Krzysztof Penderecki - St Luke Passion, Threnody, Polymorphy etc. (1989 compilation, rec. 1963-72)

R.I.P. Krzysztof Penderecki, 23 Nov 1933 - 29 Mar 2020

The great, the magnificent, the occasionally utterly terrifying Penderecki, one of the most viscerally thrilling composers of the 20th century (in his early work at least), has died at the age of 86.

Penderecki kept busy right into his eighties, but it's his music from the 1960s - early 70s that will remain the most celebrated, certainly by me, for its sheer power, brutality and unearthly beauty.  Like many people, I first came to Pendercki's music through its use in film & TV; Kubrick and Friedkin in particular knew how effectively music this unsettling could enhance psychological horror to a degree that little other music could.  Most recently, I remember sitting dumbfounded at the single most avant-garde hour of TV I've ever seen, courtesy of David Lynch, with a perfectly-placed Threnody To The Victims Of Hiroshima soundtracking the Trinity nuclear test.

The original recording of Threnody is here on Disc 2 of this collection, kicking off 48 minutes of some of Penderecki's most mind-melting early music.  Polymorphy, String Quartet No. 1 and Psalms Of David are also featured in their original 1960s recordings, ending with Dimensions Of Time And Slience, recorded in 1972.  And the main feature of this collection is the St Luke Passion from 1966; whilst not quite as blood-curdlingly extreme as Utrenja, it definitely has its hair-raising moments.  Farewell, then, to one of the most singular and stunning composers of all time.  More Penderecki next week.

Disc 1 link
Disc 2 link
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Previously posted at SGTG:
Utrenja
Symphony No. 2
Compilation of EMI recordings

Leo Smith - Divine Love (1979)

A gorgeous, spacey (the number of jazz albums with more of a sense of 'space' than this one must be vanishingly small) masterwork from the multi-talented Leo Smith, in the years just before he adopted the name 'Wadada'.  This was Smith's first album for ECM, and a well-deserved addition to their 'Touchstones' gallery last year; he'd return to the label sporadically after Divine Love, most recently just a couple of years ago.

Sense of space, then... take the opening title track, for example.  For nearly 22 minutes, it drifts in long, languid sighs and calls from Smith and from Dwight Andrews on alto flute.  No drummer keeping time, just sporadic little clatters of percussion, occasional vibes/marimba from Bobby Naughton.  Moments of nothing but pure reverberating silence.  This is free jazz retreating from the coalface of everyone blowing at once to find zen sanctuary.

Kenny Wheeler and Lester Bowie join Smith for a three-way trumpet conversation on the shortest track Tastalun.  Even at its most full-blown, the same ambient calm prevails, like watching the vapour trails of three different aeroplanes occasionally cross over each other.  To close, Charlie Haden provides a more grounded setting for Smith, Andrews and Naughton to move around in on the 15-minute Spirituals: The Language Of Love.  There's still nothing that could be called a beat for the musicians to groove to, but Haden and Naughton do provide a bit more sense of forward motion as the track progresses.  One of the most beautifully unique albums in the ECM catalogue.

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Henryk Górecki - Choral Music: Totus Tuus (2012)

Another take on choral Górecki (see Miserere in links list below), from a charity shop dig a few weeks ago.  This collection is bookended by two works that it has in common with that Nonesuch album, Euntes Ibant Et Flebant and Amen, which offers a nice contrast to the earlier recordings and also leaves a good 45-ish minutes of stuff I wasn't familiar with.

The first of the latter, then, is Lobgesang (2000) written in commemoration of the Gutenberg Bible.  It takes the same technique as Miserere, etc of insistent repitition of a minimal text with gradual musical development, and adds judicious use of a glockenspiel at the end.  Next up is the album's title track, another beautifully austere piece for acapella choir.  Using a more pointedly Roman Catholic liturgy, it was written for a papal visit to Poland in 1987.

That leaves the longest and most instrumentally-augmented work, Salve Sidus Polonorium.  Written in 2000 for a papal-political summit, the text is about the 10th century missionary St. Wojciech (aka Adalbert of Prague).  The first section adds a tolling bell at key moments, before organ, piano and percussion fill out the grandest moments of the central section.  Then the joyous finale is adorned with more bells and piano.

