David Lang

David Lang's the little match girl passion, for vocal quartet doubling on percussion instruments, won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008. It's a strong, striking piece with a surprisingly potent emotional punch. Part of its effectiveness derives from the story itself, which is so achingly poignant that it can hardly fail to raise a lump in the throat. The text is primarily compiled from the story by Hans Christian Andersen and from familiar sections from Bach's St. Matthew Passion, which sound fresh and new in English translation. Lang's clear-eyed avoidance of sentimentality saves the story from the bathos into which it could easily sink in a less skillful musical setting.

Dark, emotional, and exquisitely beautiful, David Lang's new CD, Elevated, has premiere recordings of 3 recent works. Taken together, these pieces create a world in which consonance fights dissonance, hope struggles against hopelessness, and simple melodies are constantly beset by gravity, weight, and decay.

As one-third of the composer-collective Bang on a Can, David Lang is something of a genial father figure of the indie-classical scene. Talk to any of the world's main players and you're likely to hear them tell you about their life-changing stint in Bang on a Can's summer festival, which has acted as a sort of feeder school and incubator for the group's try-anything mentality. Lang's music has undergone many stylistic shifts over the years: In the 80s, he wrote bristlier stuff, but in the last decade or so, he's shifted quietly into a more pensive register. The Little Match Girl Passion, his 2008 work that won him a Pulitzer, was written for only four voices and some hand bells. This Was Written By Hand, his most recent recording, is a collection of short solo piano works played by the British pianist Andrew Zolinsky. The album holds the same, sustained melancholy mood: thoughtful, searching, elegiac, minimalist. Lang's way with repetitive phrasing doesn't feel like that of minimalists like Glass or Reich's, though.

Of the three Bang on a Can founder composers, David Lang’s music has always been the glassiest, the sparest, and for some listeners the most precious. In recent years, his aesthetic has become leaner still, paring down already simple material to gaunt extremes in something approaching neo-plainchant. The national anthems (note the lower case; nothing vainglorious here ) takes fragments of text from the anthems of all 193 United Nations member states and unfolds at speaking speed, with plenty of room for breaths between phrases and plenty of clarity to the words. It has the feel of sad and eerie intoning. The Los Angeles choir clinches the right sound for Lang – unflinching, spellbound – while the Calder Quartet gives sleek accompaniment. Also on the disc is a new choral version of Lang’s little match girl passion, the piece originally for four voices that won him the Pulitzer prize in 2008 and which, in the mouths of many, becomes a sort of collective prayer in the congregational tradition of Bach’s chorales.

According to the composer, the five works on David Lang's 2003 recording Child constitute an "attempt to examine certain experiences as I remember (and misremember) them from my childhood. Each individual movement is in some way a memory of how I learned to do something." For this recording, Lang gathered the separately commissioned but closely affined pieces into a suite for a varied ensemble of winds, strings, piano, and percussion, presented here by the Italian chamber ensemble Sentieri Selvaggi.

Compiling four pieces for four different ensembles, David Lang’s "writing on water" is a free-flowing recording that presents several unusual and rarely revealed facets of the composer who is perhaps most well-known for his monumental choral works (the Pulitzer-winning "the little match girl passion" and the more recent epic "the national anthems"), as well as his poignant song cycles ("death speaks" and "love fail").

Cappella Amsterdam and its artistic leader Daniel Reuss return to PENTATONE with a world-premiere recording of David Lang’s the writings. For this cycle, Lang has chosen five texts from the Old Testament tied to Jewish holidays. These writings share a universal appeal, a focus on what it means to be human. Lang’s austere and repetitive score makes a profound emotional impact, fully in line with the poetry of the subjects recited. This album comes with insightful programme notes by the composer, as well as an evocative analysis by his esteemed colleague Nico Muhly.

This thrilling album showcases some of Lang’s most urgent, rhythmically complex music performed by an incredible ensemble lineup: the London Sinfonietta, Crash Ensemble, Alarm Will Sound, and more. The title track, “Writing on Water,” sets a scintillating patchwork libretto that pieces together literary descriptions of shipwrecks and drowning in its commemoration of the Battle of Trafalgar. Lang’s Nyman-like vocal music lurches and pitches amid a bustling instrumental accompaniment that combines electric guitar and orchestra. The incessantly exciting “Forced March” is a series of relentless collisions between melody and rhythm, while “Increase” combines complex musical patterns and contrasting moods to hypnotic effect.