Third Sound: Heard in Havana
Innova

Some recordings are significantly enhanced by the inclusion of background detail. One such is the debut album by Third Sound, which invites a considerably stronger appreciation once the circumstances of its creation are known. In this case, the background info brings clarity to the project but even more critically cohesiveness: with ten living American composers' works presented, Heard in Havana doesn't sound terribly cohesive, but with the backstory included, the recording comes into much sharper focus.

How the release came together is fascinating in itself. In late 2015, the American Composers Forum (ACF) sent the chamber ensemble and ten composers—Kati Agócs, Ingrid Arauco, Kai-Young Chan, Cindy Cox, Jeremy Gill, Michael Harrison, Jennifer Higdon, Christopher Wendell Jones, Amadeus Regucera, and Spencer Topel—to Cuba to present a program of contemporary American music at the twenty-eighth Havana Contemporary Music Festival. That presentation did more than offer a compelling argument on behalf of contemporary American classical music; it also resonated politically and historically for being the first concert wholly centred on contemporary American music to take place in Cuba since before the Cuban Revolution.

Comprised of Sooyun Kim (flute), Romie de Guise-Langlois (clarinet), Karen Kim (violin), Michael Nicolas (cello), Orion Weiss (piano) and composer Patrick Castillo (managing director), the NY-based Third Sound ensemble meets the challenges of the repertoire presented on the near-eighty-minute release. With works by ten composers performed, it's natural that a broad spectrum of styles and moods would be encompassed, especially when the ten come from different parts of the U.S. and bring different backgrounds to their creative work. Some are well-known—Pulitzer Prize-winner Higdon the most recognizable name, arguably—but all contribute material that merits attention. For the record, Heard in Havana isn't a document of that live presentation; instead, the works featured in that program were recorded in spring 2016 at a New York studio.

The works constitute a fascinating cross-section of contemporary compositional practice, beginning with Topel's Details on the Strasbourg Rosace, a gripping, four-part meditation inspired by structural transitions within sections of the Strasbourg Cathedral's stained glass rosace. Following it is the second movement of Agócs' Immutable Dreams, Microconcerto [in memoriam György Ligeti], which pays tribute to her Hungarian roots and, of course, Ligeti with an intricately woven piano concerto in miniature. Flute-driven music reminiscent of the kind in a traditional Japanese Noh theatre production appears in Chan's For Mieko, the composer in this instance drawing inspiration from Fumiko Enchi's novel Masks. Gill himself notes that echoes of Monteverdi, Puccini, and Mahler emerge in his three-part Paean, Epitaph, and Dithyramb, but its opening movement suggests Messiaen could be added to the list.

Arauco's Fantasy-Quartet wends for ten-plus impassioned minutes through explorative chamber territory that in its most romantic moments calls to mind the early twentieth-century writing of Schoenberg and Debussy. Whereas the fundamental musicality of Arauco's makes it one of the recording's most accessible pieces, others are less immediately easy to warm up to. A case in point, Wendell Jones's a crowd of twisted things, a knotty rumination on memory's fallibility, presents a suitably fragmented concoction of piano and violin micro-elements, the work's compositional design purposefully disjointed and non-linear.

Heard in Havana detours into electroacoustic territory via Harrison's Radians Phase II, which uses just intonation tunings to illustrate new harmonic sequences. The piece, its unusual pitch combinations notwithstanding, achieves a surprisingly harmonious, almost peaceful effect in its merging of acoustic timbres and sine tones. At album's end, the opening movement from Cox's Wave deploys staggered figures by violin, cello, and piano to generate an ever-surging wave-like effect, after which Higdon's Smash caps the recording with interlaced patterns that barrel forth collectively in a mad dash.

June 2020