Recommended listening; 4 new albums to listen to this summer!

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John Banther: Hello everyone, I'm John Banther and this is Classical Breakdown. It's the last episode of Season Six and per tradition, it's an episode on recommended summer listening before I go on a much needed summer break and I think I have some great selections that you will enjoy, and thank you so much for listening and making each season bigger than the last. Thank you for sharing it, reviewing it, and sending me episode ideas.

Some highlights from me from this past season have to be our discussions on Aaron Copland in episode 120 and his defense of democracy with Lincoln Portrait in number 123. It was also great to have some brass playing stars like Chandra Cervantes in episode 116, and Chris Gekker in 122. They told us all about their instruments and they played for us too, and I especially loved reading Olly Wilson's musicology work that can change how you hear music. We talked about that in episode 125. And of course, if you had a favorite episode this season, you can let me know. And a big thanks to my steady WETA classical co- hosts this season, Evan Keeley, Linda Carducci, and James Jacobs.

I have four albums to share with you and it's kind of a composer showcase two, starting with the first one. This is an album of oboe music by Madeleine Dring. In fact, this is a complete album of all of her oboe music. Madeleine Dring is probably an unfamiliar name to many, she was for myself. She was an English composer who was born in 1923 and died in 1977. She studied at the Royal Conservatory of Music with composers like Herbert Howells and Ralph Vaughan Williams. In 1947, around 23 or 24 years old, she married an oboist who would go on to be a star player of his time, Roger Lord, and one for whom she'd write many works.

There isn't a lot available publicly about her from this time until her death and sometimes includes the ever loaded sentence and parentheses about family commitments being a reason for less output. She died in 1977 at 53 from a brain aneurysm and while many works are lost, many were preserved by her husband and this album contains her complete oboe works. I have a soft spot for albums featuring the oboe, especially in compilations like this because while it can be such a serious instrument in the orchestra, I think they get to show all of their sides in a setting like this and they often have a flirtatious or beguiling quality too that I just really enjoy. And it's Nicholas Daniel doing the flirting on the Oboe in this album when called for across 10 works by dream. Daniel is an award- winning English conductor and oboist and taught for a time here in the United States at Indiana University.

The first work is her three pieces for oboe and piano, which in this album has the slower middle movement separated and towards the end. This has that beguiling quality I was talking and it also feels quite dance- like with moods that are just dissimilar enough to meld into the next contrasting musical idea. The three pieces are types of dances too. Number three is tango, number one is waltz, the order recorded here, and then the second one, Sarabande, appears later.

Following this, there is another dance, Italian dance, and it feels like it's definitely calling back to the tarantella, a dance that could revive people who were convulsing or in some kind of delirium as if they were bitten by a tarantula. That's a whole real part of music history that we don't have time for right now, but I definitely hear that in this instance.

One of the qualities I like about Dring is her voice leading and harmony. She creates very interesting lines and imitation between two people. I think she's breaking the counterpoint rules when needed, like in the second movement of her trio for oboe, bassoon, and harpsichord played on piano here, it's quite angular and very smooth at the same time. And kind of reminds me of some of the sounds of New England composers, the sound they had for a bit in the 20th century, but she has a more rounded or singing style in this instance. Just take a listen to some of the final movement of this trio. I think it encompasses everything I've talked about so far.

Another work to mention out of the 10 is her trio for flute, oboe, and piano. These three instruments sound most distinct compared to her other trios. The previous one, for example, can really feel like the oboe and bassoon. They're together as a team, but here we have three individuals more often.

The middle movement of the trio might be the most relaxed section of the album too. Many of the works here exploit the instrument's light and dance- like qualities. And even here in this andante, you feel a faster or more subdivided pulse from the piano than you might expect for an andante like this.

Something you might notice when you go listen to this, and I hope you do, is that her portrait on the album cover looks more like a movie star from the 1940s and '50s than a composer of that time. That is because, well, she did a lot of work composing for TV and radio. She did a lot, but unfortunately much of that has been lost. Very little of her music has been recorded, but hopefully this will be the start of something that lets us hear more from this composer, Madeleine Dring, in the future.

Next is something special from the MiraLamar duo. It's a live album called Moudone, and Moudone is Arabic four cities, and we're going to hear music on five different cities here. First, a little on the performers. Mira Abualzulof and Lamar Elias met when they were children at the Edward Said Conservatory in Bethlehem, the occupied West Bank, and this close relationship is something you will know just from hearing them. More on that in a bit. Today, they are based in Toulouse, France and inspired by their own identity seek to create music that is a fusion of Western classical music and Palestinian music.

