Breaths... The Best Of

Another of the albums I've re-acquired on vinyl that I formerly owned on cassette is this compilation of some of Sweet Honey in the Rock's best tracks as of 1987. I feel fairly sure I bought it relatively soon after its release. Theirs was among the several kinds of music that Andy Kershaw would play on his Radio 1 show - there's a fair chance I heard of them from him. They're an a capella vocal quintet with a sixth member who provides sign-language interpretations of their songs.

At Discogs this is categorised as "Gospel/Soul". There's more here of the socially-conscious, political & inspirational than the outright religious: they're preaching a kind of semi-secular gospel on this record, though their singing must surely derive much of its quality and heft from devotional roots. My favourite tracks here include the rousingly righteous 'Ella's Song' & 'Study War No More', and softer-edged numbers like the title track and 'Oughta Be a Woman'.

A little less to my liking are the closing songs on each side: 'Mandiacapella' is all scat-singing/vocalese of a kind that doesn't grab me; while the full-bore climax of 'Azanian Freedom Song' goes on a bit too long. Even so, this is a very fine collection. I also once owned their album Live at Carnegie Hall, which includes a mesmerizing rendition of 'Wade in the Water' that I dearly love.

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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...

Influencías

In my original blogging days, I would occasionally run giveaways to offload unwanted books or CDs to whomever claimed them. Sometimes the recipients would offer to send me something in return. It was in this way that, ca. 2007, a Catalan correspondent sent me Influencías: a CD of perfomances by the Barcelona-based Cuarteto Casals. The CD begins with Maurice Ravel's renowned string quartet: I hadn't known the piece before receiving this disc, but I was sold on it by this fresh & bright performance. Next is a quartet called 'Vistes al Mar' by the Catalan composer Eduardo Toldrá. Its evocative maritime movements are prefaced by recitations of poems by Joan Maragall, a Catalan author whose works directly inspired the piece. Lastly there's an arrangement of Joaquín Turina's atmospheric 'Oración del Torero', originally composed for a lute quartet. I'm on the fence about the cover photo: it's a well-composed picture & not a bad idea, but with 2...

This is a Recording

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