Volume 21 Issue 2 - October 2015

Wei and pianist Angela Park, perform String
Theory (2011), composed as the test piece for
the 2012 Eckhardt-Gramatté competition.
It’s “a compendium of string effects,” writes
Burge, designed to challenge the competitors’
techniques, yet it’s no hodge-podge of mere
“effects,” thanks to its constant melodic and
rhythmic forward motion.
Three very engaging pieces, very engagingly
performed.
Michael Schulman
Concert note: Ensemble Made in Canada
performs John Burge’s Piano Quartet in
Kingston at the Isabel Bader Centre for the
Performing Arts on October 30.
Tim Brady – The How and The Why of
Memory
Symphony Nova Scotia;
Centrediscs CMCCD 21515
!!
Montrealer Tim
Brady is a fertilizing
force on the Canadian
new music scene. A
composer, electric
guitarist, improvising
musician, concert
and record producer,
his active administrative
engagement with the Canadian
concert music community over the past few
decades has been multifaceted and deep. On
this album, as distinct from previous Brady
albums I have reviewed in these pages, we
hear his composer chops applied to orchestral
forces: a symphony bookended by two string
concertos, one for violin and one for viola.
They are admirably rendered by Symphony
Nova Scotia, conducted by Bernhard Gueller.
Listening to The How and the Why of
Memory: Symphony #4, (2010-2013), cast in
a single continuously unfolding movement,
I was repeatedly reminded of textures and
rhythmic and harmonic ideas of composers
active in the early- to mid-20th century.
Perhaps those allusions are implied by the
title. Brady however never allows such superficial
affiliations to get in the way of musical
momentum or dramatic gesture, characteristics
embedded in his musical voice which
engage listeners on an emotional level.
Brady’s very confident Viola Concerto
(2012-2013) is dominated by its violist Jutta
Puchhammer-Sédillot’s cocoa-coloured
sound and brilliantly lyrical playing. It is
also imbued with a heart-on-sleeve expressiveness,
counterpointed by poised classicist
melodic phrases and minimalist sequences.
The multi-hued orchestration is endowed
with plenty of rhythmic excitement and
harmonic movement, relieved by mysterious
moments of elegiac repose. The last section,
marked “groove,” is particularly effective and
texturally surprising. The Viola Concerto is
my favourite work on the album and it makes
a very valuable new addition to the international
viola concerto repertoire.
Andrew Timar
Concert notes: Numus presents Tim Brady’s
opera Ghost Tango with Janice Jackson,
soprano and RL Thompson, baritone at the
Registry Theatre in Kitchener on October 2.
TorQ Percussion Quartet includes music of
Brady in its program at the Tranzac Club on
October 28.
Stefan Wolpe Vol.7 – Music for Violin and
Piano
Movses Pogossian; Susan Grace; Varty
Manouelian
Bridge Records 9452 (bridgerecords.com)
!!
Armenian-born
Movses Pogossian,
first-prize winner
of the 1985 USSR
National Violin
Competition and now
based in California,
is the featured soloist
in the latest of Bridge
Records’ landmark series devoted to German-
Jewish/American composer Stefan Wolpe
(1902-1972).
Wolpe’s four-movement, half-hour-long
Violin Sonata (1949) is among his most
enduring works, spanning an emotional
gamut from playful and joyous to melancholy
and anguished, and all the way back again.
Pogossian and pianist Susan Grace provide
all the intensity and flexibility required for its
varied moods.
Pogossian is joined by his wife, Varty
Manouelian, in two pieces, Duo for Two
Violins (1924), with motoric echoes of Bartók,
and the short Two Studies for Two Violins
and Piano (1933).
The CD opens and closes with unaccompanied
works, Second Piece for Violin Alone
(1966), a three-minute quirky charmer that
would make an effective recital encore, and
the 15-minute Piece in Two Parts (1964),
a thoughtful, thought-provoking series of
brief, pithy phrases, influenced perhaps by
Wolpe’s interest in Oriental meditation. The
disc also includes a 29-bar fragment from an
unfinished Second Violin Sonata (1959).
The detailed booklet notes are by Toronto
musicologist Austin Clarkson, who studied
with Wolpe and became, in 1981, the first
board chairman and general editor of the
Stefan Wolpe Society.
This is intriguing repertoire that deserves
to be heard.
Michael Schulman
John Cage: Four
Quatuor Bozzini
Quatuor Bozzini CQB1414 (actuellecd.com)
!!
Montreal’s Quatuor
Bozzini has been
together for 16 years
and has recorded 15
CDs of the kind of
challenging contemporary
music that they
specialize in, including works by Canadians
Malcolm Goldstein, Tim Brady and Jean
Derome and international figures like Steve
Reich and James Tenney. The experience tells
as they take on John Cage’s three works for
string quartet, realizing distinctive versions in
the process.
The earliest of the compositions, String
Quartet in Four Parts (1949-50), is a work
descriptive of the four seasons with the
composer’s notes encouraging light string
contact and no vibrato. The work’s structure
and minimal harmonies create an unlikely
resemblance to the melodic purity of medieval
music. Leaping ahead to 1983, Thirty
Pieces for String Quartet presents the musicians
with both demands and choices: each
piece lasts about a minute, with each musician
given a sequence of notes to be fitted
into the “time bracket.” The musicians individually
choose between microtonal, tonal
and chromatic options, but the parts are not
directly related to one another except for the
coordination of segment lengths. The music
that emerges within these configurations is
rich in complexity and convergence, a kind of
collaboration between composer, performer
and listener.
The final work, Four, from 1989, is the
most radically reductive of these works, still
employing time brackets but offering choices
from its sparse materials to all the performers.
The result is spacious but continuous with
tonal structures that may gently evolve or
appear transient. The cumulative work is
a serene landscape in which mysterious
elements emerge and disappear.
Quatuor Bozzini assumes the substantial
demand that this music makes on its
performers: to at once realize the work in
shaping its form while allowing the components
to maintain their distinct, non-structural
identities. If the Arditti Quartet’s recordings
of these works (on Muse from the early
1990s) have long stood as masterful readings
(they worked closely with Cage on Four),
Quatuor Bozzini does a fine job of traversing
this music, inevitably creating new works in
the process.
Stuart Broomer
The Korngold Project Part One
Daniel Rowland; Priya Mitchell; Julian Arp;
Luis Magalhães
TwoPianists Records TP1039282
(twopianists.com)
!!
Pianist Luis
Magalhães, originally
from Portugal
and now living
in South Africa,
is co-founder of
TwoPianists Records
and its Korngold
Project, which here makes an auspicious
debut, daring to go head-to-head (in the
Suite) against Sony’s recording (SK 48253) by
the all-star cast of Joseph Silverstein, Jaime
68 | Oct 1 - Nov 7, 2015 thewholenote.com