Best Of 2023: Classical
Composers and performers and their endless search for new sounds and expressions
Every January, there’s that moment where you think, surely the tide of musical magnificence coming from composers and performers on the cutting edge of new music will be stemmed this year. Let everyone - including me - catch their breath. But no. Endless invention and expression is still the modus operandi of these sonic adventurers. Here are the releases that stuck, starting with links to those previously covered.
Listen along to most of it here and find the rest on Bandcamp:
Record Roundup: 2023 First Quarter Report, Pt. 1
Guy Barash - Killdeer
“An utterly unique intersection of jazz, electronic, spoken word, and chamber music…”
Nyokabi Kariuki - Feeling Body
“…she arrives at an expression in sound that feels both remarkably new and deeply human.”
Record Roundup: 2023 First Quarter Report, Pt. 2
Loadbang, Ekmeles, et al - The Consent Of Sound And Meaning: Music Of Eric Richards
“…a varied overview of an important figure in the New York avant garde scene.”
Lei Liang - Hearing Landscapes/Hearing Icescapes
“As a form of sonic landscape painting, Liang’s work succeeds marvelously.”
Brooklyn Rider - The Wanderer: Live From Paliesius, Lithuania
“…a major work, five movements that find Golijov luxuriating in the textures of the instruments and their capacities for interplay.”
Missy Mazzoli - Dark With Excessive Bright
“Ultimately, Mazzoli is a story teller, whether in the opera house or not - and these are some of her finest tales yet.”
Robert Honstein - Lost & Found
“…it will serve as the perfect introduction to Honstein’s work should you need one.”
Seattle Symphony Orchestra - Walker & Dawson: Orchestral Works
“So, yes, let’s fill up the shelves with more Walker and Dawson recordings. They’ve got a long way to go to outweigh the more commonly revisited repertoire.”
Record Roundup: Passionate Diction
Roomful Of Teeth - Rough Magic
“…a wonderful performance on Roomful’s first full-length album in eight years.”
Yaz Lancaster - AmethYst
“…a richly emotional tapestry that sends off inquiries into realms of identity and connection - cultural, political, and sexual.”
Seth Parker Woods - Difficult Grace
“This astonishingly powerful album finds cellist Woods demonstrating curatorial skills that are the equal of his virtuosic playing.”
Lawrence Brownlee - Rising
“But anyone with a heart will take succor and inspiration from the sheer beauty and light radiating from this album.”
Ben Vida with Yarn/Wire and Nina Dante - The Beat My Head Hit
“A four-year collaboration between composer/performer Vida and the piano/percussion ensemble led to this hypnotic collection.”
Best Of 2023 (So Far)
Matthew Herbert - The Horse
“The album takes us practically through the history of human music, using bones as flutes, plucking gut-string stretched over other bones, and eventually arriving at orchestral sounds and pounding electronic music.”
Olivia de Prato - Panorama
“…delivers you to the heart of the instrument’s expressive possibilities.”
Michelle Lou - HoneyDripper
“…listening feels very active and, at about 40 minutes each, taking the full measure of the work makes for many absorbing hours.”
Record Roundup: Music for One, Two, or More
Sarah Saviet - Spun
“…an excellent introduction to a fabulous musician who is bound to become only more familiar.”
Madison Greenstone - Resonance Studies In Ecstatic Consciousness
“The results occupy a provocative mid-ground between the European avant garde and free jazz.”
Meredith Bates - Tesseract
“Over these six long tracks…this visionary from Vancouver builds up cinematic layers of sound with her violin, electronics, voice, and found objects.”
Claire Chase - Density 2036 Parts VI, VII, and VIII
“The instrument is, like all winds, a transformer of breath and there’s no one better than Chase at enacting that alchemy.”
MIZU - Distant Intervals
“The way she layers her cello into massed walls of sound, or combines various multi-textured strands is not only a sound to lose yourself in, but one that seems to hold you up.”
AndPlay - Translucent Harmonies
“…lucid performances that shine brightly in this glorious recording.”
