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13 The words that come to mind in response to a selection of instrumental pieces by Rob Keeley (NMC D179) are likely to seem like faint praise: delightful, charming, cheerful, sunny. They hardly do justice to the skill with which this composer creates small motifs that sound utterly fresh – and all these compositions spring from single seeds – and that stay fresh through the music’s absolutely transparent yet intriguing byways, the shape-shifting quite clear because the ideas are so compact and so firmly stamped, rhythmically. Nor do the pretty words meet the sureness of Keeley’s instrumental writing, and even its individuality, within a style that uses almost nothing in the way of special effects. Two Ways of Looking at a Spider, for instance, is a perfect fit for the sounds and the rhythmic character of a (ten-string) guitar, besides offering, in its first ‘way’, a close image of how spiders move. The excellent performance is by Jonathan Leathwood.
All the other pieces feature Keeley’s piano playing, which is as precise and colourful as his composing. The one solo piece, Bells of Halkis, is by no means alone in how it chimes and resonates; it also resonates with the work that precedes it, Music for Art and Tom, for sax and piano, which starts as an alarm call and winds its way down into an elegant blues. There are jazzy tones elsewhere, and suggestions too, through the kinds of modality Keeley’s motivic working implies, of Russian-period Stravinsky without the Russianness or of Messiaen. These, however, are fleeting shadows that pass across music that is wonderfully and astutely itself – that is immediate but never banal or academic.
The programme includes a bunch of tight little oboe pieces alertly played by Melinda Maxwell and – perhaps the wittiest item, suggesting sax and clarinet swinging like two people on a garden seat – Oregon Moods, featuring Andrew Sparling and Tim Holmes. But there might be even more to be said for the Horn Trio, with its middle movement that starts out as a hocket for violin (Darragh Morgan) and horn (Richard Watkins) and ends as ghost music, tiptoeing out.

12 Luc Ferrari (1929-2005) is fondly and expertly remembered in a compilation of pieces (Wergo WER 6737-2) from outside – before and beyond – the realm he made his own, of electronic-archival trawlings through the soundscape of the world. Here is Ferrari at the piano, a fun composer if also at times a tiresome one, given the best possible tribute by a fine musician, Elmar Schrammel.
Four of the six offered works find the composer, in his mid-twenties, making his way through serial Paris with one ear cocked more to Webern than Boulez and the other to Poulenc. Despite the claims of the outer movements’ markings in his ten-minute Antisonate (1953) – ‘Violent’, ‘Sauvage’ – this is a piece of humour and charm, as is the slightly shorter Sonatine Elyb from the same period. The Suite hétéroclite belongs here, too, and though it is hazardous to speak of tendencies when there is a quarter-century gap between these 1950s pieces and the next ones, perhaps the composer was learning the virtues of miniaturization. On the other hand, Visage I (1956), the longest continuous movement here, is also the most convincing and the most touching: a rolling snowball that falls apart.
For all that the Ferrari suggests otherwise, one could imagine his Collection de petites pièces for piano and tape recorder (1984-5) working better in its original form, as a kind of pianist’s Krapp’s Last Tape, the performer operating on both instruments. Run together, the pieces lose impact, and the recurrences of one wan little tune become almost infuriating. One arrives with some relief at ‘Dernière Variation’, only to discover it is not. Also, the super-miniature – few of these pieces go on for much more than a minute and many are less than half that long – is a difficult genre.
The recording leaves us with two Fragments d’un journal intime (1980-82), pieces that are again unable to forget fragments of tune, but now in a plaintive atmosphere, oscillating between folksong and café piano.

11 Brian Elias writes music that knows where it is going. Its elements and its vectors are strong and consistent – and they work: ideas that demand onward motion, harmonies that provide it, or stall it. The House that Jack Built (NMC), a collection of three orchestral works by him taking its name from the earliest of them, displays complete authority and a sharp sense of sound, whether in the energy-packed solo lines that mark out his music’s intentions or in its beautifully spaced and coloured chords that are sometimes repeated in a kind of internal reverberation.
All three compositions are made of chants and dances, both of these in the case of the title piece gathered from one of the great battlegrounds of Europe: the primary school playground. Anyone who has survived conflict thereon will recognize the elementary material, and recognize also the derisive howls and the taunts that call out through this exuberant but also scary score.
Instrumental drama is just as strong in A Talisman, though this is a long song for bass-baritone, setting the in-parts-incomprehensible text inscribed on a silver amulet passed down in the composer’s family. Indeed, the voice here enters an action that is already in progress, and the trumpet – a favourite bearer of tidings for this composer – is almost as much a soloist as the singer.
The third work is Doubles, which again is music of vividness and force, assertive and persuasive, with distinctive ideas zig-zagging through an unstoppable half hour. One slow passage arrives at faintly Messiaen-like chords, from which a momentary violin concerto tumbles out. Nor is this a unique surprise (for certainly there are surprises at the end) in music that is, not entirely paradoxically, utterly forthright.
Forthright, too, are the performances, by the BBC Symphony Orchestra, Doubles and Jack seemingly recorded at their premières, in 2009 and 2002 respectively.

