Republic of Strings.
Darol Anger and the American Fiddle Ensemble: Darol Anger, fiddle, baritone
violin, octave mandolin; Brittany Haas, five-string fiddle; Scott Nygaard,
guitar; and Rushad Eggleston and Natilie Haas, cello. (Compass, 4372-2)
Darol Anger's latest CD
is all over the map—literally. The master fiddler has gone searching
the globe for inspiration for his new American Fiddle Ensemble disc.
From Africa to Finland, Brazil to Beirut, Anger has assembled the articles
of confederation for what he's dubbed a Republic of Strings.
Think of this group as Musicians without Borders.
Anger (a corresponding editor
for Strings) has brought together some fine traveling companions
in the American Fiddle Ensemble: guitarist Scott Nygaard, 16-year-old
prodigy fiddler Brittany Haas, and cellist Rushad Eggleston (who also
performs with Anger in the Cajun and Appalachian-influenced Fiddlers
4), with cellist Natalie Haas pulling her own weight on three tracks.
Sara Watkins of Nickel Creek hitches a ride for vocals on Stevie Wonder's
"Higher Ground" (see how eclectic this disc is?), Laurie Lewis
does similar honors on Joni Mitchell's "Help Me," and bassist
Todd Sickafoose contributes string bass to five tracks.
As excursions into world
music, these performances are not exactly pure. Rather, Anger and company
have absorbed these many musical styles and made them their own. This
is not one of those old Nonesuch Explorer albums, and that's a good
thing; had the American Fiddle Ensemble been striving too hard for authenticity,
this might have been little more than a musical costume party, a bunch
of suburban Americans masquerading as Finns and Africans.
The arrangements, mostly
by Anger with some by Nygaard (who also contributes one original), are
dense and rich, but they never sound clotted. The playing is energetic
and alert, and all the musicians boast spot-on intonation, but there's
a wonderful ease and comfort to the performances.
These people aren't showing
off; they're making music.
Their refinement becomes
apparent right off the bat with Liz Carroll's Celtic "Lost in the
Loop," uptempo but easygoing, with excitement building through
the gradually thickening texture rather than virtuoso fireworks. Brittany
Haas turns in especially impressive work on "Grigsby's Hornpipe,"
but like Anger, she never preens or struts.
Other highlights include
a fabulous solo by cellist Eggleston on a cover of Bill Monroe's "Old
Dangerfield"—he maintains a great bluegrass sound and feel,
even while subtly evoking the tone of an electric guitar—and the
mostly pizzicato African song "Dzinomwa Muna Save," in which
the group sounds exactly like a thumb piano.
With Republic of Strings,
Anger and his mostly young colleagues have planted their flags on at
least four continents. In the process, they've proved that by becoming
citizens of the world, no matter what their musical inspiration may
be, they always sound right at home.
—James Reel
Boccherini:
Guitar Quintets, String Quartet.
Europa Galante: Fabio Biondi and Lorenzo Colitto, violins; Ernesto Braucher,
viola; Maurizio Naddeo, cello; Giangiacomo Pinardi, guitar. (Virgin
Veritas, 7243 5456072)
Continuing his quest to
"valorize the Italian repertoire"—even when the music
in question was composed in Spain—Fabio Biondi, along with members
of his magnificent early-music ensemble Europa Galante, has produced
another sterling recording of chamber pieces by the prolific Luigi Boccherini
(1743—1805). The two quintets for guitar—Quintet IV "Fandango"
in D major, G.448 and "La ritirata di Madrid" in C major,
G.453—which bookend the much earlier String Quartet in G Minor,
G.194, date from a less prosperous period in the composer's life when
he lacked a regular patron. Transcribed from earlier cello and piano
quintets to accommodate a guitar-playing marquis, these two quintets
(Boccherini composed six in this untitled series) seamlessly cobble
together movements from different compositions. The simple addition
of guitar to the standard string quartet mix produces a rich, exotic
sound with inescapable Spanish overtones, and just in case we miss those,
Boccherini infuses the quintets' concluding movements with themes from
Spanish popular music. An energetic fandango—replete with castanets—caps
the D-major quintet and scene-painting variations on a military march
close the C major. The three-movement quartet, the last of a set of
six in Op. 24, provides a brighter, more traditional counterpoint to
the guitar quintets, especially in the minuet that concludes the piece.
