Songs and Structures – Bridge Records
The New York Times
The 25 Best Classical Music Tracks of 2018
Listen to the next-to-last track on this recording of recent works by Mr. Meltzer and see if you don’t want to hear the entire album. It’s from his “Kreisleriana,” brilliantly crafted yet elusive music that seems at once playful, dangerous, waltzing and jumpy.
Voix des Arts
Best Contemporary Music Recording of 2018
When hearing new music, it is imperative to remember that at some time all music was contemporary. Bach, Brahms, Beatles, or Beyoncé, the evolution of the music of any artist or age can be traced to a finite beginning before which its influences and inspirations were only disparate noises and notions. Physiologically, artistic creation is owed to fortuitous ignitions of synapses within complex cognitive processes, but there is something unknowable and unnameable in the mind that sees a raindrop, a star, or a skyscraper and perceives within and beyond its shape, past the limits of sight, the song that it sings into the void. The ability to hear these songs and to recreate them in sounds that other ears can perceive is eternally new. The sounds become familiar, but it is too often the familiarity of words repeated but not comprehended. In the most basic sense, contemporary music is nearer in temporal proximity to the listener than the music of past masters, but the dissolution of time is one of music’s most potent powers. The music by American composer Harold Meltzer on this Bridge Records release, Songs and Structures, is new not solely owing to its recency but, more significantly, because it makes audible the songs of iconic structures of modern life, physical and psychological. Just as Bach’s Passions are forever contemporary, the works on Songs and Structures are newly ageless.
A quartet of settings of verses by British poet Ted Hughes, Meltzer’s song cycle Bride of the Island was premièred by tenor Paul Appleby and pianist Natalia Katyukova in 2016. Composer and tenor have fostered a professional relationship not unlike the one between Franz Schubert and Johann Michael Vogl, the baritone whose performances of Schubert’s Lieder motivated the composition of some of the finest songs in the canon. In his performances on Songs and Structures, Appleby sings Meltzer’s songs as though both music and words are his own, instinctively fusing his vocalism with Katyukova’s versatile pianism. From the first bar of ‘Reveille,’ tenor and pianist entwine their instruments with shared awareness of aural textures.
Meltzer traced the narrative trajectory of ‘Reveille’ in music of absorbing simplicity, and Appleby deftly manages the ascents to Gs and A♭s above the stave. Katyukova articulates the swirling aquatic figurations that cascade through ‘Sugar Loaf’ with rhythmic exactness that propels but never hurries the performance. ‘The water is wild as alcohol’ is among Hughes’s most evocative lines, and Meltzer seized the opportunity of its musical potential by crafting a vocal line that enhances the words’ histrionic strength. It is the tenor’s lyricism that illuminates the paradoxes of ‘Thistles.’ His direct enunciation of ‘Every one a revengeful burst of resurrection’ reveals the poetic erudition of Meltzer’s treatment of the text. Appleby and Katyukova perform ‘Hay’ with a suggestion of cynicism that reaches its—and the cycle’s—climax in the line ‘Her heart is the weather.’ The disquieting honesty of Appleby’s delivery of the words ‘She loves nobody’ infuses Meltzer’s subtle musical prosody with startling immediacy. The contrast of the passage taking the tenor to top A, sung triumphantly as stipulated by the composer’s instructions, with the song’s ‘ghostly’ resolution ends Bride of the Island with a glimmer of deceptive serenity.
It is not difficult to conclude from a superficial survey of the history of Art Song that American music lacks a complementary literary tradition liked that of German Lieder, shaped by poets of the order of Goethe, Heine, and Schiller. Such a conclusion, however misguided, cannot be wholly rejected, but its validity is substantially reduced by works such as Meltzer’s Beautiful Ohio. The composer found in the poems by James Wright from which Beautiful Ohio’s texts are drawn an economy of words with layers of meaning that, like Shakespeare’s sonnets and the works of William Blake, reveal different truths to each observer. Beautiful Ohio shares with Schubert’s Winterreise an ambivalence about coping with loss, but it is Brahms’s adaptations of biblical texts in his Vier ernste Gesänge that Meltzer’s emotionally-charged treatments of Wright’s words most closely parallels.
