Volume 24 Issue 7 - April 2019

like a side effect of industry as a musical
technique.
The final movement alternates groups of
sustained harmonics to develop a state that’s
simultaneously tense and suspended, gradually
creating a sense of timelessness. A kind
of stable mystery, Musique d’art can only
grow in significance.
Stuart Broomer
Samuel Andreyev – Music with no Edges
HANATSUmiroir
Kairos 0015025KAI (kairos-music.com)
!!
Before you even
read the booklet
notes that speak
of a late work of
Marcel Duchamp in
relation to Samuel
Andreyev’s sublime
modernist composition,
you realize
– in the rhythm and stroke of reeds, strings
and percussion – that the Canadian composer
now living in France is a visualist musician.
It is clear from the very first few bars
of Vérifications (2012). Then rifling through
the booklet as you might be tempted to do,
the discovery of his scores reveals more of
his method. Of the three scores depicted,
only one is on staved paper; another is on a
black sheet and the third is on graph paper.
The notes are meticulously written, ramrod
straight. But clearly Andreyev does not mean
for them to sound that way.
This is, after all, Music with no Edges.
Fingertips holding bows and mallets are
meant to be extensions of paint brushes,
perhaps just as pursed lips on piccolos and
other reeds become extensions of musicians
painting with sound, rather than engaging in
some aural activity. So, for instance, on Cinq
pièces, Stopping, Passages and, indeed Music
with no Edges, and the final Strasbourg
Quartet, the steady drip, drip, drip of sound
as if wet from a paint brush seems to fall from
the ensemble HANATSUmiroir onto blank
canvases creating vivid pictures of sound
emboldened with emotion. Andreyev seems
to write not only with a pencil but with his
nerve endings as well.
Raul da Gama
Concert note: New Music Concerts presents
the North American premiere of Andreyev’s
cantata iridescent Notation (2017) featuring
soprano Maeve Palmer at Betty Oliphant
Theatre on May 26.
Giya Kancheli – Sunny Night
Frédéric Bednarz; Jonathan Goldman;
Natsuki Hiratsuka
Metis Islands 2019 MI-0009
(metis-islands.com)
!!
I get particular
satisfaction from
listening to an
album rendered
stylishly by gifted
Canadian musicians.
A good
example is Sunny
Night, a collection
of 17 miniatures
originally scored for the cinema and
theatre by Giya Kancheli (b.1935) recorded
at McGill University in Montreal by the duo
of Frédéric Bednarz (violin) and Natsuki
Hiratsuka (piano).
The well-known Georgian composer
Kancheli, currently living in Belgium, is
an unabashed romantic when it comes to
composing music. “Music, like life itself,
is inconceivable without romanticism.
Romanticism is a high dream of the past,
present, and future – a force of invincible
beauty which towers above, and conquers
the forces of ignorance, bigotry, violence and
evil,” states Kancheli in the liner notes.
The highlights on Sunny Night are the
two works for violin, piano and bandoneon
(Jonathan Goldman), an instrument closely
associated with the tango. Earth, This Is Your
Son for the trio is episodic and dramatic,
dominated by minor key tonalities. At just
over five minutes it is also the most substantial
work on the album. It’s more a concert
piece than incidental music.
Not only unapologetically melody-driven,
romantic and tonal – often gently drawing on
early 20th-century vernacular genres such as
the tango – the musical language on Sunny
Night also seeks to capture a single mood
befitting the music’s original theatrical function.
In that it succeeds admirably, though
sometimes the effect verges on overt sentiment.
There are times however when that is
just what’s needed.
Andrew Timar
Reiko Füting – Distant Song
Ensemble Vocal & Instrumental
New Focus Recordings FCR216
(newfocusrecordings.com)
!!
Composer Reiko
Füting (Germany
b.1970), a faculty
member of the
Manhattan School
of Music, offers an
intriguing study of
a juxtaposition of
ancient and modern
practice. The first two pieces on Distant Song,
performed by AuditiVokal Dresden and Art
D’Echo are als ein licht/extensio and in allem
Fremden/wie der Tag/wie das Licht, based
on works by Heinrich Schütz. The motet
Verleih Uns Frieden Gnädiglich is framed by
dynamic percussion, spoken word and lush,
dissonant vocalizations meant to illustrate,
in the composer’s own words, a “continuing
compositional interest in time and space.”
Meant as an epilogue to the first two pieces,
eternal return (Passacaglia) features the
Byrne:Kozar:Duo, in an alarmingly engaging
duet for soprano and trumpet using text from
Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Next
is mo(nu)ment for C, on the 2015 attack on
Charlie Hebdo in which the ensemble loadbang
reiterates “Je suis,” “Ich bin” and “I Am.”
Dutch ensemble Oerknal performs Weg, Lied
der Schwäne, a “swan song” on the subject
of euthanasia based on Arcadelt’s renaissance
madrigal, Il bianco e dolce cigno. The
same ensemble backs vocal quartet Damask
in versinkend, versingend, verklingend which
recalls Debussy’s La cathédrale engloutie and
quotes the 15th-century German folk song
Gesegn dich Laub.
In listening to Füting’s compositions, it
becomes clear that while focusing on contemporary
issues, he brilliantly incorporates
musical fragments of memory which bridge
present and past.
Dianne Wells
Empty Words by John Cage
Varispeed
Gold Bolus GBR035 (goldbolus.com/empty)
! ! Long before
John Cage created
Empty Words, he
was already encouraging
the performer
of his music to
“let go of his feelings,
his taste, his
automatism, his
sense of universal,
not attaching himself to this or that, leaving
by his performance no traces, providing by
his actions no interruption to the fluency
of nature.” In their recording of this epic
vocal piece the quintet Varispeed, together
with ten supporting musicians, seem to
have absorbed Cage’s radiant words as they
plough through the shard-like composition
completely absorbing its incandescence into
their hearts and minds – as Cage would have
it – to create a deeply committed and meticulously
prepared performance, produced with
magical results.
Cage’s monumentally challenging work
calls for invention over and above that precise
quality that the composer built into his work.
On Empty Words – literally words stripped
of meaning – the ensemble uses male and
female human voices propelled on a collision
course with acoustic (woodwinds, strings,
percussion and piano), electronic boards and
prepared (glass) instruments. The result turns
Cage’s effect of splintering and pointillist
sound into an exploitation of a wide range of
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