Adam Roberts: Bell Threads

American composer Adam Roberts delivers a selection of his chamber music demonstrating an expressive compositional voice and creating engaging instrumental spaces. Roberts’ approach is focused with a brave sense of acoustic adventurousness and, using top-notch ensembles and soloists, this release enraptures ear and mind. Whether through timbral exploration or enchanting stasis, Roberts has a propensity to secure his structures with a continuous and recognizable motif while shifting focus toward other musical narratives. The result is one of clever design and intent: the music unfolds with an initial sense of random moments, but is grounded by carefully constructed and recognizable gestural frameworks.

The disc begins with Shift Differential, an excited and energetic duet for violin and viola performed by andPlay. Roberts experiments with many successful timbral spaces that create momentum through constantly evolving, almost improvisatory, passages. Next, the Oboe Quartet performed by soloist Erik Behr and the JACK Quartet, shows Roberts’ more lyrical side in a work that is decidedly classical in its fast-slow-fast form.

The gem on the disc is a piece titled Rounds for solo harp, performed by Hannah Lash. Cascading apparitions of sound permeate amid gentle clusters and multi-layered auras. Lash’s performance is stunning, with a musicality that is rare and captivating. Happy/Angry Music, a trio performed by Bearthoven, draws upon polystylistic material and utilizes repetition to propel the music forward. Lastly, Bell Threads, a work for solo viola performed by Hannah Levinson, produces a sinuous and mysterious soundworld that is unique on the disc. This haunting work is the perfect bookend to a truly impressive collection of chamber works.

— Adam Scime, 2.04.2022

The composer Adam Roberts has a knack for exciting chamber music, and here he brings many musicians in for a varied display of rich, expressive and focused songwriting, the exact kind, in fact, that has comprised all of his work up to this point.

“Shift Differential” starts the listen with Maya Bennardo’s violin and Hannah Levinson’s viola (both of andPlay) interacting with a distinct harmonic tint, quivering moments and a rare improvisational skill, and “Oboe Quartet” follows with 3 movements that welcomes Erik Behr (oboe) and JACK Quartet providing strings in the more classical oriented setting that balances the string presence with the oboe amid some creative grooves and sublime intimacy.

“Rounds” resides in the middle and showcases Hannah Lash’s harp, where the dreamy polyrhythms and textured beauty makes a large impact in a minimal environment, while “Diptych” brings andPlay back for timbre manipulation between the violin and viola that’s quite mesmerizing.

“Happy/Angry Music” arrives near the end and is an upbeat and playful album highlight with Karl Larson’s piano, Matt Evans’ percussion and Pat Swoboda’s bass exploring rhythm and pitch with inimitable results, and “Bell Threads” exits the listen with Levinson’s solo viola almost seeming like it’s a duet with itself, exploring two different registers of the instrument with both an adventurous and vulnerable technique.

An album that shines whether the setting is solo, duet, trio or quartet, the unpredictable time signatures, very precise gesturing and unconventional rhythms make for a chamber experience you won’t soon forget.

— Tom Haugen, 1.04.2022

Strings are the predominant voice on Bell Threads, an album of composer Adam Roberts’ chamber music for solo, duo, trio and quartet. The title work, a piece for solo viola performed here by Hannah Levinson, contains the sliding between pitches, microtonal dissonances, contrasting upper and lower registers, and use of harmonics that typifies Roberts’ writing for strings. Levinson is joined by violinist Maya Bennardo on Shift Differential, a symmetrical work in three parts whose opening and closing sections feature raga-like phrasing built on stressed tones and microtonal sliding. In between is a section for the two to weave a texture of rapidly intertwining lines. Levinson and Bennardo also perform the two-part duet Diptych. Part I consists of drone tones and undulating lines with slight deviations above and below pitch, overlaid with pressure bowing; Part II includes microtonal near-unisons leavened by a more conventionally modernist-sounding counterpoint. The solo harp piece Rounds, performed by Hannah Lash, also relies on counterpoint, but of a rhythmic kind; rapidly plucked rhythms are set out against slower rhythms for a richly layered effect. The kaleidoscopic trio work Happy/Angry Music, for piano, double bass and percussion (performed by Bearthoven), plays with texture and changing time signatures and throws much of the melodic work to the bass; while the Oboe Quartet is a classically structured work written to complement the Mozart oboe quartet. Roberts’ quartet, performed by oboist Erik Behr and members of the JACK Quartet, represents an updating of the tradition, with generous use of bent tones, dissonances and extended techniques for both oboe and strings