10 The note accompanying a selection of works by the Moscow composer Viktor Ekimovsky (Wergo WER 6729-2) makes a bold claim: ‘Each piece employs technical and stylistic expressive means that have not appeared in any earlier works.’ Would it were so. The idea of a constant self-reinvention is appealing, and might be a good discipline. But alas, all five compositions here are noisy and baldly repetitive.

9 Not for the first time NMC turn the beam to northern England in offering Crossing Ohashi Bridge (NMC D174), a selection of works written for the Manchester-based Goldberg Ensemble. There is not much sound of the north here, though – nor of the east, come to that, despite the fact that the two big pieces, both strong, have oriental connections. The album’s title comes from Hiroshige by way of Geoffrey Poole, who was stimulated by a print showing people crossing a bridge in a downpour (one Manchester-Japan link right away). In his nicely confident and wide-ranging composition the ‘people’ are musical ideas that pass, or come into focus and dissolve – seventeen of them, according to his own count, or roughly one per minute. This has the intriguing effect that one cannot always be quite sure whether a particular figure has arrived or is still emerging – or is on the way out. The edges, in other words, may never be fully distinct, as can happen in heavy rain. As already suggested, there is nothing overtly Japanese in the music; this is not an exotic sketch but rather an image of traversal, of coming and going – straightforward and at the same time poetic, and memorable.
        Of similar length, Anthony Gilbert’s Palace of the Winds refers to the honeycomb sandstone structure from which the royal women of Jaipur could look out without being seen. The piece is comparable in being made everywhere of the same stuff, intervallic, harmonic and rhythmic, so that the impression is rather like that of watching a design on a large flag blowing in the wind. Constantly there is motion, at a moderate pace or more slowly – no rest; only at the end dispersal. And the feeling that prevails is that of lament, but somehow wistful, in a combination that is moving and, again, memorable.
        Roger Marsh’s Canto I grows from the tiniest seed. Nicola Lefanu’s Amores, a set of five ‘songs without words’ with horn (Richard Watkins) singing, reflects on Britten.

8 In his sixties Georges Aperghis seems to be coming forward as one of the modern masters, his talkative music at once beguiling, unsettling and funny. Klangforum Wien honours him with an excellent selection of works from between 2005 and 2008 (Kairos 0013222 KAI), all of which they introduced. (During these few years our fecund composer was also responsible for two hour-long theatre pieces, and it is a pity none of his work in this domain has appeared on dvd.)
        Two of the works are similar in scoring, duration and title, Teeter-Totter (2007-8) and Seesaw (2008), but there resemblances end, for it cannot be counted a resemblance, more an Aperghis characteristic, that they both jolt forward in switchback rides between different kinds of musical conversation. Seesaw is predominantly sombre, and keeps coming back to humming to itself quietly in the middle register, whereas Teeter-Totter is more brilliant and more fragile. Both scores, Noah’s-ark-like, include instruments in pairs, but in Seesaw the two pianos are rivals where throughout Teeter-Totter they are together. There is also the difference that Seesaw has a slightly noisy audience (in Vienna, a few days after the Amsterdam première), whereas Teeter-Totter is offered in a studio recording.
        Contretemps, with the same sort of group but a little bigger, and a little longer (twenty-one minutes), also sways and crosscuts between different streams, but these now include – or isolate – a solo soprano: the formidable Donatienne Michel-Dansac, an Aperghis regular who is fully equal to his demands for squeaks and twitterings. The piece is on one level a mad scene – ‘oh crazy’ is one of the few textual fragments that are easy to make out – but it also has moving vistas of bewilderment or despair.
        Aperghis is not, it must be said, an ace at instrumentation, and his sound world is often raw, even raucous. But he makes this an advantage in his project of demusicalizing music, and remusicalizing it as theatre. And of course, questions of sound combination are less pressing when only one instrument is involved, as is the case with Parlando, written for the Klangforum bassist Uli Fussenegger. The title is obviously apt; the double bass is talking – to itself, probably, thinking over what it has to say, trying out various possibilities. Fussenegger is rivetting. One hears the metal in the strings, the twang as well as the gruffness. A whole persona arises in sound, which is part of what Aperghis is all about.
        A note in the booklet records that the disc was made possible by Hester Diamond and Ralph Kaminsky, the latter a lovely man and great friend of new music. It is good he has this memorial.