Still, as the liner notes suggest, Boccherini explores some ideas here
that will later be associated with romanticism. Exquisitely performed
and produced, this CD adds another star to Europa Galante's constellation
of fine recordings.
—James
Keough
Brahms:
Piano Quartet; Schumann: Fantasiestücke.
Martha Argerich, piano; Gidon Kremer, violin; Yuri Bashmet, viola; Mischa
Maisky, cello. (Deutsche Grammophon, 289 463 700-2)
This disc offers an unusual
approach to chamber music for an ensemble dubbed the Platinum Quartet.
When four high-powered, world-class stars get together, the result is
likely to be a display of disparate styles and personalities rather
than an intimate collaboration, even if they are friends and, in their
own way, all play wonderfully. Kremer's tone is lean, with a narrow
vibrato; Maisky's is lush with a wide one; Bashmet's is dry, and this
is especially disconcerting in the unisons. Kremer's style is restrained,
while Bashmet's is detached. Argerich and Maisky are passionate romantics.
Brahms' instructions for the Piano Quartet, Op. 25, are
notoriously sketchy, inviting willful liberties,
so the playing is unbridled, almost hysterical, with excessive dynamic
contrast, tempo, and tempo changes. The Gypsy Finale is quite wild,
and very exciting. The balance discriminates against the violin. In
Schumann's unjustly neglected four pieces—the Fantasiestücke
for piano trio—the two slow ones abound with beguiling melodies,
the others are whimsical, mischievous, spooky. The playing is much more
simple and natural here; the balance is good.
—Edith
Eisler
Beethoven:
The Complete Cycle of Trios, Volume Two.
Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio: Joseph Kalichstein, piano; Jaime Laredo,
violin; Sharon Robinson, cello. (Arabesque, Z6765-2, two CDs)
Volume 1 of the Beethoven
cycle features the late trios; Volume 2 comprises the early ones. Except
for No. 3 in C minor, which in its tension, drama, and intensity foreshadows
later works in that key, they are among Beethoven's sunniest compositions
and a pure joy for performers and listeners. The playing, though occasionally
a bit excessive, is otherwise excellent: brilliant, charming, expressive,
poised. The balance is better on the second disc. Highlights are Op.
1, Nos. 1 and 2, the Finale of Op. 11, and the little B-flat movement.
—E.E.
Maldoror.
Erik Friedlander, cello. (Brassland, HWY-005)
Best known for his pivotal
role in radically revamping both the concept and sound of jazz-with-strings,
cellist Erik Friedlander steps out from his usual collaborative contexts
with such sympathetic musicians as trumpeter Dave Douglas, pianist Myra
Melford, and saxophonists Marty Ehrlich, Ellery Eskelin, and John Zorn
for his first solo recording. The 43-year-old
New Yorker hasn't altogether forsworn artistic partnership, however,
working closely on Maldoror with producer Michael Montes, who
provided Friedlander with minimal direction and ten evocative Isidore
Ducasse poems as springboards for his improvisations.
Writing in the mid-19th
century as Comte de Lautréamont, Ducasse created alternately
luminous and shadowy surrealistic images in a collection titled Chants
du Maldoror. Tapping an astounding technical facility that trumps
virtuosity with expressiveness at every turn, Friedlander translates
Lautréamont's lines—"He contemplates the moon which
pours upon his breast a cone of ecstatic beams," "The wind
groans its languorous tones through the leaves, and the owl intones
his deep lament," "From my nape, as from a dungheap, sprouts
an enormous toadstool with umbelliferous peduncles"—into unrelentingly
riveting musical passages ranging in duration from three to five-and-a-half
minutes.
