PRESS: reviews

By Alex Ross
The New Yorker (full article - May 12, 2008 issue)

Excerpt:

By the nineteen-nineties, Adams had begun to carve out a singular body of work, which can be sampled on recordings on the New World, New Albion, Cold Blue, Mode, and Cantaloupe labels. First came a conceptual Alaskan opera entitled "Earth and the Great Weather,” much of which is given over to the chanting of place-names and descriptive phrases from the native Inupiaq and Gwich’in languages, both in the original and in translation. One mesmerizing section describes various stages of the seasons: “The time of new sunshine,” “The time when polar bears bring out their young,” “ The time of the small wind,” “The time of eagles.” The music runs from pure, ethereal sonorities for strings—tuned in a scheme similar to that of the Aurora Bells in “The Place”—to viscerally pummelling movements for quartets of drums.

In the next decade, Adams further explored the sonic extremes that he had mapped out in his opera. “In the White Silence,” a seventy-five-minute piece for harp, celesta, vibraphones, and strings, is derived from the seven notes of the C-major scale; in a striking feat of metaphor, the composer equates the consuming whiteness of midwinter Alaska with the white keys of the piano. “Strange and Sacred Noise,” another seventy-five-minute cycle, evokes the violence of changing seasons: four percussionists deploy drums, gongs, bells, sirens, and mallet percussion to summon up an alternately bewitching and frightening tableau of musical noises, most of which were inspired by a trip that Adams took up the Yukon River in spring, when the ice was collapsing. Whether unabashedly sweet or unremittingly harsh—"Clouds of Forgetting, Clouds of Unknowing,” a memorial to the composer’s father, manages to be both at once—Adams’s major works have the appearance of being beyond style; they transcend the squabbles of contemporary classical music, the unending arguments over the relative value of Romantic and modernist languages.

By Anthony Tommasini
The New York Times (December 27, 2007)

Excerpt:

In his later years the flinty American composer Ralph Shapey, who died in 2002 at 81, would rail against the conservatism of the mainstream classical music scene in America. In fist-shaking defiance he wrote formidable, complex and ingenious works. And if people resisted, that was their problem.

Yet for all his kvetching Shapey has had a roster of champions — major musicians like the violinist Robert Mann, the cellist Joel Krosnick, the pianist Gilbert Kalish and the Juilliard String Quartet — who are challenged and exhilarated by his uncompromising works.

As an admirer of Shapey’s audacious music, I feared that performances and recordings of his works would diminish after his death, when he was no longer around to agitate. Alas, with scant exceptions, his pieces have not noticeably figured on concert programs in recent years in New York.

But two recordings released this year suggest that Shapey is winning support among the new generation of performers, and that some committed foundations and recording companies continue to support important American music....

The other recording is a two-disc release titled “Ralph Shapey: Radical Traditionalist,” from New World Records, an essential nonprofit label devoted to American music. This recording is evidence of a promise fulfilled. In 2003 CRI (Composers Recordings Inc.), a scrappy nonprofit label that maintained the widest-ranging catalog of contemporary music, went out of business after 48 years. This was a particular blow to the discography of American composers because CRI kept all releases in its catalog available, no matter the sales.

New World Records came to the rescue, pledging to digitize the master tapes of the complete CRI catalog and to make every recording available as a burned-to-order CD, complete with the original liner notes and cover art. New World also promised to reissue selected recordings and compilations. The Shapey album is one. The program includes performances of five major works originally recorded and released by CRI, mostly in the 1970s and ’80s. There are two daunting piano pieces: 21 Variations (1978), performed by Wanda Maximilien; and “Fromm Variations”(1966; 1972-73), a sprawling 52-minute work consisting of 31 variations on a chorale theme, performed by Robert Black.

