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.

 Haney: Birth of a City

Jason Kao Hwang, violin. Melanie Dyer, viola. Adam Lane, bass. Tomas Ulrich, cello.
Julian Priester and Steve Swell, trombones.
Dave Storrs and Bernard Purdie, percussion.
Big Round Records 8956
Total Time:  52:14
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

Composer David Haney’s new album Birth of a City is an intriguing collection of conceptualized improvisations.  There are two works here that explore blends of percussion with trombones and string instruments.  The title work is a series of eight different sections that explore rhythmic, or melodic fragments.  These are then improvised between whatever combos Haney intends to explore.  A host of percussion instruments are used to add a variety of intriguing sounds and punctuations with an occasional rhythmic idea providing a foundation from which the other material then springs.  The use of the trombones in the opening section gives the music an almost noir-ish quality.  When this switches to add strings, the music takes on a more intense quality and moves closer to a more classical avant-garde style.  Haney uses interesting bent pitches alongside gongs and different cymbals.  Even the melodic contours of the third part have an almost Asian-quality in their aesthetic.  As each of these different sections plays out, we get a sort of musical birthing image of different parts of this single thematic thread that provides the link between these different sections.  It connects with this concept of birthing sections of a city where different ideas will interact and where the listener seems to stand at one corner that can take them in any one direction.  The music overall has this jazzier underpinning upon which Haney also crafts music that might be more on the aleatoric classical realm, but the harmonic ideas are built around jazz progressions laid against these various explorations of line.  The music moves toward more intense writing as the parts build on one another gradually moving towards using all the different instrumental sounds.  Dissonance becomes far more pronounced as the piece progresses adding to this bustling intensity.  Sometimes, as in the seventh section here, the music has moments of emotive lyricism that move into extreme dissonance.  The work thus moves towards these denser textures becoming more forceful and dramatic culminating in the final smashing together of all the instrumental ideas in an atonal jumble of ideas and sounds.  It is as if the opening music has been deconstructed away from its harmonic and melodic roots to an exhaustive conclusion.  Part three explores a waltz tempo

The five parts of Variations on a Theme take a specific part of a thematic idea for improvisation and development.  This allows for the creation of a variety of different sonic textures and sounds.  The piece opens with the modified string quartet which lends the music a more classical sensibility.  The cool bass ostinato pattern in the second part, coupled with the brush snare, moves us more into the jazz realm.  The music dissolves into a trombone duet for its final part.

Birth of a City is in that third-stream universe that brings in aspects of classical chamber music with jazz for a more cerebral experience of musical material.  However, Haney’s lines are quite clear and this allows for an instantaneous entry into the soundworlds that he creates in both of these improvisatory works.  Certainly an album worth exploring for those who like their jazz and classical combos a little chunkier.