Friday, August 7, 2009

Cyclic Defrost Magazine

Cyclic Defrost Magazine

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Jamie Drouin – A Three Month Warm Up (Dragon’s Eye Recordings)

Posted: 07 Aug 2009 06:05 PM PDT

The title of sound artist Jamie Drouin’s ‘A Three Month Warm Up’ refers both to the time taken to collect the 124 individual sound recordings, taken from a public square in Drouin’s home of Victoria, Canada, which make up this work, and to its inspiration: the ‘atonal cacophony’ produced by orchestral players before commencing a performance. Drouin’s work relates more specifically to the tuning up phase, ‘where a single tone emerges out of the various instruments and voices’, as that is what happens here: the essential features of these 124 elements are flattened, smeared into one vast, shimmering haze, a 77-minute amorphous drone, endlessly in flux and from which it is impossible to discern its components.

It sounds like Thomas Koner, only thicker, and the approach is like that of Jacob Kirkegaard’s ‘Four Rooms’, in which Kirkegaard recorded the sound of four now empty public spaces in Chernobyl, played the recordings back in these spaces, and rerecorded the results. If Drouin’s work necessarily lacks the – literal – air of alienation and abandonment present in ‘Four Rooms’, the density of his sound more than makes up for it. Layer upon layer of hiss, din, noise, and clamour constantly jostle for attention, all futile; tones creep in and vanish, but its the full mass that’s always heard, endlessly shifting, endlessly surging forth. Its deeply, beautifully unsettling, a perpetual approach with no end in sight, like Edvard Munch’s infinite scream; the chaos of modern urban life packed into a public square and let loose.

Jishua Meggitt

Tansman: Piano Works (Chandos)

Posted: 07 Aug 2009 06:04 PM PDT

Coming of age in the turbulent Paris of the 1920’s, Alexandre Tansman’s neo-classicism has remained largely overlooked, out-of-vogue among the company of the serialist avant-garde, but it’s finally beginning to receive the attention it deserves. Performed with real devotion by British pianist Margaret Fingerhut, a regular champion of underdog composers, these piano works, spanning Tansman’s career from the twenties to the eighties, reveal a composer closely in touch with the approachable neo-classical practices of the time.

A number of themes recur, particularly a fondness for mazurkas and jazz-tinged ‘blues’, and, unsurprisingly given Tansman’s background, the shadow of Debussy and Ravel’s hazy impressionism. ‘Recuil de Mazurkas a Albert Roussel’ takes Chopin’s lyricism in more surprising directions, while his ‘Troiseme Sonatine a Walter Spies en souvenir de Bali’ plays, subtly, with ringing gamelan timbres. The most recent works, the ‘Album d’amis’ miniatures of 1980 are the most rewarding, and varied, taking in the complexity of Ligeti in the ‘Etude’, his vision of American blues in ‘Tempo di Blues’ and the tonal simplicity of Zbigniew Preisner in the final Berceuse Polonaise. These are all pleasingly approachable but never uninteresting pieces, and this recording should go some way to intorducing Tansman to new listeners.

Joshua Meggitt

Jeajoon Ryu – Sinfonia Da Requiem (Naxos)

Posted: 07 Aug 2009 06:03 PM PDT

South Korean composer Jeajoon Ryu is among today’s most exciting orchestral composers, as the works on this new disc on Naxos attest. Ryu studied under Krzystof Penderecki in Poland, a country renowned for the quality of its orchestral composers (Penderecki, Lutoslawski, Gorecki). Penderecki declared Ryu’s Sinfonia da Requiem featured here ‘a masterpiece’, and it received a ten-minute standing ovation from its audience at its premiere in Warsaw last year. Who said contemporary audiences were jaded?

It’s easy to see what the fuss was about. Composed as a tribute to the survivors who helped rebuild Korea following the Second World War and dedicated to Juyung Chung, the founder of Hyundai, The Sinfonia is a stirring and powerful tribute that avoids all obvious stereotypes. From the opening bars Ryu sets forth thick streams of strings, letting them writhe around like forlorn pythons, before the chorus emerges with all the solemnity of a Russian Orthodox service. The Polish connection is evident, particularly Penderecki’s post-Threnody sacred works, and the control of Lutoslawski, yet Ryu is also unafraid to let tonal beauty emerge too, with moments as rich as Tchaikovsky. His Violin Concerto shows equal promise, and while lacking the at times dizzying grandeur of the Sinfonia, shows that Ryu is particularly skilled in applying his voice to established forms.

Joshua Meggitt

at 6:24 PM