Whether playing pizzicato
with appropriately dry precision on "O Stern Mathematics"
or drawing lush and dark textures from his strings with a now dolorous,
now exuberant arco technique on "I Am Filthy," "The Palace
of Pleasures," or "Flights of Starlings," Friedlander
always comes up with sonic phrasing as dramatic and redolent as Lautréamont's
verbiage. When called
for, as on "A Sewing Machine and an Umbrella," he fashions
a subtle and suggestive soundtrack from a combination of extended techniques,
rhythmic variations, and canny manipulations of dynamics. Lautréamont's
foreboding fantasias and Friedlander's avant-garde background could
well have conspired to create some sort of off-putting gothic horror
story. Instead, Maldoror is a gracefully plotted series of elegantly
rendered, masterfully textured, and, indeed, simply beautiful tales.
—Derk
Richardson
Crumb:
Black Angels, Unto the Hills.
Miró Quartet: Daniel Ching and Sandy Yamamoto, violins; John
Largess, viola; Joshua Gindele, cello; with Ann Crumb, soprano; and
James Freeman conducting Orchestra 2001. (Bridge, 9139)
George Crumb's string quartet
Black Angels—a dark Vietnam War–inspired parable—a
seminal work of its time, and for that very reason you might expect
it to seem hopelessly dated three decades on, what with the amplification
"to the threshold of pain," the numerology, the maracas and
tam-tams, the chanting of numbers in Swahili and Japanese—that's
all so 1970. Yet Black Angels holds up remarkably well,
especially in this new recording by the Miró Quartet. From the
terrifying "electric insect" music of the opening pages to
the mournful austerity of the mock-viol consort quotation of Schubert's
"Death and the Maiden," the Miró Quartet exhibits absolute
security through every metrical challenge and special effect, and imparts
a real spring and bounce to most of the rhythms. Black Angels
has been recorded several times, including by the Kronos and Brodsky
Quartets, but never before has it sounded quite this coherent, meaningful,
and musical.
Occupying the first two-thirds
of this disc is Crumb's 2002 Unto the Hills, a cycle of Appalachian
songs of "sadness, yearning, and innocence." Crumb maintains
the integrity of the original vocal lines of such songs as "Poor
Wayfaring Stranger" and "Ten Thousand Miles" (performed
here by the composer's daughter Ann, an actress and jazz singer), but
bathes them in rich, mysterious, exotic, atmospheric percussion.
—J.R.
A
Love Song. Percy
Heath, double bass and cello; Jeb Patton, piano; Peter Washington, bass;
Albert "Tootie" Heath, drums and percussion. (Daddy Jazz,
no catalog number)
Hard to imagine that this
is 80-year-old bassist Percy Heath's debut as a bandleader. For more
than half a century, this jazz stalwart has been a fixture on the music
scene, most notably as a longtime member of the Modern Jazz Quartet
and as a coleader of a band with brother Tootie Heath, but also performing
and recording with Miles Davis, Ornette Coleman, Stan Getz, and many
others. These sessions, recorded in 2002, showcase Heath's gorgeous
tone, his lyrical and rhythmic genius (check out the extraordinary intimacy
of Heath's bass solo on the title track), his mastery of a wide range
of bass and cello techniques, and his considerable talent as a composer.
He reinvents the John Lewis classic "Django" and swings hard
on Sir Roland Hanna's rollicking "Century Rag," but Heath
absolutely shines on "Suite for Pop," a 13-minute four-movement
work recorded here for the first time in its entirety, in which he delivers
a master class on classiness. A must-hear for any jazz-bass player.
—Greg
Cahill
Malipiero,
Debussy, Ravel, Shulman.
Stuyvesant String Quartet: Sylvan Shulman and Bernard Robbins, violins;
Ralph Hersh, viola; Alan Shulman, cello; with Benny Goodman, clarinet.
(Bridge, 9137)
Fifty years ago, the Stuyvesant
Quartet was one of America's most outstanding chamber ensembles. But
the group, founded in 1938 by brothers Sylvan and Alan Shulman, disbanded
in 1954, moments before the dawn of stereo, and so it has remained of
interest only to collectors of scratchy old records. That's a shame,
because the recordings just reissued by Bridge, mostly made in 1950–51,
attest to a group that could boast excellent, intelligently varied tone,
superb ensemble, great involvement in a score's details without mannerism,
and wide musical interests.
The Malipiero Quartet No.
