Helmut Lachenmann: My Melodies
One—the?—highlight of 2024 was witnessing the London Symphony Orchestra, under conductor Ilan Volkov, perform 89-year-old German composer Helmut Lachenmann’s My Melodies for eight French horns and large orchestra. This recording, also released this year, and taken from an earlier performance in Munich conducted by Matthias Hermann, gave a vivid account of Lachenmann’s obsessive deconstructing and reverse-engineering of orchestral norms, reconstructing sound from the debris. Embedded in the music is a Beckettian sense of melodies that never quite arrive, a sonic paradox out of which Lachenmann teases toneless, noteless, hissing, breathing noise—the whole orchestra as a huge lung, inhaling and exhaling air.
Cloudward by Mary Halvorson
Guitarist and composer Mary Halvorson’s music speaks with the unruffled directness of nursery rhymes and folk songs, but then you dig deeper and realise she’s not happy unless she is also splitting the melodic atom; whimsy and musical muscle operating in perfect harmony. This latest album, with her long-standing six-piece band, is a beguiling listen from beginning to end; Halvorson’s light-touch compositions feeding her improvising musicians with plenty of food for thought. The great Laurie Anderson, with her violin, makes a cameo appearance on one track and slots seamlessly into Halvorson’s idea of what music should be.
Jean-Philippe Rameau: Les Boréades
Like much to do with the life and times of the French Baroque composer Jean-Philippe Rameau, the circumstances surrounding his final stage work, Les Boréades, remain wrapped in mystery and lost in time. He apparently heard the work in rehearsal, but, by the year of his death, 1764, the piece was unperformed and would remain so until 1982. Key to the score, and to the success of this dazzling new recording by conductor György Vashegyi, are Rameau’s drill-bit rhythms, which fill the music with dance while also powering a genuinely terrifying storm scene. The plot is flimsy and forgettable—but, my goodness, what music!
Jewels in the Treasure Box by Art Tatum
Toledo-born pianist Art Tatum, who died in 1956, was the pianist every other jazz pianist loved—and feared—the most. No other pianist of the 1940s and 1950s brought such nimble-fingered technical dexterity to the art of jazz improvisation, and even pianists as distinguished as Dave Brubeck, Oscar Peterson and Duke Ellington were nervous of appearing alongside him; after Tatum played, there was nothing left to say. Newly unearthed Tatum music comes along only very rarely and this three-CD set of his trio, captured live at the Blue Note in Chicago in August 1953, is a treasure trove indeed. The highlight, perhaps, “St. Louis Blues”, which Tatum floods with perfectly executed arpeggios worthy of Franz Liszt—before unleashing rootsy stride piano that floats like a butterfly and stings like a bee.
Solo Throat by Elaine Mitchener
This, the first solo album from London-based vocalist Mitchener, doesn’t so much set lines by poets including Una Marson and Edward Kamau Brathwaite as devour their words inside soundscapes so vividly polydimensional that you’re tempted to step inside them and take a walk around. A jazz singer, an interpreter of complex modern composition scores, also a free improviser, composer and movement artist, no single album could capture the full range of Mitchener’s art, but Solo Throatlaudably attempts to combine all those perspectives on making sound into a unified vision. It turns out to be a beguiling way of making what might be music, might be performance art… might be pure theatre of the imagination.
Robert Schumann: Piano Quartet and Quintet
Think Robert Schumann, the great Romantic composer from Leipzig, think those four game-changing symphonies and that famous piano concerto. But this new recording, led by pianist Alexander Melnikov and violinist Isabelle Faust, of two early chamber pieces, written back-to-back in a flight of creative fancy in 1842, made a cogent case that this moment unlocked the harmonic daring and melodic poise with which Schumann would make his name. Schumann’s inner world can be difficult to unpick—easy to play the notes while missing the musical intent by a mile. These performances, though, remained diligently alert to his cryptic mood changes and inscrutable depths.
fLuXkit Vancouver (its suite but sacred) by Darius Jones
New York saxophonist Darius Jones recorded fLuXkit Vancouver at Western Front, the Vancouver venue famed for its unfailing support, over 50 years, for free improvisation, modern composition, electronic music and Fluxus gigs. Jones wraps all that history up into this volatile, capricious 50-minute piece, partly composed and partly improvised, which he conceived for an ensemble of string players and percussion. His compositional frameworks inspired his musicians to take off in a thousand directions at once, while Jones’s own saxophone, charismatic and alert, constructs historical bridges of its own—enriched by his grounding in blues and soul and in the sound of Duke Ellington’s saxophone great Johnny Hodges, and fully conversant in throwing around sound in ways that would have made Ornette Coleman and John Coltrane proud.
Felix Mendelssohn: Complete Symphonies
Too often, there is a tendency to cherry-pick—but, in this new cycle, Estonian conductor Paavo Järvi wants you to hear Felix Mendelssohn’s sequence of five symphonies in the round. Mendelssohn’s third and fourth symphonies—the “Scottish” and “Italian”—are concert-hall evergreens, while his first, second and fifth are heard much more rarely. The First is a Mozartian student piece, written when the composer was 15; the Second is an unwieldy choral symphony that might topple into itself at any moment; but Mendelssohn operated at such an elevated level of melodic and harmonic invention that even his lesser works feel essential to his story. His Fifth Symphony, the “Reformation”, austere and steely, was only published after the composer’s death, but Järvi makes a powerful case for the piece being an ugly duckling that can’t help but grow beautifully.
Martin Arnold: Flax
Composer Martin Arnold, from Toronto, writes pieces that unfold over often very lengthy durations, yet resist the sort of recurring, cyclic forms that composers often deploy to turn minutes into hours. Instead, his music disintegrates as he assembles it. Chord patterns keep derailing, as they never quite land where you think they’re about to. Flax, his 79-minute piece for solo piano, written in 2021, abruptly falls towards busy silence, or actively fails to be rebooted by succulent jazz chords co-opted from, perhaps, Thelonious Monk or Bill Evans. Hearing Arnold’s anti-processes work themselves out over the long haul becomes utterly addictive. Pianist Kerry Yong keeps all the plates spinning.
The Carnegie Hall Concert by Alice Coltrane
The programme Alice Coltrane played at Carnegie Hall in 1971 included her late husband John’s “Africa” and “Leo”, as well as a pair of pieces from Alice’s own recent jazz-meets-Indian music album, Journey in Satchidananda. (In her group that night: saxophonists Pharoah Sanders and Archie Shepp; bassists Jimmy Garrison and Cecil McBee; drummers Ed Blackwell and Clifford Jarvis; tamboura player Tulsi and Kumar Kramer on harmonium.) Whether knitting the emerging patterns together with athletic harp swoops or rearranging the harmonic molecules with piano-playing both finespun and muscular, Alice injected her personality into every note. This concert, issued this year for the first time officially and in full, was a revelation.
