Marked by the experiments of Luigi Nono or Helmut Lachenmann, and by his practice of seventeenth and eighteenth century music, French composer Brice Pauset is pursuing an original path, marked by his rhetorical questioning of earlier forms of music. This is music in tune with our own culture and, at times, would transmit its evidences. The vocal issue remains central, even in Brice Pauset’s catalogue: “The voice as an instrument,” he writes, “the voice as identity (and it then literally becomes human), and finally, the voice as an instrument of identity. It is only at this moment that the musical and political can carry on a dialogue, and that music can attempt to express its time.” Performed by the WDR Sinfonieorchester & Chor Koln, Ensemble Recherche, and Arditti Quartet, this is an album of great intensity served by first-rate performers!

MOZART String Quartet No. 18. String Quintet in D, K 593 1 • Brentano Str Qrt; Hsin-Yun Huang (va) 1 • AEON 747 (62:25)


Chamber music enthusiasts not yet familiar with the Brentano String Quartet have a rare treat in store. Soon after joining forces in 1992, the quartet won the Cleveland Quartet and Naumburg prizes. Today they continue a rigorous schedule of international tours. As with all the finest quartets, Brentano’s members—violinists Mark Steinberg and Serena Canin, violist Misha Amory, and cellist Nina Maria Lee—are individually gifted players of the first rank. Their latest release is an unusual pairing of one of Mozart’s quartets dedicated to Haydn with the D-Major viola Quintet.


From the initial statement of the primary thematic material in the A-Major Quartet, the Brentano is at pains to give each line its individual expressive shape and proportion. Every gesture is imbued with meaning; every harmonic progression has a sense of inevitable forward momentum. The variations of the extended slow movement unfold as a series of vividly individual characters. The rich polyphonic textures of the Allegro non troppo finale, reflecting Mozart’s involvement with Bach’s music at the time, emerge in luminous colors and with breathtaking clarity.


Since one rarely encounters a string quartet followed by a quintet in either performances or recordings, hearing K 593 on the heels of the A-Major Quartet is astonishing: what an amplification of texture Mozart creates with the addition of another mezzo voice. The slow introduction to the opening Allegro is touching in its tenderness and uncertainty. In the Adagio, the dead-center intonation makes the chains of suspensions almost heart-rending. The Minuet, one of Mozart’s finest, is filled with contrast: savor, for instance, the delicacy of the pizzicatos in the Ländler-like trio. The joyous finale fairly bursts with ebullient vitality.


Technical values of the sound engineering, made at the Academy of Arts and Letters, one of New York City’s preferred recording venues, are extraordinarily high. All the nuances of the Brentano’s lean but fruity sound are evident. Antoine Mignon’s notes are evocative and well translated. Ultimately, of course, the performances are what matters. This is playing that, while employing modern instruments, is fully cognizant of the ways and means of 18th-century bows and gut strings. Vibrato is never applied reflexively, but appropriately functions as but one element of an arsenal of expressive devices. Put another way, this is a modern ensemble that has internalized the lessons of period-instrument practice, and with stunning results. These are intellectually cogent performances that never lose sight of the music’s inherent kinesthetic pleasures. Very highly recommended.


FANFARE: Patrick Rucker

Curious, open-minded, fascinated by other cultures, Ondrej Adámek assimilates every aesthetic whose path he crosses. His works reveal all these influences, stamping them with a very individual sound colour that, combined with a powerful rhythmic sense and solid formal solid architecture, creates highly personal music by no means exempt from dramaturgy. Adámek seeks out specific playing techniques for classical instruments and creates new and original instruments. Here the Ensemble Orchestral Contemporain under the direction of Daniel Kawka lays before us an eclectic panorama of his music, from the ritualised, even mechanised sinuosities of a lullaby to the disconcerting mechanism of the strange musical machines he invents, which he does not hesitate to place in front of the orchestra.

