ALBUM REVIEW: “David Stock: Concertos” with Gil Rose and BMOP, Featuring Andrés Cárdenes, Alex Klein, and Lisa Pegher

By Geoffrey Larson

David StockDavid Stock did not hold back. That one thing about the late composer is for sure; his music was unfettered by any sort of self-consciousness or reticence. His works are an unabashed good time, and the bluntness of his titles reflect a musical personality full of good humor: Plenty of Horn, Blast!, Sax Appeal, Knockout. David was an up-front kind of guy, and was profoundly focused on creating, promoting, and nurturing the finest musical art. He left an indelible mark on the American musical landscape in long associations with some of the country’s finest orchestras. Through his creation of the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble and his work with other Pittsburgh institutions, he brought amazing culture and musical vitality to the Rust Belt.

Who better than Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project to do justice to his work? Rose shares Stock’s ties to Pittsburgh (both were educated at Carnegie Mellon), and his no-nonsense, quality-above-all-else attitude. In response to the often modest size of BMOP’s concert audience, Rose told the New York Times, “I don’t like to put a lot of money into marketing because I’d rather put it on the stage.” He has focused on building an orchestra of the Boston area’s finest freelancers and focusing their collective musical might into the most consummate performances of contemporary music, with a special emphasis on preserving the music of living composers in high-quality recordings with his own BMOP/Sound label.

David Stock: ConcertosRose and BMOP explore Stock’s concertos in this latest release, teaming up with soloists who were close with the composer. The Cuban-born violinist Andrés Cárdenes premiered Stock’s earlier 1995 Violin Concerto with Pittsburgh Symphony during his time as that orchestra’s concertmaster, and aside from his usual spectacular virtuosity brings a special affinity to this music. He seemingly devours every note and rhythm in the Concierto Cubano (2000), particularly in the tango-like third movement “Dancing, with fire.” That third movement is not far from the textures and harmonies of the final movement of Copland’s Clarinet Concerto (both works are scored for soloist and string orchestra), revealing some of the underpinnings of the Americana in Stock’s orchestral sound. Though BMOP’s intonation begins to fray slightly in the course of some rapid and challenging passagework, the orchestra executes this music with resolute confidence and poise under Rose.

Stock’s music is not all pyrotechnics: the lyricism that rounds out the works on this release actually makes the collection quite accessible for newcomers to his music. The second piece on the disc is especially demanding of a special seriousness in addition to the trademark Stock joviality, and oboist Alex Klein is fully committed, giving an almost operatic performance. In Oborama, Stock presents a series of five character pieces that each feature a different instrument, touring us through the oboe family from English horn to musette (piccolo oboe), oboe d’amore, and bass oboe before giving the final word to the standard oboe itself. Klein is an especially adept practitioner of the instrument to excel on all five, giving life to each instrument’s character as portrayed in the five-movement drama. If you know of another work that features five instruments of the oboe family, please tell us. It must have been a rare treat to see this work in live performance – we are super jealous.

There’s more live performance FOMO in Lisa Pegher’s recording of Stock’s Percussion Concerto, which is whoa!-inducing from the start. Stock strikes up an unbalanced dialogue between soloist and orchestra at the outset, with the soloist interjecting thunderously among soft string chords à la Ives’ The Unanswered Question (or the second movement of Beethoven’s Fourth Piano Concerto, with roles reversed). Pegher masterfully captures the underlying tension of the inward-looking second movement (marked “Introspective”), and the soft tones of the marimba never seem to wander aimlessly. She’s right at home as the fully battery is unleashed in the jubilantly syncopated finale, and BMOP is up for the mad scramble of notes as well. Stock has written another fearsome part for the orchestral timpanist in this concerto, and BMOP’s Craig McNutt trades blows with the soloist with aplomb.

I first met David Stock at a Seattle Symphony rehearsal in 2007, when the orchestra was preparing for a performance of his work Blast! under Gerard Schwarz. One of my favorite memories of David comes from one of the many conversations we had at performances of the Pittsburgh Symphony (did he miss a single one?), when I reminded him of that occasion in Seattle. He exclaimed at me from behind his suspenders and massive glasses, “It’s not just Blast, you know, it’s Blast! With an EXCLAMATION POINT!” Speaking of Stock with Jerry Schwarz in Pittsburgh in 2014, Schwarz said to me: “We chose to feature David’s music in a program of the All-Star Orchestra. He always said, ‘It’s not just Blast, you know, it’s Blast! With an EXCLAMATION POINT!’”

David was an unforgettable person, and the infectious character of his music is felt both by those familiar with his work and experiencing it for the first time. Though this latest BMOP release was recorded before his passing in November 2015 and was never meant as a eulogy for the composer, it serves as a fitting tribute, wrapped in the blinding virtuosity, good humor, and friendship that these musicians do best.

Geoffrey Larson is a host on Second Inversion, and is the Music Director of Seattle Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra.

ALBUM REVIEW: Mason Bates’ Mothership featuring Gil Rose/Boston Modern Orchestra Project

by Geoffrey Larson

BMOP throws down orchestral music of Composer-DJ Mason Bates

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Ever since the extravaganza of the YouTube Symphony’s premiere of Mason Bates’ Mothership at the Sydney Opera House in 2011, the piece has taken off (sorry), popping up in the programs of major orchestras across the US and abroad. Mothership is perhaps the most direct and largest-scale representation of Bates’ style as an ensemble composer, which blends contemporary American classical composition with jazz and electronic sounds. Its driving, grooving feel is positively addictive, like Short Ride in a Fast Machine seen through a smoky jazz/electronic kaleidoscope. A slightly more introspective middle section relies on the talents of improvisers, making no two performances the same – and some borderline EDM-style beats and electronics provided by a laptop-driven synth setup or the keypad-operating composer himself drive the pace of the music. It’s totally fun, and totally infectious.