7 The beautiful title of Jonathan Harvey’s Bird Concerto with Pianosong might sound alarm bells in evoking another composer – one with whom Harvey has tweeted in the past – but we can relax. Though there are a couple of points in this half-hour piece where Saint François d’Assise suddenly appears, and though the piano bows out with some gently valedictory, benedictory chords in midnight blue, this is altogether Harvey’s piece, and one of his most charming.
        It is so, in its individuality and in its charm, partly by virtue of its mastery of what has long been a Harvey speciality: the interweaving of instrumental with electronic sound, to which is added here the intermingling of avian and synthetic. The brilliant songs of some Californian birds, which Harvey seems to hear in Californian sunshine, flow seamlessly into electronic chirpings and ululations, and both real birds and imaginary ones are joined by the piano in its top register at the opening of the piece, where a bright little motif – one that will recur – kick-starts the scanning of diverse musical horizons, a process not so much of development as of wonderment. Groups from the accompanying ensemble chime or surge in now and then, and there are prominent accordion solos, but the piano’s is the dominant instrumental voice, singing with the birds. Music of light and joy – joy seemingly in the adventure of musical discovery as much as in the source material – , the work is finely presented here by Hideki Nagano with the London Sinfonietta under David Atherton.
        Three Sinfonietta players are heard in the solo pieces also included: Gareth Hulse and Tim Gill in versions of Ricercare una melodia and Paul Archibold in Other Presences. Ricercare una melodia – for a solist whose part is recorded live and played back, first at the same speed, later awesomely decelerated – seems to bend to fit the shape of whatever is playing it, oboe or cello. Both these excellent, highly musical performances are in the six-minute range, and engrossing. Other Presences, which seems to carry the aura of the trumpeter for whom it was written, Markus Stockhausen, is almost twice as long, and feels that way, though this is perhaps the piece that loses most from the drama of musician and ‘other presences’ being invisible. All is much clearer in the voluble dialogues of the two earlier pieces.

6 At once pure and perplexing, the sounds that are being themselves in Cage’s late ‘number pieces’ can easily convey his ideal – as much as his far less determined music – of communication without content: the ‘I have nothing to say and I am saying it’ thing. It may be hard for listeners to get used to this, to contemplating a stretch of music as if it were the ripples in a stream, but the experience can be more inspiriting and strange than boring; it can leave us awakened and subtly alarmed. Perhaps especially is that so of these last pieces, since they deal, in general, with ordinary notes and intervals and chords, played by ordinary instruments – with the small coinage of music, trickling out as if there were nothing to pay for any more.
        This is difficult only (and it’s a big ‘only’) for the performers, who will probably be used to making sense. Instead of listening to their colleagues, they will have to present each sound as if it were the first. Whatever shape seems to be forming – a cadence, an intensification, an orbit – is irrelevant. Whatever you played last is irrelevant. All that matters is this, now.
        A sense of such immediacy, at once level and intense, comes across well in two of the three performances on mode’s sixth volume of these number pieces (mode 239), those of Five and Seven, Thirteen having traces of continuity that, not entirely paradoxically, disturb the flow. In Seven, which is similarly for a mixed ensemble (expanded Pierrot team), there is more trust that time will go on without being pushed, and the effect is breathtaking as well as wonderfully imaginative in the sound discoveries that happen and, at times, witty. Five, which lasts only that number of minutes, is well worth hearing without checking what the sound sources are going to be.
        Performances are by Essential Music, recorded in 1993-4, when the pieces were relatively new. Indeed, Thirteen seems to have been laid down a few days after the group gae the U.S. première. This is, then, a historic release as well as a beautiful one.

