Volume 23 Issue 5 - February 2018

Double Concerto. Violinist Joe Puglia evokes
references to Berg’s Violin Concerto amid
orchestral hints of Mahler. The Double
Concerto, with soloists Harmen de Boer and
Harry Sparnaay, offers touches of humour,
impressionistic colours and sustained
passages of quasi-tonal lyricism.
There’s more
to admire on The
Entangled Tales
CD, containing
de Raaff’s
Cello Concerto,
Entangled Tales
and Symphony
No.3 “Illumination…
Eclipse.” The Cello Concerto reveals a very
different side of de Raaff, as brooding, songful
emotionality replaces brash busy-ness. Here,
the dynamics are subdued, the orchestral
textures leaner but darker. In five connected
movements lasting half an hour, the inwardlooking,
penumbral concerto receives a
haunting performance by Marien van Stallen,
the cellist for whom it was written, and the
Rotterdam Philharmonic Orchestra led by
Yannick Nézet-Séguin.
Entangled Tales, an eight-minute synopsis
of de Raaff’s penchant for assertive declamations
and vivid sonorities (similar to Unisono)
was commissioned by the Boston Symphony,
premiered at Tanglewood and subsequently
incorporated into his Symphony No.1
“Tanglewood Tales.” It’s performed with suitable
high energy by Neeme Järvi and The
Hague’s Residentie Orkest.
De Raaff’s 30-minute, three-movement
Symphony No.3 is performed by Het Gelders
Orkest under Antonello Manacorda. As its
subtitle suggests, it deals with contrasts of
light and dark, beginning with two piccolos
and tinkly percussion creating eerie, electronics-like
sounds, followed by a sudden
descent into the orchestra’s dark timbres of
brass and percussion. The struggle continues
throughout, with quiet, plaintive solos
and duos alternating with powerful tutti
outbursts. The symphony ends with gentle
chords played in mid-range instrumental
registers, suggesting a final resolution of
synthesis and reconciliation.
I recommend the Entangled Tales CD
for anyone wanting an introduction to this
significant 21st -century compositional voice.
Michael Schulman
Zoltán Jeney – Wohin?
Various Artists
BMC BMC CD 240 (bmcrecords.hu)
!!
Wohin? gives
international
listeners a valuable
insight into
the postmodernist
Hungarian concert
music composer
Zoltán Jeney
(b.1943), featuring recent works for solo
piano, voice, cello and piano, string quartet
and orchestra. Jeney has been a major voice
in Hungarian concert music circles since
the 1960s. In 1970, in collaboration with
five other leading Hungarian composers, he
cofounded the influential group Budapest
New Music Studio, which introduced the
aesthetics and music of John Cage and
Minimalism at its public concerts.
The most provocative work on this album
is the title track, Wohin? (German for
“Where?”) A five-minute orchestral score
featuring a truncated chorus in its last 30
seconds, it’s his response to the Allied invasion
of Iraq. Jeney offers a withering parody
in his postmodern mashup of recognizable
bits of Beethoven’s Ode to Joy. As the anthem
of the European Union proclaiming that “All
people will be brothers,” Jeney couldn’t have
chosen a better subject with which to convey
his deeply ironic view of the war.
Pavane (2007) for orchestra, the last
and most substantial work here, employs a
128-note melody derived from a fractal series.
Its first section recalls Ligeti’s Atmosphères
with amorphous, shifting orchestral textures
and tight heterophony. The second section,
characterized by jagged polyphonic lines
is brief, succeeded by a much longer final
movement featuring a continuous, harmonized
melody. The music builds into a kind
of halting secular chorale – punctuated by
irregular percussive accents – fading out on a
quiet yet ultimately unsettled unison.
Andrew Timar
Peter Eötvös – String Quartets: The Sirens
Cycle; Korrespondenz
Audrey Luna; Calder Quartet
BMC BMC CD 249 (bmcrecords.hu)
!!
Péter Eötvös
(b.1944) is a
highly respected
Hungarian
composer of operas
and large ensemble
works. Musical
director of the
Ensemble Intercontemporain from 1979 to
1991, he has guest-conducted top European
orchestras. The sirens of Homer’s Odyssey
have inspired works of writers and composers,
including Jörg Widmann, whose excellent
Island of the Sirens for solo violin and
strings was reviewed here in March 2014.
Eötvös joins their company with The Sirens
Cycle (2015/16), a complex work operating
in a number of dimensions including
pre-compositional spectral analysis of the
spoken text. Even in this engaged recording
by coloratura soprano Audrey Luna and the
Calder Quartet, the work is overwhelming
and only reveals its secrets gradually! The
soprano has an attractive timbre and a threeand-a-half-octave
range, here applied, using
both conventional and extended vocal techniques,
to singing and declaiming texts by
Joyce (from Ulysses), Homer and Kafka. By
turn they are startling, humorous, erotic and
finally dispiriting, as the sirens mysteriously
disappear.
In both the above composition and
Correspondence: Scenes for String Quartet
(1992), the American Calder Quartet displays
mastery of extensively used instrumental
techniques including harmonics, by-thebridge
(sul ponticello) bowing, and pizzicato;
glissandi become almost speech-like at times.
The latter bring us to the unspoken text of the
work, which is from correspondence between
W. A. Mozart and his father Leopold in 1778.
Derived in part from a method of assigning
vowels to intervals, the uncanny effect is that
instruments strive for but don’t attain speech.
Roger Knox
JAZZ AND IMPROVISED
For You
Carol Welsman
Welcar Music WMCD369
(carolwelsman.com)
! ! I have long
been up for any
recording by
Canadian jazz singer
and pianist Carol
Welsman (now Los
Angeles-based),
and my admiration
continues
with her most recent CD, For You. It is a solo
recording except for three tracks on which
expert guitarist Paulinho Garcia plays. The
title refers to a social media process: after
listening to 30-second soundbytes, around
5,000 voters selected the songs. The result is
16 standards in a wide variety of moods, styles
and languages, each song presented with
enough musical intimacy to suggest that it is
indeed, For You.
On this disc Carol Welsman sings in
English, French, Spanish, Portuguese and
Italian – regardless, her excellent diction and
sense of style are convincing as is heard in
such titles as Les Parapluies de Cherbourg
(Legrand) and Corcovado (Jobim). American
numbers show the same clarity and sensitivity
to lyrics, suggesting many different
moods. Her delivery is direct and almost
non-vibrato in Bewitched, Bothered and
Bewildered, breathy and sensual in My
Foolish Heart, and vulnerable, almost down
to a whisper in Skylark. Those remembering
her exuberant singing and pianism in earlier
times may be surprised by the restrained
contralto and spare apt accompaniments on
this CD. Yet she conveys a feeling of optimism,
and a sense of more closeness is now gained,
perhaps abetted by producer Takao Ishizuka.
The disc has already been a bestseller among
jazz listeners in Japan.
Roger Knox
76 | February 2018 thewholenote.com