Recent listening – quick takes « Secret Geometry

Recent listening – quick takes

Published October 26, 2011 Uncategorized 1 Comment
Tags: Bridge Records, George Crumb, Miles Davis, Thomas Adés

A few items, new and old, that I have enjoyed recently:

Thomas Adès: Tevot, Violin Concerto, Three Studies from Couperin, Dances from Powder Her Face. The first two pieces are major statements. Tevot – the name means “ark” or a musical measure – is a big single movement orchestra piece, thickly layered, recalling Ligeti in its density; the concerto is of necessity more lightly scored. Both pieces share some of the same interests in repeated, layered cycles – both have memorable slowly descending quasi-tonal chord progressions – not unlike the infinitely unfolding slow music in Adès’ Asyla. The “non-tonal” or “quasi-tonal” successions of tonal chords recall some of the modal effects of Vaughan Williams, of all people, as well as some of John Adams’s preferred harmonies. Probably the neo-Riemannian harmonic analysis that has been in vogue for a bit (identifying compositional strategies that change just a note or two when moving from chord to chord) would work well on these passages in Adès.

Miles Davis: “Four” and More. Classic live material from 1964, with George Coleman, Herbie Hancock, Ron Carter and Tony Williams (only 18 at the time). Davis and his colleagues were done a disservice by whoever compiled so many insanely fast pieces into a single album. It is pretty hard to take straight through, but in smaller doses it is astonishing. I especially liked the energetic and constantly varied work of Williams. He is a very active player, but there is an airborne quality to the sound he gets from his set that keeps his playing from being overwhelming.

George Crumb: The Ghosts of the Alhambra, Voices From a Forgotten World. Volume 15 in the Complete Crumb Edition being issued by Bridge Records offers two vocal pieces. Alhambra returns to Crumb’s beloved Lorca, in settings for baritone, guitar and percussion, while Forgotten World is the fifth in Crumb’s cycle of American Songbooks, arrangements of traditional American tunes for voice (in this case, baritone Patrick Mason and mezzo Jamie Van Eyck) and a percussion orchestra manned by four players, plus amplified piano. Members of Orchestra 2001, led by James Freeman, are old hands at Crumb’s music, and the performances are superb. In the last stanza of the last song, “The Demon Lover”, the mezzo sings “And what hills, what hills are those, my love, Those hills so dark and low? and the baritone replies, “Those are the hills of Hell my love, Where you and I must go.” Crumb’s setting is appropriately disturbing and profoundly creepy.

1 Response to “Recent listening – quick takes”

Feed for this Entry Trackback Address

1 Voices from the Heartland « Secret Geometry – James Primosch's blog Trackback on January 29, 2012 at 1:06 pm

James Primosch, composer

When honoring him with its Goddard Lieberson Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters noted that "A rare economy of means and a strain of religious mysticism distinguish the music of James Primosch... Through articulate, transparent textures, he creates a wide range of musical emotion." Andrew Porter stated in The New Yorker that Primosch "scores with a sure, light hand" and critics for the New York Times, the Chicago Sun-Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the Dallas Morning News have characterized his music as "impressive", "striking", "grandly romantic", "stunning" and "very approachable".

Primosch’s compositional voice encompasses a broad range of expressive types. His music can be intensely lyrical, as in the song cycle Holy the Firm or dazzlingly angular as in Secret Geometry for piano and electronic sound. His affection for jazz is reflected in works like the Piano Quintet, while his work as a church musician informs the many pieces in his catalog based on sacred songs or religious texts.

His music has been performed by the Chicago Symphony, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the St. Paul Chamber Orchestra, the Lydian, Cavani, Cassatt, Ying, and Miami string quartets, the 21st Century Consort, the New York New Music Ensemble, Network for New Music, Dawn Upshaw, Lisa Saffer, Janice Felty, and Lambert Orkis. Twelve of his compositions have been recorded for Albany, Azica, Bard, Bridge, CRI, Centaur, Innova, and New World labels, with new discs of vocal and choral works planned.

David Patrick Stearns on “Songs for Adam”

If there's anything out there like Primosch's Songs of Adam, I haven't heard it - though the music wears its singularity lightly, with no need to express itself radically. It has a confidence of expression that comes of Primosch's having written a steady stream of song cycles since the late 1990s. Composers are still drawing legitimate inspiration from poets of the increasingly distant past, such as Walt Whitman, but Primosch pushes both himself and thus his listeners onto new ground with Susan Stewart's verse, which are called songs in their printed version because they suggest music, especially in the first poem, in which Adam is stuttering his way into existence.

Both poet and composer share an ability to contemplate how basic elements of existence might feel for the first time, and the duo know how to capture that in their respectively cultivated vocabularies, with an emotional rightness that never becomes too analytical.

In fact, Primosch enters the Korngold zone when describing Adam's intoxication with the word. Though words are set dramatically and in ways that are well written for the voice, the best moments are in the masterly orchestration, which gives an extra percussive spark to moments of discovery and unflinchingly confronts the agony of Adam's expulsion from Eden.

The pale strings capture his disappointment in the real world in an overall dramatic arc that's almost epic, going from the unimaginable (the beauty of Eden) to the unthinkable (the world's first children, Abel and Cain, and the world's first fratricide).
-Philadelphia Inquirer, May 2, 2010

Secret Geometry – James Primosch's blog