ZAIMONT Piano Sonata. Calendar Collection: Spring, Summer, Autumn. Jupiter’s Moons. Wizards. La Fin de Siècle. A Calendar Set. Cortège for Jack. Jazz Waltz. American City: Portrait of New York. Hitchin’. In My Lunchbox. Hesitation Rag. Reflective Rag. Judy’s Rag. Serenade • Elizabeth Moak (pn) • MSR 1366 (2 CDs: 155: 36)



ZAIMONT Piano Sonata. A Calendar Set. Le Fin de Siècle • Christopher Atzinger (pn) • NAXOS 8.559665 (65:55)


ZAIMONT Piano Sonata. Jupiter’s Moons. La Fin de Siècle. Hesitation Rag • Joanne Polk (pn) • ALBANY 617 (62:56)


Judith Lang Zaimont, now in her late 60s, has been a consistently and productively active presence on the American compositional scene since the 1960s, and I have followed her work—though not exhaustively—from almost as far back. She has won a generous share of awards and enjoyed a series of academic affiliations, notably on the faculties of the Peabody Conservatory, Adelphi University, and the University of Minnesota. She now lives in Arizona, devoting her time largely to composing. Although I have found her work collectively to be of variable interest, it has always impressed me with both excellent craftsmanship and a basic sincerity of expression, devoid of glitz or mere cleverness. Her basic stylistic roots are in a traditional 20th-century language, though updated in some pieces with sounds and techniques that entered the modern vocabulary after midcentury. But nothing I have heard of hers ever violates sound musical judgment or good taste. But what I don’t hear is a personal stamp, a recognizable voice that proclaims her identity, or a sense that she is sharing her deepest personal feelings. However, while such a recognizable identity often enables listeners to feel closer to a composer, it is not a prerequisite of artistic importance.


A pianist herself, Zaimont has composed a good deal of music for the keyboard. Her piano music represents much of her strongest work, and some pieces—such as A Calendar Set —have attained a well-earned popularity. The three releases discussed here comprise the vast majority of her music for piano solo, with some pieces—the Piano Sonata, for example—addressed on each recording, making comparisons inevitable. Although Joanne Polk’s release doesn’t include A Calendar Set , an Arabesque disc, titled Zones (Z6683), features her performance of that work. In addition I have a Leonarda LP that includes Gary Steigerwalt’s rendition of A Calendar Set . I will say at the outset that making these comparisons was the most difficult aspect of this review, as all three pianists are extraordinarily fine, and all three recordings are distinguished by performances that are both sympathetic and brilliantly virtuosic. Though one pianist may seem to grasp some pieces better, another captures some of the others more effectively. Consumers’ decisions will be based on factors other than excellence of execution. Mississippi-born Elizabeth Moak has been performing Zaimont’s music for decades, and built her doctoral work around it; her two-CD set—the culmination of her years of study and performance—is, of course, both the most comprehensive recording and the most expensive one, and includes the vast majority of her music for piano solo. Christopher Atzinger’s on Naxos features the most important pieces, and is budget-priced. Polk’s on Albany also offers a fine selection, and is full-priced.


Zaimont’s most ambitious work for piano solo is the Sonata (1999–2000). This half-hour work in three movements covers a good deal of expressive territory within the generally modern-traditionalist language. In ways that are hard to articulate, the work doesn’t have the feel of a sonata—a sense of businesslike goal-directedness propelled by an individual treatment of familiar formal designs. The first movement begins and ends atmospherically, and might even be described as improvisatory. However, the central portion boasts a strong assertive thrust—propulsive and quite challenging for the pianist. The second movement, which is described as a reflection on the slow movement of Beethoven’s “Pathétique” Sonata, is really much more than that. Again, much of the music is ruminative and improvisatory in character, although scherzoso portions of the movement provide considerable technical challenges for the pianist. The third movement is rapid and toccata-like for the most part, although this is relieved by some slower passages. All in all, the multiple tempos within each movement make following the basic structure only by ear a little difficult. But on the whole, this is a challenging and provocative work, and one that rewards multiple rounds of concentrated listening. As suggested earlier, all three pianists do more than justice to the work. If forced to select a preference, I would probably choose Polk’s as the one with the greatest technical assurance.


