‘The Four Elements’
Brooklyn Rider (In a Circle)
This year, Brooklyn Rider is marking its 20th anniversary as one of the most adventurous string quartets, and this simply excellent recording makes for an ideal celebration.
Calling it a climate change album would put its contribution too simplistically, though it certainly is one. Cast in sections devoted to the ancient elements of earth, air, fire and water, it explores our relationship with the natural world through works by a gratifyingly broad range of composers, all writing in the last seven decades. The result is intellectually lucid, aesthetically omnivorous and emotionally draining — the rare musical protest at the destruction of our planet that actually succeeds as art.
There are post-World War II classics at its core — Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony and Dutilleux’s “Ainsi la Nuit,” performed with the passion and authority they deserve — but they in no way overshadow the six more contemporary pieces. There are worthwhile works by Dan Trueman, Andreia Pinto Correia and Conrad Tao, but three others stand out: the violinist Colin Jacobsen’s “A Short While To Be Here…,” an infectious celebration of American folk songs that nods to Ruth Crawford Seeger; Akshaya Tucker’s frightening “Hollow Flame,” an eloquent response to Californian wildfires and an elegy for the awesome beauty lost within them; and, to close, Osvaldo Golijov’s “Tenebrae,” which ends in quiet, rapt transfiguration, as if bringing us to a promise unknown. DAVID ALLEN
Kurtag: ‘Jatekok’
Pierre-Laurent Aimard, piano (Pentatone)
So much of Gyorgy Kurtag’s music exists in miniature form. Take, as examples, the “Kafka Fragments” for soprano and violin or “Signs, Games and Messages” for solo viola — assemblages of brief gestures crafted with microscopic attention to detail. The apogee of this affinity for the minute is “Jatekok” (Hungarian for “games”), a vast and growing collection of miniatures for two- and four-hand piano. In the booklet of Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s essential new recording, the composer calls them “diarylike short documents of my life”: homages to and remembrances of friends, brief contemplations, stories and scenes. All of them are written with the kind of fiercely exquisite craft evident in Kurtag’s entire catalog.
Working closely with Kurtag, Aimard chose 81 pieces from the 10 published books of “Jatekok,” as well as from the still-in-manuscript 11th book. Most are less than three minutes long; many are less than one. Each is a universe in microcosm, and Kurtag’s tone painting — “Falling Asleep,” “The Bunny and the Fox” — is astonishingly evocative. There are moods of irreverent humor, nostalgia and explosive energy. Given the number of memorials to Kurtag’s colleagues and loved ones, including his wife Marta, who died in 2019, large stretches of this set have a veil of sadness over them. Yet even at its darkest, you hear a composer reveling in what can be achieved with an absolute economy of means, and how vividly a dedicated performer can make it all come to life. DAVID WEININGER
‘Adjust’
Anzû Quartet (Cantaloupe)
Each project from the composer and multi-reed player Ken Thomson has been good news, whether he’s writing for chamber players or groups that bridge jazz improvisation and contemporary composition.
His streak continues on the Anzû Quartet’s debut album, with Thomson on clarinet, Ashley Bathgate on cello, Olivia De Prato on violin and Karl Larson on piano. Thomson’s three-movement “Uneasy” is first on the program and uses some minimalist strategies at its outset, unfurling melodic ideas through a series of not-quite repetitions. But, by the end of the first movement, you’ll encounter a flurrying world of motifs, not far removed from the fluidity of bebop. Brief pauses for plucked string activity prepare the listener for the austere, songful middle movement, before enjoyable group tumult returns in the finale.
Anna Webber’s five-movement “Adjust” follows. Like Thomson — with whom she has collaborated in the past — she’s a jazz-informed multi-instrumentalist, as well as a modern-composition enthusiast. Yet her tastes trend slightly more confrontational: The first two movements of “Adjust” have frequent recourse to striated ensemble exclamations. But in the fourth movement, when Thomson takes up Webber’s invitation to improvise over some mournful accompanying material, this composer’s range also seems well suited for inclusion in the lineage suggested by Messiaen’s “Quartet for the End of Time,” which first brought these players together. SETH COLTER WALLS
‘Oiseaux de Passage’
Natalie Dessay, soprano; Philippe Cassard, piano (La Dolce Volta)
Coloratura sopranos are often described as songbirds. Their voices flit, twitter and soar in quick bursts of notes. Once a voice loses its sparkle and flexibility, there aren’t many options left. So it’s rather poignant that Natalie Dessay, one of the 21st century’s most celebrated coloraturas, has named her album “Oiseaux de Passage,” or “Birds of Passage” — a nod, perhaps, to the cruel transience of her voice type.
The mind races to understand why a veteran soprano would cobble together an eclectic, 30-minute recital of French song, American opera and musical theater in which her vibrato drags and her timbre thins. But the song selection offers clues.
“Green Finch and Linnet Bird,” from Sondheim’s “Sweeney Todd,” an ingénue’s song about birds who sing despite their cages, feels a bit on the nose for an artist whose big temperament chafed against the confines of her smallish voice. Blanche DuBois’s “I Want Magic,” from André Previn’s “A Streetcar Named Desire,” is an aria of pitiful frailty and glamorous delusion; with Dessay, it becomes an artist’s credo wrapped in an elegy wrapped in an apology. “Magic, it’s what I try to give to people,” she mewls. In her prime, Dessay the stage animal certainly did.
The album’s last track, Poulenc’s “La Dame de Monte-Carlo,” a monologue set to text by Jean Cocteau, provides a different answer. Here, with an acerbic unsentimental tongue-lashing, Dessay sings forcefully about suicide when one is no longer young and beloved. If the album ponders her legacy, then Dessay would have the last word. OUSSAMA ZAHR
‘Shostakovich & Britten’
Sheku Kanneh-Mason, cello; Sinfonia of London; John Wilson, conductor; Isata Kanneh-Mason, piano (Decca)
In 2016, a 17-year-old cellist Sheku Kanneh-Mason triumphed at the BBC Young Musician of the Year competition, playing Shostakovich in every round. Nine years and a royal wedding later, he is a star on the international concert scene. This blistering account of Shostakovich’s Cello Concerto No. 2, paired with probing readings of the composer’s Cello Sonata in D minor (Op. 40) and Britten’s Cello Sonata in C (Op. 65), testifies to the uncompromising refinement and seriousness of a musician who has quietly matured under the media glare. That spotlight encompasses his siblings, some of whom are embarking on their own musical careers. On this recording, his sister Isata Kanneh-Mason is his eloquent chamber partner at the piano.
Both Britten and Shostakovich demand a wide range of tempers from a cellist, including angular wit and a kind of self-imposed reserve that clouds even the more expansive lyrical passages. In the sardonic middle movement of the concerto, the jaunty impudence of Kanneh-Mason’s playing is matched by the barely controlled wildness of the Sinfonia of London under the direction of John Wilson, while the final Allegretto alternates between viscous melancholy and sputters of martial impatience. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM
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