5 Marco Blaauw is a wonderful musician, and there are wonderful things right through his Blue Dog album (Wergo WER 2063-2). The one big problem is that all four pieces, created during sessions at the Zentrum für Kunst und Medientechnologie in Karlsruhe, are dialogues (with electronics) that – no matter how spectacular the aural results, and how properly fundamental – need to be seen to be believed. Music that, in some part, subtly confuses trumpet tones and synthesized sounds loses some effect if we cannot use our eyes to help our ears, and of course we lose the whole drama of the human being, present in the room with us, interacting with the unseen.
        Agostino Di Scipio’s MODES OF INTERFERENCE/1 is perhaps the work where that drama is most missed. On the other hand, its continuity, through ten minutes of unbroken and fascinating sound-searching, raises no questions of what is happening at any particular time, since the whole piece comes out of a controlled feedback loop, the player, with a microphone inside his instrument, tending the sound as carefully as someone carrying an elaborate dessert upstairs. All is veils, striations, bubbles of sound; nothing would give it away that a trumpet is the source.
        The three other works are, by contrast, fully trumpety. Michel Kounders’s Helmet & Sling, for trumpet and electronic aura, comes straight out of the chivalric world of Stockhausen’s music for Michael in LICHT. David Dramm’s [chaincurve] is a mesmerizing duet for melodious trumpet and stationary harmonies from Hammond organ and synthesizer, but long at twenty-two minutes and including an unexplained burst of (surely edited) prestidigitation from the electronic player (Dominik Blum).
        Brilliance and suavity (and humour) are more effectively managed in Dog Song by Yannis Kyriakides. Having in mind Blaauw’s double-bell trumpet (also heard in the Dramm piece), Kyriakides writes in his note that his thoughts turned to Cerberus, though there is nothing particularly canine, or hellish, in his piece. One might think rather of a multi-ball tennis match, given the number of electronic pulses at different speeds within which Blaauw has to keep his balance. There may be the haunting sense, too, of the scene of a catastrophe, with warning bleeps guarding us from the musician – or him from us.

4 The title of the Morgan Hayes album Violin Concerto & Other Works (NMC D163) disguises the fact that most of what we hear is piano music: two big solo pieces, three sets of miniatures and a small-scale concerto. It seems odd to hide this, especially when the pianist involved throughout is the excellent Jonathan Powell, who has a thoroughly physical command not only of the music’s technical intricacies – the cross-speeds that might suggest Carter or, more likely, Nancarrow, the sudden swerves of direction, which might be followed by a jump back to a kind of motion that had been interrupted – but also of its irony. Powell often seems to be inside the music and outside at the same time, keeping a grip on figures that have ideas of their own about where to go and when. His sometimes vocal involvement is an agreeable and even expressive sign of his engagement with music that is simultaneously sturdy and endangered.
        Bayan Northcott’s notes reveal that Hayes’s day job has been accompanying dance classes, and it shows in the sense his music gives of muscles in movement, as well as the sense – not unallied – of a beat all the more powerful for so often being averted. Hayes can do soft piano – one piece from his Strides series is a drift of Ivesian nostalgias (again the transatlantic accent) – but much more of his music for the instrument is dynamic, nervy, on edge.
        The violin, almost inevitably, projects longer lines, but often bounces similarly against the beat, especially in its two soliloquies here: Lucky’s Speech and – taking off from a decelerated version of the same nimble idea – Lucky’s Dream. Also, because Hayes is interested in particular kinds of harmony, rhythm and motif, the violin and piano pieces can seem to spin off from one another, as when the first of Three Distressed Surfaces takes over from Lucky’s Dream.
        All of this, however, is not to discount the achievement of delicacy and exhilaration in the disc’s title piece, which is much the longest item (seventeen and a half minutes) and perhaps the most seductive, for its gorgeous scoring and for how the lyrical violin and the more abrupt ensemble (though either can influence the other) knock against one another and so, as in a pinball game, detonate bursts of active colour. Keisuke Okazaki is the outstanding soloist here and in the solo pieces.

