Michael Torke: Unseen
Ecstatic Records
Common to the four recordings that constitute in their creator's mind a tetralogy—Being (2020), Psalms and Canticles (2021), Time (2022), and Unseen (2024)—are syncopated rhythms that through interlocking animate the material and ground its melodies and harmonies with urgent pulsation. What differentiates the newest of the four is its expanded personnel, with Michael Torke's own orchestra augmented by the East Coast Chamber Orchestra. Such a move bolsters the nine pieces on Unseen by giving them additional dimension, colour, and rhythmic thrust. The composer's always vibrant music assumes an even more pronounced brilliancy when the timbral possibilities are as richly exploited as they are here. What results are compact statements bursting with energy and detail. With Ian Rosenbaum's vibes and marimba amplifying the metronomic drive, strings, woodwinds, and brass now resonate with greater power when the size of their respective sections increases.
Torke chose the title to emphasize the fact that the things we most value are often intangible, things like emotion, thoughts, memories, and inner states; relatedly, Unseen, like so much instrumental music, aspires to express the ineffable and articulate using abstract means that aforesaid phenomena. Anyone sufficiently familiar with Torke's music will know already that it favours joy and rapture over despair, and Unseen upholds that tendency. Certainly there are tinges of melancholy, but for the most part the material exudes radiance in a manner consistent with a composer who named his label Ecstatic Records.
Is the music of Unseen ‘about' anything in particular? Not if one's speaking programmatically; that he titled the nine pieces numerically also argues for the absence of extra-musical content. No, these pieces are prime examples of pure music, pieces that exist as sophisticated exercises in compositional form and practice. And, as importantly, they require nothing beyond what they are when their immaculate surfaces and layers engage with such immediacy. All one need do is give oneself over to the forty-five-minute recording and bask in the splendour of its sound and rhythmic vitality.
In a given setting, jittery phrases combine to form shimmering polyphonic wholes that advance and recede gracefully. Unison brass tones expand and contract as flutes and strings dart and flutter like hummingbirds, Torke's music ever harmonious, consonant, and impeccably crafted. Evidence emerges throughout of the extra impact the expanded ensemble brings to the project, be it in the enlarged bite of the strings or the bigger oomph of the horns. Watch for the Wagnerian punch the horns give the fourth, the regal stateliness of the fifth, the dramatic intensity of the sixth, the arresting quality muted horns give the seventh, and so on.
It's hard to imagine anyone coming away from a Torke programme feeling anything but uplifted when its tone is so affirming and its intricate arrangements rendered with precision. By symphony orchestra standards, an ensemble featuring thirty-four musicians is relatively modest, yet these players attack Torke's music with so much enthusiasm they create the impression of a larger number. In one sense, however, the point is moot: whether performed by a chamber group or one significantly larger, his music always replenishes and rewards.June 2024