Dana Jessen & Taylor Brook - Set
“Fascinating, atmospheric stuff.”
Jon Nelson & Tom Kolor - Secret Messages
“The secret of the University Of Buffalo is definitely out with this prismatic array of works for trumpet and percussion…”
Byrne:Kozar:Duo - It Floats Away From You
“Kozar’s trumpet, whether emitting gleaming, held notes, busy figures, or muted passages, provides a perfect foil for Byrne’s plangent voice…”
Wet Ink Ensemble - Missing Scenes
All “All the works are witty, filled with creative fluency, and brilliantly performed and recorded.”
Switch Ensemble - Christopher Chandler & Heather Stebbins: Roots “Mysteries abound in this stellar collection of electro-acoustic compositions…”
Pathos Trio - Polarity
“…firmly establishing Pathos as a group with adventurous taste and the skills to follow through on wherever that may lead them.”
Rachel Barton Pine - Dependent Arising
“…this album finds orchestral music in rude health in 2023.”
New Reviews
Waxing Operatic
Christopher Cerrone - In A Grove This retelling of Akutagawa’s classic tale (the basis of Rashomon), cannily relocated to the fog and smoke of the Pacific Northwest in 1922, finds Cerrone making ideal use of his gifts for both melody and mystery. The libretto by Stephanie Fleischmann is clear and concise and the production and performances are top-notch making for a wonder of recorded opera.
John Aylward - Oblivion Sung with clarity and passion by baritones Tyler Boque and Cailin Marcel Manson, soprano Nina Guo, and tenor Lukas Papenfusscline, this one-act opera takes an enigmatic approach to the ideas in Dante’s Purgatorio, asking questions about identity and self-determination in a musically compelling setting. Aylward makes these archetypes painfully human in a landmark piece in his rich catalog.
Guitarism
Emmanuel Jacob Lacopo - Eastman As much as I love the music of Julius Eastman, the very flexibility embedded in its conception does not always guarantee an interpretation that resonates. At their worst, the bandwagon-jumping is palpable and can sour you on the whole enterprise of his crucial rediscovery. Not so here, as Lacopo, who seems capable of anything on the guitar, devises two original takes on classic pieces. In Lacopo’s hands, Buddha (1983) becomes a series of dense drones of woven electric and acoustic guitars, while Gay Guerilla (1979) is transformed into a more contemplative but no less resolute exercise in tension. A fine tribute to a composer willing to “sacrifice his life for a point of view.”
Taylor Brook - Dichroma: Guitar & A.I. Composer/performer Brook has been writing his own algorithmic software to enhance his work since long before sham songs were being created to game the pop charts. But his goals are entirely different, seeking to add a nimbus of computerized chance to his drones and tones, which perhaps helps him shake off any of his standard moves as a writer of music. The shadowy sounds within may just do the same for you as a listener.
Epic Tales
Liza Lim - Annunciation Triptych Composed between 2019 and 2022, this is a major orchestral statement from the Australian composer whose epic piece, Sex Magic, was a highlight of Claire Chase’s recent releases in her Density cycle (see above). Paying tribute to three female spiritual leaders - Sappho, Mary, and Fatimah - has elicited a broad canvas full of sweeping gestures and orchestration that acknowledges masters like Mahler, Sibelius, and Shostakovich while sounding completely modern and her own. The recording, by the WDR Sinfonie-Orchester conducted by Cristian Măcelaru with the soaring soprano of Emily Hindrichs in the last part, could hardly be bettered - but I certainly hope an American orchestra tries to beat it soon, at least in the concert hall.
Žibuokle Martinaitytė - Hadal Zone Appropriately for a piece that intends to shine a sonic light into the deepest and darkest undersea environments on earth, Martinaitytė’s latest masterpiece is deep, dark, and immersive. As on other works, such as In Search Of Lost Beauty, the brilliance of her scoring for small forces is astonishing. Ensemble Synaesthesis, made up of bass clarinet, tuba, violoncello, contrabass, and piano feels almost like an orchestra here, with prerecorded electronics and a sampled choir adding additional heft and atmosphere. Perhaps most captivating is the amount of color she brings to all the blackness she describes, making Hadal Zone a memorable journey indeed.