MACHAUT 11 Ballades • Lucien Kandel, dir; Ens Musica Nova • AEON AECD 0982 (75:17 Text and Translation)


De Fortune. Dame se vous m’estes. Esperance. Phyton le mervilleus. Se quanque amours. De triste cuer/Quant vrais/Certes. Il m’est avis. Sans cuer m’en vois/Amis dolens/Dame par vous. Amours me fait desirer. Quant Theseus/Ne quier. Je ne cuit pas. Hoquetus David ANON Pour vous revoir. Sois tard tempre


We have never had a collection devoted only to Machaut’s ballades on a disc until now. While the motets have had more attention recently than any other form, including a set of discs by this same ensemble on another label ( Fanfare 28:1), there are fewer of them than the 42 ballades, the longest list of Machaut’s compositions in any form. (He wrote 235 ballades, the rest not set to music.) Only four of them remain to be recorded, and while that short list has not been further reduced here, the program does give us a few works that needed more satisfactory versions. Only Amours me fait desirer and Quant Theseus (along with the instrumental hocket, which is not a ballade) have been much recorded in the past, and both of them, along with Esperance , have been recorded very nicely on an Ensemble Gilles Binchois disc (not reviewed here). De Fortune, Se quanque amours , and Je ne cuit pas are all on a superb Orlando Consort disc (22:5). Dame se vous m’estes is on the recent Gothic Voices disc (30:4), while Il m’est avis is on a fine Ferrara Ensemble disc (also not reviewed here). The disc concludes with two anonymous virelais (one instrumental) that show Machaut’s influence on the next generation of composers.


So apart from these pieces, there are still three ballades that needed these new interpretations. The four singers and four players render this collection in varied ways. Set for two to four voices, some use a solo voice with instruments on the other parts, others are a cappella vocal renditions, and still others are vocal performance with instrumental doubling. All of the ballades are given with all three strophes. Phyton , sung by a cappella voices, is a notable gain, replacing David Munrow’s incomplete version with one voice and two crumhorns. The other two that are marked improvements over anything up to now are both triple-texted ballades, a different text in each voice. Both are given elegant a cappella performances.


The last decade or so has seen one Machaut disc after another receiving favorable reviews. This is partly due to the performances that preceded those that we hear in this new era, a range that too often dipped sadly below an acceptable level of interpretation. It is also due to the exceptional level that current interpreters have attained. At the rate we are going, it will be some years before we have the complete Machaut, but perhaps it will eventually be satisfactory as well as complete.


FANFARE: J. F. Weber

2018 Gramophone Magazine Contemporary Album of the Year

With this album coupling his Sixth and Seventh string quartets, the æon label completes its recording of all the quartets of Pascal Dusapin with the Arditti Quartet. This second release follows the earlier recording of his first five works in the genre, released in 2009. Complicity, transmission, comprehension: Pascal Dusapin’s output has been so familiar to and closely associated with these musicians since the 1980s (six of the works were composed for them) that it has become inseparable from them. The present edition reveals a trajectory that has lasted more than thirty years now and has established a coherent corpus over time. It helps the listener to grasp some of the composer’s deep-seated aspirations and the evolution of his style. The Arditti Quartet enjoys a worldwide reputation for their spirited and technically refined interpretations of contemporary and earlier 20th century music. Many hundreds of string quartets and other chamber works have been written for the ensemble since its foundation by first violinist Irvine Arditti in 1974. Many of these works have left a permanent mark on twentieth century repertoire and have given the Arditti Quartet a firm place in music history. Over the past thirty years, the ensemble has received many prizes for its work. They have won the Deutsche Schallplatten Preis several times and the Gramophone Award for the best recording of contemporary music in 1999 and 2002. In 2004 they were awarded the ‘Coup de Coeur’ prize by the Academie Charles Cros in France for their exceptional contribution to the dissemination of contemporary music.

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REVIEWS:

The remarkable Quatuor VII, Open Time, a huge set of 21 variations, lasting nearly 40 minutes receives here a magisterial performance.

– Guardian (UK)

Both works reaffirm the composer’s quartet cycle as among the most significant now emerging.