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Previously posted at SGTG:
Early works
Symphony No. 3
Beatus Vir
O Domina Nostra
Miserere
Kleines Requiem / Lerchenmusik

Günter Schickert - Kinder In Der Wildnis (2013 remaster, orig. rel. 1983)

Like Cluster & Farnbauer from just over a week ago, on its original release this album was another great krautrock score for the British tape label York House Records.  Günter Schickert might not have been from the recognised top tier of the genre like Cluster were, but he was still an important figure and remains active.

Schichkert's first two albums offered his own twist on the Göttsching/Pinhas/Reichel echo-guitar sound.  This one is a fair bit looser and more eclectic, which comes from the circumstances of its compiling.  In the early 80s, Alan & Steve Freeman (they of the Audion magazine and Crack In The Cosmic Egg reference guide) sought out Schickert and discovered he had a tape archive ripe for digging, and secured the release of some of the material through YHR.

There's still a decent amount of echo-guitaring threaded through Kinder In Der Wildnis, especially as the album progresses and the vocals thin out.  The main mode of expression, however, is a fuzzed-up, almost punkish rush reminiscent of Klaus Dinger's later music at its most garagey.  The tracks still stretch out to an average of about five minutes, allowing plenty of Schickert's guitar work room to shine - especially on the longest track Rabe In Der Nacht.  In keeping with the Dinger comparisons, there's also dropped-in tapes of ambient sounds, from birdsong to children and firework celebrations.  Some of the latter are a later addition to this Bureau B edition of the album, which had to be remixed from the ground up as the original mastertapes weren't useable.  This has the interesting a-historical effect of having celebratory sounds both from West Berlin in 1980, and from the reunified Germany a decade later.

Original cassette cover, 1983

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Keith Jarrett Trio - Tribute (1990)

Haven't returned to Jarrett, let alone the Standards Trio, for a while on this blog now.  So here's a nice two-hour serving of phenomenal playing, interaction and improvisation, and not so phenomenal (but tolerable) vocalizing.  Tribute is a recording of a particularly sublime Jarrett-Peacock-DeJohnette concert held on 15th October 1989 at the Köln Philharmonie.  The 'Tribute' concept is that each track on the album is dedicated to a jazz legend who once performed it; the dedicatees are included in brackets after each song title in the tracklist.

Disc 1 gets underway with an effortless strut through Lover Man [Lee Konitz] and I Hear A Rhapsody [Jim Hall], everyone firing on all cylinders as expected.  The trio take the tempo down a bit for a gorgeous Little Girl Blue [Nancy Wilson] before the first half of the concert ends on a massive high.  Solar [Bill Evans] segues into a lengthy group improvisation, one of their very best, which was titled Sun Prayer for the album.

Disc 2 follows a similar pattern, with a frantic Just In Time [Charlie Parker] giving way to an achingly beautiful Smoke Gets In Your Eyes [Coleman Hawkins] and much more.  The finale doesn't spill straight over into improvisation this time: It's Easy To Remember [John Coltrane] deserves the spotlight in and of itself.  Then the trio launch into a minimal Jarrett groove with a Latin flavour, entitled U Dance (and you will - or at least tap a foot) for the final improv.  Gorgeous to the last drop. (I nicked that last line from a much better reviewer than me.)

Disc 1 link
Disc 2 link
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Previously posted at SGTG:
Setting Standards: New York Sessions
Changeless
At The Blue Note: Saturday, June 4th 1994, 1st Set
Tokyo '96

Synergy - Computer Experiments Volume One (1981)

More stochastic composition using computer programming today.  Unlike Iannis Xenakis' work in the early 60s though, there's no jagged, creaking string intstruments here, just 44 minutes of eerily becalmed ambient electronica with an occasional proto-Blade Runner feel.