— Daniel Barbiero, 11.25.2021

Like Kurtág’s music, that of Adam Roberts on a New Focus Recordings release has a narrow emotional compass and a preoccupation more with sound for its own sake than for sound whose purpose is communicative. The quartet here, which is the longest work on the disc, is for oboe (Erik Behr) and members of the JACK Quartet (Christopher Otto, violin; John Pickford Richards, viola; Jay Campbell, cello). Its second movement claims the sort of connection to an earlier composer of which Kurtág is fond: Roberts’ movement is called Lament: Hommage à J.S. Bach. And in fact there are Bachian elements here, including lyricism that Roberts otherwise denies to himself and his audience. Roberts (born 1980) repeatedly undermines the references to earlier material, though, as if extreme chromaticism and dissonance somehow improve on or pay a kind of odd tribute to the Baroque. The quartet’s first movement – Explosive, Curvy, Raucous – and its final Toccare give the work as a whole a classical three-movement structure, but Roberts goes out of his way to undercut and undermine that design and the occasional quotations embedded in it by making typical contemporary-composer performance demands, such as extended glissandi and material that floats with odd dissonance above disconnected accompaniments. This (+++) CD does showcase Roberts’ interest in various chamber-music and solo-instrument composition, although the sound of the various works tends to be very similar even when the instrumentation differs. The opening and closing works on the disc show this clearly: Shift Differential for violin (Mary Bennardo) and viola (Hannah Levinson) is aurally closely akin to Bell Threads for solo viola (Levinson). The solo treatment of the harp (Hannah Lash) in Rounds parallels that of the solo viola, with each work pushing to extend the inherent sound of the instrument for which it is written (another typical contemporary-composer approach) and both featuring irregular rhythms and a disconnected, jagged overall feeling. Also here is Diptych for violin and viola (Bennardo and Levinson), the two movements sounding similar to the single-movement Shift Differential but going on at considerably greater length, with the second movement focused on the production of microtones within scalar patterns. Different instruments are used for Happy/Angry Music, played by an ensemble called Bearthoven that includes piano (Karl Larson), percussion (Matt Evans), and bass (Pat Swoboda). This piece is more fun than anything else on the disc, accepting and accentuating the two percussion instruments (the piano is treated quite percussively) and often using the bass in a percussive manner as well. It is not always clear what music is happy and what sounds are angry, but it scarcely matters: parts of the piece are propulsive, parts hover aurally and fade into silence, parts delve into a level of consonance that Roberts otherwise employs infrequently, and parts (such as extended scales on the piano) simply sound silly – apparently intentionally. The work goes on a bit too long (almost 12 minutes), but there is enough cleverness in it to make it enjoyable to listen to. In fact, it is worth hearing more than once, a statement that is not always easy to make about contemporary music. The rest of this disc is on the ordinary side, but Happy/Angry Music is interesting enough to keep listeners engaged and certainly not angry – in fact, to keep them at least intermittently happy.

— Mark Estren, 11.24.2021

Adam Roberts is an American composer, born 1980, so an aspiring artist. Not much can I say about him, as the press release (as often is the case) limits itself to talking about the prizes won, fellowships, and who has performed the music. Well. Discogs does not help much, either, as it seems that several profiles have been mangled, with a jazz (double-)bassist of the same name (or is it the same person??) being also listed. But Roberts' own profile mentions nothing other than 'serious' classical music. So. He has published on Tzadik.
The music on this release is dominated by strings, including a harp, but also includes a piano/percussion/bass piece, and an oboe quartet. The first track is a very pensive violin/viola study, where both voices meander around each other in a dissonant, but beautiful manner. The Oboe Quartet starts off with more meandering, only that this one appears less stractured, not making best use of the somewhat complementary sounds of strings and oboe. The second movement is more carefully set with a soft, even tender, dialogue of the instruments. The third, and last, movement manages to pick the best of both previous tracks and makes an interesting listening. Had he only scrapped the 1st Mvmt ... A harp solo piece follows that actually manages to sound a bit like a piano, but as such is not too interesting. Diptych returns to the violin duet, whilst the title piece is a viola solo. The latter is a bit limited in impact and maybe a bit too long, as ideas run out.
Nevertheless, what really caught my attention was Happy/Angry Music, a trio of piano, percussion, bass. The anticipation was rewarded. We find influences from Chick Corea to Keith Jarrett and Keith Emerson that evolve into a long piece mostly dominated by the
piano. Which is a bit of a pity, as the potential of the percussion contributions is not fully explored (or lost in the mix). The release shows the variety the artist profile claims, but also, that some contexts work better than others.

