5 New Classical Albums You Need To Hear

Whatever "classical" means to you...

Anna Thorvaldsdóttir (photo: Anna Maggy)

Every fourth Tuesday of a given month, I’ll be reviewing five new albums, sometimes focusing on a single genre and other times grabbing whatever sounds good. This week, we’re all about classical. We’re defining that term pretty broadly, of course, but each of the records below is brilliant in its own way. Let’s dive in, shall we?

I’ve been a fan of Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdóttir for a decade now. I first wrote about her music here, followed up three years later here, reviewed one of her works as part of a trilogy of multi-composer albums here, and most recently wrote about her again here. In that last piece, I wrote,

Mostly because of my own ignorance, I don’t know of anyone else making music like this right now. (If you do, I’d love to hear about them.) It has an extraordinary, overwhelming effect on me, but I think that’s because I come to it from several directions at once: I can hear connections to Gustav Mahler and Jean Sibelius, but it also draws me in by reminding me of Sunn O)))’s “Alice,” Charles Mingus’s Let My Children Hear Music, Laibach’s Krst Pod Triglavom/Baptism, and Dimmu Borgir’s Puritanical Euphoric Misanthropia.

Thorvaldsdottir’s latest piece, UBIQUE, was commissioned by flutist Claire Chase as part of Density 2036, an ongoing project to create a new repertory for the flute, concluding upon the centennial of Edgard Varèse’s flute solo Density 21.5. It’s scored for flute, bass flute, and contrabass flute (all played by Chase), piano, two cellos and pre-constructed electronics. The other performers are pianist Cory Smythe and cellists Katinka Kleijn and Seth Parker Woods.

UBIQUE is a 45-minute piece divided into 11 movements, and it starts off quite promisingly, with deep subsonic rumbles and witchy whispers just at the edge of decipherability. Some of Chase’s low flute notes drop into didgeridoo range, and Smythe’s piano interjects almost jazzy figures here and there. The cellos, meanwhile, do most of the heavy lifting. And I do mean heavy; at more than one point, I heard figures that reminded me of the triads in Black Sabbath songs.

Thorvaldsdóttir’s sonic trademarks are all here: low rumbles, percussive strikes of bow against cello, a post-Goreçki mournfulness. And there are some fascinating new sounds, too; in “Part VIII”, Chase sounds like an enormous bulldog snoring and sneezing in its sleep. But there’s a little too much lightness and romanticism in other movements for this piece to become a favorite of mine, at least not yet. I wanted it to be scarier.

Percussionist Christopher Clarino interprets work by five composers on Parlando. The three-part title piece, by Igor Santos, is a duo for vibraphone and synthesizer, the latter played by Shaoai Ashley Zhang; the sharp metallic strikes are swaddled and countered by gentle drones and shimmers, rendering the whole thing oddly blissful, even when Clarino unleashes a burst of clanking. Barbara Monk Feldman’s “Glockenspiel” is only two minutes long, but has the spaciousness and meaningful intervals of both Morton Feldman (to whom she was married) and Thelonious Monk. It leads seamlessly into Thomas DeLio’s “jeu de timbres”, which features a range of instruments including orchestra bells and what sounds like a drum kit. The pauses between eruptions are sometimes long enough to suggest Clarino’s walking across the room from one instrument to another. There are two other long pieces, Anthony Donofrio’s “Meditation on Italo Calvino’s ‘The Castle of Crossed Destinies’” and Michael Pisaro-Liu’s “The Narrow Path”, which require the listener to focus, lest the whole thing drift away. Even at its most melodic, solo percussion music can be a challenge to the listener, but Parlando is worth the effort.

Lei Liang’s Dui (translation: “to face”) is co-produced with cellist Maya Beiser, who performs the six-part, 16-minute “Mongolian Suite” and released it on her Islandia Music label. (I interviewed Beiser in 2021, when she released an album of Philip Glass compositions.)

