String Creatures by Liza Lim (NMC Recordings)
Australian composer Liza Lim, now resident in the UK, is string-obsessed, viewing string and rope as materials that have bound societies together throughout history: we weave tangled webs, we tie ourselves up in knots, we walk tightropes, we wonder at the length of a piece of string. Her magnificent string quartet String Creatures—performed here by the New York-based JACK Quartet—plays with the materiality of string sounds, from thick chords to delicate microtonal weaves. The physicality of the music might give your ears rope burn if it weren’t for the bracing, granite beauty of Lim’s writing. Anyone wondering where the modern view of the string quartet—initiated by Béla Bartók and Elliott Carter—has ended up, go here; the release, easily my disc of the year, also contains some solo string pieces and an earlier string quartet.
On a Modern Genius, Vol 1 (Stoney Lane Records)
Recording Thelonious Monk’s gravity-defying, structurally inside-out compositions is how many young jazz musicians get their wings, but few Monk rethinks speak with the power of this album by Birmingham-based tenor saxophonist Xhosa Cole, which was my jazz listen of the year. Working with a group that includes the strong-ankled rhythmic stampedes of Brooklyn tap-dancer Liberty Styles, Cole rewires the call-and-answer melodic loops of “Let’s Cool One”, merely hints at the melodic contours of “Rhythm-A-Ning” and takes “Misterioso” on a 16-minute improvisational workout that has transformed it into “Straight, No Chaser” by the end. Cole finds the funk at the heart of Monk’s music, then rearranges its molecules.
Michael Tippett: New Year (NMC Recordings)
Finally—a recording of Michael Tippett’s New Year, the sci-fi opera he created approaching his 80th birthday, complete with rap routines and a libretto riddled with urban slang. Its UK premiere in 1990 was a big deal at the time, attracting a level of coverage that would be a pipe dream today, but the opera has been more talked about than actually heard since. The plot—a dystopian tale featuring a time-travelling spacecraft (Tippett adored the TV series Blake’s 7)—lends itself to music of angular, jazzy violence, and there’s plenty of that. But the radiant lyricism that was always at the core of Tippett’s work is never far behind. Yes, there are occasional longueurs, but by the third act the music is soaring—and you’re amazed that a composer of Tippett’s advancing years could pull off something so audacious and fresh.
John Field: Complete Nocturnes by Alice Sara Ott (Deutsche Grammophon)
Dublin-born composer John Field was a contemporary of Beethoven, and if he is remembered at all these days, it’s usually because of his influence on the music and thinking of Chopin. Alice Sara Ott stumbled across Field’s Nocturnes, all 18 of them, during lockdown and they’ve been percolating through her imagination since. Her performances, tasteful and packed with character, do Field the greatest of service. Nothing here has the emotional depth or musical daring of Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven; but Field had real melodic gifts and his endearing, whimsical, gently droll pieces are a charm a minute.
Cellular Songs by Meredith Monk (ECM Records)
Meredith Monk, the New York-based composer, vocalist and performance artist, is now in her early eighties, but the exploratory mood of this latest record still makes it feel like young person’s music. The Monk method has long been to deconstruct conventional vocal techniques, drilling down ever deeper inside syllables and microtones, and Cellular Songs was inspired by how cells move both collectively as a body of independent beings. The music—for a group of five female singers, with occasional piano and vibraphone—is both playful and radiantly beautiful, full-on song forms balanced carefully against tracks that play with sounds ordinarily considered incidental: tongue clicks, whispers and notes continually on the slide.
Yowzers by Ben LaMar Gay (International Anthem)
Yowzers, the latest album from Chicago cornetist, composer, improviser and singer Ben LaMar Gay, is a gumbo of high-intelligence composition and stretching improvisation, all stirred by Gay’s unique facility for relating folk material to the present day. Recorded with his long-standing quartet—Tommaso Moretti (drums), Matthew Davis (tuba, piano), Will Faber (guitar)—with added guests and a choir, the album offers a kaleidoscopic view of American history, Gay’s compositions both rooted in the earth of tradition and shooting for the stars.
JS Bach: Mass in B Minor by Raphaël Pichon and Pygmalion (Harmonia Mundi)
French conductor Raphaël Pichon’s take on JS Bach’s Mass in B Minor, leading his own period-instrument ensemble and choir Pygmalion, heads places where classic recordings of Bach’s totemic masterwork have tended not to tread. From Karl Richter in 1961 to John Eliot Gardiner in 1985, conductors emphasise this music’s muscle and solemnity. Pichon, though, aims for speed and a lightness of touch that might leave some people cold, but that also feels refreshing, like a real product of Parisian chic. He is also detail-led; I don’t think I’ve ever heard the texts articulated with such painstaking clarity, in a luminous performance unafraid to glow—and very much on its own terms.
The Quartet (OTOROKU)
When the pioneering German free-jazz saxophonist Peter Brötzmann played at Cafe OTO in east London back in February 2023, his health was already failing, and the two evenings captured in this CD set document the last music he would make in public. Brötzmann’s classic-period albums—given titles such as Machine Gun, Nipples and Die Like a Dog—perched themselves between cartoon violence and ecstatic blowing. By 2023, Brötzmann’s lungs—weakened by Covid-19—were not what they had been, but the profundity of his music surged forth nonetheless. Supported by Jason Adasiewicz (vibraphone), John Edwards (bass) and Steve Noble (drums), Brötzmann’s high-velocity saxophone here will appeal to anyone whose taste in John Coltrane coincides with A Love Supreme onwards.
Johannes Brahms: Piano Quartets Nos. 2 & 3 by Krystian Zimerman et al (Deutsche Grammophon)
Brahms’s piano quartets, difficult to achieve in performance and not much loved in the concert hall, don’t come along very often on record. Polish pianist Krystian Zimerman, the nominal big-name leader of this all-star group, makes the point that these pieces contain the essence of Brahms, to which I’d add that anyone who loves the symphonies and piano music should dive in here eagerly. This playing itches with curiosity; music not so much committed to repertoire as discovered through the process of recording. The treats come thick and fast, from cello playing of resplendent lyricism (care of Yuya Okamoto) in the Andante of the third quartet to the thigh-slapping dance of the finale of No.3.
Asymptote Versatile (1963-64) by Éliane Radigue
French composer Éliane Radigue, now 93, eventually worked her way towards generating compositions through workshopping micro-nuances of tuning and attack with instrumentalists prepared to go deep inside sound. Her first surviving composition, Asymptote Versatile, dates back as far as 1964 but was performed for the first time only at the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival in 2023, from where this recording was taken. From her earliest days, Radigue clearly felt the stuff of music differently and made this piece by plotting curves from the Fibonacci sequence against conventional notes. Such a fancy concept is no guarantee of worthwhile music, of course, but the 12-piece ensemble who performed at Huddersfield made a convincing case for this music, Radigue’s harmonically exquisite sounds moving like cells, constantly dividing and forming fresh affiliations.
