Soundtrack



Up in the Air, Music from the Motion Picture (Rhino). Jason Reitman’s movie, one of the best films of 2009, opens Christmas Day in area theaters. The music? Uh, it’s not so hot. Anyone, then, expecting a musical delight, on the order of the soundtrack to Reitman’s last smash hit movie, “Juno,” is out of luck. The movie is about the airport-and-hotel love affair of two Platinum Card Amex customers who fly around the country for a living—in his case, from corporation to corporation, “downsizing” everyone that home managements can’t bring themselves to fire in person. It’s all downhill after the first selection, a bang-up R&B version of Woody Guthrie’s “This Land is Your Land” by Sharon Jones and the Dap Kings. A lot of it is either by Crosby, Stills, Nash and Young (CSNY’s “Taken It All,” Nash’s “Be Yourself”) or CSNY wannabes and it’s pasty folk rock indeed. The title song, by Kevin Renick, sounds like something created by a singer who’d just heard the teen bedroom sprung rhythms and singsong vocals on the “Juno” soundtrack and decided to write something he thought Reitman might like. Apparently, he did. It all works in the movie, but not on record. ??(Jeff Simon)



New Music



Earle Brown, Contemporary Sound Series Vol. 2: Works of Feldman, Brown, Nono, Maderna, Berio, Maxwell Davies, Birtwhistle, and others performed by various performers and ensembles (Wergo, three discs); Iannis Xenakis, Chamber Music 1955-90 performed by pianist Claude Helffer and the Arditti String Quartet (Naive, two discs). This is not music to soothe the savage breast—or savage beast either. Nor is it music to boogie down with or accompany bathroom caulking. In different ways, Earle Brown and Iannis Xenakis are among the more invaluable giants of mid-20th century “New Music” (which, needless to say, is now less “new” than sonically and gesturally “avant-garde”). Earle Brown was less significant as a composer than as one of the earliest propagandists and proponents of the then-little-heard music of Cage, Berio, Stockhausen and the late UB Varese Professor of Music Morton Feldman. He was a recording engineer, and these original recordings from 1960-1973 were originally released as part of a groundbreaking “Contemporary Sound” series on 18 LPs. They fall into three discs here: “Works for Chamber Orchestra,” “New Music from London” and, of greatest interest, a whole disc devoted to Feldman and Brown. For a composer best known for in-venting a mathematics-based “stochastic” music, composer/ architect Iannis Xenakis created some of the most sonically gripping music in all of the late-20th century avant-garde. Nothing on Helfer and the Arditti Quartet comes anywhere close to the monumentality of his percussion piece “Persephassa” or his electronic piece “Bohor I,” but the power of this fierce music for solo cello, solo piano, violin and piano, solo violin, trios, quartets and quintets is both exceptional and well-played, considering its fiendish demands. Ratings:??? for both (J. S.)



Vocal



Susan Boyle, “I Dreamed a Dream” (Columbia). If the record companies could dream a dream, it would look a lot like Boyle: a singer with a moving backstory (ugly duckling plucked from obscurity) and a classic style that appeals to a boomer audience, the only people still buying CDs. But who is this Scottish sensation? She’s certainly not a pop singer. Her solemn version of the Monkees’ “Daydream Believer” and her theatrical take on the old Skeeter Davis hit, “The End of the World,” sound surreal, almost parodic. You’d think with her formal, almost operatic style, Boyle would shine brightly on devotional offerings like “How Great Thou Art” and “Amazing Grace.” But on both, she sounds oddly mechanical, like a whale-bone Julie Andrews. As she proves on the title track, the stentorian ballad from “Les Miserables,” Boyle has a big, imposing voice, but it’s stiff and more than a little dolorous. For some reason, Boyle seems to enjoy an emotional bond with her fans. But thus far, she hasn’t learned to make a similar connection with her material. ??