The five pieces on the record are very different, but fit together into a coherent 72-minute statement. It all begins with “Vis-à-vis,” a duo for pipa player Wu Man and percussionist Steven Schick. (I interviewed Schick in 2022, and I really want you to read that one, because he’s brilliant.) That piece starts slowly, but rises to one crescendo after another in waves of sharp-edged strings and dry, hard rattles and thumps. It’s the perfect lead-in to Beiser’s performance of “Mongolian Suite,” for solo cello, which is a virtuoso exploration of dark romantic moods expressed through melodies from traditional Inner Mongolian songs, augmented by her own mastery of drones and harmonics. That’s followed by “déjà vu”, a duo piece performed by violinist Cho-Liang Lin and percussionist Zhe Lin that’s a kind of counterpoint to “Vis-à-vis” (more swoony, less jarring); “Luminosity”, a solo piece played by bassist Mark Dresser that has the ominous heaviness of my favorite Anna Thorvaldsdóttir works; and finally, “Lakescape V”, for the ensemble loadbang, consisting of trumpeter Andy Kozar, trombonist William Lang, bass clarinetist Carlos Cordeiro and baritone vocalist Jeffrey Gavett. Dui is a truly beautiful album that draws me in deeper every time I listen to it, and unlike most music these days, I actually prefer hearing it through speakers rather than headphones.

Violinist Zachary Carrettin and pianist Mina Gajić have recorded before under their given names; Aequora is their first album using the collective name Mystery Sonata. It features compositions by four Icelandic composers, including María Huld Markan Sigfúsdóttir, Daníel Bjarnason, Páll Ragnar Pálsson, and Anna Thorvaldsdóttir. The opening title piece, by Sigfúsdóttir, was originally scored for piano and electronics; the violin part was added when the duo expressed an interest in recording it, but you could never tell. It’s an ominous but romantic 10-minute journey into a desolate but starkly beautiful landscape. Bjarnason’s “First Escape” is a hectic and unsettling violin solo that makes you feel like you’re being chased through the aforementioned desolate landscape by an unidentified pursuer. Pálsson’s two-part “Notre Dame” was originally written for harp and violin, and according to the press release “explores the many distinct timbres and intonations of a unison pitch”, which may explain why it has a somewhat static, shifting-from-foot-to-foot quality. “Reminiscence”, Thorvaldsdóttir’s contribution, is a solo piano piece, but it involves a lot of reaching inside the instrument, so you get her usual scrapes and horror-movie sounds, which I appreciated. It’s divided into seven short sections (just eight minutes of music total), and each of those is different enough that the pauses are suspenseful. What’s coming next? The album ends with “Re/fractions”, another Sigfúsdóttir composition and one specially commissioned by Carrettin and Gajić. It’s more conventional than “Aequora”, more romantic and traditionally beautiful; there are some chords in the first of its two movements that sound like the beginning of a pop ballad, and Carrettin is playing so softly the strings sound like a flute at times.

I knew percussionist Michael Wertmüller was a composer, but I always think of him as a drummer, because he was part of saxophonist Peter Brötzmann’s Full Blast trio, and his son Caspar Brötzmann’s trio Nohome. Shlimazl is a three-part piece running about 33 minutes, for electric guitar (played by Kalle Kalima), drums (played by Lucas Niggli), and the Basel Sinfonietta and the NDR Big Band. I don’t know how many musicians that is in all, so let’s just call it a fuckton. It’s got a lot of energy, though the middle piece, “Y”, does serve as a kind of bridge between opener “Mazel” and the big finale, “Shlimazl”. The music has an old-school orchestral quality, plus a big band’s in-your-face energy, that will remind you of big compositional names like John Williams or John Philip Sousa as well as Charles Mingus or the Jazz at Lincoln Center Orchestra, and the juxtapositions can be wild. The strings and percussion are bouncing along and all of a sudden the horns come surging in like a spring windstorm and then there’s a drum solo! Then a riff that sounds like surf klezmer! Then some more blare! If you asked John Zorn to write a symphony, you might get something like this. And as a result, you get a lot more loud cheering from the audience than is typical for classical recordings.

Well, that’s it for now. See you on Friday, when we’ll be talking about Anthony Braxton, and (if you’re a paying subscriber) a lot of other interesting things, too!