I got only two things on Record Store Day and they are CDs at that, but they were 50% off in honor of Record Store Day nonetheless. Both have been on my wishlist for a long time and come highly recommended.
There is no Bach on Baroque; no Handel, Telemann or Vivaldi. This is the music of the 21st Century, not the 17th, and the composers are violist Nadia Sirota’s friends—who just happen to include some of the most respected musicians of our own moment.
The six pieces on Baroque were written with Sirota’s distinctive sound in mind and recorded (by her longtime collaborators at Bedroom Community) to exaggerate the idiosyncracies of her tone. Fellow labelmates Nico Muhly, Daníel Bjarnason and Paul Corley provide three pieces, while composers Judd Greenstein, Shara Worden and Missy Mazzoli provide the other three.
Baroque, as the title of the album, references a number of things; the concerto form - balancing a soloist against ensemble accompaniment - is an invention of the Baroque era, so while there are concerti here, of a sort, they’re concerti of a decidedly more portable variety. Both Judd Greenstein’s “In Teaching Others We Teach Ourselves”, whose intimate ensemble accompaniment opens the album with a different paradigm of “solo” versus “tutti” than more famous efforts in the form, and the self-aware symphonics of Daníel Bjarnason’s “Sleep Variations”, which closes the disc, build Sirota’s virtual backup band from the overdubbed sound of her own playing. There’s also something very Baroque about the style of pieces like “From the Invisible to the Visible”, by Shara Worden (Clogs, My Brightest Diamond), and “Tooth and Nail” by Missy Mazzoli, two radically different pieces that are both about the elaborate ornamentation of slowly moving harmonies.
Sirota’s approach to the instrument owes something to recent trends in Baroque playing. She can keep her bow-hand light and her left hand still, for a gin-dry sound. It’s a sound prized by, among others, Nico Muhly who thinks of Sirota as his most trusted interpreter—another reason being the sort of rhythmic precision his “Étude 3” demands, with an almost wicked glee. Paul Corley creates a piece to which timbre is so central that the voice of Sirota’s instrument seems as much a part of the composition as the notes she plays. His “Tristan da Cunha”—dark, extreme, and alarmingly detailed—is “Baroque” in the sense of “Brueghel-esque.”
Which leads us to the one thing all of these pieces have in common: that level of detail. Words like “complex,” applied to music, too often suggest a level of intricacy designed to confound, whereas each of the works Sirota brings together here offers an audible clarity of purpose. So let’s instead say that these works—to whatever extent they may recall the Baroque—are instead exquisitely baroque, each concerto, miniature or soundscape realized with extravagant intricacy.
James McVinnie - Cycles
https://bedroomcommunity.bandcamp.com/album/cycles
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/album/5F8sFBJZSO7j9BxUvOpvXc
James McVinnie’s Cycles comprises thirteen organ pieces by labelmate and composer Nico Muhly. Performing the pieces in addition to McVinnie are Nadia Sirota, Chris Thompson and Simon Wall.
McVinnie is neither a stranger to Muhly’s music nor the label’s output, having collaborated closely with its artists throughout the years. What makes McVinnie such an ideal interpreter of Muhly’s music is that he and Muhly share not just an understanding of the capabilities of the pipe organ as a musical instrument, but also an equally deep understanding of, and even affection for, its limitations.
McVinnie speaks eloquently on behalf of his instrument’s potential. “The organ is like a grand symphony orchestra controlled by one person manning a series of keyboards and pedals, stops and buttons. On the one hand, an organ can imitate orchestral instruments—the ardent string section of an orchestra, a lyrical clarinet, a French horn, timpani—and on the other, it has its own indigenous magisterial voice. Organs are built to speak into specific acoustic spaces. When you play, it’s as if you’re playing the whole building you’re in, which often can be electrifying.” And the organ as an instrument is tied to centuries of liturgical practice, capable of supporting or imitating a church choir with a solemnity few others could hope to summon. McVinnie is quick to point out, however, that the organ is also “the ultimate and original synthesizer”—and it is nothing if not a mechanical, wind-powered synthesizer, with all of the uncanny falseness that that word implies.
Much of Muhly’s work aspires to a kind of pop-art superflatness. The organ’s mechanical sound, its resistance to subtle dynamics, work perfectly with this tendency in Muhly’s music—particularly filtered through McVinnie’s subtle registrations, the combinations of stops pulled out to create each timbre. For instance, in Muhly’s prelude for their mutual friend, the Rev. James Mustard, McVinnie gives the slow-moving harmonies a breathy warmth, but it’s through a sparkling, crystalline pane of arpeggios.
The symphonic, the acoustic, the sacred, the synthetic: there’s a little of each in every one of these pieces, and sometimes more than a little. Muhly’s Twitchy Organs pairs the organ with viola and percussion, but on this recording, the space is as much of an instrument as the pipes are. It sounds warm and grand and alive; it sounds like an ambient work for reverb-soaked synths; it sounds like a prayer. It is, in fact, all of the above.
