Brutal New Music Reviews

 Bergamot Quartet - In the Brink All in all, the Bergamot Quartet's debut album successfully presents premiere recordings of new works by their group of top-notch performers. While not all the pieces are equally captivating, Bergamot still creates music with extreme technical skill and intense dedication to the support of new music. In the Brink , the Bergamot Quartet 's debut album, showcases premiere recordings of four works for string quartet. The album features music by mid-career composers Paul Wiancko , Tania León , and  Suzanne Farrin , as well as the titular, four-part work, "In the Brink", by violinist/composer Ledah Finck , a co-founder of the quartet. The ensemble makes a solid attempt to introduce new music into the string quartet's contemporary canon (listen to the album here ). Wiancko's Ode on a Broken Loom  launches off the album with musical narrative of densely weaving threads. Bergamot gets a chance to show off their technical chops and impe...

 Payton MacDonald - Explorations 54 (ALN commissions) MacDonald presents convincing and musically-intelligible recordings, a difficult feat for pieces which hinge on interpretation of graphic scores. Payton MacDonald  is an innovative percussionist and composer who performs and records an awful lot of music. His bandcamp project,  Explorations ,  explores the realm of contemporary improvisation and expression on solo marimba with and without electronics. Explorations 54 , titled accordingly, is the 54th installment in MacDonald's series of full-length albums, and showcases four new works by MacDonald and three other composers. MacDonald commissioned these new pieces when students at the 2021 Arts Letters & Numbers virtual summer workshop offered to compose new works for solo marimba. All four works are focused around the implementation of graphic and other non-standard notational techniques (listen to the bandcamp album here ). Oswald Huỳnh 's  Ngũ Hành ope...

 Kyle Grimm - Compulsion Loops The 'barrage of square waves' employed in the piece allow Grimm to get away with demented musical ideas, while still enabling the audience to comprehend them. Compulsion Loops , composed and performed by Kyle Grimm ,   is a wild and energetic work written for Max/MSP and a Nintendo GameCube™ controller. The work is somehow both lovingly nostalgic and terrifyingly anxiety-inducing. Grimm performs the entire work using just his controller to trigger and change sounds in MAX. I would love if in future performances Grimm hooks up a small hand camera so that we can watch the controller being using in live time. It would increase the amount of interest in watching the performance, almost as if Grimm is literally 'controlling' the music. The 'barrage of square waves' employed in the piece allow Grimm to get away with demented musical ideas, while still enabling the audience to comprehend them. Using relatively simple and recognizable soun...

 Don Freund - Urban Pastorale Urban Pastorale  is yet another work which is unsurvivable in the legitimate musical world, and will hopefully not cause musicians or audiences to suffer through subsequent performances. Urban Pastorale   is an almost thirty-minute long 'symphony' in five movements by composer Don Freund . Freund was commissioned by the Jacobs School of Music at Indiana University, where he is also professor of music composition. The work was premiered on March 6 by the IU Symphony Orchestra led by Thomas Wilkins . Freund calls for an incredibly large orchestra, writing for triple woodwinds (with multiple doublings), two saxophonists, four horns, three trumpets (first doubles flugelhorn), three trombones, a euphonium, and tuba. He also writes for quite the menagerie of percussion, calling for four players and a separate timpanist, each in their own sea of instruments, necessitating the first be a steel pan specialist. The expansion of the orchestra give...

 Per Bloland - Shadows of the Electric Moon Shadows of the Electric Moon  seems like yet another work only 'cool' to other performers who have bothered to waste at least hundreds of hours to learn it. It takes extreme patience to sit and listen to this fifteen- minute long work for solo percussion and electronics. Per Bloland  clearly has an impeccable understanding of what sounds can be coaxed out of just a snare drum, cymbal, and crotale, but the piece itself it unbearably long for seemingly no reason. Shadows of the Electric Moon  seems like yet another work only 'cool' to other performers who have bothered to waste at least hundreds of hours to learn it (listen to it here ). On rare occasions, Bloland gives the audience a small taste of a groove onto which they can latch, but never for more than a few seconds at most. These sections allow the audience to actually hear all of the intricate and interesting changes the sound exerciser is making. I do wish that Blola...

 Mason Bates - Piano Concerto Bates' virtuosic piano writing, brilliant orchestration, and truly masterful use of percussion, comes to the forefront. Mason Bates , known for his work involving the 'intersection between music and technology', is not the first composer to come to one's mind when imagining who would compose a new, full-length classical piano concerto. It was just as much of a surprise to me to hear that Bates was jointly commissioned by The Philadelphia Orchestra , who premiered it in mid-January under the baton of Maestro  Yannick Nézet-Séguin , and the San Francisco Symphony  to create this half-hour long concerto for the Russian pianist Daniil Trifonov . Bates has written few concerti, and currently only has three works, one of which is the Piano Concerto , listed in his catalogue. In spite of this, Bates' virtuosic writing and elegant scoring resulted in quite the daring work for piano and orchestra. For too long, Mason Bates has been the epitome o...

 Sam Pluta - Neural Duo I      With an opening ‘whack’, Pluta ’s Neural Duo I is off and running. The work never lets up, with both the trumpet, minus a mouthpiece, and Pluta’s own Neural Net synths instrument bombarding the listener with fast, punchy rhythms for the entire seven and a half minutes.      Peter Evans ’ trumpet playing is that akin to a crazed virtuoso. The fact that a trumpeter is confident and strong enough to play their instrument in a percussive and unconventional manner is impressive. Evans’ convincing sense of rhythm is what really holds the piece together.      Despite this reflection, one really has to debate whether the trumpet itself adds anything to the work. Is Neural Duo I a duet for trumpet and NN synths, or simply a piece where Pluta needs any instrument with rhythmic capabilities to use as a basis for his electronic instrument? Even with that being said, it is important to note that even though the work was...