For the Record: November 15, 2024.
A phantasmagorical opera by Kate Soper gets an appropriately vivid recording, plus new arrivals 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.
Album of the week.
Kate Soper
The Romance of the Rose
Ty Bouque, Phillip Bullock, Ariadne Greif, Anna Schubert, Devony Smith, Kate Soper, Lucas Steele, Wet Ink Ensemble/Eric Wubbels
(New Focus; CD, DL)
The term sui generis could have been coined for Kate Soper, so distinctive and singular is the music-theater idiom she’s developed over a series of works both deeply heady and unambiguously ingratiating.
A co-founder of the long-running composer-performer collective Wet Ink, and named Kravis Emerging Composer (emerging being a relative term) by the New York Philharmonic this week ahead of a substantial world premiere next May, Soper has created an extraordinary canon of lyrical yet confrontational works. In Voices from the Killing Jar (2010–12), Here Be Sirens (2014), Ipsa Dixit (2016), and The Hunt (2023), she has probed topics including gender, sexuality, agency, creativity, emotional entanglement, language, and music itself, often in direct conversation with the great thinkers and writers of the Western canon.
An exemplary, engaging storyteller, Soper deploys her brook-clear soprano with exacting enunciation, but happily distorts her voice through physical or electronic means as her subject matter requires. Her compositional idiom seems to envelop everything, from Medieval minstrel ballads and Baroque filigree to cabaret-style directness and punk-rock caterwaul. Her erudition is omnipresent; she never disguises the keen edge of her intellectual scalpel.
All of those aspects of Soper’s grand vision are accounted for in The Romance of the Rose (2020, premiered 2023)—writ large. Created for the Long Beach Opera, which presented it in February 2023, this idiosyncratic opera affords Soper her largest vocal cast to date: seven voices, comprising three sopranos, a mezzo-soprano, a tenor, and two baritones.
A few of the principal singers from the Long Beach production appear on this new recording, and Soper takes on one of the soprano assignments herself; all of the vocalists handle her most flamboyant tasks, from Baroque display to electronic exaggeration, with persuasive assurance. The Wet Ink Ensemble, conducted by Eric Wubbels, plays with a style and swagger born of long, long commitment to Soper’s music, realizing all the intricacies and wonders of her sensitive score. The recording captures it all in brilliant detail.
That abundance suits the emotional maelstrom Soper conjures in service to, as she describes it straightforwardly, “an operatic exploration of the ways in which love, sex, and music wreak havoc on our sense of self.”
Inspired by Le Roman de La Rose by Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, and incorporating texts from Christine de Pizan, Christina Rossetti, William Shakespeare, and Alfred Lord Tennyson alongside her own abundant verbiage, Soper thrusts a principal character called The Lover into a busy disquisition with archetypes representing Reason, Idleness, Shame, and so on.
It’s beautiful and silly, provocative and poignant; you’re wildly entertained, while always mindful of the work’s care and earnestness: I imagined a sort of Inside Out III as made by George Frideric Handel, Georges Aperghis, and David Lynch, except no such three imaginary boys mash-up could have concocted precisely this mix of wisdom and whimsy—to say nothing of singing it.
Put simply, this is a triumph of imagination and execution: the kind that reminds you, not for the first time, how badly we need an opera company in New York City that would stage things like this regularly, and in so doing help the art form to flourish and grow.
The Romance of the Rose is available now for streaming and download… but in this instance I can’t urge you strongly enough to buy the beautiful physical package: a miniature hardcover book with a handy libretto and original illustrations by Julie Doucet. True, this oversize object won’t fit your bespoke CD shelves, but you won’t be putting it away soon, anyway.
Bonus tracks.
So many recordings deserve attention this week, including minimalist intensity from Du.0 and RAGE Thormbones, a genial collection of through-composed sonatas by Ethan Iverson, a starry posthumous tribute to Philip Jeck, a beautiful Takács Quartet performance of a rich piece by Nokuthula Ngwenyama, and a ravishing survey of works by Caterina Schembri. (I’m also extremely partial to Colouring Hockets, a vivacious project for percussion quartet and big band by John Hollenbeck: full disclosure, I wrote the liner notes.)
But if I can convince you to listen to just one more recording this week beyond Kate Soper’s opera, make it Land of Winter, composed by Donnacha Dennehy for the new-music sinfonietta Alarm Will Sound. An hour-long work divided into 12 sections named “December,” “January,” “February” and so on through “November,” the work is less a literal demarcation of calendar time à la Antonio Vivaldi, and far more a kind of topographical map of seasonal-affective responses to levels and degrees of light throughout a 12-month span.
The title, Dennehy reminds us, is an English translation of Hibernia—the Roman name for Ireland. And here again, as in previous encounters, Alarm Will Sound and conductor Alan Pierson show their deep affinity for Dennehy’s music.
Alarm Will Sound will present the NYC premiere of Donnacha Dennehy’s Land of Winter at the Irish Arts Center, 726 11th Ave. (bet. 51st & 52nd Sts.), on Dec. 11 & 12 at 7:30pm; details here.
New this week.
