These Are The Vistas

It only ever happened once that I impulse-bought an album because I heard it playing while I was in a record shop. It was at the Virgin Megastore in Cardiff, where, on the first floor of an otherwise open-plan store, there was an enclosed room where the classical and jazz recordings could be found. I was browsing through the classical CDs paying scant attention to the music until I discerned a distinctive melody: a jazz trio version of Aphex Twin's 'Flim'?

That caught my ear, and, when it was followed by an impressively manic arrangement of Blondie's 'Heart of Glass' I made my mind up to buy the album, conveniently on display at the counter: These Are the Vistas by The Bad Plus. It was the first time a contemporary jazz record had grabbed me so forcibly. I loved the whole thing, and found there was a third cover version on the disc in the shape of the trio's take on 'Smells Like Teen Spirit'.

The remaining eight tracks are all original compositions by the band-members. Of those, my favourites are 'Keep The Bugs Off Your Glass And The Bears Off Your Ass', written by drummer David King, but with bassist Reid Anderson taking the lead; and the sublime ballad 'Everywhere You Turn', a composition of Anderson's which blossoms out from (and back into) the quietest of pianissimos, with the melody delivered beautifully by Ethan Iverson at the piano.

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Complete String Quartets

While the string quartets of Nikolai Yakovievich Myaskovsky (1881-1950) were all published in the Soviet era, a few of them had pre-revolutionary origins. Two quartets he wrote in 1911 and '09 while a conservatory student re-surfaced some twenty years later designated as Quartets Nos. 3 and 4. An even earlier "schoolboy" piece was later re-worked more radically as Quartet No. 10, premiered in 1945. Myaskovsky partook of an ample share of the turmoil and tragedy of his times: he was wounded and shell-shocked after service on the front line in World War I, and his father, who had been a high-ranking military engineer, was brutally murdered by a revolutionary mob. Despite that, his music, even at its most sombre, hasn't the black bile or biting sarcasm of Shostakovich's, or of his friend Prokofiev's. Of the works collected here, in excellent early '80s performances by the Taneyev Quartet, only Quartet No. 1 has any significantly metallic tang of early S...

Ein Schattenspiel, etc.

Georg Friedrich Haas is a contemporary Austrian composer of "art music". "Haas's style recalls that of György Ligeti in its use of micropolyphony, microintervals and the exploitation of the overtone series; he is often characterized as a leading exponent of spectral music" says wikipedia. Only a relative few of his many compositions have been issued on CD - many more of them can be found on YouTube. On this 2020 disc are three of his works in which standard classical instrumentation is augmented and altered by "live electronics". Two are string quartets and one is for solo piano. Is a string quartet still really a quartet if there are meanwhile some other people with laptops busily twizzling the sound? There is a live performance video of the 'String Quartet No. 7', the first work on the disc, where the JACK Quartet are supplemented by a trio of sound boffins to realise the composition. Whether it's properly a quartet or a septet is neithe...

Onslow

George Onslow was an odd-man-out among 19th-century French composers. Born into wealth and privilege, the grandson of an English Earl, he had no need to follow the operatic gravy train, with string quartets (of which he wrote 36) and string quintets (there are another 32 of those) forming the bulk of his compositional output. The present disc contains his 28th, 29th and 30th quartets, in compelling performances by the Quatuor Diotima. These quartets were written toward the end of a prolifically-creative period for Onslow in the years 1829-35. Viviane Niaux, in her informative booklet notes, ascribes this to the composer's having heard performances of two of Beethoven's late quartets for the first time in 1828, at their Paris première. Like many of his contemporaries, Onslow was at once "fascinated and disconcerted", and, although he considered them "extravagant", they seem to have been powerfully inspirational. A further spur to creativity may have been his ...

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