Escapade: Music for Large and Small Ensembles
US Air Force Academy Band/Lt. Col. Philip C. Chevallard, Lt. Col. Steven Grimo;
Solar Winds;
Eastern Wind Symphony/Todd Nichols;
Danny Helseth, euphonium. Mark Dorosheff, Nathan Wisniewski, violins. Bryce Bunner, viola. Christine Choi, cello;
Steven Przyzycki, xylophone. Stellar Brass
Big Round Records 8957
Total Time:  54:11
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

Joseph Spaniola serves as composer/arranger for the US Air Force Academy Band before his current position on the faculty of the University of West Florida.  He has received numerous accolades from a number of band organizations and ensembles.  In this new release, ensembles that he wrote this music for are featured here in six works mostly for winds.

The US Air Force Academy Band is featured in two works.  They start things off with the piece that lends the album its title, Escapade.  The piece is a motivic exploration that moves across a number of variations of color and rhythmic excitement.  The latter blends jazz references, punctuated by brass and sax interplay, as well as some great expanded percussion writing.  It makes for an exciting opening to the album.  The Eastern Wind Symphony commissioned, and performs, Blow, Eastern Winds.  A swirling figure in woodwinds opens with longer brass lines layered over the top before we move into a section that has a great lower ostinato pattern and slightly more dissonant musical ideas, more modal coupled with a bit of jazz-like extended harmonies in the brass.  As in the opening number, this work too explores the various colors of the band with plenty of percussion interplay and a few contemporary techniques (blowing air through instruments).  For the most part though, the music is engaging and accessible adding some important works to band literature.

The Solar Winds are a group of clarinetists (performing on a variety of Bb, Eb, basset horn, and bass instruments depending on the piece).  The more significant work for this combination is the three-movement Klempirik Farms for clarinet quartet.  Spaniola crafts some jaunty melodic ideas that also have a nice jazz-like quality to them.  The music has a more personal connection referencing the composer’s memories of his family farm.  Gentle, lyrical melodies provide a nice contrast in the central “Fertile Ground” without really referencing a Copland-esque Americana.  Spaniola’s tends to fall more in the traditional romantic-tinged style with a beautiful simplicity that also has some wonderful coloristic harmony.  “Playful Hearts” has a quirkier rhythmic quality which adds a nice shift and moves into a more dance-like finale with great dialogue sections between the quartet.  They are also featured in a work for band that highlights clarinets in The Winds of the Quadrumvirate.  Spaniolar explores the quality of each of the four clarinets in the quartet against a directional application (North, South, East, West) that then pulls them all back together to unify their otherwise diverse sounds and applications in the piece as a whole.  Each of these are essentially movement/mood shifts that provide a variety of color.  The melodic writing is always engaging and Spaniola’s rhythm backdrops provide a great punctuation to the lyrical melodies as heard in the other pieces on the album.

One of the more unique works on the album is Dream.  Written for Danny Helseth,  who performs it here, Dream is a series of unique episodes that further explore Helseth’s virtuosity both technically and expressively.  The setting of euphonium with string quartet is a rather fascinating one in and of itself (and it would be fascinating to hear how this might translate to string orchestra).  Spaniola’s style here tends to a more classical concert approach, the rhythmic ideas of the wind band music are apparent here as well, but the string quartet adds a decidedly different dimension.  Though the music is mostly tonal, the dissonance in this work becomes more advanced and closely intertwined in the strings especially.  The euphonium then elaborates in larger swaths of material that picks up these motives and rhythms and expounds upon them.

The album closes with a delightful klezmer-like piece, Der Heyser Bulgar for brass and xylophone.

While it would be wonderful to have a full album of Spaniola’s band music, this collection of his work provides some great contrast of ensembles that show off his compositional abilities and voice.  The music is quite accessible and always engaging throughout.  Big Round will hopefully explore additional wind band literature, especially when it has such excellent ensembles and performers to bring this music to a wider audience.

Tacit-Citat-Ion
Melis Jaatinen, mezzo-soprano.
Rebecka Sofia Ahvenniemi, electronics.
BIT20 Ensemble
Silje Aker Johnsen, soprano. Ellen Ugelvik, prepared piano.
Hilde Annine Hasselberg, soprano. Manuel Hofstatter, percussion.
Joshua Rubin, clarinet. Yumi Murakami, piccolo.
Hans Gunnar Hagen, viola.
Ravello Records 8011
Total Time:  57:51
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

Ravello Records tends to bring a variety of contemporary music that explores unique approaches to composition.  Here is a chance to explore the chamber music of Finnish composer Rebecka Sofia Ahvenniemi.  Her work is a combination of acoustic instruments, voice, electronics, and fixed media that have their roots in the avant-garde experiments of the 1960s.  The music has this sense of deconstruction to primary elements of timbre, attack, and expression which are then reassembled to have the listener consider these components of music.  The pieces here include a host of vocal settings with several works for instruments in an eclectic collection of contemporary music.

There are several vocal works on the album.  The opening track, Dada-Aria (2016) is a striking exploration of pure vocal writing that references 19^th-Century opera, though here all the extraneous accompaniment support has been removed to focus on the sounds of the voice which is stunningly performed here by Melis Jaatinen.  Herze Beim Spinnrade (2013) takes its inspiration from a familiar Schubert song though reinterpreted here through a harsher, almost mechanical accompaniment enhanced with a prepared piano.  Vocal virtuosity that requires a full range of technique is also employed with an equally excellent interpretation by Silje Aker Johnsen.  It is another of the ways that Ahvenniemi’s music works to merge traditions from different musical eras.  One can hear this more in the very brief L’Operette D’Amor where the past and present collide with the use of looped electronics and percussion elements against the vocal aria.  The more extensive Det Osynliga Barnet (2013) is an opportunity for Ahvenniemi to use her compositional technique, with its own moments of ambiguity, in a text that is equally so.  Banalala (2014) connects with the composer’s philosophical and aesthetic intersections with another work for voice and fixed media.

Three pieces for solo instruments with electronics and/or fixed media display how Ahveniemi explores the qualities of these solo lines within this context.  The clarinet work, Ode to a Tree (2016), is among the eco-musical approaches where pre-recorded vocal sounds have a somewhat primal feel against the timbre of the solo instrument.  The piece was premiered in an area surrounded by trees making this larger connection to the woodwind and its surroundings.  Lucia (2009) is a work for piccolo that also employs electronic manipulation to amplify and alter the decay of this instrument as its own unique color is emphasized.   Finally, one of the composer’s more performed works, A Song for the Viola (2011) creates an equally intriguing, brief dramatic work inviting us to consider the multitude of directions an idea might take us.  Perhaps the most experimental piece here is Winds (2016) which focuses on breathing sounds imaged originally in surround sound.  The air moves through a melodica which adds some slight tonal quality to the music.

The album’s title comes from one of the two works for string quartet included here.  Wuthering Modes, Not Moods (2017) explores aspects of how music is being created with these methods of expression being stretched within the texture.  The idea here parallels that of the opening work as timbre and musical gesture become the key elements of Ahvenniemi’s creation.  Finally, Tacit-citat-ion (2013/2018) serves as a sort of summary of Ahvenniemi’s integration of the past and present which here also includes a reference to modern musical style, in particular that of Kaija Saariaho whose Nocturne for solo violin is the departure point.

Though one can certainly hear the distant experimental music of the 1960s and 1970s in her work, the eclectic collection here shows how Ahvenniemi has taken these approaches and blended them into a unique musical language that wants the listener to rethink and rehear the way our own expectations of sound and tone color are created.  In that respect, the album makes for an often fascinating listen with many fantastic, committed performances.