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SOUNDS OF AMERICA B Y B E E B R U C E : P H O T O G R A P H Y and pianist Melinda Lee Masur, who appear to dismiss any hint of sibling rivalry. They share phrases with loving attention to detail and balance even as they celebrate the varied conversations in the music at hand(s). The ensemble’s new album highlights this special artistic intimacy in works from the 19th and 21st centuries, the former represented by a beloved master, Schumann, and the latter by two figures who may be new to many listeners, Finnish composer Uljas Pulkkis and British composer Edmund Finnis. The juxtaposition of old and new music is as seamless as The Lee Trio’s playing. It becomes immediately apparent why the recording is titled ‘Midsummer Night Magic’ as the Lee musicians immerse themselves in the titular first movement of Pulkkis’s Fern Flowers (2015). Darting lines and sunny sonorities pervade the activity, which gives way to poetic warmth in ‘The Vision’ and joyful and robust tripping of the light fantastic in the ‘Fern Flower Dance’. Finnis’s Five Trios (2019) declares no programmatic intentions, instead evoking a panoply of dreamy atmospheres and interactions that fulfil the magical nature of the album’s mission. The trios are compact, captivating and mostly quiet, and the Lee players suspend each narrative through utmost concentration and precision. The two Schumann pieces hail from the 1840s, a period of creative fertility, touring demands and mental turmoil for the composer. Both the Fantasiestücke, Op 88 (1842), and Piano Trio No 2 in F, Op 80 (1847), find Schumann in characteristic lyrical, hearty form, providing players with ample opportunity to engage in a series of close encounters. The third movement of the Fantasiestücke is a prime example of the composer’s expressive individuality, a tender duet for violin and cello over undulating piano lines. The Lee sisters apply equal amounts of intensity and delicacy to Schumann’s ardent, charming and buoyant soundscapes. Their organic artistic approach is the product of like artistic minds, and perhaps an intuitive sensibility rooted in familial unity. However the Lees forged these performances, they are eminently worthwhile. Donald Rosenberg Our monthly guide to North American ensembles S.E.M. Ensemble Founded 1970 Home Willow Place Auditorium, Brooklyn The history of New York’s new music scene would not be complete without mention of the S.E.M. Ensemble. Founded in 1970 as part of the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts at the State University of New York in Buffalo by the Czech-born composer/flautist Petr Kotik and his colleagues Julius Eastman and Jan Williams, the ensemble relocated to New York City in 1983. From the outset, Kotik says, the ensemble’s mission was simply to perform ‘music that we thought was worth doing’. That worthwhile music included works by its founders – S.E.M. has always been a ‘composer’s group’, as Kotik puts it – but over the years the ensemble has premiered and performed music by what can only be described as a veritable who’s who of contemporary creative voices: Earle Brown, John Cage, Morton Feldman, Philip Glass, George Lewis, Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros, Frederic Rzewski, Karlheinz Stockhausen, T o¯ru Takemitsu, Henry Threadgill, David Tudor, Christian Wolff, Iannis Xenakis and La Monte Young, among others. ‘Why don’t we have a milieu that fosters a sense of adventure, energy and excitement of the current, the new, the authentic?’ Kotik and several composer colleagues ask in a 2023 manifesto published on the ensemble’s website. The answer is complicated, to say the least; nevertheless S.E.M. has been working determinedly for more than half a century now to create just such a milieu. In New York, they perform regularly at their home, Willow Place Auditorium in Brooklyn, and have also appeared at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center. S.E.M. have also toured extensively, including regular stops in the Czech Republic for the Ostrava Days Festival. Gramophone readers with an interest in the experimental music tradition will surely know S.E.M. through their recordings, most notably a crystalline account of Feldman’s For Philip Guston on the Dog w/a Bone label (2000), a performance of Eastman’s Femenine (a work S.E.M. played in the ’70s) that Philip Clark praised in these pages for its balance of ‘orgiastic joy and snarling defiance’ (Frozen Reeds, 12/16), and a now-classic Wergo disc featuring John Cage’s Concert for Piano and Orchestra and Atlas eclipticalis (12/93), for which the ensemble was expanded to become the Orchestra of the S.E.M. Ensemble. At that time, too, Kotik conducted the complete two-hour Atlas at Carnegie Hall in 1992. Writing in The New York Times, Alex Ross described the experience this way: ‘Static sonorities shifted, intangible events solidified; collective images began to appear amid shapeless sound. I was reminded of an Orthodox Easter service: across expanses of tedium, an epiphany rises in the back of the mind.’ A few years later, in 1999, Paul Griffiths began his Times review of an S.E.M. Ensemble concert at the Paula Cooper Gallery this way: ‘A Bach suite, then something by Jackson Mac Low, followed by Richard Strauss’s Metamorphosen before a bit of Cage, and this was just the first half of the concert. Nobody else creates programmes the way Petr Kotik does.’ Oh, and if you’re wondering what S.E.M. stands for, it’s simply the middle syllable of ‘ensemble’, with periods added to add a aura of mystery. Andrew Farach-Colton gramophone.co.uk GRAMOPHONE AWARDS 2024 V

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