The other major work is the cycle A Calendar Set , which occupied the composer on and off throughout the 1970s, and was her first extended work for piano. As its title suggests, these are 12 character pieces, each associated with one of the months of the year. These subjective associations create an attractive, evocative, and convincing conceit. (More on this later.) Two of the pieces—July and December—are quodlibets that ingeniously weave familiar tunes (patriotic for the former, carols for the latter) into a subtle texture. These pieces are more traditional in style than the Sonata, with undisguised roots in the Romantic piano repertoire represented by Chopin, Scriabin, and company. I have been familiar with these pieces since shortly after they were completed, and I must say, they appealed to me upon initial exposure, and continue to do so today. Again the performances are all extremely good, but if forced to select one I would probably go for Moak, although Atzinger is more effective in some of the pieces, Polk in some of the others, and Steigerwalt in still others.


Interestingly, during the period when Zaimont was working on A Calendar Set , one of her publishers suggested that she compose another set based on the same months-of-the-year conceit, but designed to be somewhat easier to play, and with explicit pedagogical intentions. She fulfilled this request with Calendar Collection —12 pieces that are just as appealing to hear as the concert set, and reward serious musical consideration. Moak includes nine of the 12 on her recorded recital. Let me note here that while a good deal of the music included on Moak’s program was composed with pedagogical intentions and limited technical demands in mind, none of this music is any the less interesting for it, nor are the results so elementary as to be identifiable as student fare.


Jupiter’s Moons is a group of six short pieces, composed in 2000. Each of the pieces draws upon both mythological and geophysical associations from which to anchor its character. At this point I must voice a reservation I noted in my last review of music by this composer: Zaimont has a propensity for fanciful titles, presumably to offer gentle suggestions to guide the listeners’ imaginations. However, with some exceptions—most notably A Calendar Set —I find these titles to be more of a bother than they are worth. In most cases I find myself looking in vain for connections between the music and the images suggested. Rather than facilitating a grasp of the expressive intentions of the music, for me they are more of a hindrance.


The six pieces identified as Jupiter’s Moons generally inhabit a stylistic realm that most would term Impressionistic, with some reminiscences of Debussy, although the first one avoids both tonality and meter. Each piece is both evocative and engaging, and as a group they are delightful. But instead of movement titles such as “The Moons Swim in Orbit, “Europa,” “Leda,” “Io,” etc., I would have been content with “Six Preludes,” period. I have no principled objection to fanciful titles in general, but the associations must be universal enough to engender spontaneous confirmation in the listener—otherwise they are distractions. I find that Polk’s presentations of these pieces are somewhat more exciting and dynamic than Moak’s. If I have a criticism of the latter’s generally fine performances, it is that they tend to be a little understated and bland—especially the more difficult pieces. On the other hand, Moak is somewhat more effective in clarifying the textures, while Polk can sometimes be a little murky.


Wizards is a nine-minute piece in a single movement, composed in 2003. It is a fantasy that presumes to delineate the features of three distinct “Magic Masters.” The style is somewhat reminiscent of late Scriabin, although there is some hand-damping of the strings. Aiming to convey a sense of magic and mystery, the music is again quite challenging for the performer.


The nocturne La Fin de Siècle dates from 1979, and is another one of Zaimont’s most popular and frequently performed pieces. It is also another whose title—or in this case, subtitle—is both limiting and misleading, explicitly suggesting a work of retrospection—a venture into the language of a bygone era. But again, this seven-minute piece is much more than that: For one thing, it is no more alien to Zaimont’s natural language than are many of these other works, its agitated central section embracing a harmonic language that evolved decades after the turn of the century; for another, it is a superb and often beautiful work in its own right—not in the least hackneyed or preoccupied with retrospection, but, rather, spontaneous and improvisatory, although the listener who makes too much of the subtitle may readily overlook its breadth and depth of expression. The nocturne is included on all three discs discussed here, as well as on the Leonarda LP, and all four performances are excellent. Here I find it simply impossible to choose one as the best.


The remainder of this review is devoted to shorter, less ambitious pieces, all but one of which is found on only the Moak disc. Zaimont is fond of the ragtime genre, and has written several. Her Hesitation Rag is the most ambitious of those included here. Composed in 1998, the six-minute piece is quite an elaborate concert work, maintaining the essential elements of the genre, while reaching beyond its limited associations. It is included on Polk’s CD as well; she provides a fuller, more sonorous rendition than Moak, who is more delicate. The other two rags— Reflective Rag and Judy’s Rag —date from the 1970s. They are shorter and less ambitious, but no less delightful and engaging—and are worked out with considerable subtlety.


