Jim McNeely: ‘Primal Colors’
Frankfurt Radio Symphony; Frankfurt Radio Bigband (Challenge Records)
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music Classical or YouTube Music
Jim McNeely — jazz composer, pianist and educator, and resident writer for the Village Vanguard’s house orchestra — died in September at 76. But thankfully he remained active during his final months. According to the composer and pianist Ethan Iverson, his former student, there’s more big-band work from McNeely’s pen still to see the light of day. Until that hits, you can catch up with his recent collaboration with two of Frankfurt’s radio ensembles: one symphonic, the other a swinging band.
McNeely’s writing for both groups yields pleasure from the first number, “Black.” After a brooding opening, he steers some tangy orchestral sonorities into a section possessed of American groove. And, after some vivid soloing from Frankfurt’s improvising cohort, there’s some glorious blended playing from both halves of the call sheet. “Red” is another highlight, with its keen movement between spartan pulses in the orchestral strings, melodic passages for brasses and reeds, and some electric guitar soloing of bluesy power. This distinctive sensibility — one informed by McNeely’s wide-ranging investigation of Olivier Messiaen, Bela Bartok and Chick Corea alike — lives on through his students, like Iverson and Darcy James Argue. Still, McNeely himself will be missed.
— Seth Colter Walls
‘Joy to the World’
Chanticleer (Delos)
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music Classical or YouTube Music
Listening to this new holiday album by the stalwart men’s a cappella ensemble Chanticleer is a bit like seeing a familiar landscape transformed by overnight snowfall. Sophisticated new arrangements make even the most well-worn Christmas carols feel subtly altered and freshly luminous. On this elegantly meditative program, carols are interwoven with Renaissance motets and newly commissioned works that conjure a sense of wonder and stillness. Unifying it all is Chanticleer’s hallmark powdery blend and intonation so pure that close dissonances produce faint, shimmering beats.
You can hear those little tremors in the suspenseful beginning of Amanda Taylor’s arrangement of “O Come, All Ye Faithful,” set over a glacial drone from which the melody rises like breath materializing on cold air. Or notice the subtle vibrancy they add to the slowed-down, dreamlike title track, arranged by the group’s own Adam Brett Ward.
The pared-down textures of the Renaissance selections, including a darkly glowing “Ecce Virgo Concipiet,” by Cristóbal de Morales, are rendered with clarity and warmth. Joanna Marsh’s triptych “Winter’s Garland” adds a secular perspective on the wonders of the season. The result is a beautifully understated album with just enough strangeness to cut through the holiday glut.
— Corinna da Fonseca-Wollheim
Lachenmann: Works for String Quartet
Quatuor Diotima (Pentatone)
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There is a stark, almost ascetic clarity to Helmut Lachenmann’s three string quartets. Listening to the ensemble Quatuor Diotima move through these pieces, you begin to sense that the usual musical coordinates — melody, harmony, sentiment — have been harshly removed, and that what remains is something closer to the skeleton of listening itself, the way a city is revealed not through landmarks but through infrastructure.
This collection of Lachenmann’s string quartets comes in the composer’s 90th birthday year, as well as during the 25th anniversary of Quatuor Diotima’s relationship with him. The first quartet, “Gran Torso,” opens not so much with notes as with gestures, a breath against string and a bow against bout, all with friction held just long enough to agitate the ear. Moving on to the second, “Reigen Seliger Geister,” the ear adjusts and becomes attuned to Lachenmann’s small disturbances. The third, “Grido,” feels almost expansive by comparison, though the expansiveness is the kind you find in winter light: cold, exact, undeniable.
Throughout, the music resists narrative, yet forms its own kind of logic. What Quatuor Diotima offers here is not comfort but conviction, a performance rooted in the belief that art matters most when it unsettles.
— Arya Roshanian
Thomas Adès: ‘The Exterminating Angel’ Symphony & Violin Concerto
Minnesota Orchestra; Leila Josefowicz, violin; Thomas Sondergard, conductor (Pentatone)
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Among a plethora of skills possessed by Thomas Adès is his ability to recycle music from his stage works. His first two operas provided the source for a number of self-standing instrumental works. The newest entry is a four-movement symphony derived from “The Exterminating Angel,” his 2016 opera based on Buñuel’s 1962 film, in which a group of dinner-party guests inexplicably find themselves unable to leave their hosts’ mansion. You hear them arrive in the first movement, “Entrances,” though Adès’s slippery rhythms provide an early clue that things are amiss, as does the fact that the arrival seems to happen twice. The impression is deepened by the manically repetitive slide drum in “Marches” and the elegantly tragic undertone of “Berceuse.” The finale, “Waltzes,” gathers musical fragments from across the opera and builds them into an edifice of terrifying power, like Ravel’s “La Valse.”
Joining this rich new work is Leila Josefowicz’s lithe account of Adès’s Violin Concerto, which, it is hard to believe, is now two decades old. Other recordings have brought out the daring and originality of this fantastic piece, but Josefowicz, along with the Minnesota Orchestra and Thomas Sondergard, excels at reminding us how sheerly beautiful it is.
— David Weininger
Galina Ustvolskaya: Symphonies Nos. 1-5
London Philharmonic Orchestra; Christian Karlsen, conductor (Bis)
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music Classical or YouTube Music
Galina Ustvolskaya’s symphonies are a good kind of cacophony. Listening to her music is like stepping into a room where the air is stripped of anything unnecessary. You become aware, almost immediately, of the pressure of the space — how it narrows, how it insists.
In the London Symphony Orchestra’s survey of her symphonies, recorded under Christian Karlsen, Ustvolskaya does not guide so much as demand. The first moves with haunting solemnity, its children’s voices drifting in like uncanny fragments. The later ones grow more austere, pared down to their hardest edges: the piano hammered as if staking territory, the winds forming walls of sound that feel less like accompaniment than a warning. Nothing about it is gentle.
In its gripping performances, the London Philharmonic’s forces move with implacable clarity and methodical restraint. Piano clusters land like blunt objects, brass eruptions flare and vanish, and silence itself feels charged. By the end, what endures is not emotion in the usual sense but a sensation of having stood close to something immovable. Ustvolskaya doesn’t offer solace. Instead, she offers honesty, and sometimes that is the more enduring gift.
— Arya Roshanian
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