Appleby premièred Beautiful Ohio in 2010, and he and Katyukova prove in the performance on Songs and Structures to be as musically and dramatically well-matched in this music as in Bride of the Island. The vivid imagery of the opening song, ‘Small Frogs Killed on the Highway,’ as bizarrely poignant as its title intimates, is communicated assertively but without exaggerated pathos. Appleby and Katyukova approach ‘Little Marble Boy’ reverently, as though performing the song in the hollow, hallowed space conjured in Wright’s poem, their sounds demonstrating the skill with which Meltzer instilled the mood of the text in his music. In ‘Beautiful Ohio,’ the tenor voices ‘I know what we call it / Most of the time’ with particular eloquence, echoing the wariness that haunts the music.
In all of these songs, Katyukova’s playing provides a second voice, not disinterested accompaniment, and her technical mastery of Meltzer’s writing for the piano allows her to focus on nuances of phrasing that reinforce details of her colleague’s interpretation, not least in ‘Caprice.’ Untroubled by the tricky chromatic writing centered in the passaggio, Appleby voices ‘The trouble is / They keep turning faces toward me / That I recognize’ confidently. He and Katyukova boldly stride through the demands of ‘Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,’ unflinchingly confronting the ambiguities of both music and text. Though there is no real stylistic kinship between the works, the emotional currents by which the narrator’s journey in Beautiful Ohio is transported recall the bittersweet integration of thankfulness and sorrow at the core of the music composed by Henry Purcell for the funeral of Queen Mary II in 1695. The philosophical threads that bind words to music in Beautiful Ohio are more tangled than those woven into Purcell’s music, but Meltzer’s songs are no less reliant than any others upon performers’ prowess. Beautiful Ohio and Bride of the Island could be performed differently but surely no better than by Appleby and Katyukova on this disc.
Aqua for string quartet is a musical response to the visual and spatial impact of Aqua Tower, a residential building at 225 N. Columbus Drive in Chicago’s Lakeshore East development that was designed and built under the supervision of a team headed by noted architect Jeanne Gang. Meltzer’s writing in Aqua is as intrinsically ‘vocal’ as in his song cycles, the interactions among instruments here probing the metaphysical implications of an edifice’s marriages of earth and sky, steel and glass, public and private. One of the most intriguing aspects of Meltzer’s artistry is his gift for fabricating gossamer strands of sound that metamorphose into vast vistas. The performance of Aqua by Avalon String Quartet on this disc is a celebration of musical camaraderie, the instruments’ timbres combining to produce an engrossing sonic silhouette of Aqua Tower. The ways in which Meltzer’s part writing exploits traditional tonal relationships are reminiscent of Arvo Pärt’s syntheses of plainsong. The Avalon musicians are clearly as aware of their colleagues’ playing as of their own. They are also unmistakably aware of how Aqua dissolves the boundaries between visible monuments to man’s ambitions and the intangible pursuit of community.
Composed in fulfillment of a commission by the Library of Congress for a work to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the death of celebrated Austrian violinist Fritz Kreisler (1875 – 1962), Meltzer’s Kreisleriana pays homage both to Kreisler and to the music that he espoused. Organized in six movements, the piece might be described as a series of variations on a theme of virtuosity. Kreisler studied with Bruckner, Delibes, and Massenet in the course of an education that exposed him to virtually every trend in composing for the violin and gave him technical assurance sufficient to write his own pieces and successfully masquerade them as works by renowned composers.
Meltzer’s music traverses a broad spectrum of musical influences, but his own voice remains audible, especially in the inimitably innovative development of thematic material. The performance of Kreisleriana by violinist Miranda Cuckson and pianist Blain McMillen is a whirlwind of technical wizardry of which Kreisler would be proud, but there is depth in this music greater than virtuosity alone can infiltrate. Cuckson never attempts to mimic Kreisler’s singular style of playing: rather, she plays Meltzer’s music with her own impassioned phrasing, which McMillen supports with pianism of sensitivity and suavity. Kreisleriana does not attempt to be an Enigma-esque musical portrait of its subject. If Meltzer tasked himself with composing music that reimagines Kreisler’s artistry from a Twenty-First-Century perspective, he succeeded. In this performance, Cuckson and McMillen succeed in playing Meltzer’s music as Kreisler played Beethoven’s.
