Volume 25 Issue 4 - December 2019 / January 2020

György Kurtág – Scenes
Viktoriia Vetrenko; David Grimal; Luigi
Gaggero; Niek de Groot
Audite 97.762 (naxosdirect.com)
!!
The nonagenarian
Hungarian
composer György
Kurtág ranks
among the leading
living modernist
music masters.
His precisely
crafted, intense,
compressed, emotion-filled and dramatic
style evokes a kind of sonic haiku, demanding
the utmost from instrumentalists and
singers alike.
This album presents six previously
unreleased songs and instrumentals by
Kurtág, with lyrics from literary works in
Hungarian, Russian and German. Scenes
from a Novel, Op.19 (1984) for example,
consisting of 15 extremely varied short
movements, is a prime example of Kurtág’s
oeuvre. With melancholic, introspective
texts by the Russian writer Rimma Dalos,
the songs feature virtuoso soprano Viktoriia
Vitrenko, who nails the shifting emotionaltonal
terrain. She is impressively supported
by violinist David Grimal, bassist Niek de
Groot and cimbalomist Luigi Gaggero. Given
its masterful composition, imbued gravitas,
dramatic and emotional range and the near-
20-minute length of this series of epigrams,
the work takes on an operatic magnitude.
And I found the rest of the songs here just as
compelling.
The Hungarian cimbalom is a stylistic and
national marker on much of the album, a
sonic through-line in addition to the voice,
although novice listeners should not expect
even a tinge of Magyar folkloric colour. The
cimbalomist Gaggero makes a solo appearance
at the end of the album on Kurtág’s
Hommage à Berényi Ferenc 70. His soft, wistfully
sensitive rendition feels like a relaxed
puff of gently perfumed smoke after the
intense multicourse sonic dinner we had just
experienced.
Andrew Timar
Soli for Tuba, Zheng, Horn, with Percussion
McCormick Percussion Group; Robert
McCormick
Ravello Records rr8014
(ravellorecords.com)
!!
The awardwinning
Floridabased
McCormick
Percussion Group
specializes in interpreting
non-mainstream
percussion
scores, often collaborating
with guest
non-percussionists.
Its latest album presents five works by four
American composers featuring one or more
non-percussion soloist backed by the forces of
the MPG, the size of a modest orchestra.
Album opener Loam by Kentucky composer
Tyler Kline is a substantial four-movement
concerto for tuba and percussion ensemble.
Metaphorically, it seeks to convey the notion of
natural cycles: the earth being tilled, life being
born from the soil and ultimately returning
to it after death. Prize-winning Taiwanese-
American composer Chihchun Chi-sun Lee’s
attractive Double Concerto for Tuba, Zheng
and Percussion Orchestra is perhaps the first
work scored for these instruments. She effectively
juxtaposes the expressive upper register
of the plucked strings of the zheng with the
lower wind tones and multiphonics of the
tuba, the texture filled in by the spatially
arrayed percussion sounds. While the first
movement blends colour, timbre and gesture
among these disparate instruments, movement
II focuses on tuba and zheng solos. The final
movement balances all three forces in an energetic
finale.
Lee’s other score on the album,
Zusammenflusses (Confluences), is a duet for
zheng and percussion, distinguishing it from
the concerto forms of the other works on the
album. Using a non-tonal language, Lee deftly
counterposes the differences and similarities
between the plucked and bowed zheng,
vibraphone and various cymbals.
This album, a journey into unexpected
combinations of sounds and cultures, is one
well worth taking in.
Andrew Timar
Jimmy López Bellido – Symphonic Canvas
Fort Worth Symphony Orchestra; Miguel
Harth-Bedoya
MSR Classics MS 1737 (msrcd.com)
!!
Two novels,
written nearly 400
years apart, inspired
these two works,
both from 2016,
by Jimmy López
Bellido (b.1978),
composer-inresidence
of the
Houston Symphony.
Miguel de Cervantes’s final literary creation
described two Scandinavian nobles’ adventurous
pilgrimage to Rome. López Bellido says
his Symphony No.1 – The Travails of Persiles
and Sigismunda wasn’t intended to portray
the novel’s events, but “to convey [its] spirit,
greatness and humor.” Nevertheless, the fourmovement,
45-minute symphony contains
many dramatic “events” – eerie forebodings
leading to garishly scored, violent climaxes.
The Latino-tinted third movement provides
the only “humor” – jazzy and snarky.
In December 1996, Túpac Amaru terrorists
took hundreds of people hostage after
storming a reception at the Japanese ambassador’s
residence in Lima, Peru, López
Bellido’s native city. His 2015 opera, Bel
Canto, was based on Ann Patchett’s 2001
novel of the same name, itself based on
the four-month-long hostage crisis. The
three-movement, 30-minute Bel Canto –
A Symphonic Canvas, encapsulates the
opera. Perú, Real and Unreal begins with the
Overture and ends with the climax of Act
I, the shooting of diva Roxane Coss’ accompanist.
La Garúa depicts an enshrouding
fog and several hostages’ plaintive emotional
outpourings. The End of Utopia derives
from the final scene, the attack that frees
the hostages and Coss’ anguished aria, here
“sung” by a trumpet, over the desolation.
Both works show López Bellido has clearly
mastered the knack of building suspense and
effectively ending it with climaxes of exceptional
sonic power and brilliance.
Michael Schulman
Morton Feldman Piano
Philip Thomas
Another Timbre at144x5
(anothertimbre.com)
! ! 2019 marks
the 20th anniversary
of John
Tilbury’s signal All
Piano, a four-CD
set approaching
almost all of Morton
Feldman’s piano
music. Here the
younger Philip
Thomas presents a five-CD, six-hour set of
even more of these works. There’s a direct
lineage: in 2014, the two pianists recorded
Two Pianos and other pieces, 1953-1969
(also on Another Timbre), covering Feldman’s
works for multiple pianos and some for
pianos with other instruments.
Thomas explores the breadth of Feldman’s
solo piano music, omitting only a few student
pieces from the 1940s, while resurrecting
others, like an archival minute-long Untitled
piano piece, dated 1947, for a glimpse of
Feldman’s nascent vision. There are also transcriptions
of two pieces with lost scores,
including the piano part in the soundtrack for
the film Sculpture by Lipton.
Thomas brings a reflective depth to the
work, emphasizing the composer’s preoccupation
with sonic detail. Although Feldman
didn’t alter the piano’s physical character
like his colleague John Cage, he explored its
sonic character and notation with a unique
depth, including silent fingerings to create
harmonic resonance, varied approaches to
grace notes and allowing sounded notes to
decay in full, the sounds isolated and appreciated
individually.
While sometimes developing a kind of
dislocation – even writing two-hand parts as
if they were synchronous, then instructing
that they be played separately – Feldman
put a new emphasis on attack, duration and
decay. There’s great detail in Thomas’ 52-page
liner essay, including his description of a
92 | December 2019 – January 2020 thewholenote.com