Volume 27 Issue 4 - February 2022

written for bassoon, this collection highlights
Jackson’s gift of masterful arrangement and
features several rare and delightful pieces for
contrabassoon, his specialty.
Moving and uplifting, the smooth expressive
playing of Jackson’s performance coupled
with de Margerie’s elegant interpretation
must have been a delightful and unique
experience for their neighbours; and now for
the rest of us too.
Melissa Scott
Metamorphosen
Maiburg Ensemble
Ars Produktion Ars 38 328 (proclassics.de/
aktuelle-cd-news)
! Annette Maiburg,
artistic director
of the Maiburg
Ensemble, aspired
in this CD to engage
in a “dialogue” in
which the music of
disparate cultural
traditions fuse, so to
speak, to produce a
music which is new and which did not exist
before. Maiburg, a highly accomplished classically
trained flutist, is joined in the project
by pianist Pascal Schweren and double bass
player Matthias Hacker, both also classically
trained but with strong educational backgrounds
in jazz, and percussionist, Fethi Ak, a
renowned German-Turkish darbuka player.
Each musician makes great and unique
contributions to the project. For example,
Schweren’s solo, which brings Bartók’s Pê
Loc to a surprise ending, is a delight; Ak
has several wonderful solos in compositions
as diverse as Bartók’s Mâruntel and
Buciumeana and Mendelssohn’s Scherzo
from A Midsummer Night’s Dream; Hacker,
to my ears anyway, brings the most convincingly
idiomatic jazz contribution throughout,
connects beautifully with Ak’s solo in
Mâruntel and plays a very effective bowed
passage in Mahler’s Adagietto. Maiburg not
only plays the challenging flute part from
Mendelssohn’s Scherzo flawlessly but also
brings wonderful lyricism to her solos in
Ravel’s Kaddisch and Bartók’s Buciumeana.
The cultural fusion, however, just doesn’t
seem to happen, despite the good intentions,
until the last track on the CD, Hov Arek, an
Armenian folk melody notated by the great
Armenian composer and ethnomusicologist,
Komitas. Here magic happens, musicians
and music become one, and the dream
becomes reality.
Allan Pulker
Hindemith – Mathis der Maler; Nusch-
Nuschi-Tänze; Sancta Susanna
Radio-Symphonieorchester Wien; Wiener
Singakademie; Marin Alsop
Naxos 8574283 (naxosdirect.com/
search/8574283)
! The title work
on this terrific all-
Hindemith release,
Symphony ‘Mathis
der Maler’, gets
a probing, gutsy
performance from
Marin Alsop and the
superb ORF Vienna
Radio Symphony. For 27 dramatic minutes,
we’re swept into the harsh, visionary world
depicted by the German Renaissance painter
Matthias Grünewald in his magnificent
Isenheim altarpiece. This symphony is rightly
one of Hindemith’s best-known works. Yet
the related opera, Mathis der Maler – for me,
his greatest work – is rarely done.
Hindemith arranged Nusch-Nuschi-Tänze
from an earlier opera, Das Nusch-Nuschi. But
unlike Mathis der Maler, it’s no masterpiece.
And the dance suite remains forgettable,
despite Hindemith’s imaginative orchestrations
and Alsop’s lively performance.
Hindemith’s daring Sancta Susanna is
the standout here. Alsop’s recording of this
youthful one-act opera is so gripping, it
belongs among the outstanding recordings
of his works, along with Roxolana Roslak
and Glenn Gould’s sublime Das Marienleben
and Sviatoslav Richter’s wonder-filled Ludus
Tonalis.
The tension builds relentlessly – an organ
pipe whistles, heavily scented lilac blossoms
rustle, nightingales sing joyfully, a couple
makes love right outside the church window,
a giant spider leaps into Susanna’s hair.
August Stramm’s expressionist libretto is truly
shocking, especially when Susanna, finally
unhinged, strips off her nun’s habit and
embraces a sculpted image of Christ naked on
the cross.
Ausrine Stundyte conveys the devastating
impact of Susanna’s defiance with ravishing
expressiveness, while Renée Morloc’s
Klementia sets the stage for the horrific
ending with harrowing dramatic power. This
is opera at its most explosive – and delectable.
Pamela Margles
MODERN AND CONTEMPORARY
Resonances
Aiyun Huang
Sideband Records 06
(sidebandrecords.com)
! Virtuoso percussionist
Aiyun Huang
has recorded a
selection of new
works that challenge
the performer
in different ways.
In each, the listener
is immersed in
varying intimate and unique sound worlds.
In a piece titled Désastre, Inouk Demers
produces a dreamy landscape that evokes
slowly descending sonic blankets upon the
watershed resonance of gongs and cymbals.
This homogenous and enchanting piece
creates a wondrous metallic stasis – fittingly
so, as the work’s title suggests something
falling from the stars. Chris Mercer’s Concerto
Chamber places an acoustic guitar into
the percussion setup and asks the percussionist
to strike it with mallets, slides, rubber
balls and a triangle beater. Mercer cleverly
infuses his piece with these novel percussive
guitar sounds amid a flurry of spellbinding
auras that are highly impressive
and otherworldly in their creative expanse.
In Valerio Sannicandro’s Disentio (translated
as “extension”), Huang exhibits her
world-class command over the vibraphone
in a piece full of expression and angular
melodic leaps. Canadian composer Chris
Paul Harman creates hypnotic intricacies
in Verve – an evocative piece that spans the
entire range and resonant capabilities of the
marimba. The soloist must use their voice to
execute percussive utterances that alternate
with tambourine and drum punchiness. With
each piece, Huang delivers a performance of
the highest quality – a testament toward why
she is among the leading percussion soloists
of our time.
Adam Scime
Soaring Spirits
UBC Symphony Orchestra & Choirs;
Jonathan Girard
Redshift Records TK492
(redshiftrecords.org)
! Jonathan Girard
conducts the
UBC Symphony
Orchestra and
Choirs in a release
of newly recorded
orchestral music by
three of Canada’s
most visible
composers. Stephen Chatman’s A Song of
Joys alternates between boisterous pulsations
and tender interludes throughout its seven
44 | February 2022 thewholenote.com