianist Kariné Poghosyan picked where she left off after a meticulously intuitive and thunderously applauded performance of Rachmaninoff and Stravinsky there in November, 2019. That New Yorkers had to wait so long for a reprise is a crime. Undeterred by the past almost three years, she delivered a similar amount of fireworks and detailed insights to another packed house and several ovations.

The material drew from her latest album, understatedly titled Folk Themes: she is a fierce and articulate exponent of music from her Armenian heritage. Poghosyan’s well-chronicled, dazzling technical prowess is matched by a remarkable attention to content: her performances are akin to a jazz singer who takes the lyrics line by line for maximum emotional impact, not to mention unexpected mirth.

One of the evening’s early highlights was a tender and spacious but playful version of Komitas’ Shushiki, which contrasted with an alternately thunderous and suspenseful version of Samuel Coleridge-Taylor’s Waltz No. 6.

Four lyric pieces by Grieg rounded out the first half of the concert: the alternately hopeful and foreboding To the Spring, the deliciously phantasmagorical March of the Gnomes, the angst-fueled, Rachmaninovian Minuet for Vanished Days, and a rewardingly lithe, understated take of Wedding at Troldhaugen.

There was majesty to match the requisite shreddy intensity in her performance of Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 12. Yet she found a coy flirtatiousness in how she held back her phrasing, particularly before the lithely dancing music-box interlude, whose dynamics she worked with a similarly dynamic charm. As she played, she would look up, completely overjoyed, leaving no doubt that this was a love song with a happy ending.

By contrast, his Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6 was much more stately and somber. In the beginning, moments of triumph were subsumed in an pervasive pensiveness, Poghosyan exercising considerable restraint with the lefthand and the rhythmic drive while opting for glitter and gleam. Still, she found a swinging passage where she was literally bouncing on the piano bench in the seconds before throwing caution to the wind and driving it to a careening coda.

Liszt’s Rhapsodie Espagnole fell somewhere in between. This time out, Poghosyan had picked an irridescent green gown instead of the red Trans Am of an outfit she’d worn at the 2019 concert – and she didn’t give the crowd the big bicep flex this time around.

The encores were arguably the highlight of the night. The first was a briskly kinetic, crystalline romp through Babajanian’s gorgeously chromatic Dance of Vagharshapat. The second which has become a signature piece in her repertoire, was an opulent, ecstatic, pointillistically pristine rendition of Kachaturian’s Toccata.

Poghosyan’s next concert in the tri-state area is on March 12 at 2 PM where she joins the Wallingford Symphony Orchestra on a program including works by Prokofiev plus Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 2. Tix are $30.

Organist Gail Archer Delivers a Breathtaking Concert For Peace at St. Patrick’s Cathedral

Thursday night at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, Gail Archer played what might have been the first organ concert there in almost three years. That’s a crime: the church has some of the richest natural reverb of any building in town, and the Kilgen organ there is a treasure which deserves to be unleashed in all its glory. Archer excels on that instrument, and made an auspicious return with a profoundly relevant program dedicated to peace between Russia and Ukraine, in solidarity with the citizens of both nations.

Lately, Archer has made a career out of exploring specific organ traditions from cultures which aren’t typically associated with the instrument. While even the typical, small European city can be full of old organs, they are conspicuously absent from the remaining churches in Russia and Ukraine. Archer drew her program from material from her two albums featuring repertoire from both countries.

She opened with an electric, aptly majestic take of Glazunov’s Prelude and Fugue in D minor, Op. 98, making maximum use of the church’s upper-midrange brass and reed stops. Cached within her cyclotron swirl was a steady forward drive which as she recorded it came across more sternly than the triumph she channeled here.

Next on the bill were a couple of preludes by Rachmaninoff nemesis César Cui. His Prelude in G minor had echoes of Mendlessohn balanced by a rather opaque chromatic edge. Archer’s take of his Prelude in Ab major proved to be another opportunity for her to revel in the vast range in the available registers, this time a little further down the scale.

She flawlessly executed the rapidfire phrasing and torrential crescendos of 20th century composer Sergei Slonimsky’s Toccata. The last of the Russian pieces was another 20th century work, Alexander Shaversaschvili’s Prelude and Fugue: again, Archer’s registrations were a feast of dynamic contrasts, through a judicious processional, more muted phantasmagoria and a determined if persistently uneasy drive forward into a fullscale conflagration.

Turning to Ukraine, Archer focused on 20th century and contemporary composers before closing with the High Romantic. The Piece in Five Movements, by Tadeusz Machl showcased the organ’s many colors, from close harmonies in uneasy counterpoint, to more spare and distantly mysterious, to a more insistent, melodically spiky radiance and a stormy interlude fueled by challenging pedal figures.

Archer couldn’t resist unleashing every breath of portentous intensity in Mykola Kolessa’s defiantly disquieted Passacaglia, through some subtle rhythmic shifts. Likewise, the Chaconne, by 21st century composer Svitlana Ostrova came across as a radiant if dissociative mashup of familiar classical tropes and modernist acerbity, with some spine-tingling cascades.

