A special eight-page section focusing on recent recordings from the US and Canada S Adler Choral Trilogy. How sweet the sound. A Hymn of Praise. Let us rejoice. My beloved is mine. Psalm 23. To Speak to Our Time Gloria Dei Cantores / Richard K Pugsley Gloria Dei Cantores F GDCD066 (49’ • DDD • T/t) Samuel Adler (b1928), who studied with Copland and Hindemith, taught for 63 years at the Juilliard and Eastman schools of music. Sixty of those years are represented on this album, including most notably the powerful title-piece, To Speak to Our Time, commissioned by the Dresden Chamber Choir for their remembrance concert on the 80th anniversary of Kristallnacht. The musical and emotional ghosts the topic raised for the composer, who grew up in the shadow of the Third Reich before his family escaped to America in 1939, take on new meaning in light of the Ukrainian invasion. The 20-minute piece is scored unusually for a cappella choir and two violins, from which Adler has created music that stretches the familiar to express emotions that can be clearly understood from musical signals: dissonant, soaring choral lines and consoling, compassionate resolutions, woven through with strands of lyrical ecstasy and brief, enchanted solos. That its four choral movements are in different languages – Nelly Sachs’s ‘Chorus of the Wanderers’ in German followed by Psalms in Hebrew, Latin and English – gives it a sad gravity. The singing is powerful, passionately sculpted and proud. The work’s four short instrumental movements, providing abstract commentaries in the form of musical dialogues, are expertly played by Lucia Lin and Julianne Lee. The unique St Cecilia organ at the Church of the Transfiguration on Cape Cod, its pipes located in suspended mahogany chambers lining the north and south sides, plays a key role, ubiquitous yet discreet, whether sounding glowing notes or more forceful phrases as signal posts. In How sweet the sound, a beautiful setting of ‘Amazing grace’, it illuminates the ending in a radiant embrace. Laurence Vittes M Brouwer ‘Reactions – Songs and Chamber Music’ All Lines Are Still Busya. Declarationb. I Cry – Summer 2020c. The Laked. Rhapsodic Sonatae b Sarah Beaty mez dBrian Skoog ten aMari Sato bc vn/narr eEliesha Nelson va bcdeShuai Wang pf Naxos American Classics M 8 559904 (56’ • DDD • T) Margaret Brouwer covers a lot of emotional territory in the music on her new CD, ‘Reactions’, which comprises works composed between 2005 and 2020, including one written in the throes of the pandemic. The American composer has the expressive skills to evoke the passions she sets out to describe – love, ecology, racism, even being trapped in telephone hell. Rhapsodic Sonata (2011, rev 2016) is a three-movement work for viola and piano in which Brouwer’s musical language – tonal with deft sprinklings of harmonic spice – draws the instruments into ardent and wistful conversations. The viola is temperamental in the extended first movement, ‘Cáritas’, with its hint of a Gregorian chant, and loving and impish in the shorter two movements. Eliesha Nelson plays the viola part with penetrating focus and beauty, and pianist Shuai Wang is equally sensitive to the music’s changing moods. In Declaration (2005), Brouwer takes up subjects ‘addressing violence and war and the equality of all people’, as the composer writes, to texts by Ann Woodward, Thomas Jefferson, David Adams and herself. The word-painting in every case is vivid and often surprising, as in the almost defiant setting of an excerpt from the Declaration of Independence. Mezzo-soprano Sarah Beaty, violinist Mari Sato and pianist Wang bring these narratives to vibrant life. The stresses of the pandemic and the scourge of inequality are depicted in fervent terms in I Cry – Summer 2020, which Sato and Wang give an intensely compelling performance. The Lake (2019), set to Brouwer’s own text, is both a poetic show of gratitude and a plea to wake up to climate change, shaped with subtle urgency by tenor Brian Skoog and pianist Wang. Sato goes it alone in the satirical All Lines Are Still Busy (2019), in which the violinist practises, contributes phone effects, and fumes while being kept on hold. It’s a vexing exercise in futility the rest of us know all too well. Donald Rosenberg Dashow ‘Soundings in Pure Duration, Vol 2’ … At Other Times, the Distances. Soundings in Pure Duration – No 7a; No 8b; No 9c; No 10 James Dashow elecs with bNicholas Isherwood bass-bar cManuel Zurria bass l a Enzo Filippetti alto sax Ravello F Å RR8063 (88’ • DDD) The heyday of electroacoustic composition, arguably from the 1950s to the 1970s when it was a vital strand of avantgarde music, may have passed but the tradition continues to flourish. Early pioneers such as Pierre Schaeffer, Varèse, Cage and Stockhausen may have left us but others have continued to explore electroacoustic music production into the present century, such as Mario Davidovsky, who died in 2019. James Dashow, 10 years Davidovsky’s junior, is another such, who continues to produce vital and intriguing new music in this medium. Just as Davidovsky’s major contribution could be said to be his groundbreaking Synchronisms series, so Dashow has been working similarly on an evolving series called Soundings in Pure Duration. The first, for hexaphonic electronic sounds only, dates from 2003 but most of its nine successors are duets for a solo instrument and the electronic component, performed gramophone.co.uk GRAMOPHONE JUNE 2022 I