Between 1975 and 1987, and sporadically afterwards, Synergy was the alias of electronic musician Larry Fast, perhaps best known for his work with Peter Gabriel.  For this particular album Fast utilised a program called Pink Tunes, written by John Simonton of PAiA electronic kits, to send control voltages to a Prophet 5 synth.

The result was the two eleven-minute tracks and one 23-minute track that make up Computer Experiments Volume One (there wouldn't be any subsequent Volumes).  The first track in particular is a thing of shimmering beauty, then the other two dive deeper into more minor-key ambience.  Eno and Vangelis fans should definitely give this a go.

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BBC Symphony Orchestra - Anders Hillborg: Swedish Maverick (recorded live, 22 Feb 2020)

There's a few particularly interesting broadcasts on BBC Radio 3 In Concert this spring (I'm still enjoying the Bang On show), so here's another one.  Anders Hillborg, born 1954 in Sollentuna Kommun near Stockholm, was the subject of a "Total Immersion" day on Sat 22 February, with three concerts given over to his chamber, choral and orchestral music.  Today's post is the latter; the other two will be broadcast (and feature here) in due course.

Hillborg, who I wasn't aware of until this broadcast, started in pop music and moved through electronic composition to become an eclectic and unique composer.  This concert covers six of his orchestral works, from the 95-second Fanfare that opens the show to the 25-minute Violin Concerto No. 1 that was one of his earliest compositions.  There's also a brand new work that had only received its world premiere a few weeks earlier, Through Lost Landscapes.  With Messiaen-esque bird calls, it closes the concert evoking the birds' disappearing natural habitats.

In between are two of Hillborg's most striking orchestral works: the multi-section Eleven Gates full of aquatic, impressionistic drift, and Beast Sampler, which showcases his skill for conjuring alien-sounding effects from the orchestra to its fullest extent.  Completing a remarkable concert is Hillborg's clarinet concerto Peacock Tales, which is what the image above relates to.  The clarinettist Martin Fröst is tasked not only with the fiendish lead part, but also playing it masked whilst performing the extensive choreography.  This makes it a piece that has to be seen - so here's a different performance for that element - but even just hearing it as part of the concert is spectacular.  Hillborg is definitely a composer I'll be taking a closer look into.

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Cluster & Farnbauer - Live In Vienna (2017 remaster, orig. rel. 1980)

Cluster's first live album was recorded at the Wiener Festwochen Alternativ on 12 June 1980, where they teamed up with an Austrian percussionist/sound artist named Joshi Farnbauer.  The first release of the recording was as a 90-minute cassette on the British YHR label, and its digital debut (after a couple of clips were included on Kluster CD reissues) came via Important Records who released a double CD in 2010.

Bureau B put out this single CD seven years later, their version tightening up the recording by making small edits to most tracks and a cut of several minutes to Drums.  I don't have the uncut recording to do a comparison, but I reckon this 80-minute version does the job just fine.

The gargantuan improvisations Service and Metalle are the most striking highlights here, sounding closer to the first two Cluster albums (or even the Kluster albums) than anything Moebius & Roedelius had done later in the 70s.  Metalle in particular develops into a stunning droning, pulsing soundscape, and features two further percussionists, from the German/Austrian New Wave.  Giving the concert variety, there's also two typically gorgeous Roedelius piano features, in the closing track and in Piano, which includes elements of Manchmal from the then-current Cluster album Grosses Wasser.

Original cassette J-card, 1980 - cover credited to Moebius

link
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Cluster at SGTG:
Cluster & Eno
Curiosum
Apropos Cluster
Qua

Windham Hill Artists - An Evening With Windham Hill Live (1983)

An Evening With... was a star-studded 'live sampler' album issued by Windham Hill in their first flush of major success.  From the liner notes: "On October 9th, 1982, a group of ten Windham Hill musicians gathered for two shows at the Berklee Performance Center, Boston, Massachusetts. It was during those two shows that these recordings were made."