Also included are the compact, intense 12-minute String Quartet No. 6 and the 35-minute, traditionally structured String Quartet No. 7, performed by quartets drawn from the contemporary chamber ensemble of the University of Chicago that Shapey established when he joined the faculty in 1964. His work with this adventurous ensemble gave him a secure home base. Having conducted student ensembles since he was 17, he was a skilled conductor and an inspiring teacher.

What comes through in this recent trove of recordings is that for all the gritty complexity of Shapey’s works, this authentic music has arresting qualities, including pugnacious rhythmic vitality and vibrant humor. Yes, like many curmudgeons, Shapey had a self-deprecating sense of humor, which came through in a 1996 interview with The New York Times when he turned 75. “Now it’s official: I’m an old fish, as they say in Yiddish,” he said, laughing heartily.

Shapey described himself as structurally a classicist, emotionally a romanticist and harmonically a modernist. His musical language came from a free adaptation of the 12-tone technique that he called “the mother lode,” in which aggregates of pitches around each note in his rows allowed him to shift from chord to chord through common tones, lending his harmony a grounded quality. In any case, during a good performance of a Shapey work, few listeners will fret about tone rows. The music is too ecstatic, thorny and elemental for that.

The “Fromm Variations,” for example, abound in steely harmonies, jagged lines and leaping chords. The sheer size of the 52-minute work is overwhelming and impractical, which makes Mr. Black’s commanding performance the more impressive. But for all the unremittingly intensity and outbursts of aggressively dissonant cluster chords, there are stretches where the pace slackens and the music turns quizzical and tender.

The 21 Variations for Piano, at nearly 30 minutes, is more approachable. The initial theme is like some wild and jerky dance. Many of the variations hover on the divide between impishness and intimidation. Again there are those passages of ruminative, elegiac writing, all qualities compellingly conveyed in Ms. Maximilien’s performance. Here is a work that could be a knockout among the right companion pieces on a recital program... Full Article

By Vivien Schweitzer
The New York Times (September 16, 2007)

Joshua Gordon, cellist; Randall Hodgkinson, pianist.

MOST composers yearn to have their music performed regularly, but for much of his life Leo Ornstein was blithely unconcerned with the limelight. “If my music has any value, it will be picked up and played,” he told The New York Times in 1976.

On a fine new disc from New World Records the value of his powerful works for cello and piano is revealed by the pianist Randall Hodgkinson and the cellist Joshua Gordon, admirable chamber musicians who play with passion and sensitivity.

In the early 20th century crowds flocked to hear Ornstein, also a piano virtuoso, play his avant-garde pieces. But Ornstein, a Jewish immigrant from Ukraine (who died in 2002 at 108), abandoned glittering concert halls of London and New York for the anonymity of a trailer park in Texas.

His rhapsodic, chromatically lyrical cello works are a world apart from his futurist works like the dissonant “Danse Sauvage.” The gripping Six Preludes for Cello and Piano (1930) are mostly dark and moody, veering between violent outbursts and rhapsodic introspection. They include a jaunty Presto (a scherzo of Bartokian propulsion and frenzied rhythms), a contemplative Andante and an explosively colorful Allegro Agitato.

The tumultuous Sonata No. 1 for Cello and Piano encompasses chromatic harmonies, alluring cello melodies and dramatic Brahmsian piano writing.

The disc also includes premiere recordings of several works, including “Composition 1 for Cello and Piano,” a Jewish-sounding lament with a sobbing cello melody, and the more astringent Two Pieces for Cello and Piano (Op. 33).

These exemplary performances should ensure that Ornstein’s cello works will enjoy some of the limelight the composer shunned for so long.

From Barrelhouse to Broadway: The Music Odyssey of Joe Jordan
By Jack Rummel

This is an amazing CD, for it expands our knowledge and appreciation of the music of Joe Jordan exponentially! Jasen and Tichenor’s book Rags and Ragtime, an indispensable source of ragtime information, devotes only ten lines to Jordan ’s biography, while the booklet in this seminal recording by the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra contains thirty pages of carefully researched information including many pictures.