Symphony Of Northwest Arkansas - New Canons If the clarion call of Paul Hass’s In Saecula Seculorum, which opens this expansive collection, gives you the impression that something of import is happening here, that would be entirely appropriate. The three movements of Hass’s piece, with the SNA showing off its gleaming brass section, surround pieces by Raymond J. Lustig and Trevor New. The first, Latency Canons, seems to tell a string-driven story, and the second, Cohere I, layers textures of strings, winds, brass, and percussion in a series of song-like snapshots. New Canons proves there’s more to look for from Arkansas than stress-inducing headlines.
Dai Fujikura - Wayfinder In 2020, I wrote of Turtle Totem, “This expansive collection puts Fujikura's expertise in nearly every setting - from chamber to orchestral - on full display.” This sublime album continues the story with works large and small, all featuring Fujikura’s distinctively delicate approach. The title piece, a 20-minute viola concerto, opens the album with aching musical poetry, played with sensitivity and rhythmic incisiveness by Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti in a performance and recording that is the perfect calling card for the piece, the composer, and the player. The nine solo pieces that follow, for everything from mandolin to shakuhachi, arrive with the immediacy of a sketch and the structure of a song, rounding out an often lighthearted portrait of one of the finest composers of our time.
Klangforum Wien - Lucia Dlugoszewski: Abyss And Caress Massive - and massively important - overview of a dangerously neglected 20th century composer. The title track, a 30-minute piece for trumpet (a marvelous Peter Evans) and orchestra composed in 1975, is an outlandish and entertaining start to the festivities. Detroit-born Dlugoszewski, who studied with Varèse and was the first woman ever to receive the Koussevitzky International Recording Award, died in 2000 and the fact that we’ve had to wait this long for premiere recordings of that piece and two others here is a crime. All kudos due to Klangforum for this reclamation of an exciting musical voice.
Going (Mostly) Solo
Ashley Bathgate - 8-Track With the possibilities opened up by Pro Tools, composing for seven prerecorded tracks plus a soloist seems almost as quaint, technologically speaking, as the consumer cassette format to which Bathgate’s title seems to refer. That was even the case when Steve Reich’s Cello Counterpoint was new back in 2003. But in art it’s often limitations that lead to inspiration, as is the case with Reich’s piece and the four others catalyzed by his approach and featured here. Bathgates’s curation has works by composers Fjóla Evans, Emily Cooley, and Alex Weiser leading the way to the Reich, with all of them leaning into the textures and tonalities of what is essentially a cello octet, with Weiser’s Shimmer effectively serving as a mission statement for the project as a whole. Expect plenty of shimmer in that piece and throughout this sleekly performed collection.
Cassie Wieland/Vicky Chow - Hymn “The electronics all stem from objects I had around my house,” composer/producer Wieland noted in the press release for this cycle of reflective electro-acoustic works for piano, “…because the work is about very internal feelings and memories, I wanted to build that connection to the ‘internal’ sonically. I wanted to explore making tiny objects sound massive…in the same way that the tiniest memories can hold the most importance.” The end result provides a space to connect these gorgeous sounds to your own internal states of the past, present, and future.
Austin Wulliman - The News From Utopia In his solo debut, the JACK Quartet violinist turns his instrument into everything from steely skeins to woozy drones in a deeply involving collection of his own compositions.
David Bird - Wire Hums The sound of a cello’s neck snapping - the result of a mistake during his teenage years - resonated through the years and led Bird to create this mystifying series of electronically-enhanced pieces. While that earlier fracture was inadvertent, Bird’s work to deconstruct the instrument sonically is deliberate and fascinating throughout. Lyricism, violence, and humor all abut each other in an album that shows a whole new side to a composer whose work is always a great listen.