Ricardo Arias - pieces of everyday life (Sawyer Spaces)
Ka Baird - Ictum Exercises (Polyrhythmic Studies) (Astral Spirits)
Antoine Beuger - now is the moment to learn hope (Sawyer Spaces)
Karen Borca/Paul Murphy - Entwined (Relative Pitch)
Kyle Brenn - the shape of a child (Cantaloupe Music)
Donnacha Dennehy - Land of Winter - Alarm Will Sound/Alan Pierson (Nonesuch)
David Dunn - Music, Language and Environment: Environmental Sound Works 1973–1985 (Nyahh)
Du.0 - O Most Noble Greenness (Orb Tapes)
E/I - explicit isolation - compositions by Szymon Gąsiorek (Mappa)
Joe Fonda Quartet - Eyes on the Horizon (Long Song)
Foster Bennett Wick - Carne Vale (Relative Pitch)
Beat Furrer - Spur - Claudia Chan, Thorsten Johanns, Quatuor Diotima (bastille musique)
Jacques Hétu - Symphony No. 5, Op. 81 - Toronto Mendelssohn Choir, Orchestre du Centre national des Arts du Canada, Orchestre symphonique de Québec/Alexander Shelley (Analekta)
John Hollenbeck - Colouring Hockets - John Hollenbeck, Patricia Brennan, Marcio Doctor, Matt Moran, NDR Bigband/JC Sanford (Flexatonic)
Frank Horvat - Anatomy of the Recovering Brain - Kathryn Ladano (I Am Who I Am)
Ethan Iverson - Playfair Sonatas - performances by Miranda Cuckson, Makoto Nakura, Carol McGonnell, Mike Lormand, Taimur Sullivan, and Tim Leopold (Urlicht AudioVisual)
Philip Jeck - rpm - contributions from Fennesz, Gavin Bryars, Chris Watson, Rosy Parlane, Cris Cheek, Claire M Singer, Faith Coloccia, David Sylvian & Hildur Guðnadóttir, Jah Wobble & Deep Space, Drums Off Chaos, Chandra Shukla, and Jana Winderen (Touch)
Lee R. Kesselman - Would That Loving Were Enough - Haven (Blue Griffin)
Sophia Kirsanova - The Morning Mist - compositions by Ēriks Ešenvalds, Aivars Kalējs, Pēteris Vasks, Linda Leimane, and Platon Buravicky (Skani)
Peggy Lee & Cole Schmidt - Forever Stories Of: Moving Parties (Earshift Music)
Dan Lippel - Adjacence - compositions by Dan Lippel, Mario Davidovsky, Ken Ueno, Peter Gilbert, Nico Muhly, Tonia Ko, Peter Adriaansz, Tyshawn Sorey, Carl Schimmel, Sidney Marquez Boquiren, Tania León, Bernadette Speach, and Charles Wuorinen (New Focus)
Ava Mendoza - The Circular Train (Palilalia)
David Q. Nguyen - Every 17 (Sawyer Spaces)
Nokuthula Ngwenyama - Flow - Takács Quartet (Hyperion)
Oaagaada - Music Of (We Jazz)
Zeena Parkins - Dam Against the Spring Tide (Relative Pitch)
RAGE Thormbones - Breaking Ships (Tripticks Tapes)
Ángeles Rojas - Sometimes i dream of a place where you can whisper with the wind (Sawyer Spaces)
Adam Rudolph - Autumn Moon Meditation (Meta)
Alfredo Santa Ana - Before the World Sleeps - Miranda Wong (Redshift Music)
Elori Saxl - Earth Focus (Original Score) (Western Vinyl)
Caterina Schembri - Sea Salt & Turpentine - Michelle O’Rourke, Ficino Ensemble (Ergodos)
Michael J. Schumacher - Living Room Pieces (Chaikin; limited edition music box)
Silkroad Ensemble with Rhiannon Giddens - American Railroad (Nonesuch)
Stefan Smulovitz - Bow and Brush: 12 Scores of Nadina Tandy (Redshift Music)
Kate Soper - The Romance of the Rose - Ty Bouque, Phillip Bullock, Ariadne Greif, Anna Schubert, Devony Smith, Kate Soper, Lucas Steele, Wet Ink Ensemble/Eric Wubbels (New Focus)
Trance Map (Evan Parker & Matthew Wright) - Horizons Held Close (Relative Pitch)
Dan Trueman - The Seventeenth Hotel (Many Arrows Music)
Bruce Wolosoff - Rising Sun Variations (Avie)
Emmanoel Ximendes - Rudimentares (Sawyer Spaces)
Upcoming releases.
November 20
Matt Weston - Communism Has Appeared on the Scene (self-released)
November 21
Ivo Perelman’s São Paulo Creative 4 - Supernova (Tratore)
November 29
PainKiller (John Zorn, Bill Laswell, Mick Harris) - Samsara (Tzadik)
December 9
Paul Dunmall Quartet - Here Today Gone Tomorrow (RogueArt)
N O Moore + Eddie Prévost - Scratched Earth (scatterArchive)
December 13
David Lang - poor hymnal - The Crossing/Donald Nally (Cantaloupe Music)
Spencer Zahn - Statues Live (Leaving)
December 17
Niloufar Shiri + Isaac Otto Hayes - OSHI (Infrequent Seams)
January 10
Nate Wooley - Henry House (Ideologic Organ)
January 17
Mark Kirschenmann - Tonics: 7 Melodies for Trumpet with Bamboo Mouthpipe (Infrequent Seams)
February 1
Matt McBane - Buoy (Gradient Music)
February 7
Christopher Dammann - Christopher Dammann Sextet (Out of Your Head)
Find many more upcoming releases in For the Record: The Master List, here.
Photographs by Steve Smith, except where indicated.