Of Time and Place
Dimitri Atapine, cello; Hyeyeon Park, piano.
James Winn, piano.
Argenta Trio; Panoramicos;
Mary Kay Robinson, flute; Don Better, guitar.
Cleveland Chamber Collective; Halida Dinova, piano;
James Umble, saxophone; Cleveland Duo
Navona Records 6162
Total Time:  65:24
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

In this new collection of chamber music, Navona introduces us to the music of Monica Houghton.  Currently residing in Nevada, Houghton has traveled widely with multiple performances at festivals around the world.  Her experience inspired her to incorporate non-Western instruments and musical approaches into the fabric of her music.  The current collection of eight chamber works combines her interest in poetry with the various landscapes and cultures she has experienced while also exploring different textures: a couple of works for solo piano, several for mixed ensemble or duets, and even a text setting for soprano and chamber trio.

Two works on the album focus on natural vistas.  The first is the Andean Suite (2014) which opens the album and is set for cello and piano.  Across the four movements, the music has a somewhat romantic tone.  The first movement “With the Condors” has a nice soaring line and gentle grace.  In “Lacuna”, Houghton limits her pitch level as she explores four distinct pitches for her melodies against a somewhat impressionistic piano line.  The movement features moments of lyricism and a brief burst of rhythmic energy.  The descriptive writing continues in “White Horse” with a beautiful burst of piano color in a dialogue between the instruments.  The harmony has these rather open qualities that are not quite modal.  It sets things up nicely for the final “Dance” which more overtly explores folkish rhythms and melodic gestures.  In the second nature-inspired work, Houghton turns to Nevada with music that bookends a landscape with first a movement inspired by a Shoshone legend, and then concluding the work with a movement reflecting on the pioneers who travelled through the state on their way West.  The resulting piece, Wilderness Portraits: Three Places in Nevada (2012) is for string trio (violin, cello, and piano).  The opening movement has a bit more sinuous chromatic writing that lends to the more dissonant quality of the harmony.  A few more contemporary techniques add to the level of eeriness in the music.  These blend between little motivic statements in this mostly story-like movement.  The central movement allows for moments of lyricism in the first part with the violin working its way upward in the texture.  The piano adds a denser harmonic fabric as the two solo instruments move back and forth across the texture.  The final movement, “High Rock Canyon”, begins in the lower regions of the piano with a motif that is soon picked up by first cello, and then violin.  The two string instruments provide a more incessant forward motion and discussion that alternates between longer lines and little fluttering motions while the piano tends to provide transitional flourishes.

James Winn performs the first work for solo piano, The Twelve Causes from the Circle of Becoming (2013).  Inspired by Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the music explores this visual idea of the “Wheel of Life” creating its own circular form.  An austere opening becomes one of the repeated concepts that sets up an almost modified rondo.  Each of the “causes” is then a branch off of this idea.  The music shifts between moments of dark, ominous writing and a more wistful and reflective shimmering of colors a la Satie, but minus the minimalist inflections.  After all the ominious beginning though, it tends to become gradually more peaceful and restrained.  Corpo Sonoro (2007) was composed for pianist Halida Dinova who performs it here.  The four movements take their inspiration from the poetry of Maria Davico, a Brazilian poet.  Each of the four movements is quite brief, poetic essays of their own.  Of the pieces on the album, this one tends to be the most modern of the batch with more clusters and dissonance in the music.  There are some slight suggestions of folk rhythms in the midst of more intricate writing.  Houghton likes to balance her music with these contrasts of darkness and light.  Here this takes shape as lines that move into brief, chromatic themes in the higher register of the piano, and low clusters and open harmonies that menace in the lower ranges.  These sometimes undulate with a simple melodic thread over the top, including use of thematic quotation.  Indeed, the piece does tend to emphasize the sonorities of the piano here culminating in the slightly more atonal final movement.

Panoramicos commissioned Stay, Shadow (2012) which appears in the central part of the disc.  The work is for soprano, flute, viola, and piano.  The text is a sonnet by the 17^th-Century poet Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz.  Houghton incorporates a bit of music from de la Cruz, who was also a composer, by framing the text with the quote.  This concept of encircling heard in the Tibetan-inspired piece, to some extent informs this work as well within the textual scheme.  The vocal line has a more lyric style while the accompanying instruments provide some interlude moments to set a bit of tone.  Sometimes the flute line has an almost Baroque-like outline.  The instruments themselves can be somewhat lost when the vocal line appears.  Houghton solves this by using the flute to flow out of the vocal line and adding the viola for a more emotional edge to the music.  Inspired by poetry of the Tang Dynasty, the following Three Songs Without Words (2010) are brief brushstrokes for flute and guitar.  Here too are these long lyrical lines with the guitar providing a bit of rhythmic drive in this rather intriguing, intimate work.

Two works on the album reflect Houghton’s connections to Ohio (she studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music) and feature musicians from the Cleveland area.  First is Epigram (2008) for string quartet.  A single movement work, Houghton here explores again the concept of brief musical pitch material, in this case, the three-note motive from Beethoven’s last quartet connected to his statement “muss es sein”.  With its Romantic musical inspiration, the music here tends to be an extension of this style with an essay that further elaborates on Beethoven’s idea.  In that respect, it is somewhat like a theme and variation technique with the music sometimes deconstructing the idea and creating an often impassioned plea.  The last work on the album features saxophone, violin, and piano.  Sky Signs (2005) has one of the larger pitch collections that Houghton explores in these works.  Here it is a seven-note idea that is introduced at the start and then becomes a sort of fantasia that features some structural arrivals where repeated ideas occur.  This too has this concept of circularity, inspired by changing clouds in this case, that feels wrapped around itself and constantly is evolving.

