Hans Otte: ‘The Book of Sounds’
Conor Hanick, piano (Il Pirata)
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music Classical or YouTube Music
You can think of the German composer Hans Otte’s “The Book of Sounds” (1982) as a sort of postwar counterpart to Bach’s “The Well-Tempered Clavier.” Bach sought to survey the manifold possibilities of tonal harmony and counterpoint; Otte set out to explore composition as sonic space. What happens when you rebalance sound and silence? Or isolate one voice of the musical fabric? In 12 parts, “The Book of Sounds” explores this terrain with a language that sounds almost hopelessly consonant — a rejoinder, perhaps to the then-dominance of serialism. Minimalism is the most obvious influence in the music’s repeating patterns, but older composers like Debussy and Satie materialize in the music’s shimmering beauty.
But the piece is also meticulously structured, something that comes through in Conor Hanick’s superb new recording. It grows gradually more complex and dissonant as it progresses. Its midpoint — a wandering, chromatic line with no accompaniment — comes as a quiet shock. Hanick’s care with the score is audible on both the macro and micro levels. Above all, he reveals how much there is to discover in this seemingly simple art for a listener who, Otte wrote, “wants to be completely one with sounds.”
— David Weininger
Douglas J. Cuomo: ‘a raft, the sky, the wild sea’
Joe Lovano, saxophone; Winston Salem Symphony; Michelle Merrill, conductor (Blue Cloud)
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Recently, I wrote about the health of “classical Americana” in light of Carnegie Hall concerts that offered works by Duke Ellington and John Adams. Among the responses I received was an email from the composer Douglas J. Cuomo. He included a link to his latest concerto. I’m glad he did.
As performed by the Winston-Salem Symphony and the storied jazz tenor saxophonist Joe Lovano, Cuomo’s “a raft, the sky, the wild sea” makes for a strong half-hour of listening. Though often hushed, it also features surges of energy that draw succor from the language of swing. And while the orchestral aesthetic on offer has a noirish interest in seduction, it’s never obvious during moments of harmonic swell.
This capacity to seduce may have roots in Cuomo’s past career in scoring for the screen. (He contributed music to “Homicide: Life on the Street” and the theme song to “Sex and the City.”) The harmonic distinctness may come from his collaborations with improvisers, and his professed admiration for Lutoslawski. Listen for the way Cuomo’s orchestral material informs Lovano’s lovely (and largely improvised) solo part. This composer has similar projects in development for Sullivan Fortner and Tyshawn Sorey. I’ll await those.
— Seth Colter Walls
Mozart: Piano Concertos Nos. 9 & 22
Jan Lisiecki, piano; Bamberg Symphony Orchestra; Manfred Honeck, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)
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For much of the 18th and 19th centuries, composers believed that specific keys carried specific meanings. Mozart thought that E-flat major evoked nobility and grandeur, traits that define his two piano concertos in that key, No. 9 and No. 22, which are grouped on this album from the Canadian pianist Jan Lisiecki.
The Bamberg Symphony Orchestra, under Manfred Honeck, begins No. 9 with a striking chord and a swoop of sound, then Lisiecki dances in with an elegant touch that leads the ear toward each long phrase’s conclusion. His playing evidences more spontaneity and assurance than in his earlier Mozart album. The dialogues with the orchestra during the Andantino second movement are thoughtful and balanced, and his precision and exuberance delight in the finale, with its little touches of opera buffa.
Lisiecki — who has said that he prioritizes simple, clear lines in his approach — is more expansive in the No. 22, which adds a pair of clarinets to darken the timbre. He relaxes his tempos at times to give its more introspective moments their due, matched by Honeck’s slightly fuzzier, more Romantic approach. Both tighten their rhythms for the prancing final rondo, made famous by the film “Amadeus.”
— Jeremy Reynolds
Dora Pejacevic: Complete Symphonic Works
Annika Schlicht, mezzo-soprano; Martina Filjak, piano; Staatskapelle Weimar; Ivan Repusic, conductor (Audite)
Listen on Spotify, Apple Music Classical or YouTube Music
You may not have heard of the composer Dora Pejacevic (1885-1923), but she cuts an imposing figure in Croatian music. An ambassador of late-Romantic style, she brought the orchestral song into her country’s repertoire and wrote its first modern symphony and concerto. These works, alongside the entirety of Pejacevic’s orchestral output, appear on this compelling album.
An admirer of metaphysical poetry, Pejacevic longed to escape into a creative world in which the spirit would transcend the bodily. She never could. World War I, whose violence she witnessed firsthand as a nurse, brought the physical roaring back into her music, while her own life was cut short in childbirth. Pejacevic’s Piano Concerto is full of aching ascending figures and elegant melodic eddies, but the pianist Martina Filjak brings out the percussive intensity that grounds the work. In “Liebeslied,” whose lush but limpid harmonies recall Mahler, Pejacevic sets a text by Rainer Maria Rilke about lovers resonating as one string, unable to escape the pull of the body even as their souls long for freedom. As sung with rapturous intensity by Annika Schlicht, this piece is a perfect introduction the tensions between earth and spirit that define Pejacevic’s music.
— Gabrielle Ferrari
Dvorak: Early Songs
Martina Janková, soprano; Barbara Maria Willi, fortepiano (Navona)
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There is a willful modesty about Dvorak’s art songs, many of which remain obscure compared with his symphonies and chamber music. They arrive without ceremony, but they do insist on being heard.
In this album, a compilation of Dvorak’s early music for voice and piano, the soprano Martina Jankova treats each movement not as juvenilia but something closer to marginalia: brief, searching notations in which feeling appears before it has been fully named. She lets the songs’ simplicity stand, shaping phrases with a careful, almost conversational sense of pacing. This allows the music to breathe without ever losing direction. More impressive is the silvery transparency to her timbre, both clean and unforced, bright at the core but sharp at its edges, which lends even the smallest, most uncomplicated phrase a tensile strength.
What lingers, though, is her understanding of the texts — earnest, circling themes of longing and distance with a kind of unguarded sincerity, or the vulnerability of perhaps saying too much, or not enough. The result is less about projection than intuition: the quiet discipline of knowing exactly what needs to be said, and no more.
— Arya Roshanian
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