For the Record: July 19, 2024.
An album of the week by Conrad Tao and Talea Ensemble playing music by Felipe Lara, plus more listings for new and upcoming releases.
For the Record rounds up details about new and pending recordings of interest to the new-music community: contemporary classical music and jazz, electronic and electroacoustic music, and idioms for which no clever genre name has been coined, on CD, vinyl LP, cassette, digital-only formats… you name it.
This list of release dates is culled from press releases, Amazon, Bandcamp, and other internet stores and sources, social-media posts, and online resources such as Discogs. Dates cited typically correspond to initial U.S. release, and are subject to change. (Links to Amazon, used when all else fails, do not imply endorsement.)
These listings are not comprehensive—nor could they be! To submit a forthcoming recording for consideration, email information to nightafternight@icloud.com.
All opinions expressed herein are solely my own, and do not express the views of any employer.
The lead-in.
I’ve been following the music of Brazilian-American composer Felipe Lara since 2006, when I attended a concert by the Arditti Quartet at New York University specifically to hear the U.S. premiere of French composer Pascal Dusapin's String Quartet No. 5 and in the process became acquainted with the school’s current crop of graduate student composers. Everything I heard was impressive, but one piece stood out in particular. I wrote about it all on my O.G. blog.
The last of the student works, Felipe Lara’s Corde Vocale, stuck me as the piece most likely to gain entry into the Arditti repertoire: an introductory stretch of stabbing thrusts, stitched together with the most tenuous of sonic threads, gave rise to a series of tonal chords made all the more startling by context. A transition of sine-wave stillness led to an agitated conclusion. The horsehair-ripping physicality of Lara’s piece announced a bold, distinctive voice, presented with stylistic confidence and technical assurance.
Dunno about the Arditti, but Corde Vocale has found its way into the repertoire of more than a few leading contemporary quartets, including JACK and Mivos. Here’s a performance by the Bergamot Quartet at the Peabody Institute, where Lara is an associate professor and chair of the composition department.
That piece, and others like it, introduced a composer whose music is complex and uncompromising, yet instantly, urgently communicative and impactful. Lara’s Double Concerto for esperanza spalding, Claire Chase, and large orchestra was a Pulitzer Prize finalist this year.
Now, there’s a amazing portrait CD devoted to Lara’s music out this week on the German contemporary-music label Kairos: Portals, recorded by pianist Conrad Tao and Talea Ensemble. Included are four compositions – ensemble works Chambered Spirals, Ventos Uivantes, and Fringes, and a solo piano piece, Injust Intonations – composed between 2014 and 2020, and recorded from 2017–2022.
Since this album just popped up on my radar yesterday, I don’t have anything more exacting to say than this: You couldn’t wish for a more concise, focused, and convincing introduction to a composer anyone interested in new music needs to know. The performances convey the customarily persuasive precision and advocacy Tao and Talea are known for, and the program notes, by composer Evan Johnson, get right to the heart of the matter:
Felipe Lara’s music comes at you as curves, or as brushstrokes, the sort of large, energetic brushstrokes that enlist the whole body, the sort that leave raised ridges of paint on the canvas as a palpable trace and splatters of color on the newspaper-covered floor. It is always in motion, restlessly flexing, squirming, shuddering, breathing, heaving, darting around corners, turning itself inside out.
You can download a PDF of the CD booklet with Johnson’s notes from the Kairos website, free of charge. You can also order the album there, or from your favorite purveyor of preserved music in physical format, or you can stream it at all the usual places, including Spotify, Apple Music, and YouTube.
New this week.
Morten Duun - Code Breaker (cmntx)
Grant Evans - Rust Holographic (Hooker Vision)
Felipe Lara - Portals - Conrad Tao, Talea Ensemble/James Baker (Kairos)
Joëlle Léandre - Lifetime Rebel (RogueArt)
Mat Muntz - Angels Variations - performances by Miroslav Beinhauer; gamin, Anna Webber & Li-chin Li; and Carrie Frey & Adrianne Munden-Dixon (self-released)
Matt Pavolka - Disciplinary Architecture (Sunnyside)
RAHA Duo - Swirl - compositions by Evan Ziporyn, Emily Koh, Matthew Aucoin, Jonathan Bailey Holland, Marti Epstein, and Curtis Hughes (New Focus)
Elori Saxl - Drifts and Surfaces - Third Coast Percussion, Tigue, Henry Solomon, Robby Bowen, Elori Saxl (Western Vinyl)
Elliott Sharp - Vodka (Zoar)
SORBD (Edith Steyer, Mia Dyberg, Rieko Okuda, Isabel Rößler, Sofia Borges) - Wild Peacock in Transit (Relative Pitch)
Various artists - The Middle of Everywhere: Guitar Solos, Vol. 1 (AGS Recordings)
John Zorn - Ballades - Brian Marsella, Jorge Roeder, Ches Smith (Tzadik)
John Zorn - Hannigan Sings Zorn, Volume One - Barbara Hannigan, Stephen Gosling (Tzadik)
Upcoming releases.
August 20
C6Fe2RN6 - C6Fe2RN6 (Astral Spirits)
September 6
Aiden Hellmuth - Good Intentions (Fresh Sound New Talent)
September 13
Sarah Davachi - The Head As Form’d in the Crier’s Choir (Late Music)
Wendy Eisenberg - Viewfinder (American Dreams)
Davóne Tines & The Truth - ROBESOИ (Nonesuch)
Tulpas - Atisbo (Astral Spirits)
September 20
Tallā Rouge - Shapes in Collective Space - compositions by Karl Mitze, Kian Ravaei, Gemma Peacocke, inti figgis-vizueta, Gala Flagello, and Akshaya Avril Tucker (Bright Shiny Things)
Find many more upcoming releases in For the Record: The Master List, here.
Photographs by Steve Smith, except where indicated.
The Lara album is indeed terrific - an instant hit with much depth to explore!