It's a treat to hear all these great musicians out of the studio and on stage, even if just a fleeting spotlight falls on each of them.  Michael Hedges is up first with a superb Rickover's Dream from Aerial Boundaries, the live solo performance showcasing his extrodinary talent to an even greater extent than the original.  Not to be outdone, Alex De Grassi turns in nine minutes of rolling loveliness in Turning: Turning Back, then is heard in a group format on another of his pieces, Clockwork.  That odd sound you hear is a lyricon, the first ever electronic wind controller; the player here, the late Chuck Greenberg, was one of the co-engineers of the instrument.

Hedges returns to kick off the album's second half, again playing a track from Aerial Boundaries, Spare Change.  Dedicated to Steve Reich, the piece is backed up by Liz Story on piano and bassist Michael Manring, and displays just how much the early Windham Hill stable owed to the classic ECM sound.  Next in the spotlight is Windham Hill founder William Ackerman to play two of his pieces.  Visiting has more lyricon from Greenberg and bass from Manring, then Hawk Circle is a guitar duet with Hedges while George Winston backs them on piano.  And it's Winston who closes the album, in a solo medley of Reflections and John McLaughlin's Lotus Feet.  Absolutely gorgeous music from start to finish.

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Windham Hill at SGTG:
Piano Solos | Autumn | December (Winston)
Solid Colors | Unaccountable Effect (Story)
Southern Exposure (De Grassi)
Aerial Boundaries (Hedges)

Iannis Xenakis - EIDMC De Paris conducted by Konstantin Simonovich: Atrées, Morsima-Amorsima etc (2010 compi, rec. 1968-9)

Double-CD collection of all the Xenakis works recorded for EMI La Voix De Son Maître/Pathé Marconi's Perspectives Musicales imprint in the late 60s.  The legendary series only ran to around ten releases, but was packed with pioneering music; their logo and eyecatching cover designs (see original LP covers below) were homaged by Sonic Youth in the late 90s/early 2000s.  There's a couple of solo pieces included here amongst ensemble work by the Ensemble Instrumental De Musique Contemporaine De Paris conducted by Konstantin Simonovich.

Four of the pieces here belong to Xenakis' family of 'ST' (stochastic) works, where in 1962 he devised a composing algorithm to be fed into the IBM 7090 computer.  Atrées (ST/10-3) starts off Disc 1, with its five parts that can be played in any order (1, 3, 5, 2, 4 in this case), followed by Morsima-Amorsima, which only used a small amount of leftover ST output.  Both have plenty of the classic Xenakian glissandi, sounding as if the music is sliding off the page.  Disc 1 is rounded out by the two solo pieces, in which Xenakis turned geometric functions into music: Nomos Alpha for cello (alternate recording here), and Herma for piano (alternate recording here).

On Disc 2, ST/4 is a string quartet in which the cello has to downtune during performance to reach the lowest notes assigned to it, and the piece itself is a reduction of ST/10-1080262, also featured here.  Leaving the computer program behind, Xenakis returned to geometry for Akrata, completed 1965 and featuring his other sonic trademark of the time, that great staccato pulsing momentum.  Completing the collection are Achorripsis ("jets of sound"), his first stochastic work from 1957, and my favourite thing here: the 1962 piece for orchestra and children's choir, Polla Ta Dhina.  The choir chants the text from Sophocles' Hymn To Man on a single pitch whilst the orchestra unleashes hell behind them - it could make great horror movie music.  Perhaps befitting this being the six hundred and sixty-sixth post on this blog...

Atrées / Morsima-Amorsima / ST 4 / Nomos Alpha - Perspectives Musicales LP, 1968

ST 10-1,080262 / Polla Ta Dhina / Akrata / Achorripsis - Perspectives Musicales LP, 1969

Perspectives Musicales LP that included Herma, 1968

Disc 1 link
Disc 2 link
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Previously posted at SGTG:
Evryali/Herma
Phlegra, Jalons etc
Oresteïa
Synaphaï
Persephassa
Ata, Jonchaies etc
Pléiades/Psappha
Bohor etc
Kraanerg
Terretektorh/Nomos Gamma
La Légende D'Eer
Persepolis

Info source credit: Xenakis: His Life In Music (James Harley, ISBN 0415971454)

Bang On A Can All-Stars / BBC Concert Orchestra - Bang On! (recorded live, 28 Feb 2020)

A fantastic concert given last Friday at the Queen Elizabeth Hall, London, in which the BBC Concert Orchestra were paired with the Bang On A Can All-Stars.  The group's parent organisation Bang On A Can, founded in the late 80s, have performed works by Reich, Riley, Glass and many others, as well as a famous full-album cover of Brian Eno's Music For Airports.

