New Music



Terry Riley, In C, Remixed and performed by the Grand Valley State University New Music Ensemble (Innova, two discs). Every Wednesday night on the CBS network in America, the staggering influence on our musical world of the otherwise little-known Terry Riley is completely apparent. Forty seconds of The Who’s “Baba O’Riley” are heard as the theme music for “CSI: NY,” and the band has always freely admitted that it was hearing Terry Riley’s “In C”— the prototype and bulwark of minimalism in music—that influenced “Baba O’Riley” as much as any music has ever influenced anything by The Who. The epochal first recording of “In C” was made by the great performers and Creative Associates from the University at Buffalo’s Center for New Music. This utterly logical but wildly original new two-disc set takes Riley’s “In C” and presents 19 remixes of it, “extensions,” who knows what all. What happens here is more than just, say, variations on a waltz theme by Diabelli— it’s taking one of the most influential pieces of music in our time and using it as an inspiration, in much the same completely individual way that The Who did when “In C” went into the stew that came out “Baba O’Riley.” The result is terrific. ??? (Jeff Simon)



Classical



Michael Maniaci, Mozart, Arias for Male Soprano, Michael Maniaci, male soprano, the Boston Baroque, Martin Pearlman, director (Telarc). By Mozart’s time, castrati were already fading—and even when celebrity castrati reigned, many people thought the whole tradition was icky. Still we retain a certain curiosity about the subject. Countertenors, cousin to the castrato, are multiplying. The film “Farinelli” centered on history’s greatest castrato. And on YouTube, you can listen to the last castrato, Alessandro Moreschi. Michael Maniaci is neither a castrato or a countertenor. He is simply a soprano, though the notes don’t explain quite how that happened. They say: “Maniaci’s soprano voice gives us a chance to hear something closer to the descriptions of old than anything we may have experienced.” So how does he sound? Like a dark mezzo, was my first thought. Maniaci sings three arias from Mozart opera seria—“Idomeneo,” “Lucio Silla” and “La Clemenza di Tito.” His voice has power and the trills and ornaments are good. What it lacks is humanity. Hitting low notes in the “Lucio Silla” aria, he sounds disembodied. And in “Exsultate, Jubilate,” while the middle movement is beautiful and dreamy, Maniaci does not radiate joy elsewhere the way you have to, singing that piece. Maybe it’s me. I won-der if cultural factors do not get in the way of our appreciating this strange artistry. In any case, a fine attempt to recapture the past, and the Boston Baroque does a great job with this explosive music. Rating: ??? (Mary Kunz Goldman)



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Rossini, Complete Piano Music, Vol. 3: “Peches de viellesse 3— Album pour les enfants adolescents” performed by pianist Alessandro Marangoni (Naxos). Rossini’s “Peches de viellese”—the sins of old age— is one of the great stories in music. The popular composer of some of the most famous operas of his time stopped composing for years and then, in the final decade of his life, composed deliberately small-scaled piano pieces collected as the “sins of old age.” It’s as if across the centuries Erik Satie had found a precursor he probably didn’t even know about. The fifth volume of Rossini’s “Sins of Old Age” is called “Album for Adolescent Children” and includes the Mendelssohnian “Ouf! Les Petit Pois” (“Ah! The Peas”), just in case anyone didn’t quite get the point just how much anti-rhetorical wit was actually going into these “sins.” Italian pianist Alessandro Marangoni, 30, is playing Rossini’s complete piano music with zest and all the ironic relish it deserves. ??? (J. S.)



Jazz



Empirical, “Out ’n’ In” (Naim). “Chutzpah,” as the ancient Jewish tradition has it, is best defined by the child who kills his mother and father and then throws himself on the mercy of the court because he’s an orphan. Another might be a young British jazz group praised to the skies by no-longer-young Courtney Pine and paying so much tribute to Eric Dolphy on its newest disc that it includes two tunes from Dolphy’s classic “Out to Lunch” LP (“Hat&Beard” and “Gazelloni”), one outright tribute to Dolphy and that unsettling Dolphy instrumentation of alto saxophonist over vibraphone. No alto saxophonist or bass clarinetist today can quite jolt a listener by coloring as far outside the lines as Eric Dolphy did with such virtuosity in the ’60s (Dolphy’s phenomenal command of his horn is what distinguished him completely from the more vocally expressive Ornette Coleman), but when these young Brits immerse themselves in Dolphy’s still-challenging spirit, they aren’t kidding in the slightest. The contrapuntal interplay of hornmen Nathaniel Facey and Julian Siegel on “A Conversation” actually seems to pick up in places where Dolphy left off. A major surprise. ??? (J. S.)



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Tineke Postma, “The Traveller” (Et’Cetera). Tineke Post-ma is a lovely, 31-year-old Dutch saxophonist who learned a lot of her trade by coming to America and studying with Dick Oatts, Chris Potter and Dave Leibman. On this disc, she is in formidable American musical company—pianist Geri Allen, bassist Scott Colley and drummer Terri Lyne Carrington. (And no, it is no doubt no accident that three of the four members of this quartet are women. A point is being made with off-hand matter-of-fact-ness.) Among other things that Postma does that lesser young musicians seldom seem to, are: Makes perfect sense of overdubbing in “Song for F” and plays a theme by Villa Lobos (with accompanying vocals by singer Anne Chris, no less) in a way that fits perfectly with everything else she does and doesn’t sound like pretentious kitsch. At this stage, she is more than a “promising” player, she’s a young jazz musician worth paying dedicated attention to. ???(J. S.)



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Gail Pettis, “Here in the Moment” (OA2).No one is likely to accuse Seattle jazz singer Gail Pettis of being in the same current class as Cassandra Wilson. She is nothing if not workmanlike. On the other hand, her second disc is a major surprise. According to Don Heckman’s splendid notes, she was born in Kentucky, raised in Gary, Ind., and—get this now—has been a practicing orthdontist since the 1980s. The first time she ever got paid for a jazz singing gig was 2002. What’s so impressive about this disc, though, are the freshly minted arrangements and the backup playing by two separate trios as unknown as she is, most notably pianists Darin Clendinin and Randy Halberstadt and bassists Clipper Anderson and Jeff Johnson. There may be nothing especially radical about her originality, true, but there’s nothing drearily familiar about it either. She sings, she says, because she’s in love with jazz, and long before this disc is over, you’ll believe her. ???(Jeff Simon)