All music is a tribute to something—a person, a place, an event, an idea. The composer’s imagination is besieged by a realization or a recollection, and music seeps or surges from the creative deluge that results. It is not necessary for the listener to know the circumstances of a piece’s genesis in order to feel the pull of the music’s sentimental gravity. The connections between listener and composer, not esoteric bonds, determine the relevance of music. In order to enjoy the music on Songs and Structures, the listener needs no acquaintance with the literary world of Ted Hughes, the sights of Ohio and Chicago, or the career of Fritz Kreisler. Harold Meltzer’s musical tributes come with no prerequisites: the performances on Songs and Structures need only to be heard to be understood.
The San Francisco Chronicle
“Songs and Structures” may seem like a bluntly functional rubric to put on the beguiling and often beautiful works on this album, but it actually captures their essence wonderfully. The music of American composer Harold Meltzer boasts a winning transparency, one that lays bare the essential solidity of his creations while overlaying it with a vein of elegant charm. In the four pieces included here — two exquisite song cycles, a powerful string quartet and a deft duet for violin and piano — the results feel like something created out of ornate Erector set beams, with each brightly colored section firmly supporting the next. If the two cycles — settings of poems by Ted Hughes and James Wright — feel like the headliners here, that’s partly because the performances by tenor Paul Appleby and pianist Natalia Katyukova are so vibrant and forthright, letting the suave expressivity of Meltzer’s text-setting shine through. But the vivacious string quartet “Aqua,” a musical setting of the Chicago skyscraper, also gets a strong reading by the Avalon String Quartet, and violinist Miranda Cuckson and pianist Blair McMillen team up for the irresistibly witty duet “Kreisleriana.”
Opera News
For the past century, common-practice musical forms have rarely been employed in classical music; every composer at some point must find his or her own touchstone(s) to create structural cohesion in their works. Often in vocal music, the text itself provides this key element. But in instrumental music, by nature more abstract than vocal music, the underpinning of a unifying structure is derived more subjectively. Howard [Harold] Meltzer has successfully found logical unifying forces for his music. Thus the title of this newly released recording, another triumph for Meltzer, which features two major song cycles, both written for tenor Paul Appleby, and two instrumental works, one inspired by architecture and one incorporating structural elements of an earlier musical masterwork.
Beautiful Ohio (2010) is a setting of five poems of James Wright. Wright’s formal education ended at the eighth grade, but he developed great skill as a poet, receiving many scholarships and awards, including the Pulitzer Prize. A depressive, reclusive man, Wright grew up feeling alienated in a smallish town in southeast Ohio. Meltzer selected three poems about life in Ohio, interspersed with two poems about Italy, a country Wright loved but in which he felt like an outsider.
Meltzer’s music is quite varied and evocative. His writing for the piano mirrors the approach Schubert employed in his great lieder cycles. The piano part is more than accompaniment: it serves as commentary on the text and picturesquely depicts the physical setting described in the poem. This approach was most colorful in the two Italian poems—“Little Marble Boy,” in which the piano depicts the well of holy water over which a statue presides, and “Caprice,” a playful song depicting the poet’s fantasy that the trees he admires are in fact spirits that ultimately will return to human form. In the middle song, “Beautiful Ohio,” Meltzer offers a close approximation of popular song as he depicts Wright’s meditation on his hometown. These three are bookended by “Small Frogs Killed on the Highway,” a bleak meditation on life that’s attracted to suicide, and “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” in which Wright comes to peace with the blue-collar worker families who live (and are basically trapped) in his hometown.
Bride of the Island (2016), a setting of four poems by the celebrated English poet Ted Hughes, is equally vivid. “Reveille,” a nuanced retelling of the encounter between Adam, Eve and the Serpent, is written in a clever, meandering style. “Sugar Loaf” is a paean to a mountain stream, slowly and undetectably devouring its host as it carries sediment down to a receptive pool. “Thistles” depicts the eternal struggle between weeds and farmers with an appropriately spiky texture. Meltzer saves the best for last with “Hay,” in which the development of the plant serves as an analogy for the maturation of a girl into womanhood and marriage. Both the vocal line and the piano writing become richer and more far-reaching as the story develops in a subtle, not blatantly obvious way.
