Julian Brink is a South African composer. Born in Johannesburg in 1989, he first picked up his mother’s guitar at the age of ten and grew up playing in rock bands. He discovered a love of contemporary classical music through the films of Paolo Sorrentino and Paul Thomas Anderson. Hearing Jonny Greenwood's score for There Will be Blood, in particular, was what led him to pursue composition. Although he didn’t learn to read music until he was 19, while studying guitar at undergraduate level, he went on to complete a master's degree in film scoring through Berklee College of Music and relocated to California in 2015. Brink works in film music and lives in Los Angeles with his wife, actress Maddie Hasson.

In collaboration with eminent classical label Sono Luminus, Utility Music is Brink's first standalone release. Originally composed in 2019 as a score for an abandoned film project, the music was arranged for piano, harp and string trio. It was later repurposed, reorchestrated and combined with a few older pieces into what is its current form. The album features performances by several distinguished musicians, with the heart of the music being the string trio of Moldovan violin virtuoso Dan-Iulian Drutac; Nick Revel, violist of the Grammy Nominated PUBLIQuartet; and Joe Zeitlin who was the lead cellist on Mica Levi’s Oscar-nominated score for Pablo Lorraín’s Jackie.

TRACKS:

• Colombo / Green Fingers
• Miniatures
• Simple Trio No. 1
• Eventually Lapse
• Albatross
• At Night
• Eastwood No. 4
• Simple Trio No. 2
• Aura for M
• Baptism in the Field
• Pattern Shells

REVIEW:

For his first standalone release, Julian Brink has repurposed and re-orchestrated an incomplete score for an unfinished film. The 11 short, delectable tracks ‘toss boundaries’, as the trombonist provocateur Juliane Gralle observes. Taken together, it feels like there might still be a movie in there, somewhere.

‘Miniatures’ has the feel of a haunted, southern Viennese waltz surrounded in fog, its central beauty emerging serenely through the mist accompanied by drops of ringing pizzicatos. ‘At Night’ features cellist Joe Zeitlin creating other-worldly shadings of tone and colour then lifting them gently from the musical score. The two ‘Simple Trio’ tracks, which offer a vade mecum of ‘uncomplicated transitions between notes to make the samples sound more realistic’, feature the trio of Zeitlin, violinist Dan-Iulian Druțac and viola player Nick Revel of PUBLIQuartet, which Brink describes as ‘the heart of the album. I try to forget that they haven’t all met each other and aren’t playing together in the same room.’

‘Albatross’ channels John Cage and Morton Feldman with mesmerisingly deceptive, irregular beats, wonderfully quiet. The last track, ‘Pattern Shells’, influenced by Villa-Lobos, is a spontaneous splurge of brass and tropical birds.

-- Gramophone

Alongside his celebrated performances of the classical repertory, Håkan Hardenberger is also renowned as a pioneer of significant new trumpet works. The three works on this album were all composed with him in mind, and illustrate his many-faceted musical persona. The most recent of them, ‘True Stories’ by Betsy Jolas, was written in order to give Hardenberger and Roger Muraro occasion to perform together. Its title springs from the fact that the work forms the composer’s first attempt to work with sounds selected from daily life and either ‘tamed’ through stylization or left quasi crude. Sally Beamish found inspiration for her concerto in Italo Calvino’s book Invisible Cities which, in her own words, ‘reflects aspects of city life: the organized architecture but seeming randomness; the sparkling though shabby beauty, in contrast to the dark, sordid underbelly – rusting pipes, waste, squalor.’ Finally, in …miramondo multiplo…, Olga Neuwirth incorporates stylistic and melodic references, for instance from her own works and the music of Handel, but also to the performance style of the jazz trumpeter Miles Davis, lending each movement a musical atmosphere of its own. As a result, the concerto has been described as ‘a sequence of five very different musical stories’. The conductor in all three works is Martyn Brabbins, whose credentials in the field of contemporary music are impressive, having conducted hundreds of world premières across the globe.

Ever since his very first disc, released by BIS some thirty years ago, Hakan Hardenberger has earned recognition for his performances of the classical repertory, but also as a pioneer of significant and vituosic new music for the trumpet. Collaborations with composers such as Takemitsu, Part, Henze, and H.K. Gruber have resulted in numerous works, of which the two recorded here are among the more recent. Brett Dean's concerto Dramatis personae is named after the term used for the list of characters in a stage work, and casts the soloist in the role of the ''Hero''. Dean's protagonist is a complex one, however, with traits inspired by comic book super heros as well as the classical flawed heros of literature and legend: ''Soliloquy'', the second movement, is a reference to Hamlet, while Charlie Chaplin's character in Modern Times has inspired the work's finale, ''The Accidental Revolutionary''. If there is a hero in the concerto by Luca Francesconi, it is Miles Davis. In his comment sto the work, Francesconi talks of Davis as ''a musician who transcends all labels'' with ''a delicate, cracked sound'' and a voice which speaks directly to the listener. Hard Pace, the title of Francesconi's work, is an allusion to a difficult journey, but it is also a conflation of the names of the performers for whom it was written: Hardenberger, Antonio Pappano and the Santa Cecilia Orchestra. On the present recording it is the Gothenburg Symphony and conductor John Storgards who provide Hakan Hardenberger with expert support in these demanding and rewarding scores.

Craig Morris, former principal trumpet player of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, has recorded brilliant solo trumpet versions of three Philip Glass classics. Morris’s new recording features works ranging from Glass’s constantly shifting ‘Melodies’ (1995) to the driving minimalist rhythms and figures of ‘Gradus’ (1968) and ‘Piece in the Shape of a Square’ (1967). ‘Melodies’ was written as incidental music for a play based on the novel, Un Captif Amoureux (Prisoner of Love) by the French author Jean Genet. Glass’s thirteen melodies cover a wide range of emotion, from touching and introspective to joyous and dancing. The visual element of ‘Piece in the Shape of a Square,’ is much more a part of the composition than it is in ‘Gradus.’ The music is set up in a roughly 10’ square, with one performer on the inside of the square and one performer on the outside. The performer on the inside moves around the square in a clockwise direction, while the performer on the outside moves around in a counterclockwise direction. Virtuoso trumpeter Craig Morris plays both parts on this fascinating recording.