Archer closed the program with Iwan Kryschanowskij’s epically symphonic Fantasie, ranging from a simmering blue-flame fugue, to a long climb with more than an echo of the macabre. A dip to more restrained, swirling resonance was no less intense; Archer worked briskly from there up to a deliciously descending false ending and a surprisingly understated coda.

The next concert at St. Pat’s, on March 9 at 7 PM, is a reprise of the annual series of Irish folk music performances which were interrupted by the lockdown. This one is dedicated to the memory of Mick Moloney, who died suddenly last year and had been a fixture of those shows.

Stunning, Haunting New Compositions by One of New York’s Most Adventurous Bassists

Good bass players are like good singers: they get enlisted for a wider range of projects than most musicians. Bassist Max Johnson is probably as well known for his work in Americana as he is with jazz. He’s playing the latter, leading an intriguing trio with tenor saxophonist Neta Ranaan and drummer Jason Nazary on Jan 28 at 7:30 PM at the Django; cover is $25.

But Johnson has another side, as a composer of new classical music. On his latest album When the Streets Were Quiet – a reference to The Trial, by Kafka – he appears only as a conductor, leading a chamber ensemble of violinist Lauren Cauley, violist Carrie Frey, cellist Maria Hadge, clarinetist Lucy Hatem and pianist Fifi Zhang.

The opening number on the album – streaming at New Focus Recordings – is Minerva, for clarinet, violin, cello and piano. After a spacious introductory reference to Messiaen’s Quartet For the End of Time, the ensemble work a simple, increasingly emphatic, steadily acidic counterpoint. Quartet for the Beginning of Time, maybe?

Johnson switches out piano for viola for the quartet on the title track. Hatem’s clarinet moves broodingly over an uneasy, close-harmonied, organ-like sustain from the strings. A couple of shivers and subtle swells further indicate that trouble is brewing. Frey leads the strings deeper into otherworldly microtonal territory, as minutely modulated tremolo effects signal the clarinet’s mournful return and a solemn, slowly drifting procession out. Franz Kafka would be proud to have inspired music this spellbinding.

Next up is Johnson’s String Trio for violin, viola and cello. The more somber, sustained moments of Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 8 spring to mind, Cauley leading a slow but ineluctable upward trajectory toward horror. Hadge leads the group into more calming terrain, with distant echoes of what could be a Britfolk ballad mingled within the unease. The trio take their time moving between a jaunty bounce and portentous swells on the way out.

Hatem, Frey and Zhang play the final piece, Echoes of a Memory, again echoing Messiaen at his sparest. Pianissimo highs against stygian lows give way to a cautious, icy pavane of sorts, part Federico Mompou, part Bernard Herrmann. This doesn’t sound anything like what Johnson will likely be playing with the jazz trio on the 28th but it’s often transcendent. Is it fair to be talking about one of the best albums of the year when we’re not even done with January yet?

A Revealing Collection of Rare Polish Organ Music and a Concert for Peace by Gail Archer

Organist Gail Archer gets around. She has an unbounded curiosity for repertoire from around the globe and likes to explore it thematically, country by country. This makes sense especially in light of the vast and sometimes confounding variation in the design of pipe organs from various cultures…meaning that just about every individual instrument presents its own unique challenges.

One of Archer’s most colorful albums, drolly titled An American Idyll, is a salute to the composer-performers who were stars of the organ demimonde in the Eastern United States in the 19th century. Her two most recent albums have focused on rare organ works from Russia and Ukraine, each a country where church organs are a relative rarity. Her latest album Cantius – streaming at Spotify – is a fascinating and often riveting collection of rarely heard works by Polish composers. Archer’s next performance is a free concert for peace on Jan 19 at 7 PM at St. Patrick’s Cathedral, featuring both Russian and Ukrainian works. She plays the cathedral’s mighty Kilgen organ magnificently – if you are in New York and this is your thing, you do not want to miss this one.

Archer takes the album title from St. John Cantius Church, whose sleek, French-voiced 1926 Casavant organ she plays here. She opens with late 19th century composer Mieczyslaw Surzynski’s Improvisation on a Polish Hymn, a pleasant processional which gives her the chance to pull out some juicy upper-midrange stops and engage in a little baroque minimalism. Likewise, the brief Pastorale in F# Minor, by another 19th century composer, Wincenty Rychling begins with a stern hymnal focus but becomes more of a stroll.

20th century Polish-American composer Felix Borowski is represented by his Meditation-Elegie, an attractively workmanlike take on Louis Vierne, which Archer plays with increasingly steely grace. Contemporary composer Pawel Lukaszewski contributes his Triptych for Organ, Archer having fun with the brooding, Messiaenic suspense and  fugal crescendo of the fleeting first movement. She then lingers in the opaque resonance of the Offertorium and brings it full circle with mystical, steadily paced minimalism.