I was already hooked after seeing the YouTube performance of Mothership, but after witnessing excellent performances by the Pittsburgh Symphony of this work and others such as Desert Transport during Mason’s time as PSO Composer in Residence, I was a full-blown addict. Where’s the recording??, I muttered to myself through sleepless nights. So, a very heartfelt thank-you goes out to Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project for satisfying (and abetting) my addiction with a full album of Mason’s orchestral music.

(available now from BMOP/sound)

For the listener, this release pulls no punches. We are first launched into space with Mothership, then glide along the gossamer textures of Sea-Blue Circuitry, are blasted by the orchestral fanfares of Attack Decay Sustain Release, and are then enchanted by the humid, electronic-cicada-filled ambience of Rusty Air in Carolina before being flung across the desert in a helicopter in Desert Transport. Modern classical albums that feature only one composer are rarely listenable all the way through; not so with this one. It’s unmistakably Bates throughout, but the deep variety of orchestral sounds, augmented with electronic wizardry from the composer’s club DJ side, never succeed in exhausting the ear.

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As for the performance, BMOP is in their usual excellent form, with ensemble playing that is tightly coordinated in the midst of rapid-fire passages and a brass section that is strikingly powerful in its attacks and beautifully in tune. In the midst of synthesized textures, the orchestral layers come through crystal-clear. In Mothership, we even get an improvisation from Su Chang, the virtuoso guzheng player from the work’s premiere performance, together with Jason Moran on FM Rhodes synth. Rose’s highly accurate treatment of dynamics takes the ensemble to a beautifully evocative place in Rusty Air in Carolina, and adds appropriate shaping and punch in the other works. We should be very relieved that Rose and BMOP aren’t afraid to really let it rip in this music’s most powerful moments.

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Part of what makes this music great is its versatility: it’s at home in so many different settings, from the venerated orchestral concert hall, to the sweaty dance club, to your living room on a Tuesday night. This album is a keeper, then, but not without a major drawback: The B-Sides, Bates’ moody set of orchestral vignettes, is disappointingly absent. Did they run out of room? Is there a follow-up? It’s ok, I’ll wait.

 

ALBUM OF THE WEEK: Lou Harrison’s La Koro Sutro

by Rachele Hales

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“Old Granddad” sounds like something you might ask a bartender to mix up, but it’s actually what you get when you manipulate scrap metal, trash cans, and oxygen tanks into a percussion instrument played with baseball bats.  Given its resemblance to a gamelan it is often also referred to as an “American Gamelan,” but I think we can all agree that “Old Granddad” is a much cooler name.  It was built by Lou Harrison and his partner William Colvig and is heard throughout Harrison’s Suite for Violin with American Gamelan and La Koro Sutro.  So what does this thing sound like, anyway?  I’m so glad you asked!  Pretty much like gongs and chimes, turns out.

 

Harrison’s Suite for Violin with American Gamelan opens with a haunting folk melody before morphing into what Harrison calls “stampedes” in recognition of the “lively and unrelenting rhythms” used to reflect Balinese dance.  The final Chaconne of the suite brings the entire piece to a peaceful, dreamy conclusion.  Harrison successfully fuses his strong Asian influence with a Western compositional attitude in this suite, and the CD only gets sweeter from here.

La Koro Sutro is the second piece on this album and translates from Esperanto as “The Heart Sutra,” which is one of the most beloved and famous sutras of the Mahayana Buddhist tradition and describes the path one must take to achieve the pure distillation of wisdom (Nirvana).  Harrison’s use of Esperanto, the most widely-spoken constructed language in the world, is a clear social and political statement reflecting his hope for a united world and the transcendence of ethnic & national boundaries.

While the suite on this disc is lovely, this reviewer was utterly captivated by the title track La Koro Sutro, largely because of the astounding choral performance by The Providence Singers.  The warmth and precision they bring to this recording cannot be overstated, especially in “5a Paragrafo” where, in the text, The Bodhisattva (enlightenment being) reaches total tranquility & euphoria and will stay there forever.  Do I understand Esperanto?  No.  Am I educated about Buddhism?  Not really.  But I learned what pure bliss sounds like the moment “5a Paragrafo” hit the 1:30 mark.  On their website The Providence Singers describe the selection this way: “It is in a six-note B-minor scale — the E-natural is left out as it would be out of tune in justly tuned syntonon diatonic.”  Since I don’t know what any of that means I can only describe it as…  glowing.

La Koro Sutro concludes with a return to the original Sanskrit text and heavy emphasis on the deeper sounds of Old Granddad (created by whacking oxygen tanks with baseball bats – don’t try it at home!) as well more of the gorgeous plinking heard throughout the entire sutra.   Lou Harrison said that “making an instrument is one of music’s greatest joys,” and this reviewer is very grateful for his contribution.  La Koro Sutro is a rewarding album for patient listeners and makes me want to bring 1995 back so I can just lay on my floor and listen to it all day.

Go here to purchase the album, performed by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and Gil Rose!