John Luther Adams - Darkness And Scattered Light A virtuoso who used his powers for good, bassist Robert Black seemingly created his own elegy with this contemplative album. Black, a member of the Bang On A Can All-Stars who died in June 2023 at 67, explores his instrument’s glorious dusky tonalities in his adaptation of Three High Places (2007), originally written for violin. The title piece (2023), for five multitracked basses, hints at the mysteries of what lies beyond empirical knowledge, and Three Nocturnes (2022), another solo piece, plumbs depths of darkness in lapidary fashion. Composer and performer are so simpatico throughout this remarkable release that they might as well be one.
Chamber Made
Julia Werntz - Someone Who Loves You Throws Me At You This astringent portrait album of five works, most of them inspired by the natural world, serves as a great way to get to know Werntz, a Boston-based composer known for using microtonal methods. The most recent piece, Kaspoleo Melea (2018), composed for two sopranos (Stephanie Lamprea and Rose Hegele) and a mezzo-soprano (Katherine Growdon), seems to point in a different direction, with texts from Sappho and Plato finding a continuum of humanity across the centuries.
Ladyybirdd - Tomorrow’s Yesterday A pure example of genre-fluidity, Gina Izzo’s debut album as Ladyybirdd defies categorization so firmly that even as I type I’m questioning whether it belongs here or with electronic music or jazz. With guests like Ambrose Akinmusire (trumpet) and Immanuel Wilkins (alto saxophone), the latter arena would seem most apropos. In fact, Into What Is Wanted, with Wilkins blowing for the rafters and Nick Dunston creating a swinging pulse on bass, could hold its own with any other jazz released this year. But there’s something about Izzo’s attitude that seems to combine conceptual freedom in a context of musical rigor that has me leaving it here. It’s an adventurous approach that also provides easy access to the discoveries Izzo made along the way so you should be undaunted when pressing “play” on this remarkable album.
José Manuel López López - Infinita Domenica Featuring his two string quartets (2007 and 2020) and Trio No. III (2008), these performances by members of the Arditti Quartet reveal a composer with a flair for exploiting the possibilities of stringed instruments in distinctive and dramatic fashion.
Doug Bielmeier - Music For Billionaires Aided and abetted by Hypercube and Unheard-of//Ensemble, two groups expert in the uncategorizable, Bielmeier stakes his claim as one of the brightest lights in the electroacoustic music. He also has a way with titles, as proven by such pieces as Corporate Responsibility Pledge, which churns along with puckish wit led by an unctuous clarinet, and Burning Old Man Summer, which depicts a plasticine halcyon of the mind. Terrific stuff - and I’d love to have it on vinyl, if only to see the fantastic cover blown up to 12x12.
Lea Bertucci - Of Shadows And Substance I have been negligent in getting a bead on the work of this NYC conceptualist and performer, but thanks to the algorithm recognizing my interest in anything with which percussionist Matt Evans is involved, I am now devoted - at least to these hypnotic pieces. Vapours, performed by Quartetto Maurice, turns a the strings into a cloud of multi-dimensional sound and seems to draw from an endless well of inspiration. The title piece has an electronically enhanced ad hoc ensemble (Henry Fraser (bass), Lucia Stavros (harp), Lester St. Louis (cello), and Evans) creating churn and drang, propelling forward and sometimes doubling back on itself. A rich feast.
Stephen Yip - By Moonflowers If it is spare elegance you crave, look no further than this dreamy collection of pieces by a Hong Kong-born composer who should be more widely known. The recording lends warmth and performances by the likes of the Mivos Quartet and InFlux Flute And Harp could not be more convincing.
Jackson Greenberg - The Things We Pass On Through Our Genes Never satisfied with the results of the string quartet he wrote for his thesis at Princeton, Greenberg took the recording, chopped and screwed it to a fare-thee-well, and transformed it into a hazy yet urgent investigation into trauma, memory, and family ties. Having honed his skills writing for television and film, this brief album finds Greenberg making a powerful step towards creating an identity outside of those collaborative worlds.
