Music Gesture And Life

Firma Melodiya and the Moscow State Tchaikovsky Conservatory with support of the All-Russian Non-governmental Organization The Union of Russia’s Composers present the first release from the large-scale project Anthology of Contemporary Choral Music by Russian Composers performed by the Chamber Choir of the Moscow State Conservatory.

Hyperion has reissued on its midpriced Helios label this fine program of English works for string quartet, recorded in 1994. The composers, born approximately 20 years apart in the order given in the headnote, offer an insight into the evolutionary trends in British music before, throughout, and after the 20th century’s two Great Wars.

Composer Wang Lu’s debut full length recording opens with a sonic portrait of a late afternoon in the life of a Chinese city park, with pre-recorded sounds of conversations layered on top of ephemeral gestures in a mixed instrumentation ensemble. It is the perfect opening of a recording featuring the music by an artist whose ears and mind are always observing the interface between life and music with openness and wonder. Wang Lu is wonderfully adept at painting a scene through sound, using several small gestures that heard together add up to a unique world unto themselves. The ensemble writing that follows in the subsequent movements of Urban Inventory, performed here by the recently formed Third Sound Ensemble, is both virtuosic and also often tongue in cheek, displaying a refreshingly dry sense of humor.

This piano suite was commissioned by The Manege exhibition center, Saint Petersburg, for the project Quietude and Joy. Music being played in exhibition halls is not a novelty. If you google for exhibition background music you will find collections of music ‘suitable’ for all sorts of exhibitions. This is similar to soundtrack libraries offering material for all sorts of movies. But in this case the idea was to create original music that will become an integral part of that particular exhibition while being a composition that could be performed live and released as an album.

Nine cello sonatas by Vivaldi have survived. Six of them were published as a set in Paris in about 1740; that set, mistakenly known as the composer's Op. 14, contains the sonatas recorded in this release. The three remaining sonatas come from manuscript collections. All but one of the six works are cast in the slow-fast-slow-fast pattern of movements of the sonata da chiesa. The odd one out, RV46, in fact, retains the four movement sequence but inclines towards the sonata da camera in the use of dance titles. The music of these sonatas is almost consistently interesting, often reaching high points of expressive eloquence, as we find, for example, in the justifiably popular Sonata in E minor, RV40. Christophe Coin brings to life these details in the music with technical assurance and a spirit evidently responsive to its poetic content. Particularly affecting instances of this occur in the third movements of the A minor and the E minor Sonatas where Coin shapes each phrase, lovingly achieving at the same time a beautifully sustained cantabile.