Paul Appleby regularly collaborates with Howard Meltzer, and here he provides the perfect tone and character to bring these two cycles to life. He and pianist Natalia Katyukova compliment each other well.
Kreisleriana (2012, 2014), a work for violin and piano, was written to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the violin virtuoso Fritz Kreisler. At the premiere, Miranda Cuckson performed it on Kreisler’s Guarneri violin. (The title also evokes Robert Schumann’s piano masterpiece of the same title.) Meltzer utilized minute aspects of Schumann’s piece to inform the structural underpinnings of his six movements without directly quoting it. Kreisleriana is energetic, convincingly rendered here by Cuckson and pianist Blair McMillen, who also performed the world premiere.
Aqua (2011) is a vibrant string quartet, whose structural inspiration came from Aqua Tower, one of Chicago’s most striking skyscrapers. Meltzer mirrors the tower’s undulating surface with vivid, whirling music, alternated with slower, dramatic moments. It’s well played by the Avalon Quartet, though marred in a couple of spots by the vocalizing of one of the players. Why can’t some string players and keyboardists (such as Glenn Gould) control this distracting tendency?
New Music Buff
This is the second Harold Meltzer (1966- ) disc to come across my desk in the last two months or so. This time he is heard on the venerable Bridge label which produces a great deal of quality recordings of new and recent music. This one contains four works spread over 15 tracks and, like his previous CD, includes some vocal music alongside two chamber music pieces without voice.
Meltzer seems to be one of a generation of composers who have absorbed many of the vast styles and methods which flowered in the twentieth century. He is not easy to categorize except as a composer. There are in his music gestures and ideas that span neo-romanticism, minimalism, etc. but he has a distinctive and very affecting style.
Meltzer’s ability to write for the human voice and these songs put this reviewer in the mind of composers like Ned Rorem. I’m not saying he exactly sounds like Rorem, just that he is as effective in his writing. Stylistically there is at times an almost impressionist feel in these songs and, while the piano accompaniment is wonderful, they almost beg to be orchestrated.
There are two song cycles on this disc, the first setting poems of Ted Hughes (Bride of the Island, 2016) and the second setting poems by Ohio poet James Wright (Beautiful Ohio, 2010). Tenor Paul Appleby had his work cut out for him and he delivers wonderful performances with a voice that is well suited to lieder but clearly with operatic ability as well. Pianist Natalya Katyukova handles the intricate accompaniments with deceptive ease in these cycles.
There are two chamber works on this disc. The first is Aqua (2011-12) which is inspired by the architecture of the so-called Aqua building in Chicago by architect Jeanne Gang. In a city known for its fine architecture this 2007 building manages to stand out in its uniqueness. Need I say that his piece suggests impressionism. It’s string writing is complex with a vast mixture of effects that, under the interpretive skill of the Avalon String Quartet, suggest movement in much the way the building itself does. This is genius, the ability to mix all these string techniques into a coherent whole. It is a basically tonal work and it is seriously engaging but listener friendly in the end.
The second chamber work is a piece written for the 50th anniversary of the death of legendary violinist Fritz Kreisler. As it happens the Library of Congress, who commissioned the piece, owns Kreisler’s Guarneri violin and it is they who commissioned this work. Miranda Cuckson does the honors on violin ably accompanied by the trustworthy Blair McMillen. To be sure some of Kreisler’s style is used here but this work, “Kreisleriana” (2012) comes across as more than an homage, more a work informed by Kreisler. It’s a really entertaining piece too.
Thanks in particular to Bridge Records for releasing this. Bridge is one of those labels whose every release deserves at least a bit of attention. This time I think they’ve found a fascinating voice in Meltzer’s works. Now how about some orchestral work?
The Art Music Lounge
Harold Meltzer (b. 1966) is an American composer who is influenced by a wide range of things from architecture to “postmodern fairy tales” (perhaps even Steve Allen’s Bop Fables from the mid-1950s?) to “messages inscribed in fortune cookies” (this from his Wikipedia page). All I know is that I liked what I heard, so I decided to review this CD.
