Boring Like A Drill.

Everyone else has been raving about these two new Cassandra Miller CDs and I need to get in on it too. Like many others, I’ve been waiting for the second half of Another Timbre’s Canadian Composer Series to drop since the accompanying booklet came out with the first batch of discs in May last year. The booklet’s promised titles have now been delivered in full, including several fresh recordings from the first half of 2018. I’ve spent the long weekend playing these five CDs over and over, purely for enjoyment.

I added that last bit because I could have written up the lot after just one listening; each one of them leaves an extraordinarily vivid impression in the mind. I’ll get around to discussing all of them in the next few days but right now I need to mention the two I had been most looking forward to, dedicated to music by Cassandra Miller. I’ve been alternately baffled and knocked out but always charmed by her music, so here’s the chance to get some on record. O Zomer! includes the title piece and violin solo For Mira, both of which were played at the Cafe Oto gig a couple of weeks ago. The same musicians play here on the CD and so the performances are equally excellent – better, I should say, as the playing conditions would have been preferable. As with Mira Benjamin on For Mira, dedicatee Philip Thomas plays the piano piece Philip the Wanderer with expected authority. Any wandering in the piece is typically incongruous and beguiling: a slow rising up from the depths, followed by a declamatory pealing of bells and ending on a single, repeating scale ascending in the higher registers. At one point, the page turner starts to whistle in descant (here, the whistler is violinst Clemens Merkel from the Quatuor Bozzini). I could wonder why all this happens but it’s simply delightful as-is.

The disc includes the BBC’s recording of the monumental Duet for Cello and Orchestra, from its world premiere in 2015 at the Tectonics Festival in Glasgow. This was my introduction to Miller’s music and hearing it again in retrospect has only magnified its achievement. Cellist Charles Curtis with Ilan Volkov conducting the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra are superbly matched for this piece, an aural frieze that juxtaposes an almost immobile cello with rolling fanfares from the orchestra, like an inverted antiphony. As time passes, the orchestra is subdued by the cello and in turn subsumes it; only at the end does the soloist emerge for a brief, enigmatic statement, half whispered. The transcendentalism of Ives and Ruggles looms beneath the surface, that of a mystery that cannot be contained in words.

The second disc, Just So, consists of string quartets played by the Quatuor Bozzini. The major work here, About Bach, is a fitting companion to the Duet for Cello and Orchestra: viola and cello play in the manner of baroque viols, a chorale that crosses over itself again and again until it finally exhausted. Against this, the violins play endlessly rising harmonics in the stratosphere, ethereal and remote. The effect is sublime at first and then strangely affecting as the elegaic implications of the music embed themselves in the consciousness, the harmonics continuing unperturbed by the cadences below. Miller talks about this piece being shaped by Bach transcriptions, Jewish music and computer glitches, bringing order out of the messy circumstances of life. Quatuor Bozzini make the fiendish technical requirements of playing this piece with finesse all but invisible.

The other pieces contain elements of the folkloric, to varying degrees. Warblework names its four movements after species of birds, mixing up the mimetic, programmatic and impressionistic in an idiosyncratic way that deftly avoids the Scylla and Charybdis of Messiaen and John Luther Adams. The disc is topped and tailed by two brief works, the smart and sweet almost-a-solo Just So which sounds like a folksong transcription, and the more serene and sonorous Leaving which is, in fact, a transcription. It’s been worth the wait.

Filed under: Music, Reviews by Ben.H
Tags: Cassandra Miller