Playlist

Live

January 8, 2016
Seattle Composers' Salon
Chapel Performance Space, Good Shepherd Center, Seattle

Ivan Arteaga

Ivan Arteaga

Reed voice human voice inside each outside each voice being outside through each voice being inside enclosure through each voice being outside voice's disclosure - holding outside, birthing inside.

Patrick O'Keefe - Three Bagatelles

The first one was done before I got a bead on it, but the second was really pretty. I liked the way the harmonies of the third jostled each other, shoulder contra shoulder, not unfriendly.

Amy Denio

Best title of the night, possibly of the year: Recipe for Disaster. I am still and always in awe at how effortlessly Amy seems to generate good feelings in everything she does. How can one not smile? She has an easy comfort with what I can only call "song-ness", music consists of a bed of rhythm and a play of tune. The joy is in the details.

Keith Eisenbrey (with Banned Rehearsal)  - Tambourine Quintet (or Banned Rehearsal 901 160108) - Karen Eisenbrey, Keith Eisenbrey, Steve Kennedy, Aaron Keyt, Neal Kosály-Meyer

I was quite gratified both by how easily my colleagues got into it, and by the response. This (and the whole evening) is an example why I love the Seattle music scene.

Recorded

Alfred Cortot

January 3, 2016
Ballade in A-flat Major, op. 47 - Chopin - Alfred Cortot

The first eight bars comprise four gestures, each in a distinct register. It also divides neatly in two, each half a question and answer, the latter like an echo of the first. Then four bars, two big, two little. Echo's echo. Got that straight? Good thing, because the ground begins to shift something ferocious.

Symphony in D minor, op. 120 (#4) - Schumann - Seattle Symphony Orchestra, Gerard Schwarz

Schwarz hears this differently than I do, his reading is leisurely, dreamy, and a bit heavy, with a tendency to broaden and luxuriate in a warm glow, rather than to quicken, ignite. This works pretty well for the opening, circling in the dark to an inner light, but never really gets its get-up-and-go up and gone.

Sonata in F Major op. 99 - Brahms - Gregor Piatigorsky, Artur Rubinstein

I love those low cello double stops toward the end of the first movement, an anchor in the bottom of the sea pulled by an unseen ship high above.

January 5, 2016
My Little Zulu Babe - Williams and Walker [from Allen Lowe's That Devilin' Tune]

Fascinating, but uncomfortable to listen to in almost every way imaginable.

The Invisible City of Kitezh (Suite) - Rimsky-Korsakov - Philharmonia Hungarica, Richard Kapp

A sound track drifting free of its film.

In Session at the Tintinabulary

January 4, 2016
Gradus 281 - Neal Kosály-Meyer

Three simultaneities open, equivocally similar, identically uncertain. Coherence is a process of connecting presence to memory. When we hit bottom the summit re-emerges.