American City: Portrait of New York is a group of six short pieces that purport to evoke various images associated with New York City. What is most striking and remarkable about them is that five of the six were composed in 1957—when Zaimont was 12! If the prospective listener anticipates being called upon to indulge the composer’s shameless vanity, that listener is entirely wrong. These are mature, sophisticated, entertaining, and pianistically challenging vignettes that in no way betray their youthful origins, and won a number of auspicious awards at the time they were composed. Although she added the movement “Scrapers” in 2010, the composer insists that the five early pieces remain essentially untouched (the few subsequent modifications are indicated in the program notes).


Jazz Waltz is a short movement from a 1996 work called Suite Impressions . It is a pleasantly stylish piece, inventive both melodically and harmonically.


In My Lunchbox (2003) is a suite of five short pieces, with individual titles such as “Swimming Tuna,” “Celery Stalks,” “Dessert—Sugar Rush,” and other items typically found in a child’s lunchbox. It is designed for 11-year-olds who have been playing for at least four years. While its pedagogical intentions are explicit, and the pieces are more manageable technically, they are musically interesting enough to engage the attention of young pianists and those for whom they play.


Serenade was composed on a single day in 2006. Zaimont calls it an homage to big-band music and the film scores of the 1940s, but I do not hear these associations at all. What I do hear is an irresistibly lovely six-minute piece of great appeal and some real beauty. It has been approved for performance in a number of different instrumentations.


Hitchin’ is another short pedagogical piece, composed in 2007, and designed to engage the interest of high-school-age piano students. I am sure that it accomplishes its intentions, as it is infectious and lively. But it is not all that easy to play!


The most recent piece here is Cortège for Jack , written just a few days after Zaimont learned of the death of her former composition teacher Jack Beeson in 2010. She notes that she composed the piece on an involuntary and irresistible impulse. Although it is in triple meter, it has the character of a processional, solemn and poignant.


In conclusion, I note that these shorter pieces are played with considerable subtlety, artistry, and attention to detail by Elizabeth Moak, on what is her debut recording.


FANFARE: Walter Simmons

For enthusiasts of the orchestral Schuman and the American 20th century symphony this brings the Naxos Schuman project to a close in style.

Rejoice! With this disc Naxos complete their survey of the numbered Schuman symphonies. You will look in vain for symphonies 1 and 2: they were disclaimed by the composer. That’s a pity as it would be fascinating to hear these works of the 1930s. I have not given up hope.
 
Schwarz here has the conqueror-advocate’s measure of the bell-haunted Eighth Symphony. It was premiered in the Lincoln Center in 1962 with Bernstein conducting and was recorded by Bernstein the same year. That recording is easily and inexpensively accessible on a 1998 Sony CD alongside symphonies 3 and 5 via Amazon. While I still recommend that CD for an unassailably vital and kinetic Third Symphony Schwarz is to be preferred in the often more tensely reflective Eighth Symphony. He takes a minute and a half more than the comparatively opaque Bernstein but the Seattle results positively glow. This is a work that can be difficult to approach but I find it completely accessible in this Schwarz-Naxos version. Schwarz’s reading is as much of a revelation as Walter’s Brahms 3, Oramo’s Sibelius 6 and Ormandy’s Nielsen 6. The lucid and directly engaging recording is a co-conspirator in the results. The prestissimo finale showcases the audio engineering which accommodates solo strands and florid climactic material with a natural ease and without any sense of perspective zooming. Even Schwarz cannot completely transform the rather hollow gestures of the last page or two of this score but overall the Symphony emerges wonderfully well – better than ever.
 
Night Journey was one of four ballets on which Schuman collaborated with Martha Graham. Its spareness of utterance and angularity is only partly accounted for by the score which specifes fifteen instruments. A diminutive orchestra was not an unusual restriction for Graham ballets of that era – no doubt sensitive to cost and touring practicalities. The music has a Bergian astringency whether pensive, charged with nocturnal foreboding or fitfully frenetic. That inward quality echoes Barber’s tense dark chocolate romanticism but presents in more transparent textures. Night Journey has been issued on CD before by CRI but is not currently available. The Ives/Schuman Variations on ‘ America’ is a brilliant showcase built around a song that most Brits will recognise as God Save the Queen. The familiar tune is put through some wheezingly irreverent transformations. This is in no sense a representative Schuman work but is full of left-field fun.
 