(David Hiltbrand, McClatchy Newspapers)



Classical



American Handstands:



Music of Del Tredici, Moe, Cipullo and Ornstein performed by pianist Jeanne Golan, with pianist Christopher Oldfather (Troy). The main attraction here is the 1925 Sonata for Two Pianos by Leo Ornstein, the extraordinary American composer/ piano virtuoso who, in his best early work (as in this sonata adapted from a piano concerto) combined the rhapsodic dissonance of Scriabin with the blistering percussive pianism of a new century. He remains a huge virtually undiscovered country in American musical modernism who spent most of his very long life as an almost completely overlooked pedagogue in Philadelphia. The performance by Jeanne Golan and Christopher Oldfather is bristling and phosphorescent. Not quite as good is Golan’s performance of the 2003 “Three Gymnopedies” of 72-year-old former University at Buffalo Creative Associate David Del Tredici, a piece of typical charm but one with a clam or two in performance. Also performed are works by 50-ish composers Eric Moe and Tom Cipullo. ??? (J. S.)



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Aulis Sallinen, Symphony No. 6 “From a New Zealand Diary” and Cello Concerto performed by cellist Jan-Erik Gustaffson and the Norrkoping Symphony Orchestra conducted by Ari Rasilainen (CPO). The compositions of 74-year-old Finnish composer Aulis Sallinen on CPO have been among the disc revelations of the past few years. In the post-Sibelius compositional world of Finland, his reputation is far behind that of Rautavaara, but each new symphony that appears is enormously impressive. His sixth symphony is subtitled “From a New Zealand Diary,” which is all well and good, but I’m not sure there is contemporary music more Nordic sounding than this. It’s his longest symphony at 40 minutes and abounds in the kind of post-Bartok and post-Honegger brooding you might expect from a composer whose works are both tonal and post-serial. The cello concerto is a distinctly lesser work but well-played. ??? (J. S.)



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A Chatman Christmas,



Choral Music of Stephen Chatman, sung by the University of British Columbia Singers, Bruce Pullan, conductor (Canadian Music Centre). British Columbian composer Stephen Chatman studied with Karlheinz Stockhausen, and it’s safe to assume he has seen and done it all. Maybe that’s why, for him, the old is new again. Chatman’s choral music is free from the dissonance that characterizes so much modern choral music. Sometimes he looks back to early music—several songs call for a medieval drum. Even in his contemporary-sounding selections—such as “Make a Wish For Me On Christmas,” sung to a softly rocking piano accompaniment —are defiantly melodic. There is an entrancing a cappella arrangement of traditional carols, including “The First Noel” and “Bring a Torch, Jeannette, Isabella.” Let us toast with wassail this quality and only occasionally excessive Christmas CD from our northern brethren. ????(Mary Kunz Goldman)



Jazz



Jon Gordon, “Evolution” (ArtistShare). This is a sterling record by a (formerly) young jazz alto saxophonist/composer, featuring compositions for saxophone and strings, saxophone-piano duets and saxophone with vocalise. In other words, it’s cerebral music but by no means without soul or lyrical beauty. Saxophonists don’t win a Thelonious Monk competition in 1996 and disappear— especially not if they’ve got Phil Woods running around saying you’re one of the greatest jazz alto saxophonists ever and Wayne Shorter endorsing your playing and compositions all over the place. What the disc lacks in urgency, it has in cool, spare beauty from Gordon, pianist Bill Charlap, guitarist Nate Radley and friends. ???(J. S.)



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Jacques Schwarz-Bart, “Abyss” (Obliqsound). He’s the 46-year-old son of two writers, notably of the late French-Jewish novelist Andre Schwarz-Bart, author of “Last of the Just,” one of the revered classics of Holocaust literature. The news here is both good and bad. When you hear the extraordinary polyrhythms of the disc’s first cut “Pan Ga To,” you think you’re really in for something, a melding of jazz to both “the mystical music of Morocco” and “the traditional music of Guadeloupe” (where Schwarz-Bart’s mother was born.) Before the disc is over, it offers fusions of a notably lesser and drearier sort, but Schwarz-Bart is an interesting saxophonist and a man with interesting jazz friends (John Scofield solos on one tune.) ???(J. S.)