The first city or place we're going to go to is Souq Bethlehem and it's referring to the Bethlehem marketplace Al Suq. In 1927, an earthquake destroyed most of the shops and the market. In that year the city turned it into like an open square, but in 2014 the market was brought back and the original facade was restored.

And as we hear in the music, it sounds like a lively place. Vendors, shopkeepers, arriving early, putting out new produce or fish and meats, local chefs and people mixing together, trying to get the best produce for the day. And I will warn you, look at pictures of this marketplace at your own risk on an empty stomach.

Now, we've heard music on marketplaces before. Think of The Market at Limoges in Mussorgsky's Pictures at an Exhibition, where you can even hear a little skirmish. One thing you'll notice when you listen to this live album is that the ensemble playing is very tight. And the more you listen, the more you'll notice how subtly and how together and how nuanced they are making dynamic or articulation or timbre changes together.

You'll notice that the violin sound changes in timbre adding a whole new dimension to the music. What she is doing, I think, is playing slightly closer to the bridge but not too much, and I think that thin and sharp, not in pitch, but like a knife's edge, that sound is also made by using very little pressure with the bow and using more of the edge of the bow. So it's sort of a softer sound, but her bow I think is still moving quite quick with just the edge and a little closer to the bridge. This is a technique and sound I would guess she does not even remember hearing or maybe even learning the first time, but it's now so innate like her own voice.

Another technique she uses at times that we haven't talked about is bariolage, and that's when you play the same note on two different strings. It's the same pitch, but the timbre is very slightly different. It creates a type of pulsating sound. What I also love is how this is very improvisatory- sounding.

Leaving the delicious market in Bethlehem, we go to next two cities in one work, it's Ramallah Al- Quds. This feels introspective, meditative, and you'll hear it starts with piano alone and just the softest, almost imperceptible at first, pizzicatos in the violin.

And with the bow, she rises out of the sound of the piano on the violin seemingly from nothing. And we've talked many times about how one instrument will accompany another and then they'll switch rules, but I don't remember us talking about a time like this where someone is doing so little yet so much at the same time. Listen for how she is also shaping the line and dynamics over these long- stretching notes with the piano.

Ramallah is an important city about six miles north of Al-Quds, which is Arabic for Jerusalem. And at 2, 860 feet, Ramallah means God's height. And it almost feels like we ourselves are at a great height looking over our eyes scanning and following in the distance these rolling hills, very meditating. Al- Quds is six miles to the south. And like the other monotheistic religions in the region, it's a very important city spiritually for Islam. This slowly grows over several minutes and slowly but surely rises in energy to reach a high point about midway through. Later, there comes a section that really brought to me the introspective feeling like a quiet internal crying or pleading that ends the piece.

And from introspection comes celebration in the next piece, Jericho's Lantern. Jericho, if you didn't know, is one of the oldest cities in the world. In 2010, there was a celebration of the city at 10, 000 years old in which the Jericho municipality in cooperation with Palestinian Art Academy and German artists lit and flew lanterns over the city at night celebrating the Palestinian people's love of life, hope, and light, and desire to walk freely as lanterns fly with no barriers. It opens upbeat as you hear, exchanging lines and ideas back and forth. Nearly halfway through, it slows down and gets heavier.

This is something we might call pesante, kind of heavy, and there is a weight that is holding the music down, but it gradually becomes lighter and lighter with the drudging downbeats slowly giving way before ending the whole thing by jumping back into that upbeat sound we heard at the opening.

There is one more piece, a short improvisation, almost like an encore, but I wanted to tell you a reason I chose this album is because it's an incredible live performance. I work with live recordings every week for my Monday evening show, Front Row Washington, and I've worked with a lot of great live performances nearly every week for seven years, but I think I can count on one hand how many performances reach this level of connection, ensemble playing, and nuance. And when it happens, they tend to be improvisatory or often tango or fusion- based, which I think you can hear that connection here. And Monday night at 9: 00, a shameless plug, it's the last Front Row Washington before a summer break and it's going to be a great concert with the Steve Honigberg Tango Ensemble.

But we get to the last now in this live album, it's a short improvisation that also serves like an encore. It's called Shat Gaza. The Arabic word for beach is shati, and the beach along the Gaza Strip has been deeply important and it's symbolic for Palestinians, a place of solace, escape, and a source of livelihood as told by countless people. I think her improvisation takes on a familiar sound for us too, as we hear sounds that we might interpret as the blues or blue grass- like lines.