— Robert Steinberger, 11.23.2021

Adam Roberts is nothing if not eclectic. This fascinating collection of his chamber music runs through a gamut of styles and harmonic voices, from abstract and experimental to lush melodies and even a refreshing splash of jazzy rhythms. The unifying element is Robert’s meticulous attention to craft and structure, qualities which require technical excellence by the performers, which is consistently the case on this CD. Shift Differential and Diptych were written for the duo of Maya Bennardo, violin and Hannah Levinson, viola (the pair are known as andPlay). In both pieces, Roberts using this intriguing pairing to explore timbral and dynamic interplay. The music is not traditionally melodic, which is way of saying that the language is challenging, but there is an alluring beauty to the manner in which Roberts shapes his material and creates an emotional, even theatrical quality in both works. Shift Differential, in particular, radiates a kind of subtle joy that brought a smile to my face as I listened to it. Diptych, as the name implies, is in two parts, emphasizing dynamic contrasts as one would find in a Beethoven sonata. Levinson is on her own in Bell Threads, a deeply expressive lament, written as an elegy for the composer’s late grandmother.

The Oboe Quartet, vividly performed by the redoubtable JACK Quartet, with guest oboist Erik Behr, finds Roberts working in a retrograde manner, but replete with his contemporary sensibility. It is a compelling piece, and perhaps the most accessible work in this collection. Roberts calls the middle movement an homage to Bach, but I hear a Baroque flavor in all three movements. One would expect a composer to borrow rhythmic and polyphonic tropes to echo music from the time of Bach, and that is certainly happening here, but I was most struck by the subtly expressive way in which Roberts honors the timeless melodic genius of Bach, which I imagine is a much more challenging effect to achieve.

Happy/Angry Music, performed by the piano, bass and percussion trio that calls itself Bearthoven, as in the Diptych, is a study of contrasts. It opens with a jazzy, driving exuberance, as supported by a standard drum kit. The energy then dissipates a bit, with the bass seemingly bouncing across its considerable range, and the percussionist creating gamelan like effects lending an Asian sensibility to the music. I was not always able to distinguish between the happy/angry moods, but perhaps that ambivalence is intentional. At the center of the program is music for solo harp, Rounds, written for the performer on this recording (and longtime colleague of the composer), Hannah Lash. Roberts describes the work as “a fantasy in its stream-of- consciousness movement through different textures.” It is, indeed, a rich pattern of layers of sparkling sound, often effusively lush, but there are also blasts of dissonance, as a whole representing a dramatic, even theatrical profile.

The music of Adam Roberts, as showcased on this collection, is both smart and sensuous, a winning combination. His toolbox is large, but there is never a sense that he is showing off, but simply choosing the vehicle that best fits his expressive needs. Excellent performances across the board, and clean, full-voiced recorded sound.

— Peter Burwasser, 1.26.2022

The peripatetic American composer Adam Roberts (b. 1980), who has held teaching positions in Boston, Istanbul, Georgia, and Ohio, presents an array of chamber works that delivers a sound world tailored for each. There are a few common features that he repeats—his extreme fondness for overlapping glissandos sticks out clearly, the effect landing in the vicinity of Indian ragas and seasickness as pitches slither and slide past each other. One of his strengths is for unusual timbres, as in the title work, Bell Threads for solo viola, in which high, twittering harmonics and scraping sounds produced by “overpressure” on the bow render the viola so startling and new that this becomes one of the high points on the program.

An artist’s bio found online informs us that Roberts was “born to secular Jewish parents with family from Poland, Russia, and Germany, and raised in Columbus, Ohio,” also that he spends his time between New York City and his scattered teaching positions. We have reached the stage in contemporary music where eclecticism rules, and under this rubric anything can be called music. The general listener, still stuck on tonal versus atonal music, might seem to be shut out completely, since that dichotomy is very old news by now. But listening to this album, in which every piece is played with exuberant gusto, you realize that many performers are at home here, and if they are young, they probably always have been. One senses, in the midst of some bewilderment about where the scraping, scratching, strumming, and crunching is headed (setting aside argot about “multiphonics” and “geometric heterophony”) that a general listener with open ears can become absorbed and even entertained.

The most entertaining work here is the 11-minute jamboree, Happy/Angry Music, which is playful and exhilarating in its constant variety. The instrumentation of the group Bearthoven (no comment) is piano, percussion, and bass. Since the percussion includes tam-tam, mbira (a hand-held metallic instrument from Zimbabwe), and the traditional trap set, Bearthoven sounds much bigger than a jazz trio. Roberts riffs on jazz as a baseline, but the noise-making hardly stops there. The ear can’t help but be captivated by such inventiveness and all-in playing.