It’s too easy to forget the sponsors without whose sense of judgement and even courage we would not hear the music. It’s much to the credit of the National Endowment for the Arts that they have financial sponsored this disc.
 
The more than capable notes are by Schuman biographer Joseph W Polisi.
 
For enthusiasts of the orchestral Schuman and the American 20 ^th century symphony this disc brings the Naxos Schuman project to a close in style.

-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International

In one way or another all of the works on this disc-spanning thirty-three years from 1972 through 2005-reveal an ongoing aspect of my creative process that looks back in order to move forward. It' about being in the present by unraveling memories.

American composer Haskell Small 'has a rich imagination as a composer and an assured mastery of forms. Highly original without being self-consciously modernistic, this music has a sense of traditional structures and values without losing sight of it's own.

BAKER The Glass Bead Game. 1 Awaking the Winds. 2 Shadows: Four Dirge-Nocturnes. 3 The Mystic Trumpeter 4 • Leonard Slatkin, cond; 4 Hans Vonk, cond; Saint Louis SO • NAXOS 8.559642 (66:36) Live: St. Louis 1 1/21–24/1991; 2 5/14–16/1993; 3 5/18–20/1990; 4 4/16–18/1999


From 1991 to 1999 Claude Baker was the composer-in-residence to the Saint Louis Symphony, the fourth and last in a program in which he was preceded by Joseph Schwantner (1982–85), Joan Tower (1985–88), and Donald Erb (1988–91). Recorded souvenirs of the residencies of the first three were issued by Nonesuch and New World; neither Schwantner release made it to CD, but the Tower and Erb did and can still be purchased. Though arguably the most compelling artist of this distinguished quartet—please don’t send nasty notes—and certainly the one longest in residence, Baker was not so honored. A 1993 live recording of Shadows: Four Dirge-Nocturnes was included in the limited edition commemorative set, The Slatkin Years , but that is long out of print. (The Naxos disc opts for the 1990 premiere.) So this Naxos release of live recordings originally made for broadcast between 1990 and 1999, funded by Indiana University in Bloomington where Baker holds an endowed professorship, is a most welcome redress of an unfortunate oversight.


The Glass Bead Game (1982/83)—inspired, as is almost all of his music, by a literary work and quoting from the compositions of others as annotation—is quintessential Claude Baker and therefore a perfect work to open the program. Baker, inspired by Hermann Hesse’s novel of the same name, takes his thesis from the intellectual narcissism of Hesse’s Castalian scholars. Their obsession with analyzing the past, their fascination with games, trivial detail, cleverness, and systemic complexity, and their eventual stagnation and decline through failure to create anything new are all reflected in the musical program. Baker uses Hesse and the music to shine a light on 20th-century musical obsessions, using a brilliantly executed numerologically complex serial canon; a dream-like, period-correct performance of a Johann Schein courtly dance commented upon by modern atonality; and an amazing collage of six works by Dallapiccola, Schoenberg, Vaughan Williams, Shostakovich, Penderecki, and Liszt, given unity by their incorporation of the famous B-A-C-H motive. These six pieces are assimilated Castalian-syle into a final movement, which is both amazing in its virtuosity and sobering in its ultimate emptiness.


Shadows: Four Dirge-Nocturnes (1990) and The Mystic Trumpeter (1999) are grounded as well in literary sources. In Shadows , Baker explores four haiku, using characteristics of the form—syllable counts, binary construction, and motivic concision—as compositional elements. The verses and the music are dark, evoking death, the graveyard, and mourning in each of the seasons from spring through winter. Woven into the nocturnal work are gestures, fragments, and quotes from works by Mahler, Britten, and Stravinsky, ending touchingly with a quote from “In diesem Wetter” from Kindertotenlieder. The Mystic Trumpeter concerns itself with Walt Whitman, finding both literal and symbolic connection between the verse—the title poem and “The Dalliance of the Eagles”—and Ives’s The Unanswered Question , and works by Messiaen, George Rochberg, and medieval troubadour Guiraut de Bornelh. Awaking the Winds (1993) is the anomaly. It has no literary precursor, contains no borrowed music, and is “freely chromatic” rather than Baker’s usual combination of tonality and atonality. Unlike the other works that are heavily driven by the percussion section, this one eschews even timpani. It essentially is a pastorale, though the composer disavows any programmatic intent, with suggestions of wind and sounds of nature, a storm, and a quiet dénouement.


