Volume 24 Issue 7 - April 2019

She is so totally engrossed that the music
simply doesn’t want to end. But where
she really strikes home is Pines of the Via
Appia, a tremendous tour de force depicting
an ancient Roman army emerging from
distant haze marching towards us, and the
music just builds and builds. A gradual
crescendo exploding in glorious fortississimo
without ever becoming bombastic or overpowering.
Brava!
Janos Gardonyi
MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY
Invitation – Trios for Clarinet, Violin and
Piano
Christine Carter; Duo Concertante
Marquis Classics MAR 81489
(marquisclassics.com)
!!
Having to
declare an interest
in the subject of a
disc review is an
unalloyed pleasure
when said conflict
involves praising the
work of a former
student. Together
with Tim Steeves
and Nancy Dahn (Duo Concertante), clarinetist
Christine Carter has released Invitation,
an album of trios for clarinet, violin and
piano. Alongside the witty and spirited Suite
by Darius Milhaud is Aram Khachaturian’s
almost emo Trio; Tango, a chestnut by
Canadian Patrick Cardy (1953-2005); and
last of all, Francis Poulenc’s L’invitation
au château.
The latter is new material to me, as I’m sure
it will be to many listeners. It’s a curiosity,
beautiful raw material that Poulenc never
got around to turning into a suite, unlike his
colleague Milhaud. Both composers wrote
the music on this disc as integral backdrops
for plays by Jean Anouilh, but where Milhaud
sifted his score down to four movements, the
Poulenc remains in its original form of 16
musical installments, some extremely short,
others stretching to between one and two
minutes in length.
Nothing detracts from the pleasure of
listening to the performances on this disc.
The Khachaturian stands out as particularly
compelling, but no doubt others will
find their own favourites. Tasteful style, courteous
and elegant musicianship, and technical
ease are featured throughout by all three
performers. One supposes, or hopes, this
won’t be their last such collaboration.
The liner notes are helpful, packing a good
deal of information into an interview format.
Max Christie
Excess
Lori Freedman
Collection QB CQB 1923 (actuellecd.com)
!!
On Excess,
distinguished
Montreal-based
clarinetist Lori
Freedman presses
the boundaries
of contemporary
musical discourse,
challenging the
clarinet’s, the individual composer’s and
her own expressive depths. Pressing a point,
she focuses on bass and contrabass clarinet,
perhaps the most vocal of orchestral instruments,
with every pitch ready to bend and
break, a spray of overtones seemingly ever at
the ready. Oh, yes, she challenges the listener
as well.
The program is bracketed by its most
radical and expansive adventures. British
composer Richard Barrett’s Interference
requires the performer to sing over a fouroctave
range and play a kick-drum as well as
turn in a virtuosic explosion of wild burbling
lines from the contrabass clarinet. It’s
shamanic work, an invocation of spirits, a
depth of expression that tests the limits of
performance. At the opposite end of the CD,
there’s French composer Raphaël Cendo’s
Décombres, a work of “saturation” that fills
the sound space with roaring contrabass
clarinet and abrasive electronics.
In between, Freedman reaches back to
Brian Ferneyhough’s daunting Time and
Motion Study I (1977) and explores three
recent pieces. Freedman worked closely with
Vancouverite Paul Steenhuisen on Library
on Fire and Paolo Perezzani on Thymos,
the former mixing vocal sounds with bass
clarinet, the latter the sonic potential of the
contrabass, elephants and all. It’s her own
Withwhatbecomes that’s most remarkable:
almost unvoiced, it’s filled with the quietest,
most fleeting, evanescent sounds, more
challenging in its own way than anything
else here.
Stuart Broomer
Petra Stump-Linshalm – Fantasy Studies
Various Artists
Orlando Records or 0033
(orlando-records.com)
!!
The technical
ability of the players
on this new disc is
enough to bind the
listener to the chase
of sounds they
produce. A collection
of different
works for (mostly)
winds, and most among them the various
sizes of clarinet, the CD is named for its final
multi-movement work, written by composer
Petra Stump-Linshalm. This piece calls for
four players dealing with 11 instruments
between them (flutes, clarinets, recorders,
cello, some also playing percussion). The
performers produce eerily beguiling songs
and dances. Tonality is a ghost of its former
self, pale-to-vanishing. Stump-Linshalm
is more concerned with finding voices to
utter her thoughts that no one has heard yet,
colours and consonants fresh from a finetuned
imagination. Movement is mostly
ordered but gradual, although some movements
pop and spark with sudden furtive
gestures. Nowhere is the dance faster than a
lively funeral march. Fantastic indeed, and
beautiful; and terrifying.
Opening the disc are eight short movements
for solo contrabass clarinet, which
seems to be having its moment in new music.
Uisge Beatha is an exploration in sound of
the variety of flavours found in good peated
scotch. My unmixed love of single-malt
scotch whiskey is not matched by my feelings
for the contrabass clarinet. I certainly admire
the playing ability of Heinz-Peter Linshalm,
who is featured on most of the disc, and his
mastery of the double-length bass. There’s a
mad take on The Teddy Bears’ Picnic as well; I
leave the listener to find it.
Max Christie
Simon Martin – Musique d’art
Quatuor Bozzini; Pierre-Alexandre
Maranda
QB CQB 1922 (actuellecd.com)
! ! Simon Martin
is a younger
Quebecois
composer whose
work is intimately
connected
with music’s relationship
to materiality.
His earlier
work Hommage à Leduc, Borduas et
Riopelle focused on specific works of three
great painters, setting each segment with
a small group of like instruments: a saxophone
quartet, a trio of classical guitars and
the string quartet, Quatuor Bozzini. Here the
quartet turns to a more ambitious Martin
work. Musique d’art is similarly concerned
with meaning, with relationships among
music, sound and noise and the philosophical
and material status of the musical work, its
title a play on the expression “objet d’art.”
It’s a work of substantial scale, over an hour
in length, and also great sonic mass. Quatuor
Bozzini is extended to a string quintet here
with the presence of double bassist Pierre-
Alexandre Maranda. In some of the work’s
five movements, his is the central voice. The
first part moves from silence to a consonant
drone that’s gradually engulfed in a gathering
dissonance only to return to silence.
Maranda’s role comes to the fore in the
second part, his harsh, low-register bowing
suggesting grinding tools. At another point,
his savage, whipping glissandi feel as much
76 | April 2019 thewholenote.com