From the Valley of Baca: Chamber Music of David Carpenter
Rebecca Harris, violin. Myanna Harvey, viola. Cassia Harvey, cello;
Lawrence Indik, baritone. Charles Abramovic, piano;
Katelyn Bouska, piano.
Navona Records 6208
Total Time:  66:00
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

David Carpenter (b. 1972) is a Philadelphia-based composer whose music has been heard throughout the United States.  This release features examples of his music for string trio, solo piano, and a song cycle.

The first work is a String Trio (2014) cast in three movements.  The opening movement features a couple of key components which includes a small motive that recalls the musical signature of Shostakovich.  Carpenter admits his own fascinating with the composer’s music in his reflection on the work.  In particular, it is the eighth quartet that casts becomes submerged into this piece.  This can be heard in the somewhat modernist harmonic ideas and motivic development, but also in the penchant for long, intertwining lines that move across the three instruments.  A sixteenth-note pattern of this motive informs the central movement which also has some intriguing moments of dissonance with equally poignant lyricism.  The final movement features some more intense dissonance that seems somewhat more episodic at times.  But overall, the work has a very intimate quality that is held together by its consistent motivic references which help to unify the work.

At the center of the album is a song cycle for baritone and piano which lends its name to the release as well.  From the Valley of Baca (2016) features text by the Jewish poet Emma Lazurus.  Carpenter sets this poetry against the words of Psalm 84, sung in Hebrew.  The resulting work is a reflection on the plight of persecuted people and prejudice, here further inspired by the Syrian refugee crisis of 2015.  As a result, the work has this interesting shift of ancient problems that still plague the modern world.  The music is modernist in style with the vocal line providing a nice interpretive shape to the texts while the piano interacts and suggests mood and accents important aspects.  It is interesting to also hear how the music flirts with an almost Romantic sensibility for those moments when the hopes, dreams, and longings in the text are expressed.

The Sonata for piano (2015) is performed here by the person who originally suggested it.  It began as a rhapsody and was intended to accompany a performance of the b-minor Chopin piano sonata.  The little arpeggio fall of that work along with a sighing motive became the key components explored in this piece.  By extending the work to three movements, Carpenter has a chance to further explore the style of 19^th Century piano music by filtered now through a postmodern lens.  Like the trio, it too uses a motivic idea to help provide an overarching unity.  What is more fascinating are the sort of echoes of piano gestures one might hear in Chopin with new interpretations of what chromaticism in modern dress might do.

The release here gives a sense of some of Carpenter’s more intimate pieces and possible influences that inform his music.  In each case, one hears how these ideas are transformed and allow for reflection and reevaluation of contemporary directions post 1950.

Pieces of Mind and Matter
Megan Holland, violin. Kimberly Fredenburgh, viola.
Roberta Arruda, violin. Joel Becktell, cello.
Lisa Collins and Joel Becktell, cellos.
David Schepps, cello. Mark Tatum, double bass.
David Felberg and Megan Holland, violin.
Ravello Records 8002
Total Time:  48:02
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

This new release explores a variety of string duets by Paul Lombardi allows listeners to hear the composer’s development exploring this combination of instruments.  Lombardi teaches theory and composition at the University of South Dakota.  His music is conceived within a more highly-conceived mathematical breakdown related to fractals—a complex pattern of sounds and structures often involving loops.  Lombardi breaks down rhythms in music that can shift with or without  barlines.  Sometimes this transitions within a piece and can result in a large variety of time signatures.  It is no surprise that the opening work which began this process was composed in honor of George Crumb’s 75^th Birthday commissioned by the Oregon Bach Festival in 2004.

Holocene, for violin and viola, features the gradual exploration of semitones moving from the restrictive close intervals to eventually extend a total of 11 semitones from its beginning.  The pitches are shifted between the two instruments sometimes blending in unisons and then diverging in their own opposite and apposite directions as certain rhythmic ideas recur.  A later lyrical section adds some variety against the repeated rhythmic idea that serves as a unifying factor in the piece.  The music grows toward this center and then begins to back away into more calm, and almost plaintive fragments.  While the concept is on the cerebral side, the music itself features good shifts between dissonance and consonance that draw the listener into the musical discussion.

In Aquiesce (2006), Lombardi expands his material to a 3-note motive that is used to further expand the intervallic relationships of the music.  The structure here though is a canon that moves between the two instruments not so much as dialogue, but as lines that shift from one to the other instrument.  There is a bit more expansion of technical requirements here adding some color with pizzicato and exploration of harmonics.  The duet for violin and cello explores the registral distances here as well with low tones in the latter moving upward to match pitch levels in the lower register of the violin.  The music here has a more intense quality overall with the lyrical segments creating emotional moments in the music.

The poetry of Pablo Neruda is recessed into the inspiration of a duet for two cellos, Persiguiendose (2007).  This is an interesting exploration of register between the two instruments here as first one, and then the other, receives musical information that weaves back and forth between them.  Here too one hears how Lombardi uses closer intervallic relationships to increase tension and add drama with the lyrical center providing contrasts.  Micro-canons are the overarching structural basis for the concepts explored in the work.  On another level, the music moves toward a centerpoint and then is flipped into a retrograde presentation where gestures are in reverse order from their opening occurrences.

Phosphorescent (2008) may seem like an odd name for a work composed for cello and double bass.  For this work, Lombardi uses a scale based on the overtones of the open strings of the two instruments.  The partials and harmonics of the resulting scales are then explored in the work.  Shifts between bowed and pizzicato sections add some additional variety to this intriguing brief work.

The final piece on the album, Fractures (2017) is in a sense a summation of the musical concepts that Lombardi has been returning to over the course of the past decade or so.  Here he further explores the concepts of fractals as applied to music in ways that also link to 12-tone equal temperament.  Rhythmic ideas are also further divided and compacted with an approach that recalls that used in the opening work.  Here the music has a more diffuse edge at times, reaching toward the experimental end.

Though the theory behind the works here is on the more complex end of mathematical thinking, one need not worry about the resulting music which can be discerned as works of highly-intricate explorations of rhythm and sound.  The lyrical moments of the music help provide a central focus that each piece lands on with its exploration of intensity through dissonance creating contrast.  Overall, an interesting collection of works that is a good introduction to this particular approach to creation.