1.Visions and Dreams inspired by Rembrandt and Dali with composer pianist Barend Schipper and flutist Jans Prins in the Netherlands is available at www.barendschipper.com. It has for me, after many car rides with the CD, so much to offer and treasure, so let me count the ways. First, I am struck by the inescapably engaging nature of the recording. Whatever musical or philosophical problems are suggested by the music, the musicians take us through an imaginative, evocative, subtly challenging, and spirit-expanding resolution that quietly works the listener over. Also, the discreet employment of musical ideas is ever at play and always inviting, often in an ineffable area where, as depth-psychologist Ira Progoff once told me, “we don’t understand them, we just know them”. The music is beautiful, partly because we sense that the musicians are truly yet subtly engaged in their search for meaning. We sense something quite deep, yet unforced and natural here.
2.Beethoven String Quartets Op. 18 nos 4-6 by the Eybler Quartet pulsates with a joie de vivre that requires letting go on the part of the listener for ultimate effect. It also requires the use of seat belts, but I suggest going without. Why? The Eyblers, singly and collectively, seem not so much just very able players of Beethoven’s famous early quartets, but an extension of each composition, a realization of its inherent potential for musical energy and truth. What is happening and what should be happening seem melded as one and the listener submits to dazzling technical skill that seems natural and even off-handed. I love the momentum of the Eyblers, whatever their tempo, their full-bodied textures, their sense of spontaneous interaction in common musical purpose, their lungs-full musicality, their difficult but seemingly casual runs that leave the listener behind at the first several notes and catching up breathlessly, their vigorous and impish playfulness. Best of all I think of Beethoven with awakened imagination while listening – or is it that I know myself afresh as I do?
3. For Those Who Died Trying by composer Frank Horvat and offered by the Mivos Quartet is a profoundly haunting work, one that subtly works over the listener’s emotions and creates a feeling of unanswerable sadness. Its musical arguments are precisely and economically conceived, but potently and discreetly presented through the assured and insightful readings of the Mivos group. Both composer and musicians create a ritual of mourning in which the listener truly feels a loss of lives and the fragile values that make us human and are lost when the capitalistic purpose of profit rules. The work is described as “an epic 35 movement string quartet, a tribute to those Thai Human Rights Defenders who have lost their lives over the last 20 years defending their homeland, their villages, from corporations or state-run enterprises that seek to destroy them for their own profit, regardless of those affected.” Research has “documented over 59 cases of Human Rights Defenders (HRDs) who have been murdered or abducted in the last 20 years.” An essential recording.
4.The Shaman/Arctic Symphony: Orchestral Music of Vincent Ho delivers a thrilling experience in both compositions. The Shaman is epic, unpredictably dramatic, always dynamic, and rich with uniquely assertive moments throughout, something of an encyclopedia of percussive sounds from both the Winnipeg Symphony and percussion soloist Evelyn Glennie. Glennie is totally in control of both transitions and evocative potencies of sound, and one might say she is totally at one with sound as a presence, as a force, as a complex poetry. I once interviewed Glennie for a couple of hours and especially loved her criticisms of music schools that confined a student’s potential with unquestioned traditions int music education. Did I mention that, remarkably, she is deaf, a Dame, and renowned around the world?
Next, Arctic Symphony blends the Nunavut Sivuniksavut Performers with recordings of Arctic environmental sound and the Winnipeg Symphony in a compelling reading of Ho’s score. This composition is rich with a captivating variety of sounds and, in its many narrative paths and propulsions, consumes the listener’s mind and emotions, almost compels one’s surrender to a new and unfolding world created by Ho. A very exciting CD which at times feels cosmically playful.
5.Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata with translator Ginny Tapley Takemori and read movingly deadpan and sympathetic by Nancy Woo concerns a 36 year old woman, Keiko, who works for 18 years in a convenience store and cannot imagine herself in a life beyond her job. She copies the styles of fashion and the personalities of others and the language they speak, and develops a self that above all fits in. She speaks of the placement of groceries on shelves as if this is of universal importance, and maybe that is why I think, while listening, of Hiroshi Teshigahara ‘s film Woman in the Dunes in which some critics have sensed Taoist ideas unfolding. I’m into my third listen of this quietly moving first-person novel which has been very popular in Japan.
