This fourth installment in Wild Up’s vibrant traversal of the works of Julius Eastman (1940-90) focuses not on Eastman’s fiery, rough-hewed vision of Minimalism (“Stay on It,” “Femenine” and “Gay Guerrilla”) but on his somber, spiritual side. This volume features pieces that could easily fit into a religious ceremony — albeit an idiosyncratic one. The opener, “Our Father,” among his last surviving scores, is for two male voices and has the stark, brooding sound of a medieval chant; Davóne Tines has been multitracked into close-harmony duet with himself, and his capacious, severe baritone is perfect for this music.
Tines is also a model of focused clarity in the fervent declamation of “Prelude to the Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc.” Eastman intended this as a companion to “The Holy Presence of Joan d’Arc,” 20 seething, soulful minutes, recorded here in Clarice Jensen’s transcription for 10 cellos by a very multitracked Seth Parker Woods. While the solo “Piano 2” isn’t overtly sacred, its meditative quality makes it feel at home in this company. The piece’s peaceful, even murmuring moments keep tumbling into disconsolate intensity, but Richard Valitutto maintains a core of serenity in the midst of all the heated passion. ZACHARY WOOLFE
John Zorn: ‘Her Melodious Lay’
Julian Lage and Gyan Riley, guitars (Tzadik)
The range of John Zorn’s composing activity can still stun those who know him only from his role creating and nurturing the downtown New York scene in recent decades. The latest addition to his ever-expanding catalog is a series of Shakespeare-inspired guitar duos written for Julian Lage and Gyan Riley, two musicians deeply conversant with his work.
Zorn’s musical dialect can vary wildly, but this is some of the gentlest, most openly beautiful music he’s made. These dances, laments and fantasias sound like they could fit into some alternate Baroque era, which makes for a wonderfully odd combination with their musical language, which is flecked through with hints of midcentury modal jazz and folk. Their sectionalized architecture offers tantalizing glimpses of the stories behind their allusive titles (“The Enchanted Castle,” “Shadow to My Sightless View”). Against a largely tonal backdrop, Zorn’s artful deployment of dissonance — as in “A Cruel Theft of Light” and “Mercutio” — carries great weight.
Perhaps most striking is the seamless, relaxed virtuosity with which Lage and Riley play this music. The spontaneity of their interaction suggests that some of their work is improvised, even though all of the music, according to the liner notes, is through-composed. DAVID WEININGER
Bruckner: Symphony No. 7; Bates: ‘Resurrexit’
Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra; Manfred Honeck, conductor (Reference Recordings)
In his notes for this simply excellent recording of Bruckner’s Seventh Symphony, Manfred Honeck writes as intelligently and as specifically as ever about the tiniest details in the score at hand, and how he has tried to be as faithful to their spirit as possible. He points out that many of Bruckner’s rhythms are derived from folk dances. He notes how the great Adagio is linked textually to the later “Te Deum.” Most provocatively, he argues that an extraordinary passage near the end of the first movement, in which timpani thunder around pleading strings and winds, directly illustrates the moment of consecration that is at the heart of the Mass. Whatever the inspiration, the effect in practice is magical.
If this Seventh is one of Honeck’s least interventionist readings, it is hardly less formidable than his Beethoven or his Tchaikovsky. Even more than in his terrifying account of the Bruckner’s Ninth, you get the sense that he holds the composer in awe. And it’s difficult not to feel a similar reverence for the players of the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, too. What tension and body there is in the long, legato lines they draw out, and what hush at points of calm; what sensitivity in the woodwind solos, and what security in the massed brasses. Mason Bates’s “Resurrexit” makes less of an impression, but the orchestra deserves credit for continuing to record some of the works that it commissions. DAVID ALLEN
‘Cage²’
Bertrand Chamayou, prepared piano (Erato)
John Cage’s invention of methods for preparing pianos with objects such as screws, felt and rubber in the 1940s stands as one of the great innovations in 20th-century music. The Sonatas and Interludes are the major work from this period; less well known are a large set of shorter pieces for dance from the 1940s and ’50s. They form the basis for this superb recording by the intrepid French pianist Bertrand Chamayou, which reproduces a live program he created with the dancer and choreographer Élodie Sicard.
Chamayou gets a kaleidoscopic variety of timbres from his prepared Steinway; compare the flat, hard sound of “Mysterious Adventure” and “Primitive” with the gamelan-like resonances of “The Unavailable Memory Of.” Some of these works consist of only a single line of music, and one of Chamayou’s signal achievements is his use of a light, precise sense of rhythm to keep such pieces moving forward. Elsewhere one hears songlike simplicity (“A Valentine Out of Season”) and some crunching harmonies (“In the Name of the Holocaust”).
These pieces have a breadth of appeal greater than Cage’s later, chance-driven music. Yet because every piano reacts differently to preparation, the music changes in performance, which is why he saw the prepared piano as a first step toward indeterminacy. Those methods, Cage would later write, “led me to the enjoyment of things as they come, as they happen, rather than as they are possessed or kept or forced to be.” DAVID WEININGER
John Alden Carpenter: Complete Ballets
Boston Modern Orchestra Project; Gil Rose, conductor (BMOP/sound)
Gil Rose and his audacious Boston Modern Orchestra Project ensemble have made it: This delightfully spirited release of ballets by John Alden Carpenter is the 100th to emerge on BMOP/sound, the ensemble’s record label. It’s an astonishing achievement, as much for the fund-raising and other administrative work that has been involved in bringing each of the recordings to life as for the artistic courage and technical accomplishment that mark the music-making on them all.
Much of BMOP’s focus has been on contemporary composers. John Harbison was the subject of its first release 16 years ago, and since then the likes of Andrew Norman, Vijay Iyer, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich and Lisa Bielawa have received careful, dedicated attention. Just as satisfying, though, has been Rose’s belief in some of the 20th-century composers whose music other orchestras have chosen to forget: Lukas Foss, Walter Piston, Irving Fine and so on.
That side of BMOP is celebrated here, in marvelously committed performances of “Krazy Kat,” “The Birthday of the Infanta” and “Skyscrapers,” all written between 1917 and 1926 and brilliantly inflected with echoes of the jazz that Carpenter thought was an essential ingredient in the music of his time. “Skyscrapers,” written initially at the asking of Sergei Diaghilev, is especially fine, a riotous depiction of modern Americans at work and play. Like every BMOP release, this deserves a listen. DAVID ALLEN
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