The real find here is a Henryk Gorecki rarity, his Kantata for Organ. Epic, sustained, wide-angle close-harmonied chords dominate the introduction. Then Archer wafts up from the murky lows to oddly incisive syncopation in the second movement, concluding with a rather fervent rhythmic attack that distantly echoes Jehan Alain. Did John Zorn hear this and have an epiphany which would inform his organ improvisations?

20th century composer Felix Nowowiejski’s single-movement Symphony No. 8 is more of a grande pièce symphonique, Archer patiently and dynamically negotiating its Widor-esque shifts from pensive resonance to a more emphatic attack and a mighty, majestic forward drive that opts for suspense over a fullscale anthem. It’s a High Romantic throwback and a real treat.

Grazyna Bacewicz is another standout Polish composer who is not known for organ music, but her Esquisse for Organ is exquisite: first evoking Messiaen in the gloomy introductory pavane and then Vierne in the coyly ebullient water nymphet ballet afterward. Archer winds up the album with a final 20th century work, Tadeusz Paciorkiewicz’s Tryptychon for Organ The steady quasi-march of an introduction reminds of Naji Hakim’s more energetic material, while the Meditation has more of an allusive early 20th century feel – and is considerably more emphatic than you would expect. Archer delivers the concluding Toccata with eerily puffing staccato but also a warm, triumphant pace in its more majestic moments.

A Playful, Entertaining, Dynamic New Album of Genre-Busting String Music From the PubliQuartet

You could debate whether the PubliQuartet’s latest album What Is American – streaming at Bandcamp – is punk classical, or the avant garde, or string jazz, or oldtimey string band music. You’d be right on all counts. The foursome of violinists Curtis Stewart and Nick Revel, violist Jannina Norpoth and cellist Hamilton Berry have a great time reinventing an iconic classical quartet, a couple of famous jazz numbers, and unveil a handful of world premieres that defy category. The central theme is exploring the many threads that make up what we might call American music. While it’s a lot of fun and eclectic to the extreme, the group also don’t shy away from themes of segregation or discrimination: again, highly relevant in the wake of the March 2020 global takeover attempt.

The group intersperse their own miniatures in between several of the pieces, taking turns narrating an Oliver Wendell Holmes text. “Down, down with the traitor” – powerful words for 2023!

The first work on the album is improvisations on Dvořák’s “American” String Quartet, No. 12, Op. 96. Movement one sets the stage: this is punk classical. spiked with slashes, slow drifting tones and percussive extended technique within a straightforward proto-Gershwin march. While the group blend several unembellished themes from the original, their reinterpretation is more brief.

They put a lively pizzicato swing beat to the lento second movement, when they’re not adding flitting, ghostly harmonics to the rustic oldtime gospel theme. Interestingly, the molto vivace third movement is a lot more circumspect and spacious in places. The quartet punch in hard with a march on the final movement, then back away with a hazy, contrapuntal chorale over loopy, jagged harmonics: if they recorded this live, it’s all the more impressive how they handled this polyrhythmic maze.

The ensemble build Rhiannon Giddens‘ At the Purchaser’s Option from stark oldtime blues-flavored trip-hop to a mighty anthem. Likewise, they turn Fats Waller’s Honeysuckle Rose into shivery indie classical and jaunty ragtime, with a voiceover by A’Lelia Bundles. In a diptych of Ornette Coleman’s Law Years, they veer from anthemic intensity to flickering disquiet and jaggedly dissociative blues.

The opening movement of the world premiere of Vijay Iyer‘s relatively brief string quartet Dig the Say is Carry the Ball. a jauntily swaying, riffy theme over hypnotic, rhythmic pedalpoint. The second movement, This Thing Together is equally hypnotic, but in a hazily drifting way. Movement three, Up From the Ground is bouncy and has handclaps; the final movement, To Live Tomorrow wraps it up with a jaggedly opaque edge. Iyer’s milieu may be jazz, and a lot more expansive than this, but this is a triumph of tight, genre-resistant tunesmithing.

Another world premiere, Roscoe Mitchell’s CARDS 11-11-2020 is the most ambient, minimalist and astringent work here, punctuated by echo effects and plucky pizzicato before an unexpectedly lively, acerbic coda.

The ensemble wind up the record with a medley of four covers from the worlds of soul and blues. They reinvent Tina Turner’s Black Coffee as a quasi-spiritual in 6/8 time, then bring a biting blues edge and slithery extended technique to They Say I’m Different, by Betty Davis. The driftiest, most sepulchral piece here is Alice Coltrane’s Er Ra, although the group can’t resist rising with a triumphant if whispery lattice of harmonics. They close by digging triumphantly into a determinedly swinging take of Ida Cox’s Wild Women Don’t Get the Blues.

The PubliQuartet don’t have any New York gigs coming up, but Giddens is playing an intriguing show on Jan 12 at 7 PM at the Rogers Auditorium at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where she’s joined by pianist Howard Watkins and a cast of singers in a salute to the thirty thousand slaves who escaped captivity prior to the Civil War. You can get in for $35.