The music on the album was recorded over the past nine years and is well-equalized here from the many locations and instrumental combinations.  The soprano recording seems to have the roughest go in terms of overall balance, but this is more likely a compositional issue for a work that may be most effective live.  The quartet has some slight performance noise but nothing terribly distracting.  The music here is all quite accessible with the complexity growing to some extent as the album progresses.  Houghton’s exploration of small cells of material often results in very concise pieces that listeners can easily discern the way these are explored.  The pieces tend to pull back at the end with more reflective finales.

Shostakovich: Piano Quintet; String Quartet No. 3
Belcea String Quartet
Piotr Anderszewski, piano
Alpha Classics Music Alpha 360
Total Time: 67:47
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

The Belcea Quartet embarked on a concert cycle of the Beethoven quartets which they subsequently recorded with Alpha.  Other recent Alpha releases have focused on Brahms, and the serialist trio of Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern.  The group has been performing the two works on this album as part of the concert repertoire for some time making both obvious choices for their first Shostakovich album.  It is also a rather unique pairing of two of the composer’s 1940s chamber works.  Shostakovich’s string quartets are rather fascinating works that tend to be overshadowed by his larger-scale symphonic pieces, but they are among some of the composer’s finest work often revealing his own intimate struggles with the ever-changing Soviet regime’s approach to his music.  At present, the Belcea Quartet enters a fairly-crowded field of recordings of these two pieces featured in about three dozen recordings.  The 1940 piano quintet is among the composer’s more popular chamber pieces with his own recording with the Beethoven String Quartet, which commissioned the work, among one of the classic recordings in the catalog.  In the quintet they are joined by pianist Piotr Anderszewski.

The quintet takes a more unique structural approach from the onset with its more unusual five -movements, rather than four.  Each is also more accessible with identifiable and telling melodic ideas.  The second movement introduces a fugue and there is a dense little scherzo and slow-movement intermezzo before we head into the brilliant finale.  The piece is filled with opportunities for virtuosic playing, especially for the more soloistic piano line.  For these and other reasons, the work’s more populist approach garnered the first Stalin Prize in 1941.  Still, there is something strikingly symphonic when the work is fully scored.  This sits alongside the Neo-Baroque implications of a prelude and fugue of the opening two movements.  This is a full-bodied performance as well with rich tone and dramatic interpretation among the highlights here.  The great lower end of the piano line in the fugue is just miraculous in the most intimate of final few minutes.  Here is some of the quintets most darkly gorgeous music and Belcea manages to meet this gradual disintegration of sound in the work before the warm line returns in all its restrained, intimate glory.  It is a breathtaking moment of beauty in this performance.  After this rather wrenching opening, the piece shifts to an almost celebratory scherzo with great wit.  It is as if we have moved from awe to joyous wonder.  The Belcea players have great articulation here that cuts well in the texture as the piece moves along with an excellent, bright piano line in the opening segments.  The central solo violin solo moves us into the almost folk-like melodic ideas and a very familiar mid-century style.  The plaintive, singing melody of the fourth movement returns us to that melancholy beauty of the composer’s slow movements.  Excellent phrasing and matched tone and articulation here in the violins is really stunning.  What has also struck this listener about the quintet is the way we move from this fuller sound to a gradually thinner one so that by the time we arrive in the final movement we are back in light salon territory.

Continuing in this unique 5-movement form is Shostakovich’s String Quartet No. 3 in F, Op. 73 (1946).  The composer has Beethoven in the back of his mind here with an exploration of more interconnected movements that flow from one to the next.  The opening light sonata-allegro first movement features a repeat with an almost devastating double fugue in its development that winds through a variety of harmonic areas.  The second movement brings to the more acerbic style of the fifth symphony shifting to the parallel minor, but this is even more pronounced in the central movement and its violent shifts between a wild waltz meter and a march in quick alternation.  From this, we turn to a slow passacaglia among some of the composers equally more devastating and emotionally wrenching music that starts strong but slowly has its life dynamically drained away.  The final movement seems to ask the listener to consider what they have experience here with its sense of calm, turmoil, and devastation that begs to be justified in the end.  The ideas here are clearly delineated and move us through the Neo-Classical style with his formal flirtations with Baroque forms.  The piece always has this sense that we open in the modern world and end up trying to figure out what might happen next.  This is what provides a rather intriguing undercurrent to the work which is pointedly brought out in Belcea’s performance.

These are certainly fine performances that pull the album up to the top of the heap.  The sound is crystal clear and really opens up the extreme lower ends of the music here further enhancing the piano’s lower register.  The Belcea group does an amazing job of overall balance here that pulls you into the dramatic unfolding of Shostakovich’s music and helps delineate the structures of these movements so well.  It is obviously a well-thought through performance that manages to find interest and emotional connections still well into their familiarity.  This is especially true when the music needs just a little extra rubato, or biting wit, to occasionally wink at the listener (this is especially true of their performance of the third quartet).  One of the quartet recordings of the year to track down and treasure.