New music of the week - Nov 21
Louis Couperin: The Complete Works, Vol. I — Jean Rondeau
Rondeau is one of the more charismatic harpsichord virtuosos today, with enough personality and creativity in programming to warrant a major recording contract. Erato’s marketing department certainly can’t have been delighted with his proposal to record Louis Couperin’s complete works for harpsichord, a project spanning 10 CDs. But the first volume shows that Rondeau is onto something — he has a flexibility and dynamism that breathes life into the music, and he traces a satisfying expressive arc through each of the suites even though Couperin himself never organized them as such.
Thomas Adès: The Exterminating Angel Symphony & Violin Concerto — Leila Josefowicz, Thomas Søndergård, Minnesota Orchestra
Adès is the natural successor to Ravel, with his vast orchestrations full of pointillistic detail and whirling momentum. His Exterminating Angel is his most ambitious work yet: a sprawling opera based on the Buñuel film, requiring an enormous cast of singers. Like many enterprising composers before him, he’s arranged it into a 25-minute orchestral piece. Although labelled as a “symphony” it is a dance suite all but in name, from the slithering, off-kilter tango of the opening movement to the ominous waltz finale. Søndergård draws tight, virtuosic playing from his orchestra here as well as in Adès’ early violin concerto. Josefowicz is a superb soloist, sounding effortless in some of the most fiendishly tricky writing for the violin.
Satie Amoureux — Guillaume Coppola
Erik Satie was a man of many facets: there’s Satie the mystic, Satie the boulevardier, Satie the modernist. But French pianist Guillaume Coppola’s new recording chooses to highlight Satie the lover, based on his affair with painter Suzanne Valadon. The concept is a bit stretched, particularly when the only pieces with clear references to Valadon are the 19-second Bonjour Biqui, Bonjour! and excerpts from Vexations, but Coppola convinces with stylishly louche performances of Je te veux and La diva de l’Empire. Satie’s famous Gymnopédies and Gnossiennes are cleverly integrated, as if the entire album were a single hour-long waltz.
EUSEXUA Afterglow — FKA twigs
FKA twigs describes her follow-up to January’s EUSEXUA as a more embodied response to EUSEXUA’s hard-edged club music — the aftermath of a night out. The thumping bass of EUSEXUA is hazily recalled, alternating with hallucinatory electronics and murmured melismas. It’s meant to feel very loose and carefree, but there’s a discipline to both her vocals and the layered soundscape that impress. “HARD” is a proper club banger filtered through a foggy lens, while “Sushi”’s gentle beat crescendos into a thumping New York ballroom. Lest we think she’s lost her avant-garde edge, “Lost All My Friends” has her deliriously murmuring over a whirling, ominous soundscape that compresses into ambient noise.
Appaloosa — Orville Peck
For all of his country drag, Orville Peck is one of the most adaptable singers out there. His latest EP has its share of his usual country influences: “Dreaded Sundown” is moody and atmospheric, as if on a Western soundtrack, and “Oh My Days” is almost a parody of country’s guitar twang. But he seems to expanding out of his country past, most notably in a gentle cover of Cabaret’s “Maybe This Time” and in the 50’s rock bombast of “It’s the End of the World”. As an EP it’s a bit scattered, as if he’s experimenting with different genres and voices, but it’s all done with such apparent joy and enthusiasm that it’s hard to fault him.
