A special eight-page section focusing on recent recordings from the US and Canada
Beach . Corigliano Beach Violin Sonata, Op 34. Romance, Op 23 Corigliano Violin Sonata Usha Kapoor vn Edward Leung pf Resonus (RES10321 • 61’)
The coupling is one of contrasts, much as an album of Richard Strauss and Stravinsky would present. While it’s perfectly possible to imagine a musician equally sympathetic to both idioms – as Usha Kapoor is, in fact – it’s hard to envisage a listener in the mood for one followed by the other (without, that is, engaging in a conscious act of mental agility).
Beach wrote the Violin Sonata in 1896. She was not yet 30 and her voice would become more fully her own later on, especially in her piano output. What stands out in the sonata is her assured handling of the two instruments, which always play to their strengths even when mostly engaged in conversation rather than contest. It helps that the Resonus founder/ engineer Adam Binks has given each musician their own space in the mix – there is no clashing resonance or covering of one another – with Kapoor a foot or two nearer the microphone than Edward Leung.
Kapoor’s centred tone and light hand on its sometimes heavy Romanticism stand out from her modern rivals in the piece on record. Perhaps Joseph Silverstein (on New World Records) rushes his fences in the outer movements by comparison, but his partnership with Gilbert Kalish catches fire, and their feeling for the sonata transcends good taste and musicianship.
Back in 1967, the Musical Times critic summed up Corigliano’s Violin Sonata of 1964 as a ‘good, middle-of-the-road piece in an idiom that would not have startled 50 years ago’. Almost 60 years later, the modernity of the piece has proved more durable than that, and for that matter more than most of Corigliano’s later output. The form echoes that of Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto – abrasive introduction to a pair of contrasting slow movements and leaping finale – but the proportions are so distinctively skewed that the ear is drawn more to difference than similarity. Kapoor and Leung sail through the hair-raising polyrhythms of the outer movements – 19/8 against 5/8, all in a day’s work – and the mouse-behind-the-skirting-board figuration for the finale’s second subject (or sparrows, if you prefer) is brought off by Kapoor with great mischief. I was in more of a Corigliano mood this time, but tomorrow could well be different, and the album would be equally rewarding. Peter Quantrill
Kaye At Libertya. Colossus 1067b. String Quartet No 2, ‘Howland Quartet’c. three zen poemsd. Time is the Sea We Swim Ine. While We Were Sleepingf b Dan Block ten sax dDavid Yang va dHikaru Tamaki vc bFrank Wagner db aDebra Kaye, fCraig Ketter, b Steve Sandberg pf dJames Nyoraku Schlefer shakuhachi bDavid Meade drums eLincoln Trio; c Voxare Quartet Navona (NV6604 • 70’) cf Recorded live at cSt Peter’s Church/Citigroup, New York, January 21, 2014; fHowland Cultural Center, Beacon, NY, June 9, 2018
The compositional catalogue of New York-resident Debra Kaye runs to around
70 works, ranging from orchestral and instrumental works to concertos, chamber operas, songs and choruses. This new album, the fourth issued by Navona (following a chamber album on its stablemate, Ravello, in 2014), features six pieces exhibiting a remarkably wide breadth of styles. The two piano pieces alone range from an almost New Age simplicity in the early At Liberty (1988), performed here by the composer herself, to the scrunchy discords of the volatile, nightmarish While We Were Sleeping (2012), rendered with relish by Craig Ketter. Both works have their origins in improvisations: At Liberty reportedly evolved over years while the composer was living in California.
Improvisation is integral to jazz, but Kaye’s remarkably idiomatic Colossus 1067,
composed in 2021, is a through-composed tone picture inspired by a panoramic photograph of the ride, where the piano, bass and drums depict the mechanism of the roller coaster and the saxophone the rider; the rendition here by Dan Block, Steve Sandberg, Frank Wagner and David Meade is bracingly vivid. In complete contrast, three zen poems is a trio for shakuhachi, viola and cello (2019, rev 2022), inspired by verses from 15thand 16th-century Zen Buddhist monks. A work of more philosophical character, James Schlefer’s playing of the Japanese instrument is mesmerising, and he is sensitively accompanied by David Yang and Hikaru Tamaki.
The title of the piano trio Time is the Sea We Swim In (2020, rev 2022) sounds like a quote but seems to be of Kaye’s invention (with no explicit connection to Frank Rose’s book The Sea We Swim In), a musical reaction in part to her mother’s death. A fairly closely argued single movement, circular in design and containing musical palindromes, its main arc is one of crescendo to diminuendo, well brought out by the Lincoln Trio. The Second Quartet (2017) is in three movements, moderate-slow-fast, written to mark the 25th anniversary of the Howland Music Circle, of which Kaye was a member. The Voxare Quartet play it for all its worth, particularly the vigorous final Danza energico. Guy Rickards
Rosner ‘Orchestral Music, Vol 4’ Canzona secundi toni, Op 63a. Concerto grosso No 2, Op 74. A My Lai Elegy, Op 51b. Scherzo for Orchestra, Op 29a. Variations on a Theme by Frank Martin, Op 105 b Paul Beniston tpt London Philharmonic Orchestra / Nick Palmer Toccata Classics (TOCC0710 • 89’) a Available on digital download only
Arnold Rosner’s extraordinary Requiem (A/20) was my Critics’ Choice for 2020, the gramophone.co.uk
GRAMOPHONE MAY 2024 I
