Pianist Christina Petrowska Quilico released a collection of interesting French Piano music earlier on the Navona label and now turns her attention to a survey of American music on Retro America (Navona 6361) available as a digital download and on streaming platforms.  

The music on this release covers a quite wide gamut of music moving from early avant-garde to jazz.  It is interesting to see Henry Cowell's (1897-1965) brief Six Ings (c. 1922) kick off this release.  It is an early example of the composer's experiments expanding sound.  In this work, Cowell takes a basic interval, the third, but somehow creates a quality that is more atonal.  The brevity of each movement (the whole piece takes about 9 minutes) is also in keeping with the short piano works of Webern and Schoenberg, and yet Cowell's rhythmic ideas are still well-rooted in American syncopations.  Next up is a movement from Frederick Rzewski's (1938-2021) North American Ballads in its solo version, Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues (1979) is another example of American avant-garde piano writing.  Rzewski liked to take American popular forms (blues, jazz, folk song, etc.) and then merge them into often dense and powerful textures with tone clusters being a common technique as well.  His work often shifts from simplicity to complexity and that can be experienced in this piece.  George Gershwin is the iconic American composer whose plethora of great songwriting made his wish to be respected as a serious concert composer always elusive.  Quilico shifts gears to present a suite of eight of the composer's greatest tunes rather than his Preludes.  Of course, one intriguing connection is that Gershwin took some private composition lessons with Cowell.  Thus by placing these brief little performances here on the album we have a rather nice overall balance to the opening piece.  It also provides even greater context for what the other composer's were familiar with and how that influence was integrated into their music.  The performances also seem to be informed by the composer's piano rolls and performance practice/style.

Composer Bill Westcott (b. 1948-), like William Bolcolm, has spent his life exploring jazz and blues forms of the early 20th Century.  His little suite features four movements that explore ragtime, blues and boogie woogie.  Four pieces by Meredith Monk (b. 1942) move us closer to some of the later developments in music that merges American jazz and concert music.  The great jazz pianist Art Tatum (1909-1956) is honored with performances of two jazz standards ("I'll Never Be the Same"; and "Don't Get Around Much Anymore").

The program of Retro Americana is a well-thought out one with music that all has one finger in the pie of early 20th-century musical forms.  From the serious to the more popular and accessible styles, Quilico's skill both as an interpreter of lyrical romantic writing, technical virtuosity, and a fine sense of jazz syncopation styles and performance make for a real treat for fans of American music.

Today another quick attention-calling discussion of a host of new chamber music appearing from Navona Records.

Composer Jan Jarvlepp's music has appeared quite a bit on the label and on High Voltage (Navona 6366) listeners are treated to four works for mostly "traditional" ensembles each with somewhat similar movement structures.  First up is the string Quintet 2003.  The three movement work opens with a delightful folkish Hungarian feel that has a great deal of energy and excitement.  As it moves along, there is almost a little folk-band like feel.  A contrasting lyrical central movement provides a moment of intimacy.  The nervous energy still hovers in string tremolos under the lyric lines.  The harmony is not as stark as one might find in Bartok as the third movement returns us to the stylistic approach of the opening, but there are certainly moments that lend a nod to that 20th Century master.  The Woodwind Quintet (1995) is a fun blend of jazzy rhythmic ideas with intriguing coloristic writing for the ensemble.  The central slow movement features some gorgeous lyric writing for bassoon against shifting harmonic ideas from the ensemble.  The final "Pyrotechnics" bring back all of that exciting energy with little swirling motives kicking off a jazz-inflected set of syncopations.  The work requires a great deal of virtuosic playing which the Arcadian Winds handle well here.  For the adventurous there is Bassoon Quartet (1996) which uses a contrabassoon in its outer movements.  In the central movement, Jarvlepp explores the expressive quality of the instrument.  The movement, "Reaching", does imitate this sense of outstretching gestures that move into the tenor register of the instrument from unisons to branching out to create fascinating harmonies as it develops.  A delightful English "Jig" serves as a great finale to this engaging work.  A more traditional string quartet, his first (2010), finds some of these same opening energetic motives that lay the ground work in the opening movement.  Jarvelepp does do some exploration of writing for this genre through the use of open strings.  A couple of intervals form the primary musical focus, one with a decided bluesy quality.  "Contemplation" feels more like both a reflection as well as a moment of inner angst that starts deep down inside and then suddenly becomes more agitated.  There is a bit more dissonance here that creates a poignant sensibility to the music.  The "Skating" movement brings things back to an upbeat mode with slashing motions that have a country folk feel.  The harmony shifts between popular music and more modernistic dissonances.  Each of these works has a similar overarching construction that one can hear applied to these different ensemble types.  They certainly would stand well on their own amongst other contemporary repertoire and do feel like they would be equally fun to play.  Highly recommended!

In September, the next volume in Navona's Pinnacle series (Navona 6368) brought another survey of contemporary chamber music from 8 different composers, many whose music has appeared on other releases from the label.  The album provides a fine introduction to new voices in contemporary music with a variety of pieces that are for solo instrument with piano; solo piano; string quartet; and solo piano.  The album is a digital only release available from a variety of streaming services (YouTube, Amazon, Spotify) and can also be downloaded.

Heaven to Earth Border House (Navona 6018) is a new release featuring music by Bruce Crossman.  There are two longer works on this release.  Crossman is an Australian composer who blends Western musical instruments with Asian traditional musics along with aspects of improvisation.  Shy Like Blushing Flowers is a series of three larger works with sung texts separated by brief interludes.  The music blends avante-garde piano writing with percussion.  What is intriguing is that Crossman's piano writing and the sparse textures that appear are quite in keeping with dramatic Asian music.  The piano feels more like a bridge between those two cultures as it provides some harmonic gestures (some feel almost Impressionistic) against the different percussive sounds.  These set the backdrop for the text setting.  It is also interesting to hear the vocalises emerge from some of the bell percussion as well.  It creates a quite ethereal experience in music that is indeed quite dramatic.  The album takes its title from the final work, an 18-minute piece for taegum and sanjo gayageum with an underlying connection to Korean architecture.  The concepts of space are perhaps best experienced in concert and may not quite come across in a recording, but one gets some sense of this with the imaging of the music.  The piece blends aleatoric improvisational material with contemporary techniques applied to these traditional instruments for a rather unusual work that attempts to merge the differing musical aesthetics.  The music here is in many ways an extension of music like that of George Crumb with a more specific interest in Asian aesthetics and gestures.  An album that will be of interest to the adventurous.

The same might also be said of the two-disc release featuring music by James Dashow.  Synchronies (Ravello 8060) provides a sort of overview of the composer's work that spans from the 1980s to 2008.  Dashow is an early pioneer in the composition of computer music and the pieces here include blends of electronic sounds with traditional instruments, with a septet, A Sheaf of Times, being the exception.  The integration of these electronic ideas as they blend with the other instruments is rather fascinating to hear.  Using timbres that are equally unusual (like bass clarinet, bass flute, harp, alto flute), Dashow is able to add another layer to explore sounds and pitch as well as manipulation.  Each of the works here provides a window into the composer's more complex compositional components as well.  With nearly two hours of material, listeners are able to discover how electronics and computer music can provide a whole new way of thinking about sound.