Volume 23 Issue 3 - November 2017

declined as the last century progressed.
Beginning in the 1970s a grassroots revival
spread out from its North American base,
today’s klezmer scene (re)embraces the globe.
Arab, Indian, Celtic and Korean musicians
are getting in on the act. Earlier this year
Amalia Rubin’s performance of a 1927 Yiddish
song on Mongolian TV’s version of American
Idol, accompanied by six Mongolian instrumentalists,
garnered thousands of likes on
social media.
Despite its transnational appeal, there are,
however, essential features which distinguish
klezmer music. Glissandi and syncopation
that evoke laughter or sobs, ornamentation
of the melody reflecting the inflections of the
human voice, and melodies moving within
the tonal modes of Central/Eastern Europe
are just three. Emotional mood is also often
sharply delineated, ranging from deep melancholy
to dancing exuberance.
Classical concert composers have been
attracted by klezmer’s vibrancy too. Five
are represented in the very satisfying album
Klezmer Dreams, including two Canadians,
Srul Irving Glick (1934-2002) and Airat
Ichmouratov (b.1973). Sergei Prokofiev’s
Overture on Hebrew Themes (1919) for
clarinet, piano and string quartet is the oldest
composition on this disc. Prokofiev retains
the folkloric flavour of the Jewish melodies he
borrowed while maintaining his idiosyncratic
composer voice, this time rendered in a light
tone. At over 35 minutes The Dreams and
Prayers of Isaac the Blind (1994) for Klezmer
clarinet and string quartet, by Argentinian-
American composer Osvaldo Golijov (b.1960),
is by far the longest and stylistically most
adventurous score here. It features the brilliant
and stylistically spot-on Klezmorim
clarinet solos of Montrealer André Moisan.
Starting and ending with a prayer, “Thou pass
and record, count and visit, every living soul,
appointing the measure of every creature’s
life and decreeing its destiny,” this substantial
work definitively demonstrates the reach of
klezmer – once considered folk party music –
deep into the concert hall.
Andrew Timar
Toy Piano Composers
Toy Piano Composers Ensemble; Pratik
Gandhi
Redshift Records TK452
(toypianocomposers.com)
!!
There can be few
more reliable guarantees
of contemporary
music that is
both thoughtful and
entertaining than
when the name Toy
Piano Composers
(TPC) appears on
the tin. Founded by pianists and composers
Monica Pearce and Chris Thornborrow, and
now with a decade of growth in performance
that has included over 120 new works
in various formats from chamber and orchestral
to operatic, TPC, fronted by its ensemble,
has grown exponentially in performance and
in creativity.
Fuelled as much by Reich, Riley, Glass
and Pärt as by the unfettered creativity of
young questing minds, the composers in the
collective as well as its performing ensemble
have continually pushed the proverbial
envelope and the ceaselessly receding
horizon, with music that has swelled with
classical elegance and avant-garde subversion.
This album – simply bearing the collective’s
name – appears to be the first by a group that
has focused so far solely on performance.
In keeping with the mission to create
something new and remain in the continuum
of the classical tradition, these seven works,
written by various composers from 2010 to
2014, are performed by the TPC Ensemble,
a group of nine instruments of contrasting
character. Together they are famously at ease
with the most testing new music for traditional
acoustic instruments plus toy piano.
From Clangor (Pearce) to Hermes’ Lure (Ruth
Guechtal) and Modus Operandi (Nancy Tam),
the TCP Ensemble may seem stretched to the
limit but are equal to the challenge.
Raul da Gama
Charles Wuorinen Vol. 3
loadbang; Anne-Marie McDermott; Group
for Contemporary Music; Charles
Wuorinen
Bridge Records 9490 (bridgerecords.com)
!!
Among the most
prolific of contemporary
American
composers, the
79-year old Charles
Wuorinen’s catalogue
of 260-plus
compositions
includes works for
opera, orchestra and chamber music, as well
as solo instruments and voice. He has received
many awards, including the Pulitzer Prize and
the MacArthur Fellowship. The 2014 Madrid
premiere of Wuorinen’s opera, set on Annie
Proulx’s Brokeback Mountain, was covered
by international media and has had several
subsequent European productions.
Anthony Tommasini in his 2014 New York
Times review characterized Wuorinen as an
“unabashedly complex Modernist.” And while
in 2008 Wuorinen called the term serialism
“almost without meaning,” nevertheless his
career-long commitment to 12-tone composition
is clear, with Schoenberg, Berg, late
Stravinsky and Babbitt cited among primary
influences. Fractals and Mandelbrot mathematical
sets are also central to Wuorinen’s
recent compositional procedures.
Much of Wuorinen’s music makes great
technical demands on musicians, including
tonal leaps, extreme dynamic contrasts,
and rapid exchange of pitches, all requiring
extreme precision and virtuosity. This is all on
ample display in the three works on Charles
Wuorinen, Vol. 3.
The album opens with Alphabetical
Ashbery (2013) a song cycle/motet marked by
the free-flowing, playful and often disjunctive
poems by the American poet John
Ashbery performed by the unique forces of
loadbang: Jeffrey Gavett, baritone, Carlos
Cordeiro, bass clarinet, Andy Kozar, trumpet
and William Lang, trombone. The muscular
and substantial Fourth Piano Sonata (2007),
the latest and most traditionally structured
of Wuorinen’s works in this genre, is definitively
rendered by the brilliant pianist Anne-
Marie McDermott. It Happens Like This
(2010) closes the CD. At just over 39 minutes
in seven bite-sized movements, this fourvoice
cantata is set to American modernist
James Tate’s surrealistic poems, providing a
charming close to our musical visit with one
of America’s enduring elder statesmen of
composition.
Andrew Timar
Rhapsodies Around the World
Guy Yehuda; Deborah Moriarty
Blue Griffin Records BGR441
(bluegriffin.com)
! ! An ambitious
project launched
by clarinetist Guy
Yehuda resulted in
six new works for
clarinet and piano,
all somehow influenced
by Claude
Debussy’s Première
Rhapsodie. Rhapsodies Around the World is
a fair description of the contents, as all the
continents are represented by the diverse set
of composers Yehuda chose to commission.
The disc opens with his performance of
the model work, and Yehuda demonstrates a
decent finesse with this always-difficult piece.
His reading is marked by certain injections
of personality, if that’s the right word. Over
time a well-worn piece might seem to beg
for reinterpretation, and one is always free to
provide one, just as a listener is free to like or
dislike the layering of liberties pasted on the
original.
I’m grateful nonetheless to the performer
for this collection. The various spinoffs most
resemble the original only in duration, each
between eight and ten minutes in length.
The composers provide an accounting of
their approach to the project’s requirements,
some more prolix than others. The essay
by Michel Petrossian describing his Timkat
Song bears so much analysis on its own that
one might forget the fine piece of music it
describes. American violinist/composer Piotr
Szewczyk’s Luminous Rhapsody reminds me
of the music of Joan Tower. Yao Chen almost
literally recalls the original Rhapsodie at the
outset of Through Waters, By Mountains.
Clare Loveday of South Africa wrote
Heatwave during a real heat wave, gave up
thewholenote.com November 2017 | 77