During the decade of these performances, Leonard Slatkin and the SLSO had a well-deserved reputation as promoters of new music, especially by native composers, and the orchestra was in superb shape, able to play anything that their composer might write for them. Vonk, who took over the podium in 1996, may not have taken to the idiom as naturally, but the orchestra still knew the way home and the Dutch maestro paces them most effectively. The execution of this bold, dramatic, and exceedingly challenging music is flawless, the moments of quiet and delicacy are sublimely poised, and even more to the advantage of the music, all is presented with absolute conviction. Recordings exist online of Indiana University ensembles playing this music—although The Mystic Trumpeter seems to have disappeared for now—but good as they are—and the fine Shadows is even conducted by Slatkin—none of the IU performances can match these in function or insight. The recordings themselves, the majority engineered by the late/lamented William Hoekstra, are demonstration class, and reveal little of the very quiet audiences. I was present for at least three of these concert series, so for me there could not be a better tribute to Claude Baker or to his years with the SLSO than the release of these recordings. They should serve admirably to introduce the work of the composer to those not so fortunate, as well.


FANFARE: Ronald E. Grames

One of the things I like about this disc is that all the pieces try to take classical music someplace it doesn't usually go, declares David Lang, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer who co-founded the experimental classical music festival Bang on a Can.

New Zealand-born, American-based flautist Marya Martin enjoys an international career. She joins acclaimed American pianist Colette Valentine for this recordingwhich brings together eight contrasting yet complementary pieces commissioned for her f.

Naxos has released a second collection of Russian tenor arias by Vladimir Grishko. Like the first volume, we have a beautiful tenor voice treating us to some rarely heard arias from operas not often performed outside of Russia. Probably the only familiar pieces to non-Russian listeners would be the brief orchestral excerpts from Glinka's A Life For Tsar and Polovtsian March from Borodin's Prince Igor so listening is a treat in and of itself.

The Naxos Deutsche Schubert-Lied-Edition: Schubert set the poetry of over 115 writers to music. He selected poems from classical Greece, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, from eighteenthcentury German authors, early Romantics and Biedermeier poets.

The Piano Quartet No. 2 in A major, Op. 26, written during the same period, had it's first performance in Vienna on 29th November 1862 by the same performers, in a concert in which Brahms played his Handel Variations and keyboard works by Bach and by Schumann. The concert followed shortly after Brahms had received the disappointing news of the appointment of Julius Stockhausen as conductor of the Hamburg Philharmonic, a position for which he had hoped. In a letter home from Vienna, however, he was able to report the sympathetic reception of his new piano quartet and his success with the audience as a pianist. Hanslick, who had followed Brahms's career with close interest, still had reservations, but Clara Schumann preferred the quartet to it's immediate predecessor. In 1870 the publisher Simrock asked Brahms for a four-hand piano arrangement of both quartets. He agreed to supply these, asking that his name as arranger should be included. Simrock did not agree to this last request, and printed the four-hand piano version of the Quartet in G minor without this acknowledgement and with many mistakes, as the proofs had not been sent to the composer for correction. This led Brahms to delay the arrangement of the second quartet until 1872. He had at first asked for a fee of fifteen Friedrichsdor, having received only twelve for each original composition, but was not pleased to receive in 1872 only the earlier agreed fee. His complaint persuaded Simrock to send a further fifteen Friedrichsdor. The work, which is admirably suited to piano duet, is of some length, and makes wide use of sonata form. The opening subject has two elements, a chordal theme and a winding thematic element first heard from the cello. The second subject that follows is replete with the composer's habitual cross-rhythms. The central development unusually includes three variations of the first theme, before it's return in recapitulation. The slow movement, Poco Adagio, and originally scored at first with muted strings, offers a lyrical principal theme, the strings unmuted on it's return, after the contrasting secondary material. The extended Scherzo, unusually in sonata form, has a D minor Trio that uses thematic material from the Scherzo in it's canonic writing. The quartet ends with another sonata-form movement, it's rhythmic first subject with touches of the Hungarian. It makes a splendid and complementary ending to a work that wears the unmistakable stamp of Brahms throughout. Brahms completed his sixteen Waltzes, Op. 39, in 1865, publishing them in a piano duet version in 1866 and a version for solo piano the following year. He dedicated the work to Eduard Hanslick, the genre and dedication both, perhaps, a tribute to Vienna, where he had been welcomed. In 1897 the publisher Rieter- Biedermann issued a two-piano version of five of the waltzes, included in the present recording.