‘Shostakovich: Complete String Quartets, Vol. 1’
We are spoiled with great recordings of the Shostakovich string quartets, so you might wonder why we need yet another set. It wasn’t until I began listening to these recordings by the Barcelona-based Cuarteto Casals, though, that it dawned on me how similar the playing of most other groups is: biting and hard-edged, bows digging into the strings. Of course, this is part of the music. It’s difficult to imagine even the earliest of Shostakovich’s quartets without some grit in the sound.
But one of the key features of these performances is the Casals’s use of a lighter, more transparent touch in Shostakovich’s first five quartets, for the group’s first installment in a planned cycle of all 15. These players let this music breathe a bit, and the results are bracing: Shostakovich’s melodies have a lyricism absent from many performances, the rhythms are springier, and his hammered-out chords sound like actual chords rather than blunt, percussive noise.
There is some loss of energy and intensity in the first two quartets, but, beginning with the Third, the Casals manages to hold spaciousness and intensity in a delicate balance. This isn’t how I’d want to hear Shostakovich every time, but the Casals should be commended for leaving a different aesthetic and emotional imprint. It should be fascinating to hear what they do with the remaining quartets. DAVID WEININGER
‘Meciendo’
A recent live performance by the Crossing prompted me to try, and fail, to fully catch up with this vocal ensemble’s abundance of recordings. “Meciendo” — compact, at 28 minutes — is the fourth of what will be five albums it has released this year. (Another, “Ochre,” was just nominated for a Grammy; it is named for a shining work by Caroline Shaw, but is most notable for George E. Lewis’s sly “A Cluster of Instincts,” with hissed sibilants and urgent murmurs.)
“Meciendo” is Spanish for “rocking,” as in rocking a baby, the activity described in Leanna Kirchoff’s title song, a tender setting of a poem by Gabriela Mistral. The Crossing is in its usual exemplary form. The group is poised, lucid and luminous, supremely accurate and perfect for music in which sheets of translucent, jeweled sound seem to float over and past each other in slow motion. These singers are also persuasive in the percussive, pitch-bending techniques that tend to crop up in contemporary choral composition, but those effects are mostly absent here. “Meciendo,” with eight pieces by six composers, is rather homogeneously, politely pretty. Best is the eerie wonder of Christopher Jessup’s “The Mississippi at Midnight”: barely two minutes long, and lovely. ZACHARY WOOLFE
‘Aletheia’
The four a cappella choral works by Zibuokle Martinaityte on this haunting album unfold in a world beyond language. There are no texts, just free-floating vowels and tremulous ululations. And yet the emotional impact of this bewitchingly beautiful music is direct and at times devastating. The title track was composed in 2022, in reaction to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, which in this Lithuanian composer triggered memories of the Singing Revolution that won her own country independence from the Soviet Union. Airy textures grow denser and more insistent, with shout-like accents shoving the music toward a dramatic climax. The Latvian Radio Choir sings with an astonishing array of sound colors, like wispy pianissimos, nasal overtones and granitic outbursts.
“Aletheia” is the Greek word for uncovering or unforgetting, and the wordless vocalizations can be heard both as expressions of a preverbal state of innocence and as the traumatized fallout of a terrible cataclysm. This is true also of “Ululations,” from 2023, which evokes the raw expressions of grief common across the Middle East as much as a parliament of owls. With glassy harmonies and long stretches of monastic calm, these choral works draw listeners into a meditative state without ever letting them get too comfortable: the emotions invoked in the music are too cryptic, the vocal writing too full of sonic surprises. CORINNA da FONSECA-WOLLHEIM
‘Grosz: Piano Music, Vol. 1’
In the early 20th century, the Austrian composer Wilhelm Grosz could count himself a pupil of Franz Schreker and a friend of Erich Wolfgang Korngold. In more recent decades, devotees of high-spirited, interwar composition have had an opportunity to get to know him, too: Decca issued the Harlem Renaissance-inspired “Afrika Songs,” and Grosz’s short opera “Achtung, Aufnahme!!” anchored the final album from the Ebony Band.
In 2020, the pianist Gottlieb Wallisch performed arrangements from the jazz-inflected ballet “Baby in der Bar” for the first edition in his “20th Century Foxtrots” project. Now, Wallisch has doubled back to take a closer look at Grosz’s pianistic oeuvre. This is sprightly, energetic stuff, thanks in no small part to Wallisch’s crisp technique and deep feeling for the period.
But the set also shows some of Grosz’s range. His first Dance Suite has late-Romantic flourishes; the middle movement of a sonatina from 1925 includes motifs of a crepuscular, dreamy quality. The Sonata from 1926 offers graver airs, but also boisterous play with tempo changes. Yet to my ear, the more consistently thrusting numbers make the biggest impression— as with the “Tango” from the “Quasi Fivestep” from the second Dance Suite.
Also intriguing is the “Vol. 1” in this album’s title. Here, everything but the second Dance Suite is a world premiere recording. How much else is out there? SETH COLTER WALLS
Marie Awadis: ‘Études Mélodiques’
There is a genre of simple, contemporary piano music that goes out of its way not to challenge listeners. Marie Awadis, a Lebanese-born Armenian composer and pianist, has written some of it. But her latest album, a tenderly beguiling collection of a dozen études, entices, grabs, enthralls and doesn’t let go.
The first étude reveals the prowess that Awadis mentions cultivating in her liner notes. True to its winking title, “Playing Games,” the piece presents a polyphonic puzzle of two interlocking 16th-note patterns. Its dense yet nimble texture and gradually shifting harmonies establish the record’s style. The sturdy structures bolster her delicate expressivity.
Her project clearly nods to Chopin, who also grouped études in books of 12, but if Awadis’s pieces have a clear forebear, it’s Philip Glass, with more direct wistfulness and less sense-rattling mesmerism. Listening to her thoroughly tonal orderliness is mind-clearing, but it’s also an act of empathy, as though the music were listening back.
Awadis is a lovely player, with a kindly, mysterious touch that gives the piano’s sound room to breathe, and her études, like Glass’s and unlike, say, Chopin’s or Ligeti’s, are within the grasp of a practiced amateur. Emotionally honest and deceptively difficult, they have an allure that sustains the attention required to master them. OUSSAMA ZAHR
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