‘Songs for Our Times’
Sphinx Virtuosi (Deutsche Grammophon)
This album, the Sphinx Virtuosi’s debut on the storied Deutsche Grammophon label, is most valuable as promotion for the ensemble’s parent, the Sphinx Organization, which is devoted to increasing racial diversity in classical music and turned 25 last year. Sphinx offers competitions, conferences, training programs, grants and audition support, alongside advocacy for young soloists and arts administrators, for more diverse rosters and repertory.
And now major-label recordings, too. The Virtuosi, Sphinx’s premier touring group, is a chamber string orchestra made up of young Black and Latino musicians. This hourlong program features spirited (if sometimes slightly hard-edged) playing on lively (if sometimes slightly faceless) pieces by Michael Abels, Aldemaro Romero, Valerie Coleman and Jessie Montgomery.
The violinist Amaryn Olmeda is nimble-fingered through the fiddling virtuosity of Carlos Simon’s solo “Between Worlds.” Highlights are a richly aching arrangement of a slow movement from a Florence Price quartet; the propulsive yet dreamlike, even surreal, swirl of Ricardo Herz’s “Sisifo na Cidade Grande” (“Sisyphus in the Big City”); and a breathless rendition of the finale of Beethoven’s “Kreutzer” Sonata, arranged for the group in honor of the work’s original dedicatee, the Black violinist George Bridgetower. ZACHARY WOOLFE
George Walker: Five Sinfonias
National Symphony Orchestra; Gianandrea Noseda, conductor (National Symphony Orchestra)
It has become common to refer to George Walker as a composer of firsts — in particular, the distinction of being the first Black composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. But, as he told an interviewer in 2012, “I’ve always thought in universal terms, not just what is Black, or what is American, but simply what has quality.” That characteristic is everywhere in his five Sinfonias: in their exacting construction, vibrant and unsentimental musical language, and command of orchestration.
The National Symphony Orchestra’s compelling recordings, which followed performances organized around Walker’s centennial in 2022, should widen the awareness that this composer is a major American voice. All five of the Sinfonias, composed between 1984 and 2016, are compact, lasting between 10 and 15 minutes. There is a corresponding urgency of expression and a density of rapidly changing material. Walker’s syntax is pointed, with a propensity for angular melodies, blocks of dissonance and shifting moods.
He did not mellow with age, either. The fifth Sinfonia (“Visions”) is in some ways the most severe, an outburst of lament and anger after the mass shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. Five voices intone a series of spoken texts. Their message is elusive, but the music’s heaviness reflects an artist’s sad disbelief that so little had changed over his lifetime, however many “firsts” it entailed. DAVID WEININGER
Monteverdi: ‘Vespro della Beata Vergine’
Pygmalion; Raphaël Pichon, conductor (Harmonia Mundi)
When I interviewed the terrific French conductor Raphaël Pichon toward the end of last year, he commented that “all the most extraordinary pieces of music are first a drama.” Listen to this truly excellent account of Monteverdi’s “Vespers,” and you can certainly believe it. There is a sense of religious devotion to be heard here, as of course there should be, but what is so powerful is the expressive urgency that Pichon, his soloists and his Pygmalion ensemble so fervently bring to the music. If period performance still aims, as it always has, to restore the shock of the old for the ears of today, then this is period performance at close to its very best.
That is particularly true of the choral singing, which the vocalists of Pygmalion deliver with an intensity and detailing that is reminiscent of John Eliot Gardiner’s Monteverdi Choir, even if Pichon lets more of a spirit of freedom shine through. Listen to the overwhelming effusion of their joy as they come to the “Gloria” at the end of “Laetatus sum,” for example, or the first bars of “Laudate Pueri,” which are fastidiously precise in every way, yet not at all fussy. The last verse of that ancient hymn, “Ave Maris Stella,” might seem oddly simple amid all of Monteverdi’s virtuosic invention in this work; Pygmalion make it utterly transporting. DAVID ALLEN
‘Stillpoint’
Awadagin Pratt; A Far Cry; Roomful of Teeth (New Amsterdam)
Most recordings of contemporary music that manage to cast a spell achieve that by focusing on a single composer’s voice. But grab-bags of living artists and blends of different ensembles can be hit or miss. So give the commissioning pianist Awadagin Pratt points for good taste: The half-dozen voices featured on this album all earn their time.
Crucially, each composer’s work here stretches beyond 10 minutes in length, providing listeners with significant immersion in, say, Jessie Montgomery’s sound world by way of “Rounds.” That piece can bring to mind the “Spring Rounds” section of Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring,” but also post-minimalist string writing and a lush cadenza for Pratt (who is also invited to improvise at points).
And both of the groups he plays with — the chamber orchestra A Far Cry and the vocal octet Roomful of Teeth — bring their respective A-games to Paola Prestini’s “Code,” which toggles between seething passages and beatific states. Judd Greenstein’s concluding “Still Point” brings chattering, Steve Reich-like vibes into productive dialogue with sweeping, sparkling piano writing that Greenstein describes in liner notes as a memorial to the jazz great McCoy Tyner, who died in 2020. Elsewhere, the veteran composer Alvin Singleton is heard in fine form, courtesy of his “Time Past, Time Future.”
On Tyshawn Sorey’s “Untitled Composition for Piano and Eight Voices,” the composer’s deft way of moving between stark chromaticism and traditional harmonic beauty and back makes for an event-packed ride. And “Castillo Interior,” by Peteris Vasks, is a valuable forum for Pratt’s solo pianism. SETH COLTER WALLS
Ravel: L’Oeuvre Pour Piano
Philippe Bianconi (La Dolce Volta)
“I don’t have a personality that pushes me towards extravagance,” the French pianist Philippe Bianconi says in the liner notes for this new album.
Well then he’s playing the right composer. As with Chopin and Debussy, there’s something magical, even transfiguring, in Ravel’s writing for piano, but he did it in his own exquisitely crafted way. His pieces admit impressionistic effects without drowning in them; the fountain splashes of “Jeux d’eau” become liquid glitter in Bianconi’s hands. The lonesome images of “Miroirs,” the ferocity of “Gaspard de la Nuit,” the slender waltzes of “Valses Nobles et Sentimentales,” the fairy-tale lucidity of “Ma Mère l’Oye” (with the pianist Clément Lefebvre) — these all invite expressivity and recoil at schmaltz, and Bianconi stylishly obliges.
Bianconi, who traces his pedagogical lineage back to Ravel’s circle, compels the listener to share his focus. He constructs hard, polished surfaces with glimmers of solitude, such as in “Une Barque sur l’Océan” and Sonatine. The shimmer of rapid oscillations gets a pointillistic crispness. If you want runs that sound like Champagne bubbles, look elsewhere, like Jean-Yves Thibaudet. Even when forced to play a game of Twister with his fingers, Bianconi gently articulates the voicings — the chilly tolling of bells in “Le Gibet” or the airily seductive siren song of “Ondine.” For him, elegant restraint means committing to specific choices. Call it radical clarity. OUSSAMA ZAHR
