Ralph Peterson 35th Annual Student Music Awards - Downbeat

Beyond | BY PEtER MARgASAK
Classical
Innovators
Chris Brown is a veteran of the Bay Area new
music scene and a co-founder of the computer
network band the Hub, but the three pieces on
Iconicities (New World 80723; 52:14 ★★★1/2)
explore a heightened interaction between percussion
and electronics/live processing; the
great William Winant is featured on all of them.
“Stupa” is richly resonant dialogue between
piano and vibraphone, “Gangsa”—named for
the Filipino gong—features ringing and pinging
metallic figures performed by Winant’s fourmember
group processed in hall-of-mirrors
digital refractions by Brown, and on “Iceberg”
Brown does something similar with Winant’s
crotales, glockenspiel and hi-hat. The pieces
are rooted in heavy theoretical ideas, but the
results speak for themselves.
ordering info: newworldrecords.org
There’s little wonder why the Chicago
Symphony Orchestra just signed on London
native Anna Clyne to her second two-year
term as Mead Composer-In-Residence. On
her first collection, Blue Moth (tzadik 8084;
60:09 ★★★★), she showcases a vibrant engagement
with sound, colliding noise and processed
samples with deft melodic shapes and
texture-rich abstractions. Although she’s created
purely acoustic work elsewhere, each of
the seven pieces here feature inventive electroacoustic
elements, whether brittle whooshes
tangle with the upper-register clarinet squalls
of Eileen Mack on “Rapture” or the way the
sweet murmurs and gasping breaths of Caleb
Burhans and Martha Culver and the violent
machinations of the string quartet Ethel are
fused electronically on “Roulette.”
ordering info: tzadik.com
Soviet composer Galina Ustvolskaya, a
student of Shostakovich who began working
as a freelancer in the midst of an official emphasis
on populist music, didn’t end up publishing
many works before dying in 2006, but
those she shared with the world demonstrated
an austere, steely vision. Composition No. 2
“Dies Irae” (Wergo 67392; 52:01 ★★★★) is
one of three dramatic pieces included here, as
eight massed contrabasses engage with piano
and a struck wooden cube in jarring collision
of darkness and light. “Sonata No. 6” is one
of her last works, from 1988, but it’s just as
dynamic as the earliest piece, “Grand Duet,”
performed magnificently by cellist Rohan de
Saram and pianist Marino Formenti.
ordering info: wergo.de
Claire Chase is known as the founder of
International Contemporary Ensemble, one of
the world’s best and most adventurous new
music groups, but she’s also a striking flutist.
Terrestre (New focus 122; 48:54 ★★★★) is
a stunning second solo album, and it noncha-
Anna Clyne
lantly displays her easy virtuosity and empathetic
approach. Kaija Saariaho’s swooping
title piece finds Chase breathlessly interweaving
vocal interjections and fluid flute lines
without seams, backed deftly by a quartet of
ICE members with translucent brilliance. The
middle of the album features two duets with
pianist Jacob Greenberg and one with clarinetist
Joshua Rubin on works by Donatoni, Carter
and Boulez, while the collection closes with the
premiere of Dai Fujikura’s bass flute meditation
“Glacier.”
ordering info: newfocusrecordings.com
The spectral Japanese mouth organ called
the shô is at the center of the four compositions
by Toshio Hosokawa on Landscapes
(ECM 2095; 55:52 ★★★★), where the instrument’s
slow-moving lines and rich harmonics
are both presented as sole voice on “Sakura
Für Otto Tomek” and are simulated by hydroplaning
strings on “Ceremonial Dance.”
On the opening and closing pieces the shô,
played throughout by the brilliant Mayumi Miyata,
echoes and refracts lines shaped by the
Müchener Kammerochester. Perhaps due to
the shô’s restricted mobility, these pieces occupy
a narrow sonic range, but within that palette
the sounds are ethereal, haunting and rich.
ordering info: ecmrecords.com
The music of Polish composer Joanna
Wozny, who studied under Beat Furrer in Austria,
achieves a thrilling dynamism on her recent
collection As In A Mirror, Darkly (Kairos
0013192; 62:41 ★★★★), where micro ideas
provide the starting point for her writing. The
title piece, for example, was derived from the
notion of how tiny particles or “impurities” can
affect how we see things, like a speck of dust
on a film print, while “Loses” is concerned with
how isolated sound ideas change nature when
put through various collaged permutations.
Five different ensembles are featured, including
the superb Klanforum Wien, conducted by
Enno Pope, on the title piece, and each brings
a stunning clarity to her abstract ideas. DB
ordering info: kairos-music.com
Todd RoSEnBERG