6. A Dead Room Farce: A Charles Paris Mystery by Simon Brett and starring Bill Nighy with his unique undercurrent of laid-back yet urgent, precise yet pinched, irreverent yet involved, angst-ridden yet quietly merry, and achingly deadpan delivery. I first heard Nighy in similar gear as Trigorin describing the trials of a writer’s life in a National Theatre production of Chekhov’s The Seagull in London. opposite Judi Dench as Arkadina. As each tribulation was noted, I found myself laughing uncontrollably, since Nighy/Trigorin’s woes echoed my own at the time. This was one of the funniest moments in my life and when Nighy stepped forth to take a bow afterwards, I, sitting ten feet in front of him, applauded vigorously with my hands overhead and gave him my two thumbs up, at which point he gave me a wink. I have heard eleven episodes of the Charles Paris Mystery series which are directed and acted at a vigorous clip and written for refreshing moments at every turn.
7. Maryem Tollar sings with a quietly haunting presence, an easy dignified elegance, and a self-assured femininity in a new CD, Cairo Moon, from the group Al Qahwa which also features Ernie Tollar on Arabic nay flute and saxophone, Demetri Petsalakis on oud, Naghmeh Farahmand on the dumbek, an Arabic hand drum. We have multi instrumentalists in these musicians and the CD also features Alfred Gamil on violin as in the duet with Ernie Tollar’s sax, and also Majd Sukar on clarinet. One quickly surrenders to the irresistible atmosphere created by Al Qahwa, and because this is a small group of diversely-expert musicians, one takes pleasure in, say, many tonal varieties, rhythmic shifts, and individual instrumental voices as one might in listening to chamber music – all the while as one’s hips sway to the music and one feels summoned to a nameless somewhere.
8. I’ve been listening lately to Keith Richards’ autobiography compactly titled Life -deliciously read by Johnny Depp – and again am reminded of the musical influence of touring bluesman Big Bill Broonzy on Britain’s budding rockers who were Richards’ contemporaries in the ‘60s. British folk legend Martin Carthy has also noted Broonzy’s impact on him. Anyway, the Big Bill Broonzy Story on two CDs – I first had the recording on 3 LPs as a teen – remains a priceless combination of Big Bill’s memories, demonstrations, anecdotes, and insights interspersed with about thirty blues and folk songs. Broonzy, as always, displays one of the best blends of voice and guitar in the blues canon, and his sense of precisely-right and effective fills and their placement, and of supportive rhythms, is a gift to any lover of the blues.
9. After many years of listening to Angela Hewitt’s Bach on piano and, more recently her two Scarlatti Sonatas CDs and her Beethoven Opus 31 # 2 (the first Beethoven sonata recording I bought many decades ago, with Ernst Von Dohnanyi as pianist, was the opus 31 # 2), I began to wonder if one could detect a distinctly feminine voice in piano-playing. How would Hewitt, Martha Argerich, Anne Queffélec on Satie, Ivana Gavric, Hanna Shybayeva, Katia Buniatishvili, Beatrice Rana doing the Goldbergs, Helene Grimaud, and Imogen Cooper doing the Diabelli Variations offer grounds for comparison and exploration, along with the unique insights and pianistic thrills, overt and subtle, of each one. With each pianist I have felt many moments of “oh” and “aha” and the realization that my habits of thinking were at stake. I’ll keep you posted, but don’t rush me.
10. In London last year I got to chat with folk/traditional singer Martin Carthy and am very glad of the release of Live at the Pavillion with Martin and his wondrous fiddler-singer daughter Eliza Carthy. It’s an informal yet professional, heartfelt and subtly imaginative set that sets one’s feet on the earth, back in history, and among the working class. And if Eliza is a thrilling singer you should hear her with her legendary mom, Norma Waterson, probably the most thrilling voice in all of traditional music. Norma has an unsettling yet tender depth in her voice. These people are a legendary presence in folk music, for one because they reveal the haunting artistry available in profound human experience expressed in word and music. We listen and we feel connected, moved, and thrilled by humanity reaching for its values and its value.