The PRO’s director, Rick Benjamin, has done yeoman work, for not only did he write all the liner notes but he also arranged the scores and even contributed three piano solos. The results are truly outstanding. More

Leo Ornstein: Complete Works for Cello and Piano
By David Lewis
Allmusic.com

Composer and pianist Leo Ornstein is known best for two things; (a) being the first "futurist" pianist in the early modern period and (b) being about the longest lived composer in history of music, dying at 108 in 2002. Neither of these attributes have much to say about Ornstein's music, which has been recorded heretofore in a spotty fashion with the emphasis being on the "futurist" piano music that made his name, a style that he abandoned around 1920. Anyone familiar with his extraordinary Piano Quintet of 1927, however, will already know that Ornstein was an expert and deeply serious composer of chamber music, and will be predisposed to welcome the advent of New World's Leo Ornstein: Complete Works for Cello and Piano. Performed by cellist Joshua Gordon of the Lydian String Quartet and pianist Randall Hodgkinson, this is the first "complete" recorded survey of any aspect of Ornstein's output, and the five compositions represented span a period of roughly 1914 to about 1931...It sounds like major music, and these are major performers—Gordon has studied this music closely and he and Hodgkinson have worked out the knotty problems relating to Ornstein's impatience in writing his music down. In some cases they have had to rely on their own reading of the pieces to get the fine details down in terms of dynamics, tempo and expression, as Ornstein's scores are silent on this point. All of New World's Leo Ornstein: Complete Works for Cello and Piano is absorbing and revelatory, and the recording, from Mechanics Hall in Worcester, Massachusetts, is just right. More

Christian Wolff: Ten Exercises
By David Lewis
Allmusic.com

New World Records's Christian Wolff: Ten Exercises takes an all-star cast through 12 performances derived from his open scores published as Exercises 1–14 (1973–74) and Exercises 15–18 (1974–75) works that, played end to end, might last a little over two hours...The group here is especially well suited to interpreting Wolff, and Rzewski is a particularly a strong participant, given his gorgeous solo reading of the Satie-esque Exercise 15 and his excellent liner notes for the disc, reprinted from the preface for Wolff's book Cues: Writings and Conversations...As Rzewski states it: "These scores do not de/prescribe the final resulting sound picture, but provide a map along which the players may travel." The result is vaguely jazzy, loose, unpretentious music that celebrates the little things in life, and the acoustic of the old barn suits Wolff's music to a "T." More

Zummo with an X
By David Lewis
Allmusic.com

Composer and trombonist Peter Zummo is one of the original residents of the New York "Downtown" loft scene and a contributor to many works mounted by his colleagues, which include Peter Gordon, The Downtown Ensemble, Rhys Chatham, David Behrman, Yasunao Tone, The Lounge Lizards, David First and a long list of others. Recordings under his own name are far more obscure and harder to come by; the main title on CD to date being Experimenting with Household Chemicals on the Experimental Intermedia imprint; a low profile outing indeed. In re-releasing Zummo with an X, New World Records returns a key Zummo effort to the catalogue that was only available before on an LP on Zummo's own Loris label. The New World re-release adds an attractive, previously unreleased alternate recording of "Song IV" from the dance score Lateral Pass, which features cellist Arthur Russell and arch avant-garde accordionist Guy Klucevsek. More

From Barrelhouse to Broadway: The Music Odyssey of Joe Jordan
By David Lewis
Allmusic.com