A general listener can also enter this album by the route of virtuosity. The justly renowned JACK Quartet and oboist Erik Behr surmount every demand in Roberts’s Oboe Quartet, which was commissioned to be the daring part of an odd couple with Mozart’s Oboe Quartet. The music, as far as form and melody go, is incomprehensible to me, but I got carried along by its strangeness, an experience I have become accustomed to since it also describes my response to Schoenberg’s Variations for Orchestra. Rounds for solo harp is as wildly imaginative as Bell Threads is for the viola, and the amazing harpist Hannah Lash ventures so many light years beyond the comfort zone of stummed arpeggios that you cannot help but be fascinated.

The violin-and-viola duo of Maya Bennardo and Hannah Levinson perform as andPlay, and they enjoy a close relationship with Roberts. Besides Bell Threads, where Levinson is spectacular on her own, andPlay is adventurous in Shift Differential (home of almost continuing glissandos—yikes!) and the contrasting halves of Diptych. I must admit that the appeal of both works escaped me beyond my admiration for andPlay’s energized performance. But as with any contemporary music, there’s a fine line between feeling discombobulated and with-it.

Roberts includes in his background a Guggenheim Fellowship and recognition from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. One has no doubt that his skills and his ingenious ear deservedly place him in the circle of prestigious contemporary composers. But prestige is no guarantee that a composer can break out of the self-enclosed world supported, as with modern poetry, by generous grants, university positions, and a small group of avid followers. I do my best, therefore, to point out an opening for general listeners and traditional music lovers. I’m sure that everyone involved in this album would be delighted if we paid attention to their creations. The invitation is open, and Bell Threads offers rewards to anyone who accepts.

— Huntley Dent, 3.28.2022

Like Kurtág’s music, that of Adam Roberts on a New Focus Recordings release has a narrow emotional compass and a preoccupation more with sound for its own sake than for sound whose purpose is communicative. The quartet here, which is the longest work on the disc, is for oboe (Erik Behr) and members of the JACK Quartet (Christopher Otto, violin; John Pickford Richards, viola; Jay Campbell, cello). Its second movement claims the sort of connection to an earlier composer of which Kurtág is fond: Roberts’ movement is called Lament: Hommage à J.S. Bach. And in fact there are Bachian elements here, including lyricism that Roberts otherwise denies to himself and his audience. Roberts (born 1980) repeatedly undermines the references to earlier material, though, as if extreme chromaticism and dissonance somehow improve on or pay a kind of odd tribute to the Baroque. The quartet’s first movement – Explosive, Curvy, Raucous – and its final Toccare give the work as a whole a classical three-movement structure, but Roberts goes out of his way to undercut and undermine that design and the occasional quotations embedded in it by making typical contemporary-composer performance demands, such as extended glissandi and material that floats with odd dissonance above disconnected accompaniments. This ( ) CD does showcase Roberts’ interest in various chamber-music and solo-instrument composition, although the sound of the various works tends to be very similar even when the instrumentation differs. The opening and closing works on the disc show this clearly: Shift Differential for violin (Mary Bennardo) and viola (Hannah Levinson) is aurally closely akin to Bell Threads for solo viola (Levinson). The solo treatment of the harp (Hannah Lash) in Rounds parallels that of the solo viola, with each work pushing to extend the inherent sound of the instrument for which it is written (another typical contemporary-composer approach) and both featuring irregular rhythms and a disconnected, jagged overall feeling. Also here is Diptych for violin and viola (Bennardo and Levinson), the two movements sounding similar to the single-movement Shift Differential but going on at considerably greater length, with the second movement focused on the production of microtones within scalar patterns. Different instruments are used for Happy/Angry Music, played by an ensemble called Bearthoven that includes piano (Karl Larson), percussion (Matt Evans), and bass (Pat Swoboda). This piece is more fun than anything else on the disc, accepting and accentuating the two percussion instruments (the piano is treated quite percussively) and often using the bass in a percussive manner as well. It is not always clear what music is happy and what sounds are angry, but it scarcely matters: parts of the piece are propulsive, parts hover aurally and fade into silence, parts delve into a level of consonance that Roberts otherwise employs infrequently, and parts (such as extended scales on the piano) simply sound silly – apparently intentionally. The work goes on a bit too long (almost 12 minutes), but there is enough cleverness in it to make it enjoyable to listen to. In fact, it is worth hearing more than once, a statement that is not always easy to make about contemporary music. The rest of this disc is on the ordinary side, but Happy/Angry Music is interesting enough to keep listeners engaged and certainly not angry – in fact, to keep them at least intermittently happy.