Folias Duo - Heartdance Active for over 20 years, Carmen Maret (flute) and Andrew Bergeron (guitar) have carved out a place for themselves in the musical landscape that’s more independent than the most self-sufficient indie band. On this delightful and sparkling collection, released on their own label, they pay tribute to themselves in a series of compositions that show their range - from folky tunes to modernism - without ever losing their light touch. They’re also smart enough to know what they can’t handle on their own, recording at Sono Luminus with the skillful production and engineering team of Dan Mercurio and Daniel Shores, presenting their music with the sonic perfection it deserves.
Pasquale Corrado - Works For Ensemble With pieces spanning 2013-2018 and recordings from 2015-2022, it’s about time we gained access to the dazzling breadth of Corrado’s work. D’Estasi is the perfect title for the splashy opening piece, given a stylish performance by the Ensemble Intercontemporain conducted by Matthias Pintscher. The rest of the pieces are for smaller forces and played by members of Syntax Ensemble. Pulse, which closes the album, shows that Corrado can make as much magic with five instruments as with five times that amount. Corrado is a busy conductor but putting this album into the world may find him spending more time on another side of the podium.
Plus Vocals
Lainie Fefferman - White Fire The utterly unique soundscapes Fefferman created from electronics and household objects, including “newspaper boxes, squeaky doors, a burp, and the switches of my old Ikea lamp,” somehow sound completely natural - and alternately witty and spooky - when combined with her light, vibrato-free voice. Add to that the concept, which has each track being a portrait of an undersung woman from the Old Testament, including Rebecca, Miriam, Lilith, Jezebel, and Dinah, and the whole project takes on a crushing inevitability. Just try to turn it off.
Douglas Boyce - The Bird Is An Alphabet Having three newly recorded pieces by Boyce is something to celebrate for sure, and his modernist Medievalism (or is that Medieval modernism?) sounds fantastic on this well-conceived grouping. A Book Of Songs (2019) opens the album in charming fashion, with tenor Robert Baker and pianist Molly Orlando sounding at ease, while Scriptorium (2021), written for the Byrne:Kozar Duo is a nice bonus for this fan of It Floats Away From You (see above). The final piece, Ars Poetica (2021), finds Boyce pushing in new directions, collaborating with Gullah-Geechee poet Marlanda Dekine, whose stolid recitations create a powerful counterpoint to the playing of Counter)Induction, the violin/guitar/cello trio of Nurit Pacht, Daniel Lippel, and Caleb van der Swaagh.
Maja S. K. Ratkje & Nordic Affect - Rokkur The video for Love Take My Hand, directed by the ensemble’s violinist, Halla Steinunn Stefánsdóttir, is the perfect introduction to the moods and music of this thorny album. With Ratkje lending her starlit electronics and creative vocalizing - think Björk and then go beyond - to the Baroque folk-modernism perfected by the Nordics, it’s like a series of postcards from a world in constant twilight. Amidst the darkness is a quest for love, making for experience not unlike the best gothic pop.
Joseph Branciforte & Theo Bleckmann - LP2 Perhaps the most accessible release yet from the estimable Greyfade label, this lushly emotional album finds vocalist Bleckmann and producer/electronic composer Branciforte following up their first collaboration with an even more assured sonic journey.
David Shapiro and The Crossing - Sumptuous Planet (A Secular Mass) It’s a rare year indeed when we don’t get a least one magnificent recording from this special choir under the direction of Donald Nally. But this sustained exercise in silvery singing is no placeholder, but rather an honestly uplifting series of movements based on the texts from Richard Dawkins Richard Feynman, and Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, hence the “secular” subtitle. In a still-new century that calls on us to be brave with disturbing regularity, we could likely use some new rituals; let this be the soundtrack.
From the archives:
Best Of 2022: Classical
Best Of 2021: Classical
Best Of 2020: Classical
Best Of 2019: Classical
Best Of 2018: Classical
Best Of 17: Classical
Best Of 16: Classical
Best Of 15: Classical & Composed
Best Of The Rest Of 14: Classical & Composed
Outstanding list, Jeremy! Thanks for mentioning Guy Barash, Gina Izzo/ladyybirdd, and Jackson Greenberg.