11/6/2023 0 Comments Double bass jazz pizzicato![]() Whether as archetypes, allegorical figures, proxies for natural forces, or just examples of behavior not to emulate, the gods, heroes, and anti-heroes of the Greek world have gone through many metamorphoses and shifts in significance, but through it all they have been kept alive through a centuries-long tradition of commentary, interpretation, reinterpretation, and misinterpretation. Immensity Of by Emily Praetorius is a quiet, slowly moving microtonal piece that sets Guo’s wordless voice against Kass’ bass as each produces long notes gliding downward and upward, away from and toward each other.įew products of the imagination have had the endurance of the mythological figures of the classical Mediterranean world. John Aylward’s three-movement Tiergarten (“zoo”) undergirds Guo’s delivery of Rilke’s poems about swan, panther, and unicorn with arpeggiated harmonics, thickly bowed chords, and staccato bowed and pizzicato lines, respectively. Katherine Balch’s Phrases, which sets fragments from Rimbaud’s poem Illuminations, closes the gap between double bass and soprano through generous use of extended technique for double bass, which pulls it up into an approximation of the soprano’s register. In keeping with some of Lichtenberg’s observations, Kurtág’s writing is often astringent, featuring leaping, expressionistic vocal lines underpinned by basslines that emphasize the opposition between the ranges and timbres of soprano voice and low strings. The Kurtág piece consists of short, outburst-like settings of twenty-two witty, aphoristic selections from 18 th physicist Georg Christoph Lichtenberg’s scrapbooks (or “book of scribblings”). The fourth, by Hungarian composer György Kurtág, is from 1999. Hence three of the four compositions on the album, spanning 2017-2019, were written for the two. Guo and Kass’ focus is on contemporary work, much of it which they’ve commissioned. This sparse yet exquisitely beautiful recording proves them right. What they hope to show is that this pairing, though unusual, is also unusually musical. The four works appearing on the Departure Duo’s album Immensity Of represent a sampling of the repertoire the two-soprano Nina Guo and double bassist Edward Kass-have been assembling for double bass and soprano. They, supported by the instrumental quartet’s precisely played accompaniment, bring this unsettling work vividly to life. ![]() The opera’s characters, sung by soprano Nina Guo, tenor Lukas Papenfusscline, and baritones Tyler Boque and Cailin Marcel Manson, are sharply individuated. Both the size and the makeup of the ensemble lend the music a bracing clarity that brings the voices into focus. From this minimal ensemble Aylward derives a maximum of dramatic tension, often playing the strings’ long, dissonant tones against the guitar’s staccato broken chords. In contrast to grand opera’s lush orchestration, Oblivion’s music is scored for an austere quartet of viola (Laura Williamson), cello (Issei Herr), double bass (Greg Chudzik), and electric guitar (Daniel Lippel). This is the basic storyline of John Aylward’s Oblivion, a one-act opera whose characters and scenario seem to have come from one of those obscurely symbolic dreams one sometimes has just before waking up. Two wanderers, a man and a woman, move through an otherworldly place reminiscent of Dante’s purgatory where they encounter two strange, archetypal figures – a hunter and a bound man who turns out to be a king.
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