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NA 137CD
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Performed by Sarah Cahill: piano; Da Capo Chamber Players: violin, cello, piano, flute, clarinet; Bernard Gann: electric bass. "Kyle Gann (b.1955) is a composer whose music inevitably is structured with an array of metric, harmonic and melodic ideas and strategies that would seem to guarantee it to be beyond listenable in its complexity. However, the opposite is in fact what the listener receives. The work is deeply felt, lyrically clear and driven by song. Gann is also known to the musical world as an author and critic, and teaches in the music department at Bard College. Private Dances (2004) is so hot, so longing with yearning, so lonely with the blues, so salacious in its undressing of the unsuspecting listener, that it could properly carry one a warning sticker. It is a 'listener beware' collection in six movements -- sexy, sad, sentimental, sultry, saintly, swingin'. The pianist, Sarah Cahill (one of the generation's premier 'woman on piano' performers) leaves you, the innocent listener, with nothing; she took it all. This piece is what was going on in the mind of the guy at the end of the counter in the Edward Hopper painting, Nighthawks."
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NA 134CD
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"These three pieces deliver in the clearest manner the extraordinary compositional voice of Ge Gan-ru (b.1954) . His life journey is now a somewhat familiar story of the generation of Chinese artists in the late twentieth century... of a childhood in music, of being sent to forced labor camp as a teenager, of being a professor under the communist regime, of getting away to New York and establishing a life there. The earliest piece presented, 'Yi Feng' (Lost Style) was written for his student, Frank Su Huang, in Shanghai in 1983. Its premiere caused a scandal and was denounced. Even today, 25 years later, the raw power and terrifyingly deep explosions in sound of the cello tuned in fourths down an octave, evoke an avant-garde in response to a world of imposed order. 'Wrong, Wrong, Wrong!' was written in 2006 for Gan-ru's friend and collaborator, Margaret Leng Tan. It is a Peking Opera-style voice setting for a poem from 1155 in which the woman (who was wronged) leaves nothing left behind in expressing her anguish. This melodrama is crooned, screamed, uttered, cajoled, hummed, whispered, wept and sung by the inimitable Ms. Tan, who also accompanies her self with an ensemble of toy instruments that can be found in most Chinatowns. 'Four Studies for Peking Opera' (2003) is a serious and recognizably traditional essay in the canon of piano and quartet literature. It is in four movements -- Prologue, Aria, Narrative, and Clown Music. The piano serves primarily as an incarnation of the percussion section for the Peking Opera, and is variously prepared to render gongs, cymbals, wood blocks, zithers and so on."
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NA 133CD
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"These 26 pieces for 1961 Fender Precision bass are comprised of two sets of miniature and minimalist cycles, recorded entirely over two separate days in Los Angeles area studios; each contains the briefest treatment that Roden could manage to convey the feelings and sensations at hand; they are as finite and elusive as leaves on a tree, as pearls on a string; a kind of melodic meditation -- there is an idea, seeds, flowers... a kind of a musical seed catalog in a med/mex ambient light, with a socal samba lurking beneath, or maybe an offering for spiritual equilibrium."
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NA 132CD
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"The Deep Spaces, the most recent in my series of bowed piano compositions, is a fantasy song-cycle celebrating the power and grandeur evoked by poets and composers over two millennia -- of one of the world's most dazzling and enchanting locales: Lake Como, surely the brightest jewel in the crown of the Alps and mountain lakes that adorn Italy's far north, just below Switzerland. The song texts, set for soprano soloist with the ensemble serving as accompanying orchestra (and, occasionally, chorus), are taken from writers as distant in time, culture, psychology and aesthetic stance from on another as Pliny the Younger, aristocratic native of Como and chronicler of many aspects of Roman life in the first and second centuries A.D., William Wordsworth, whose poetry celebrates both the Lake District of hi native England and the Italian Lake District he loved, and Pablo Medina, a twenty-first century poet and novelist of Cuban ancestry residing and teaching in New York. Listeners may also recognize musical themes and motives I have borrowed from composers linked to Como and the Italian mountains such as Liszt and Berlioz, weaving them together with my own melodies and textures. The Bowed Piano Ensemble was founded at Colorado College in 1977, has evolved into a small orchestra whose wide range of sound colors and textures are all coaxed from one open grand piano by ten musicians wielding nylon filament, horsehair, hand-held piano hammers, guitar picks, and other devices."
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NA 131CD
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"Erdem Helvagioglu first broke through to the international audience with his Walk Through the Bazaar...a collection of sounds from the bazaar in Istanbul that he worked to create an emotional tour. On this record the listener is presented with the performer, on live guitar with live electronics and processing. This kind of work is straight up 'new music' and has strong affinities to the downtown, improvised and modern classical currents that are being played throughout the capitals of the world. His sensibility is not obviously Turkish, though, but more of a cosmopolitan wanderer into and through the situations this type of musical theater creates. Once music starts there is a force of time that is continually active with the sounds that are happening. In composed music the composer invents the framework and the performer lives within it. In this style of live electronics the sense of time, of a current pushing the moment, is stronger...chaos beckons. Helvacioglu comes into circumstances where reality begins to come apart, threatening to collapse the song, and then melodic hooks bring the player and listener back to familiar terrain. This work is haunting, almost disturbing, at times and then builds from those elements into lyrical passages of beauty in song. Altered Realities is an album of solo acoustic guitar and live electronics. All of the textures were created based only on the acoustic guitar signal with no external sound source used during the recording. Within these textures, there are long sustaining single notes, beautiful shimmering chords and rhythmic clusters."
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NA 128CD
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"I grew up believing musical boundaries to be porous, flowing into one another: my father playing chamber music and Gypsy violin, my grandmother's Yiddish chorus, my mother's Folkways collection, plus the radio, open-minded teachers, and my own garage prog-rock excursions. At age 19 I heard Balinese gamelan, I spent long periods there in the 1980s and started my own ensemble, Gamelan Galak Tika, in 1993. These pieces from the last five years live in the margins, between musical traditions -- classical and popular, western and eastern." -- E.Z.
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NA 124CD
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"This collection of new classical Latin American work by the Cuban born, Miami based, composer Orlando Jacinto Garcia is a series of pieces that involve lyrical acts of memory set against a time free present. There are abstract references to music listened to by the composer in his past. Repetition and slow evolution of materials result in a temporal stasis which is similar in effect to some Asian and Latin American ethnic music -- the perception of the moment is of utmost importance. The exploration of the counterpoint between register, densities, timbres, and pacing are the aesthetic basis for the music. Great core is given to the point where silence begins and sound ends. At times the music seems to be far away, like the chiming of church bells in a distant town, or a memory of childhood, or an insight almost grasped -- kind of twinkling like a night sky; and at other times it is strong and intense, full of current and direction, deep colors and powerful gestures."
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