3 Three works emanating from IRCAM make up the programme for a Pierre Jodlowski collection (Kairos 0013032 KAI), two featuring the Ensemble InterContemporain under Susanna Mälkki, two (not the same two) including recorded sounds. The piece without these, Drones, works hectically with rather trivial material. Jodlowski’s talent seems to be for cinematic narrative, using sounds to evoke both the physical world and psychological states, and his work is more effective when he has electronic access to dramatic soundscapes. It is more effective, too, when pared down. Both the ensemble pieces, despite being strongly and beautifully played, convey a lot of raw, undirected tension and energy; the temperature starts high and remains so. Barbarismes, like Varèse’s Déserts, has windows into an electronic space, and though, like Drones, it keeps one interested in what will come next (a thunderstorm at one point), its musical ideas can be disappointingly elementary. Film music, it might be, for a lost film. Dialog/No Dialog, for flute and recording, is much more self-sufficient in its drama, much richer and more persuasive. At the centre of the recorded sound is a female voice, whose moments of conjunction with the flute are strikingly managed. ‘Écoute[s]’, she says at the start, and we do – and the flute does. Indeed, it may seem that the recording is listening to the flute as much as the flute to the recording. Sophie Cherrier is the outstanding performer. The documentation, though, is incomplete, and one has to go to the composer’s excellent website to discover even the dates of these works.

2 Anaïs Nin had an off-centre place in music thanks to Varèse’s Nocturnal; now Louis Andriessen given her the full spotlight with a portrait, Anaïs Nin (2009-10), recorded at a London Sinfonietta concert last year, along with his De Staat (Signum Classics SIGCD 273). Andriessen’s setting – a lot more conversational than Varèse’s – is of diary entries that speak of Nin’s erotic relationships with Antonin Artaud, Henry Miller, René Allendy and her father, the composer Joaquín Nin. The voice Andriessen gives her is light and casual; he designed the work for Cristina Zavalloni, whose singing boders on jazz and cabaret, and those affinites are strengthened by the instrumentation, for saxophones, horn, trumpet, violin, bass, piano and percussion. His choice of this formation was dictated, according to his note, by the period concerned, 1932-4; we are – though this he does not make explicit – very much in the world of Weill.
        Since the whole piece operates on this level of irony, it is perhaps too much to ask for some Weillian acid, or even some Weillian sweetness. Besides, Anaïs Nin is no Brecht, and what strength her writing has, which is principally naivety, is compromised when someone else is speaking or, as here, singing for her. Possibly naivety and sophistication, frankness and self-delusion, openness and danger, warmth and heat could all have been combined more effectively had the model instead been Berg’s Lulu (also right for the period). That, however, would be to wish for a wholly different piece.
        In any event, Anaïs Nin has other problems, of genre. We are told that film formed part of the performance, and no doubt its presence changed the nature of the space the music occupied. The songs alone, plus recordings of an actor in the roles of Artaud and Miller, sound incomplete.
        Not so De Staat, of course, which receives a polished performance under David Atherton, with Synergy Vocals providing the choral elements.

1 Old Lockenhaus and new are represented on a disc offering two concertos by Sofia Gubaidulina (ECM 2256): The Lyre of Orpheus, written for and played by Gidon Kremer, in a recording from 2006, and The Canticle of the Sun, where the soloist is Nicolas Altstaedt, performing four years later. They are concertos of different sorts, the first a passionate monologue (occasionally turning into a duologue involving cello) for solo violin with strings and percussion, the second a one-of-a-kind piece in which the solo cello, again with prominent but never overwhelming percussion, instigates and resonates with choral chanting of St Francis’s hymn of praise. Playing for over forty-five minutes in this recording, The Canticle of the Sun is also almost twice as long as The Lyre of Orpheus. On the other hand, the two pieces have much in common – and much in common with other works by this composer. In both the solo instrument is the subjective centre, a frankly singing voice. Both make play with fully tonal material – fifths, octaves, triads, overtone series – to convey an impression of light discovered within darkness. Both also resort often to the glissando, especially the upward glissando, as an expressive gesture. And both feature a short melodic motif recurring often to grip the music in a unified character.
        Gubaidulina’s own notes, printed in the brochure, warmly endorse Rostropovich as the solar personality for whom she wrote The Canticle of the Sun, but the piece has now been recorded by three other cellists: Wispelwey and Geringas as well as Altstaedt, who in his account suggests heat not so much by expansiveness as by intensity and close focus. This new recording also benefits from the clear voices of the Latvian choir ‘Kamer…’, whose long burst of light – the climax, rather more than halfway through – is thrilling.
        Not recorded hitherto, The Lyre of Orpheus has points of wonderful iridescence when soloist or orchestra sound off overtones in successsion, providing the sense indeed of some enormous instrument being spanned by giant hands. Gubaidulina in her note indicates that the governing idea has to do with difference tones in the low bass, but this is not easy to hear. One is held much more by a Gubaidulinesque sense of desperation and continuous search for what can never be found.