Yotam Haber: Bloodsnow
Sideband Records
Issued on the nascent Chicago-based imprint Sideband Records, Bloodsnow presents world premiere recordings of recent works by Yotam Haber. Currently based in Kansas City, Missouri, the Holland-born Haber grew up in Israel, Nigeria, and Milwaukee and has received a number of honours and awards, including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Rome Prize, and a Koussevitzky commission. Speaking of which, Haber's also written works for PRISM Quartet, the Alabama Symphony Orchestra, Alarm Will Sound, JACK Quartet, and others.
Writing in 2015 about Haber's chamber music release Torus, New York's WQXR characterized it as “a composer looking for a sound and finding something powerful along the way.” Much the same could be said about the material on Bloodsnow, with two pieces performed by the nine-member Talea Ensemble, another by the quartet American Wild Ensemble, and the fourth by saxophonist Don-Paul Kahl. A vocal work appears alongside three instrumentals, with bass-baritone John Taylor Ward joining Talea Ensemble for They Say You Are My Disaster.
Performed by the group, the title work was begun in 2019 when Haber agreed to help a friend complete her first Iditarod, the dogsled race across Alaska. The piece itself developed out of the composer witnessing snow turning crimson when he severed his finger while dogsledding on the Denali Highway. That experience provided the impetus for a composition that alternates episodes of contemplation with sudden eruptions of violence. Amidst clarinet, flute, and piano rumblings, icy sheets of sound evoke the landscape as the piece restlessly writhes, struggling to achieve shape and definition. Punctuated by aggressive swirls and flurries and with microtonality, dissonance, and harmonics adding to the chilly atmosphere, the material oscillates between moments of flux and others that are musically direct and clear. A programmatic element even emerges when a rapid piano ostinato suggests the charge of the sled-pulling dogs.
Shifting gears, They Say You Are My Disaster sets two songs (sung in Hebrew) to texts by Israeli poets Tahel Frosh (b. 1977) and Dorit Weisman (b. 1950). The latter's ponderous “Schnitzel” conflates the act of meal preparation and the memory of breast cancer surgery, with the poet regarding the surgery, surprisingly, as a gift of sorts rather than tragedy. Frosh's “Oh, My Bank,” on the other hand, bitterly rages against capitalism whilst also reflecting on women's place in society. As striking as the juxtaposition of the songs' content is the fact that Haber chose a male vocalist, Ward, to sing the material, which he does superbly using nuanced shadings of expression and emotion and benefiting from the ensemble's sensitive accompaniment.
Commissioned by and written for Kahl, Resistance is, in Haber's words, “a shout contained within a whisper and a whisper within a shout” that explores a panoply of effects and techniques, including microtonality, jazzy runs, and slap sounds, during its ten-minute run. At album's end, Choref (“winter” in Hebrew) revisits the geographical realm of Bloodsnow, Haber again using the dogsledding experience as well as a week he spent hiking in the glacial wilderness of Wrangell-St. Elias in 2022 as creative springboards. Performed by American Wild Ensemble, the group's flute, clarinet, violin, and cello timbres evoke the barrenness of the setting and convey a clear sense of foreboding. Writing about Choref, Haber states that it, like many of his compositions, began with the formulation of a musical problem that he then set out to solve. Bloodsnow presents a compelling, eloquently performed document of four such attempts, with no doubt many, many more by Haber to follow.December 2023