I also love how the piano is painting around the violin as well. There are some interesting parallels, albeit with very different sounds, to jazz piano coming. So that is Moudone Live, MiraLamar Duo's depiction in music of five Palestinian cities or locations like that beach or the market.

I said it was going to be kind of like a composer showcase and that continues with the next two albums as well. First, we have a compilation of works by Fazıl Say and it includes a variety of ensemble settings. We have everything from a concerto with orchestra, a sonata for violin, a string quartet, and more. If you don't know the composer Fazıl Say, this can serve as a great introduction. Fazıl Say is a Turkish pianist and composer born in 1970 whose music and performances from the piano have been appreciated all over the world. There is a lot to say, but one of the things I like to mention about him is how he studied music from an early age. His teacher told him to improvise on the piano every day on themes to do with his daily life before moving on to exercises and studies. Say says this daily improvisational exercise led to an aesthetic outlook that makes him who he is today.

The first work and headline of the album is his Violin Concerto number two, which draws you in right from the beginning. He composed this in April of 2020. Yes, we are going back to that, but it's just for a moment. Don't worry. His home in Turkey is the Aegean Sea- facing town of Urla, and he walked along the empty beach very early every morning saying, " Each sunrise had its own color, texture, and atmosphere," which subsequently flowed into the composition. And I think you do hear a sense of improvisation in his music, although improvisation feels like the wrong description too. It has a sense of freedom as in it isn't bound by typical playing rules and it feels like there are no tracks to follow.

Okay, cadenzas. There is a moment that I think we would typically describe as a cadenza, a moment in the concerto for the soloist to play alone. It happens for several minutes in fact, and it sounds as if the violin is accompanying or in conversation with itself and not us.

Then as if the soloist finds the solution to the problem that made the orchestra stop in the first place, they re- enter with a similar idea that opened the concerto. And the soloist we are hearing is Friedemann Eichhorn, a German violinist. The first movement is Sunrise and the second is Jazz Dance. Now, I freely admit that when jazz elements are used or inserted into this kind of orchestral music, it way too often just doesn't land in my opinion, or it feels inauthentic, and I say inserted because it's all too common to see it dropped in for some type of jazzy factor. Two reasons I think this works though. One, it's short and it's compact. He's doing much more with much less. For example, listen to what we might call a shout section towards the end, but really it's only the bass trombone wailing away and in bigger strokes coming in on the offbeat of beat one. And the trumpets are just blending in with a punctuated string line, not over top.

Especially with that bass trombone line and not the entire low brass section, it brings to my ears an element of Duke Ellington. It's short and to the point and it's a great contrast in pairing with the movement that comes after. And I think Say has achieved something here similar to what Michael Tilson- Thomas and Leonard Bernstein have been able to achieve similarly. The last movement is called Quiet Morning, and I'll let you discover the rest of this concerto on your own. For myself, I get the sense that the opening sounds of the concerto return on the finale, but not in a resolved type of way as if the resolution we were hoping for all along is never going to come or is something we won't understand for a long time, but we will have to just grow around it. That's my imagination of course, but the final minutes are so beautiful.

Also included here is a sextet called Leopards and it's very rhythmic maybe in a Bernard Herrmann type of way. And it has some incredible sounds that leave you wondering, " How did Fossil Say even notate that?" And that's the kind of question you'll ask yourself again eventually when you listen to his music.

Similar to that rhythmic sextet, there is a quartet titled Divorce, which explores the experience of divorce and separation of a relationship in music. There is also a sonata for solo violin on this album too, which makes this a great one to discover his music as we have such a wide range of settings. He's written a lot of music and a lot of it has been recorded, so if this is a new composer to you, there is so much more to hear. Our final album has Samantha Ege at the piano for two concertos in MAESTRA: Julia Perry and Doreen Carwithen. Dr. Samantha Ege is also a musicologist, author, and historian, and we get to enjoy all of those things come together in this album.

The first concerto is by African- American composer, Julia Perry, which is a name I had heard before when researching, but I had never heard anything, but I see since 2023 more and more of her music is being recorded. Perry's Concerto for Piano and Orchestra is interesting because it's not in three movements, rather it's described as a concerto in two uninterrupted speeds. I'll read a bit from the album release notes on presto. com to show what our pianist musicologist here is thinking.