John Adams' The Chairman Dances proves to be the perfect curtain-raiser for the show, played just by the BBC Concert Orchestra with great swing and verve - find the original recording here.  The main event concludes the first half of the concert, with the orchestra backing the All-Stars in the European premiere of Julia Wolfe's (one of the BOAC founders) Flower Power.  Written as a tribute to 1960s counterculture, it starts in woozy drones that reminded me a bit of Fausto Romitelli, before kicking into gear and embarking on a stunning journey through rock and psychedelia, dramatic orchestral evocations of protest and social upheaval, some gorgeous reflective passages and much more.

The group and orchestra play separately in the second half, with Bang On A Can All-Stars up first.  They play Horses Of Instruction, a work written for them in 1994 by a composer I only discovered last year, Steve Martland.  Like Martland's Babi Yar on that album, the influences of muscular, driving rock and Martland's teacher Louis Andriessen are both very much in evidence, but this work is much less dark in tone.  Made me think of a more melodic version of 90s King Crimson at times.  To close, the strings of the orchestra perform Philip Glass' Symphony No. 3.  I've largely avoided symphonic Glass over the years, but for all the received wisdom of this facet of his ouevre being interminable stodge, it was an enjoyable listen and a nice reflective comedown to end such a spectacular concert. Highly recommended, especially the Julia Wolfe centrepiece.

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David Hykes & The Harmonic Choir - Current Circulation (1984)

Time for something droning and meditative in the wake of Monday's frenetic electronica.  David Hykes was born in New Mexico in 1953, and formed the Harmonic Choir in 1975 to explore overtone singing.  This was their second album, mostly recorded in St Paul's Chapel at Columbia University, with the brief solo opening track coming from a concert at the Chapel of St John The Divine, also in NYC a few months earlier.

Current Circulation itself is an epic 32-minute, six part work that takes influences from Tibetan Buddhist chant and Mongolian hoomi singing by holding root notes, adding harmonics, and attempting both in one voice and more.  The technical mastery of this type of vocal work speaks for itself, and you can either marvel at the accomplishments of working this into an intricate choral setting, or just let your mind drift in the gradually shifting clouds of pure sound.

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Previously posted at SGTG: Harmonic Meetings

Squarepusher - Hard Normal Daddy (1997)

Was great to have Tom Jenkinson back in his most famous guise last month.  The new Squarepusher album, Be Up A Hello, is a return to classic form that I can wholeheartedly recommend; Jenkinson's lost none of his genius for intricate programming, way with a good melody and tracks that are just insanely entertaining.  What was missing however were his rubbery bass guitar lines of old (he was apparently nursing a broken wrist), but not to worry.

Plenty of the latter in this classic that's just about to turn 23 years old.  Hard Normal Daddy was Jenkinson's second Squarepusher album, and emerged into an increasingly crowded field as the 90s wore on of the most ambitious producers trying to push the envelope.  One aspect of this, with intricately programmed beats pushed as fast as they could go, became known as drill 'n' bass - see also the Richard D James Album - and the programming on Hard Normal Daddy is one of its lasting treasures, not least on brain-frazzling tracks like Rustic Raver and Chin Hippy.

Much more so than Aphex Twin though, Squarepusher at this time had significant influences from jazz fusion, classic funk and old TV themes, and it's this angle that makes Hard Normal Daddy such a joy for me to return to over and over.  Playing actual bass - and with tons of verve and skill - adds a definite jazzier dimension, as do classic electric piano chords.  The effect, as on the opening Coopers World or on Papalon, is of the languid mid-70s CTI sound or 70s movie music/"cop show" (in Jenkinson's words) TV music being transported to urban London in 1997.  In 2020, it's still a treat to enjoy from end to end.

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