Meltzer’s song cycle Bride of the Island is written in a modern style but with considerable lyricism in the vocal line, sung exceptionally well by the light but sweet-voiced tenor Paul Appleby. These songs are based on poems by Ted Hughes: the first about the serpent in the Garden of Eden, the second about a pool of water in the woods, the third about thistles and the fourth about hay. My sole complaint was that Appleby’s diction is more approximate than exact; consonants are often rounded like vowels so that he can produce a lovelier tone. Without the lyrics in the booklet, I wouldn’t have had a clue what he was singing. Yet the music itself is very fine. In fact, these songs put me in mind of some of Samuel Barber’s best work, which I like very much. “Thistles” is the most dramatic song of the group, with strong, roiling piano chords at the beginning whose harmonies are a bit reminiscent of Bartók.
This cycle is followed by Aqua, a piece commissioned by three different string quartets: the Avalon, Lydian and Pacifica. It was, however, premiered by the Avalon Quartet which plays it here. Since two of the three quartets played most often in Chicago, Meltzer chose a local piece of architecture, Jeanne Gang’s Aqua Tower in downtown Chicago, as his inspiration for the music. According to the booklet notes,
The piece begins by describing the building’s undulating balconies of white concrete that wrap around the structure. Harold’s writing for the strings immediately describes the seemingly liquid movement on the surface of the skyscraper, and its overlapping churning, by employing bariolage bowing technique and a dynamics layering of voices to create a whiling evocation of both water and the vertiginous heights of the building.
It’s fascinating music, and although the quartet is not divided into movements on the CD it is clearly divided into discrete sections. The second is less “flowing” more rhythmic. In this purely instrumental piece, Meltzer wrote in a starker and more abstract manner, avoiding lyricism in favor of describing what he saw in musical terms. Nonetheless it is quite good, well-developed and fascinating to hear on its own terms, even if one were not aware of the physical building used as its inspiration. Interestingly, where Bride of the Island was recorded in an ambient acoustic, Aqua seemed to have been recorded with very tight sound, which allows for fewer overtones in the quartet’s playing, yet in a way this helps one focus on the intricacies of the music. One section almost had a sort of bluegrass beat to it, though the music itself is anything but bluegrass, and in another the rhythms are jagged and rough. An excellent and highly original piece!
Beautiful Ohio is a song cycle based on poems of James Wright: “Small Frogs Killed on the Highway,” “Little Marble Boy,” “Beautiful Ohio,” “Caprice” and “Autumn Begins in Martins Ferry, Ohio,” the last celebrating the beginning of football season. (I can tell you from personal experience that, to Ohioans, football is a form of religion.) This cycle is more atonal than the first despite some occasionally lovely lyric lines for the tenor. Again, Appleby sings with a fine tone but so-so diction. “Beautiful Ohio,” in which the poet, as a boy, finds “a way to sit on a railroad tie above the sewer main,” has a sort of rolling rhythm in the piano part that I found intriguing.
Kreisleriana for violin and piano, like the strung quartet, is written in a more angular manner. This piece was commissioned by the Library of Congress to commemorate the 50th anniversary of Fritz Kreisler’s death. Meltzer chose to write a modern piece of the sort that Kreisler would never have played, but it was premiered by Miranda Cuckson on Kreisler’s Guarneri violin which is owned by the Library. It is not specified in the booklet whether or not Cuckson is playing that instrument on the recording, although it sounds something like it to me. It is, however, a very imaginative piece, the title referring not so much to the violinist as to Schumann’s piano cycle, which inspired the design and form of the work. There is, however, one a cappella passage that sounds very much like something Kreisler might have played (at least, it was technically accessible to him) had he developed a taste for somewhat more modern music. Unlike the quartet, this work is divided into separate movements (six of them) on the CD.
A fascinating look at an interesting composer whose work is varied in style and form.
