Lachlan Skipworth: Chamber Music
Ashley William Smith, clarinet.
Akiko Miyazawa and Kate Sullivan, violins. Ben Caddy, viola. Jon Tooby, cello.
Bella Hristova, violin. Umberto Clerici, cello. Aleksander Madzar, piano.
Louise Devenish, marimba/psalterphone. Emily Green-Armitage, piano.
Anna Pokorny, cello. James Guan, piano.
Navona Records 6241
Disc One: Total Time:  55:31
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

Five works by Australian composer Lachlan Skipworth introduce listeners to his unique style in these fascinating chamber pieces.  Two multi-movement works are set apart by three rather unique combos featuring clarinet (bass clarinet).  Skipworth’s study of the shakuhachi perhaps adds an intriguing aesthetic aspect to this music where individual tones are important with all their specific inflections.

First is a rather stark Clarinet Quintet whose music could very well be imaged from the cover for this album—a seemingly winter white bare, abstracted landscape.  Strings open with an angular outline creating this sense of stark soundscapes.  Over this the clarinet enters with its rich tonal qualities adding a bit of beauty against the rather harsher amorphous backdrops of the string accompaniment.  The latter add a fascinating sense of dramatic color against the more lyrical solo line.  In this respect, it is a structure that references shakuhachi pieces.  The central work on the album is Intercurrent.  In this work the music revolves around ten notes that are arranged to create a palindrome.  A prerecorded version is played back as the combo of bass clarinet, marimba, and piano play in real time.  It creates a sort of contemporary canon with the electronic phasing ideas lifting this into a blend of minimal experimental music with a mesmerizing effect.  The final single movement work closes off the album.  The Night Sky Fall is a rather interesting blend of clarinet, piano and a psalterphone (a new instrument created by Skipwroth that adds a rather unique sound to the texture).  Here descending musical lines become the musical component that is stretched and explored as it moves through different registers and colors.  It is perhaps another example of this interiorized conception of Japanese Zen music with Skipworth’s own personal style.

The first of the two multi-movement works is a Piano Trio.  One gets a sense of Skipworth’s reinterpretation of Japanese musical aesthetics and literature that can be heard more in the way the primary line is bent and shaped.  But in the first movement, the work is actually exploring honkyoku, a type of music associated with Japanese Zen monks.  This is created here by removing a sense of steady rhythm and creating a more fluid sensibility.  The opening movement integrates an actual piece from the aforementioned honkyoko repertoire, Daha (“pounding wave”).  This idea is more transformed into a atonal musical language that intricately explores the different gestures within the lines Skipworth creates.  There is a moment though in the central movement which feels like a romantic interlude with a noir-ish jazz overtone in more intense harmonic language.  The final movement has an excellent forward drive and a quality that builds on Shostakovich’s quartets.  It is a very successful piece.  The three-movement Piano Quartet is another intriguing work that feels more Western in its conception with slighter flirtations with Asian aesthetic.  There are sections with motivic repetition and ostinato that interact more between the piano and strings in a more traditional way.  What is apparent though is Skipworth’s excellent dramatic shaping of his material.

The collection of chamber pieces here are very engaging contemporary works that move beyond their philosophical influences into pieces that have transformed this material in engaging dramatic ways.  The music has a tendency never to let up but balances moments of intense dissonance with often quite beautiful lyrical writing.  As such, this is an important collection of new music worth exploring.  Performances here manage very well in some rather tough music requiring a lot of virtuosic and technical skill.

Moto Quarto
Trio Casals: Sylvia Ahramjian, violin. Ovidiu Marinescu, cello. Anna Kislitsyna, piano.
Navona Records 6237
Disc One: Total Time:  60:21
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

Trio Casals returns with this fourth collection of contemporary chamber music.  As with their last stunning release, Moto Bello, the launch of this album coincided with a performance at Carnegie Hall. There are two multi-movement works here coupled with seven brief pieces for the trio, or as solo works.

The album begins with the three-movement Three for Three (2018) by David Nisbet Stewart.  A brief “Jitterbug” kicks off the work referencing the classic popular WWII dance craze and a wicked piano line.  The central “Pastorale” is a more lyrical section for contrast before a three-part scherzo wraps things up.  Joanne D. Carey’s single movement Piano Trio No. 2 features three unique thematic ideas that are then explored motivically throughout the piece which has a rondo-like form.  Later, Clare Shore’s Day Tripping creates soundscapes that depict natural vistas from Florida’s Peace River in her opening “Peace at Dawn” to Juniper Springs in “Juniper Run.”

There are two works for solo cello.  The first of these is Dark Radiance by UK composer Emma-Ruth Richards.  She takes her interest in contrasts, inspired a bit by the way light is often connected to trumpets and then explores how this transfers into the expansive registral possibilities of the cello.  The Poem by Christopher Brakel uses the work of madrigalist Carlo Gesualdo as inspiration for his brief essay here.

Descriptive titles help provide listeners an entry point in the other single movement works on the album.  In Allyson Wells’ Since Then, the work refers to an unfortunate breakup of a quartet when a member left.  The resulting trio is now represented as a sense of loss and regret in this new version for Trio Casals which features intriguing motivic writing integrated across the three parts.  Touching lyrical writing is also notable.  L . Peter Deutsch uses the formal structure of traditional sonata-allegro form for his brief trio, “Sunset at Montelimar”.  The two themes are shifted between each of the instruments throughout the work reflecting the composer’s own reminiscing of his day in Southern France in this more traditional-sounding work of beauty.  Suspension of Disbelief by Keith Kramer introduces explorations of scales and resulting harmonies found in Japanese and Hindustani musics resulting in more modern hybrid of global and traditional music.  The album then concludes with Mathew Fuerst’s Totentanz, a highly-conceptualized exploration of the Dies irae chant.  The piece is created through mathematical constructs.

As with their previous releases, Trio Casals covers a lot of diverse musical voices.  Much of the music this time features a more modernist and atonal quality though there are certainly moments of great lyricism and traditional harmony hovering at the edges.  The performances are committed and engaging.  Certainly this is another great release for enthusiasts of chamber music and introduces a host of new musical voices as well.