Quote, " Note how her concerto is not in two movements but in two speeds as if she's playing with space- time. The first speed, slow, is as Maestro Martinez, the conductor, calls it, 'Celestial,' emerging out of a haze of strings and winds, the piano's opening solo unfolds. The irregular time signatures evoke a suspended temporality. But the second speed, fast, brings us back down to earth. Energetic rhythms seasoned with Afro- diasporic syncopations dance around the pulse. Here, the piano cadenzas are more virtuosic as you might expect to hear in the more conventional concerto, but Perry is experimenting more with color than technique. The pianist must paint rather than play." End quote.

Perry was born in 1924 and died in 1979, and you might notice a certain similarity in sound to another composer. Samantha wrote in an interview, " Perry was actually friends with Copland. They both worked with Nadia Boulanger and were part of the same scene," so if you hear those influences then it's because she was quite literally at the heart of American modernism. I recently came across some very cool footage where he's interviewing her about what she's working on, and there's a real rapport between them. She's being very jokey and sarcastic and they're very obviously comfortable enough with each other for her to laugh at his questions.

This is important as we examine and re- examine our musical past in this country, we see more people were involved or even responsible for the sound that we have today and even performance practices, both good and bad. The transition, which might be a loaded word in this type of concerto, to the second speed, fast, is immediate as you might assume from two uninterrupted speeds. I'll include links to the interview on the show notes page where you can read more about the challenges a performer faces that you might not assume as a listener. For example, it can be much more daunting when playing a slow sparse work than something, quote, 'virtuosic' or maybe this is bigger than the sum of its parts. Especially in the fast tempo, I hear the painting and brushstrokes that Samantha mentioned. She also said on this concerto, " I feel that we are working towards shaping the colors together rather than me taking center stage as a soloist."

The other concerto on this album is by British composer, Doreen Carwithen, her Concerto for Piano and Strings. She was born in 1922 and died in 2003. And like Madeleine Dring, she is a new name to me. Carwithen wrote over 30 film scores, and according to many, was the first woman to be a full- time film composer. She was a great pianist too, and studied at the Royal Academy of Music. This is much more traditional too compared to the concerto by Perry. Here, we are in three movements, and even though the strings are quite prominent in this Concerto for Piano and Strings, it feels like there is still a hierarchy as well.

She composed this work in 1948, and while I don't see anything about a narrative or idea in regards to this concerto, it does have a cinematic- like quality too. When asked about this possibility in an interview, Samantha said, " Absolutely, even though it predates her film work, it's already clear that she's got her own identity and it's very narrative- driven." The first time I heard this piece was quite a few years ago, and its urgency spoke to me very directly. I knew I had to play it at some point. There would be times where I'd wake up in the middle of the night and hear it in my head on one memorable occasion during a thunderstorm, which was pretty dramatic.

The second movement opens with an extended line for violin, and then when piano enters, it's a contrasting and murky sound. There's another moment that reminds me of Ravel's Gaspard de la Nuit, which we explored this season too. This section reminds me of the tolling bell sound that never ends in one of those sections of Gaspard. This continues to alternate between piano and strings before piano gets an extended amount of time alone, and I love the atmosphere that tremolo strings bring when they re- enter.

The entire second movement feels like we are suspended, just floating in it, which is a great contrast to what comes next. After a somewhat dramatic opening to the concerto's finale, the piano enters and has more extended moments alone in this movement compared to the others. The piano has shifting moods and it feels like they're accompanying themselves in a way that makes you forget there is a string orchestra sitting right beside her.

This happens again later, and also more cadenza- like and it's beautiful and enveloping. You're also going to hear some big glissandos on the piano, which she talks about in the interview I mentioned. This technique, glissando, seems like one of the most or more painful aspects of piano- playing. When you look this up online, a common problem is students bleed or injure their fingers or more. It is just not an easy thing to do. Even when you have it down, I don't think it's all that comfortable. So these are two great and very different concertos brought to us by a musicologist pianist, Dr. Samantha Ege, who has several more albums for you to enjoy after this one.

And if you made it this far, thank you so much for listening. Music is powerful, it's political, it can change minds without a single word, it's part of the human experience of free expression and understanding. Wherever people go, whether of their own free will or under threat of violence, music can be found and its effects are often larger than the sum of its parts. I hope you enjoy listening to these albums this summer and continue to listen and think critically. If you find some other great music this summer, you can always send it my way. Email me at classicalbreakdown@ weta. org. Stay safe, look out for each other, and I'll see you in September for season seven.