– Gramophone

Classical Music

Classical Music

REVIEW:

Each of the two has strong competing recordings as well. In Richard Stoltzman’s version of the Corigliano concerto (RCA), there is more of an emphasis on the music’s jazzy rhythms and the contrast between its expressive and abstract elements. While Eddy Vanoosthuyse may not capture the same sense of spontaneity as Stoltzman, or equal the mournful quality of his playing in the Elegy, his phrasing and control illuminates distinctive details along the way, negotiates the treacherous opening cadenza fluidly, and packs more punch in the powerful closing pages. I call it a toss-up. The same holds true for the Carter concerto, where Vanoosthuyse and Michael Collins (DG) both handle the angular passages with aplomb, and offer an absorbing account of the contemplative episodes. Oliver Knussen, conductor for Collins, is a brilliant interpreter of Carter’s music, and the must-hear DG disc also features the only available recording of Symphonia. But Vanoosthuyse’s conductor, Paul Meyer, is a notable clarinetist himself, and his grasp of these concertos is no less effective. All things considered, this is an exceptional release in every way.

— Fanfare

Classical Music

Classical Music

There are certain types of music that affirm and triumph. Others suggest a distance, a gentle journey towards far-off lands. Jérôme Combier is of this race of vagabonds. His music plunges the listener into a deep, rarefied atmosphere, dense with multiple, ghostly apparitions that set the imagination free. Here and there, a line of shadows interferes between the real voices, as if coming out of nowhere. Straight away, Combier’s music does away with the references of pitches, the distinction between sounds, breaths and friction, gone into more deeply with the electronics and closely connected to rainfalls of sand, murmurs of the wind… The electronics have this function, eroding the sonority borne by the instruments, diluting harmonies and scales in gentle saturations, sounds loaded with grain. The works brought together in this album, performed by the nec plus ultra of the music of our time, immerse us in a diaphanous glow. This is a rare recording of the highest quality!

Classical Music

Luigi Nono’s late style, a world of sharply-etched, strikingly sparse sound forms set against a background of silence, made a deep impression on the younger Wolfgang Rihm, whose works from the mid-80s onwards show clearly the imprint of the Italian master’s visionary clarity. + This recording of works for differing ensembles of solo voices shows another commonly held trait: passionate engagement with their fellow human beings, giving rise to a music of searing and shocking directness. + This new disc features music that has been a part of the EXAUDI ensemble’s lifeblood since its foundation.

The supernatural drifts of the compositions brought together in this recording, served by the power and playing technique of Severine Ballon, reveal unexpected facets of expressiveness in the contemporary cello. Fully engaged in the renewal of its repertoire, Severine Ballon especially favors conversing and working with the composers, in the intimacy of the 'sound factory'. Having initiated numerous creations to which this recital admirably bears witness, here she offers us a tailor-made program in the heart of the compositional process. Once again, what could have been likened to risk-taking allows Severine Ballon to affirm, forcefully and with conviction, her artistic identity, her commitment and her very particular place in the world of the contemporary cello.

Classical Music

What is fascinating in the music of Pascal Dusapin is the unrestrained energy that radiates from his music, the compact and radical intensity of the sound structures and the clear sense of form of the music in which a singular expressivity is achieved, where the voice of the ‘other’ — the otherness of the cello or clarinet — is expressed. Arne Deforce is renowned for his passionate and exceptional performances of contemporary and experimental music. His inventive programmes explore new musical forms of expression in which the act of an uninhibited creative listening is privileged. In this album, his interpretation is filled with a pure energy, an authentic and personal sound universe that is developed in highly expressive structures of sound and performed with an unbelievable energy that is both ferocious and joyous. Clarinetist Benjamin Dieltjens is mainly active as a chamber music player (on historical instruments as well as in the classical and new repertoire) and is regularly invited as such at many international festivals. In 2008 he was invited to be principal clarinet at the Royal Concertgebouw Orchestra Amsterdam.

Quatuor Schumann and Gyula Stuller propose a truly fresh and transparent reading of these two masterpieces of Robert Schumann's literature for piano and strings. Unanimously celebrated by the critics for their first Chausson-Fauré record, published under the Aeon label, this young ensemble of Swiss musicians shows perfect delicacy and clarity, as well as hypersensitive romanticism. Indeed, one can hardly wish for a more appropriate or more complete vision of what constitutes the true spirit of chamber music, where each individual surpasses himself without ever losing the unity of the group.