El Espectáculo Teatral
Finalista al premio Pulitzer de música de 2009 (que ganó Steve Reich con Double Sextet) el estadou- nidense Harold Meltzer (Nueva York, 1966) es una de las personalidades musicales más acusadas de su gene- ración. Esta grabación está formada por dieciséis piezas recientes, tanto vocales –en las que interviene el tenor Paul Appleby– como de cámara y ha sido saludada por la crítica interna- cional como uno de los más grandes discos de 2018, qvue ha llegado a decir de él que “igual que las cinco Pasiones de Johann Sebastian Bach son eternamente contemporáneas, las piezas incluidas en Songs and Structures son recientes añadiduras a la categoría de música sin edad”, ya se trate de canciones estrenadas en 2010 –como las que componen el ciclo Beautiful Ohio– o en 2016 –las de Bride of the Island. De las dieci-séis piezas que integran el álbum, puede que las seis tituladas Kreisleriana –compuestas en 2012 para conmemorar el quincuagésimo aniversario del fallecimiento del extraordinario violinista austriaco Fritz Kreisler, e interpretadas por la violi- nista Miranda Cuckson y el pianista Blair McMillen– sean las más hermo- sas, emocionantes y evocadoras, de un disco en el que todo lo es.
A finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in Music (which Steve Reich won with his Double Sextet), the American Harold Meltzer (New York, 1966) is one of the most acclaimed musical personalities of his generation. This recording is made up of sixteen recent tracks, both vocal—in which the tenor Paul Appleby is featured—as well as chamber music and has been hailed by the international critics as one of the best albums of 2018. One critics has said that just as Johann Sebastian Bach’s Passions are eternally contemporary, so the works included in Songs and Structures are recent additions to the category of “ageless music,” like the songs composed in 2010—those that make up the cycle Beautiful Ohio—or in 2016—Bride of the Island. Of the sixteen tracks that comprise the album, perhaps the six from Kreisleriana—composed in 2012 to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the death of the extraordinary Austrian violinist Fritz Kreisler, and performed by the violinist Miranda Cuckson and the pianist Blair McMillen—are the most beautiful, exciting and evocative, on an album in which everything is.
Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review
Today I am happy to report in on a new collection of compositions by Harold Meltzer (b. 1966) on an album entitled Songs and Structures (Bridge 9513). The title makes perfect sense with the music at hand, as there are two song cycles and then two instrumental chamber works one might note are marked by a nicely turned structural sense.
The song cycles are very well performed by tenor Paul Appleby, known as a luminary from Metropolitan Opera, and pianist Natalia Katyukova. Both cycles are quite nicely idiomatic, fluid, evocative and well realized. There is a dramatic arc in both instances. “Bride of the Island” comes out of poems by Ted Hughes, “Beautiful Ohio” a cycle with poems by James Wright. There is a pronounced, rather naturally engaged kind of Modernism at play in this music, tonal at base but very freely and expressionistically so. No one hearing this would imagine this as either a looking back to the past or a product of some other era. Yet there also is a kind of timelessness to it all, a kind of Ur laced declamatory flow that is appropriately inside the song cycle tradition, that shows a natural opening onto the way song cycles resonate and narrate when they are effectively wrought.
The two instrumental works present in this program have a good amount of structural complexity that the song cycles are not designed to have and so the contrast makes for a lively listen. The string quartet movement “Aqua” is a bit of a tour de force, with well conceived attention to the sound color and expressive possibilities of the four strings. There is a one-on-one overlap of noteful content and colorful execution that gets a glowingly sunny reading by the Avalon String Quartet. Mellifluous exertion and reposeful flow of calm reflection alternate and run one into the other in ways that mark the work as very original and moving.
The final piece is a nod to the violin brilliance of Fritz Kreisler in the violin-piano “Kreisleriana.” It has an elemental primal quality in spite of its sophistication. We do not get some kind of pastiche of Kreisler evocations so much as a very forward moving original take on it all, and so we are very much on new ground. Yet the violin virtuosity and lightness of being that characterizes Kreisler at his finest is to be heard and appreciated in a new sounding.
And when all is said and done this program gives us the kind of pleasure that comes from immersion in a very musically situated depth and meticulous brilliance. I recommend this highly for you who want to keep current with what is new and very worthy. Bravo!