Julius Eastman, Vol. 3: ‘If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?’
Wild Up; Devonté Hynes and Adam Tendler, piano (New Amsterdam)
This is the third in Wild Up’s series of recordings of works by Julius Eastman (1940-90), and it showcases the range of Eastman’s indelible naming style: witty (“If You’re So Smart, Why Aren’t You Rich?”); poetic (“The Moon’s Silent Modulation”); inflammatory (“Evil Nigger”). These are stormy, swiftly shifting, open-ended scores, rendered in new arrangements by Wild Up’s large and varied ensemble with passion, richness and complexity — a forest of details — and a controlled chaos inspired by free jazz.
Much of “So Smart” is grimly implacable, with some ethereal interludes; it is ritualistic and mystical, yet also rough and even childlike, recalling the music of Claude Vivier, Eastman’s contemporary. Voices are key to Wild Up’s interpretations, especially in the choral-centric “Moon’s,” which evokes its era’s avant-garde in its skittering mania, elliptical spoken text — “Light cannot shine where no light is,” among other koans — wildly pitched mumbling, sighing, clapping, and abrupt starts and stops.
“Evil,” originally done by four pianos, here joins two — played by Devonté Hynes and Adam Tendler — with other instruments. It begins in aggressively unified, relentlessly driving fashion, with a recurring, dark, seven-chord passage, counted off each time. But around those recurrences, the music relaxes and diffuses, entering longing, expansive spaces. Does this suggest moments of resistance or escape amid repression? The tension between community and individuality? As ever, Eastman leaves much to us to decide. ZACHARY WOOLFE
‘In a Grove’
Lindsay Kesselman, Chuanyuan Liu, Andrew Turner, John Taylor Ward, vocalists; Metropolis Ensemble; Andrew Cyr, conductor (In a Circle)
I didn’t see the premiere of Christopher Cerrone and Stephanie Fleischmann’s opera “In a Grove” in Pittsburgh last year. But this recording makes me feel as though I’ve come face-to-face with it.
That’s because the album — vividly produced by Cerrone, Mike Tierney and Andrew Cyr, who here also conducts the nimble Metropolis Ensemble — is not a mere document of the premiere, but a creation of its own, carefully considered for the studio in the manner of Meredith Monk’s stage works.
The result is an hourlong immersion into the nearly suffocating mood and atmosphere of “In a Grove,” an adaptation of the Ryunosuke Akutagawa story of the same name that also inspired “Rashomon.” In Fleischmann’s straightforward yet poetically loaded libretto, the plot is moved to the Pacific Northwest of the 1920s, where the mystery of a man’s death is examined from distorted, conflicting perspectives — resolving only once he tells his side from beyond the grave, and even then offering only one answer among many questions raised.
Two roles each are given to four singers, who dramatically embody Cerrone’s tense, direct vocal writing, which occasionally takes a sudden plunge doubled in the instruments. The music also knows more about the truth than the characters do; electronic processing flags gaps in memory or untrustworthy statements, endlessly complicating the text, and commanding attention until the end. JOSHUA BARONE
‘The Rite of Spring’ — ‘Spectre d’un Songe’
Sylvie Courvoisier and Cory Smythe, pianos (Pyroclastic)
If you’re curious how two celebrated jazz pianists stack up against today’s classical stars when it comes to Stravinsky’s piano arrangement of his “Rite,” you’ll need three things: this fine rendition; a sterling one from 2017, by Marc-André Hamelin and Leif Ove Andsnes; and a stopwatch.
Sylvie Courvoisier and Cory Smythe are both known as composers and improvisers. Here, though, they play the score straight. Yet just because they’re following the notes on the page, it doesn’t mean they can’t also imbue Stravinsky’s phrases with a dash of late-night, jazz-club flavor.
They take things about a minute slower than Hamelin and Andsnes, and in a composition garlanded with so many contrasts and pivots, that approach is not without risk. Reveling in the ballet’s opening melodic material is perfectly defensible, as is injecting a lustily bumptious, Cecil Taylor-style ferocity in the chords that open the “Augurs of Spring” section. But such moves also risk diluting balletic momentum. So give this take credit for working some magic: Even as it luxuriates, it keeps driving. And the second half’s gradual, dramatic unfolding is a real contribution to the catalog of “Rite” on piano.
In the other work on the album, “Spectre d’un Songe,” Courvoisier gets to flex her compositional side. The half-hour piece once again finds her pianism in dialogue with that of Smythe, and you’ll hear traces of the “Rite” here and there. By turns intense and languorous, it is not just a worthy follow-up to their Stravinsky interpretation, but also a key entry in Courvoisier’s growing composer-performer discography. SETH COLTER WALLS
‘8-Track’
Ashley Bathgate, cello (New Focus Recordings)
A quick glance at the title of a new EP by the intrepid cellist Ashley Bathgate might lead you to believe it’s a tribute to the beloved retro tape format. In fact, the reference is to the process of recording by multitracking a single instrument — in this case, the eight parts of Steve Reich’s “Cello Counterpoint.” That piece, composed for Maya Beiser (Bathgate’s predecessor as cellist in the Bang on a Can All-Stars), and its layered iterations of Bathgate’s expressive playing serve as a loose inspiration for the new works of three composers.
A remarkable diversity of color and expressive impact is built into these pieces. Fjola Evans builds a set of interlocking motifs for “Augun” that collect themselves into a folk melody over pedal drones. A more lyrical, Romantic spirit pervades Emily Cooley’s “Assemble,” undergirded by gentle volleys of accompaniment. That piece has a lulling effect that transforms abruptly when all of the voices play a slow chorale of ambivalent emotional force at the end. Alex Weiser’s “Shimmer” moves slowly and with lavish repetition, its ideas materializing only gradually through a beautiful and, well, shimmering textural haze.
When Reich’s piece emerges at the end, full of bustling, intemperate energy, it sounds both iconic and freshly inventive against the sounds that preceded it. DAVID WEININGER
Tim Brady: ‘Symphony in 18 Parts’
Tim Brady, guitar (Starkland)
A solo guitar symphony might raise some eyebrows, but this 50-minute piece by the Canadian composer-performer Tim Brady made me a believer.
For one thing, his electric guitar setup incorporates a looping device, in addition to other pedal effects, thus allowing Brady to create polyphonic variety. For example: After a feverishly distorted opening solo kicks off the opening track, he proceeds to layer sheets of droning sounds and clean-tone rhythm work — all before another fuzzed-out guitar voice comes back to provide a climax.
Not everything is so showy. The second movement makes much of the timbral variety that Brady can produce with his gear, but from within a calmer sensibility. Elsewhere, a few sections flirt with how close Brady can push his amplifier into white-noise territory while still tracing a clear motif.
There are also aspects of blues feeling (in the movement “more, or less, than the sum of the part”) and reverb-strewn patterns that suggest an affinity for Minimalist processes (in “assume an error in the source code”). So the contrasts come thick and fast enough to provide a symphonic range of color and attack. But diversity of approach isn’t the only goal here; most of these selections sound carefully considered enough on their own terms to invite repeat listens, whether part of a symphony or not. SETH COLTER WALLS