Memorable recordings in 2015
2015 was the year of my sharpest departure from the nominations for the GRAMMY awards. My assessment article about those nominations revealed a generous amount of overlap with recordings that had been discussed on this site; but, since my criteria for this particular article involves the memorability of my listening experiences, I was more than a little dejected to realize that I could only recall what I had written about most of those recordings with the aid of a search engine. Indeed, the most vivid memory did not involve a nomination for a recording. Rather it was the nomination for producer Judith Sherman, one of whose projects in 2015 was Anthony de Mare's recording Liaisons: Re-Imagining Sondheim from the Piano. While I would not begrudge Sherman her nomination, my personal memories were primarily of de Mare and his project, rather than the production work behind the album.
Indeed, much of what was memorable as I skimmed the headlines of my articles on this site involved what might be called "imaginative rethinking," exercised in a variety of different domains. Most imaginative of all may have been Zoë Black, Assistant Leader of the Australian Chamber Orchestra. She asked jazz pianist Joe Chindamo to add a violin line to Johann Sebastian Bach's BWV 988 set of 30 variations on an aria best known as the "Goldberg" variations. Chindamo clearly knew his Bach very well; and, more specifically, he knew how to think about each of Bach's variations as a contrapuntal fabric involving two or more voices. It is not too hard to imagine Bach himself presenting one of his students with a sample of counterpoint and challenging that student to add another line; so, from that point of view, Chindamo was basically a Bach student separated from the master by several centuries.
The results were released on a recording entitled The New Goldberg Variations. One has to listen to only the first few variations to appreciate that Chindamo's efforts were anything but a clever parlor trick. Even if not all of the notes were written by Bach himself, this album is more about Bach than many of the recordings of BWV 988 made by ostensibly more "serious" pianists.
An entirely different approach to rethinking can be found in a new Intakt album of jazz pianist Aki Takase released this past February. The title of the album is Hotel Zauberberg; and it basically amounts to using the time-based medium of making music to consider the extent to which Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain is a story about time itself. The result is an eighteen-movement suite for violin and piano with eleven movements written by Takase and five written collaboratively with violinist Ayumi Paul. The remaining two movements are Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's K. 1 minuet in G major and the Preludio movement that begins Johann Sebastian Bach's solo violin partita in E major (BWV 1006).
I have to confess that, while all of my other Takase albums sit very comfortably in my jazz section, I felt the only appropriate place for this one was in my classical section, where she could rub shoulders comfortably with Toru Takemitsu. I was not surprised that the GRAMMY judges did not know what to make of the album; but, in my book, this was one of the most absorbing recordings of recently composed music that I encountered in 2015. I hope that Takase and Paul can take this on the recital circuit and bring this music to concert stages in the United States. When it comes to original composition, this music scales a very high bar.
Another new approach to composition could be found on the new MicroFest Records label. MicroFest calls itself "The world's premier festival of microtonal music." It was founded in 1997 by John Schneider and is co-directed by Schneider, pianist Aron Kallay, and composer Bill Alves. One of the first releases on this label was an album of two compositions for violin and gamelan by Alves entitled Mystic Canyon. Alves was far from the first to explore the microtonal possibility of a violin playing in a gamelan setting. Lou Harrison is probably his best known predecessor. However, each of the two compositions on Mystic Canyon has a distinctively unique voice that would not be confused with the work of other composers drawn to Javanese music. This music becomes fixed in memory because lends itself to repeat listening experiences.
However, where modernism is concerned, the "mother lode" for 2015 would have to be all the attention doled out to Pierre Boulez. Most important was the decision of Universal Music Classics to release a ten-CD anthology of the Domaine musical performances performed and/or organized by Pierre Boulez between 1956 and 1967. In many respects this was a crucible of modernism in the decades following the end of the Second World War. As interesting as the studied but always expressive performances in this collection is the scope of repertoire that spans from Arnold Schoenberg through Igor Stravinsky (particula...