1, "Rispetti e Strambotti," is typical of the group's constant
excursions into then-contemporary music: rhythmically alive, atmospheric,
and only slightly sour harmonically (think Prokofiev). The Stuyvesant
brings both warmth and intensity to Debussy's sole string quartet, and
a superb variety of tone color to Ravel's. Alan Shulman's Rendezvous
for Clarinet and String Quartet is a pleasant, light five-minute bonbon
written for a radio broadcast with Benny Goodman; the version here is
taken from that 1946 show, Goodman's only performance of the piece.
It's too bad nobody was
able to locate the original master tapes of the three full-length quartets;
the sound, dubbed from copies—and in one case, from an LP—is
a bit duller than would be ideal for a group so timbrally variegated.
Nevertheless, the CD is fully listenable, and preserves the work of
a treasurable ensemble.
—J.R.
Michael
Hersch: Chamber Music.
Michael Hersch, piano; String Soloists of the Berlin Philharmonic. (Artemis/Vanguard
Classics, 1240)
This is the debut recording
of the chamber music of Michael Hersch (b. 1971), a composer of profound
works that evoke what the Wall Street Journal once called "sometimes
rhapsodic, sometimes crushing emotion." The first half of the disc
features two solo-piano works: Recordatio and Two Pieces for Piano.
The latter half harbors two exceptional string works: the duo After
Hölderlin's Hälfte des Lebens, featuring Matthew Hunter on
viola and David Riniker on cello; and Octet, featuring Hunter, Riniker,
and six other members of the powerful ensemble known as the String Soloists
of the Berlin Philharmonic. There is an unabashed sadness to this music.
The viola-and-cello duo was first performed during a September 11 memorial
concert held in December of 2001 at the Pantheon in Rome. Octet, a stark
11-movement piece, was inspired by the work of the tortured Austrian
expressionist poet Georg Trakl (1887—1914), who is believed to
have committed suicide while serving in the trenches during World War
I. Octet is rife with disturbing passages, yet somehow calming in the
long run. As author Nicholas Dawidoff writes in the liner notes, "It
is invigorating to spend time with someone who understands man's bleaker
impulses and who can take you to examine them with such assured perception."
This is a powerful, engaging, and most auspicious debut.
—G.C.
Short Takes
Original
Masters: The Singles.
(Deutsche Grammophon, 474576-2)
A lot of labels are repackaging
older material and raiding the vaults for buried treasure, but this
is a real treat. This two-CD set, part of the acclaimed Original Masters
series, gathers sides from 16 classical 45-rpm singles from the 1950s
(all recorded in glorious mono sound) and includes several rare recordings
found here for the first time on CD. The music is vibrant and refreshing
and unexpected. Among the string players are David and Igor Oistrakh,
Fritz Kreisler, and the Koeckert and Vegh Quartets. The bombastic take
on Rolf Liebermann's percussion-driven Furioso für Orchester, which
is as subtle as a firecracker, alone is worth the price of admission.
This disc is big-time fun.
Shalagaster.
Jenny Scheinman, violin. (Tzadik, 7709)
The best album to date from
violinist Jenny Scheinman features a talented back-up band (piano/harmonium,
bass, trumpet, and drums) on ten often moving original compositions
touched by tango, klezmer, jazz, and even Baroque pulses. Producer and
label chief John Zorn has created the most cohesive sound yet in Scheinman's
short solo career. This disc resonates with a spirit all its own. The
compositions "carry within them the mystery, history, heartbreak,
and humor of the American experience as lived through one at the margins
of culture, race, ideology, style, and spirituality," music critic
Thom Jurek has noted.
Cape
Breton Fiddle and Piano Music.
The Beaton Family of Mabou. (Smithsonian Folkways, 40507)
There's a jittery excitability
about the ebullient music found on the second volume of the Smithsonian's
new Cape Breton series that contributes to a unique sound. Fiddler Kinnon
Beaton, pianist wife Bettie, and their kin kick up their heels on this
16-track collection of strathspeys, jigs, and reels that blend traditional
Scottish dance rhythms with syncopated piano accompaniments. One highlight:
a medley featuring four fiddlers playing in unison to step dancers and
the beat of a pair of pounding pianos—a string-driven wall of sound
that must be heard to be believed.
—G.C.
