Showcasing Recent Compositions by Richard Aldag

from the Amazon.com Web page for the album being discussed

At the beginning of last month, Albany Records released the album Broadway Boogie-Woogie, a survey of music composed by Richard Aldag between 2013 and 2017 (one of which, the album’s title composition, is a revision of music originally composed in 1991). Aldag received his doctoral degree from the City University of New York Graduate Center, but he has been a long-time resident of the San Francisco Bay Area. As a result, most, if not all, of the performers on the album are likely to be familiar to those who follow performances here in San Francisco (or just follow announcements of those performances on this site).

All of those pieces are on a chamber scale, the largest being the septet required to play the title composition (eight if Aldag’s participation as conductor is added). Other than requiring two percussionists (Divesh Karamchandani and Andy Meyerson), the score consists of one-to-a-part writing for flute (Gina Gulyas), clarinet (Matthew Boyles), violin (Rachel Patrick), cello (James Jaffe), and piano (Ian Scarfe). Note that, other than the percussion, the instrumentation is the same as that required for the accompaniment of the vocalist in Arnold Schoenberg’s “Pierrot Lunaire.”

Indeed, the music can be viewed in terms of its polite nods to the Schoenberg legacy, described by Kai Christiansen in the accompanying booklet as “post-tonal expressionist.” More specifically, Aldag seems to share with Schoenberg the proposition that, in the absence of dominant-tonic cadences for structural foundation, rhythm often serves as a reliable device to guide the ear of the attentive listener from beginning to end. Indeed, there are any number of jaunty rhythms that bring to mind some of Schoenberg’s livelier approaches to atonal rhetoric, particularly in his chamber music.

The title, by the way, is an afterthought that was only assigned after the 2014 revision of the score. Aldag chose it in memory of his late friend Ed Miner, who claimed that the music “sounded like New York.” Ironically, there is no mention of the fact that this title is also the name of one of the best-known paintings of Piet Mondrian (which happens to be a personal favorite of mine). There is a painting on the album’s cover, but it is by Frank Stella. Since Mondrian’s painting is now public domain (at least according to Wikimedia Commons), I was a bit disappointed by its absence.

As to the full scope of the album, I have to confess to taking pleasure in all of the familiar names among the performers. I have encountered most of them on more occasions than I can enumerate, and I have been disappointed by any of those encounters only very rarely. For the most part, but not entirely, those encounters have involved pieces from the relatively distant past; so it was rather a treat for me to have the opportunity to listen to how they approached music that was almost “hot off the presses.”

Nevertheless, these are all players that I am used to encountering in concert settings. That sense of rhythm that I associated with “Broadway Boogie-Woogie” tends to provide a unifying thread that weaves its way through all of the compositions on this album. However, that kind of rhythmic performance almost always fares better during an in-the-moment listening experience at a recital. Thus, while I am pleased to have now at my disposal an audio document through which I can familiarize myself with Aldag’s work, my real craving is to have the opportunity to be in the audience when one of these pieces is performed.