Wednesday, September 25, 2019

“The other coast” Debuts on BIS Records

This month began with an account of the sixth album of the vocal quartet that calls itself New York Polyphony by BIS Records. The fact that BIS is based in Sweden should give some awareness of its global reach where the catalog artists it presents is concerned. I thus took a fair amount of interest when I learned that the previous month had seen the debut of the Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra (LACO) on the BIS label.

My wife and I had lived in Los Angeles during the final years when Iona Brown was the LACO Music Director, and she was replaced by Christof Perick not long before I made arrangements for our move to Singapore. Jeffrey Kahane succeeded Perick in 1997 and remained as Music Director until September of 2017. Jaime Martín appeared as guest conductor at the beginning of the new season and was appointed Music Director the following February.

Kahane is the conductor on LACO’s debut album with BIS. The album consists of four compositions for violin and chamber orchestra; and the violinist, Margaret Batjer, is also making her BIS debut. The recording sessions all took place in 2018 (March and September). The opening selection is the world premiere recording of a two-movement violin concerto by American composer Pierre Jalbert, which he composed in 2017. He wrote the concerto on a co-commission for the concertmasters of LACO, the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra, and the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra. At that time Batjer had been LACO concertmaster since 1998.

The final selection on the recording, “Lonely Angel” by Pēteris Vasks, was also composed in this century (in 2006); but it was based on the final movement of a string quartet he had composed in 1999. The twentieth century is also represented by the version for violin, string orchestra, and percussion of “Fratres” by Arvo Pärt. The remaining selection on the album is Johann Sebastian Bach’s BWV 1041 violin concerto in A minor.

This makes for impressive diversity. In the face of that diversity, there is no questioning the technical skills of either the concertmaster or the conductor. Nevertheless, my wife and I used to attend LACO concerts regularly because there was a freshness to their interpretations that we found we were less likely to encounter on our visits to listen to the Los Angeles Philharmonic. We had enjoyed Brown’s leadership and the beginning of Perick’s tenure; and, while there was much to relish in Singapore, I regretted missing the opportunities to experience more of his work.

However, while there is no questioning the high level of technique on this debut album, any sense of that freshness does not come across particularly convincingly. Batjer’s approach to the Jalbert concerto is definitely impressive; and she could not do better justice to the tempo marking for the second movement, “With great energy.” Nevertheless, the overall impact suggests that, for all of the attention to giving a precise account of all the technical details, neither the soloist nor the conductor had much to say about any rhetorical undercurrents for those details. The same can be said of the technique behind the Bach concerto.

Latvian composer Pēteris Vasks (photograph by Hokit, from Wikimedia Commons,  licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported license)

At the end of the day, I would say that the Vasks selection provides the primary motivation for listening to this album. During my early years of writing about music, I encountered from both students and faculty at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music considerable enthusiasm for Vasks and his music. I tried to seize any opportunity to listen to his chamber music in recitals there; and, when I made the move to extend my writing to records, an all-Vasks album was one of my earliest targets. Given the extent to which Pärt has become pretty much a “household name,” I still feel that Vasks deserves just as much attention; and I hope that this recording of “Lonely Angel” will give that attention a bit of a boost.

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