Chances are, if you know anything at all about Ragtime, you have heard of Scott Joplin. Joplin was originally from Sedalia, Missouri and spent several years in St. Louis, the city where, at the turn of the century, Ragtime was king. Among a number of younger composers who, like Joplin, frequented St. Louis' Silver Dollar Saloon and admired it's resident "perfesser" Tom Turpin was pianist and composer Joe Jordan, who would go on to an international career that would take him from Chicago to Broadway, to England and, in his sixties, into the U.S. Military as a decorated officer. That we know the name of Joplin, and not that of Jordan, who lived right up until a couple of years before the Academy Award winning film The Sting was released, is just one of those vagaries of the way time sometimes affects the reputation of deserving people. Rick Benjamin and the Paragon Ragtime Orchestra have decided to redress this omission through an excellent career survey on Joe Jordan, From Barrelhouse to Broadway: The Music Odyssey of Joe Jordan on New World Records...The performances here are lively and spontaneous here when needed, yet restrained and demure when the music calls for it. The singing, mainly by tenor Trevor B. Smith and soprano Bernadette Boercke, happily avoids the kind of over-arch vocalizing one often hears in these kinds of re-creations. The dance numbers are delightfully toe-tapping as well, and the Paragon plays them with pep—one would be hard pressed to find a reason to discourage anyone, particularly those inclined towards the pre-jazz popular music of the early twentieth-century, from checking out New World's generally excellent From Barrelhouse to Broadway: The Music Odyssey of Joe Jordan. More

Earle Brown: Selected Works 1952-1965
By David Lewis
Allmusic.com

The re-release of Earle Brown: Selected Works 1952-1965 on New World Records will seem like the return of an old friend to many listeners. Compiled out of CRI's tapes of Earle Brown's music, which were recorded between 1952 and 1994, for release as part of CRI's American Masters series in 1996, this disc represents almost a third of Brown's tiny, highly concentrated output...These kinds of historic performances are so rare and seldom seen on domestic CD issues that we will take them in any way they come to us...It's heartening to know that New World was willing to take the time to do it right, and Earle Brown: Selected Works 1952-1965 is certainly worth the wait. More

Julius Eastman: Unjust Malaise
By David Lewis
Allmusic.com

Julius Eastman (1940-1990) was a composer in good company around 1970. The booklet to New World Records's survey of Eastman's never before issued compositions contains a number of group shots showing Eastman in the presence of such luminaries as Lukas Foss, Lejaren Hiller, Pauline Oliveros, Jan Williams, Eberhard Blum, David Del Tredici, Morton Feldman and other first tier proponents of contemporary music of that time. The fact that Eastman's face is the only black one in these photos seems not to have impacted the attitude of his colleagues, any more than Oliveros or Renée Levine, then director of the University at Buffalo's Center of the Creative and Performing Arts, presence as the only women in these images might suggest. Eastman's blackness, combined with his uncompromising, difficult career choices, politically incorrect subject material and vulnerability in the age of Jesse Helms are all reasons why New World Records's Julius Eastman: Unjust Malaise marks the very first inkling we've had on disc of what an unbelievable talent Eastman was, and the nature of his singular contribution to American classical music... Kyle Gann's impassioned notes are well worth reading also, and set the stage for more installments of Eastman's recordings. More

George Antheil
By David Hurwitz
Classics Today

This disc is lots of fun. George Antheil's serious music (as opposed to his "shock" pieces such as the Ballet Méchanique) owes a lot to Stravinsky, a bit more to Les Six, with perhaps a touch of Prokofiev's early twentieth-century modernism and an American feeling for Jazz and popular music idioms. The ballet Dreams consists of a suite of catchy dances, including a terrific Can-Can, a nifty Polka, a Waltz, and a splendid little piece called "Acrobats". The Second Piano Concerto begins somewhat thickly and heavily but soon settles down to more familiar stuff. Its slow movement is very attractive, the finale aptly zippy. If anything, Serenade No. 2 is even more successful, a vivacious and winning piece with no dead spots at all.

The performances (and performers) on this extremely well recorded disc sound very comfortable with music that hardly could have been familiar. Pianist Guy Livingston, a fine artist who deserves to be better known, has a field day with the concerto, and the playing in general is characterful and (above all) rhythmically sharp. More