Louis Karchin: Dark Mountains/Distant Lights

There is something of a consensus from Fanfare reviewers that Louis Karchin is something of an unrecognized jewel of a composer, and I am happy to add my voice to the chorus. We are in distinctly Modernist territory here (Karchin’s teachers include Fred Lerdahl, Gunther Schuller, and Bruno Maderna); and yet, it is Karchin’s ear that stops this from being objectivist and forbidding. Take the very first sonority of Dreamscape (2016) for oboe and violin, a melding of high oboe with a violin tremolo between written pitch and the harmonic two octaves and a fifth above. It is otherworldly, and clearly challenging for the performers; it is a measure of Jacqueline Leclair and Miranda Cuckson’s control over their instruments that the sound field is so convincingly conjured. There is playfulness here, too, in amongst the quarter-tones and the multiphonics. The work is a response to Mallarmé’s poem “Apparition” (a love poem), and there is no doubting that Karchin explores the two instrument’s relationship while, towards the end, inserting a barcarolle, acknowledging the place of the work’s premiere (Venice).

Dating from over a decade earlier (2005), the Rhapsody for Violin and Piano plays with our perceptions of tonality, placing a passage that clearly references tonal structures at the work’s center (with a recollection at the close that brings the piece to rest). Again, there is a playful element to this music, with instruments chasing each other like over-dissonanced kittens; but there is real beauty, too. Credit should go especially to Miranda Cuckson’s expressive and consistently accurate playing.

It is good to hear Steven Beck solo in the Three Epigrams (2008), the first movement of which, “Celebration,” was originally a stand-alone piece for Charles Wuorinen’s 70th birthday; the second and third movements reference Luigi Nono and the visual artist Emilo Vedova (who himself collaborated with Nono). The second movement’s title, “Expressions,” echoes Nono’s Due Espressioni and is an exercise in sonic beauty, Beck offers up a crystalline sound; the elusive finale, “Upheavals,” with its contrasting gestures of granite and air inspired by Vedova’s paintings, is similarly convincing.

In the lineage of Roger Sessions’s Sonata for Solo Violin and Donald Martino’s Fantasy-Variations is Karchin’s Dark Mountains/Distant Lights (2016). Inspired by the Watchung Mountains near the composer’s home in New Jersey, the piece plays with perceptions of near and far; Karchin even illustrates in music how images fleetingly appear, only to disappear again. This is a transfixing performance from Cuckson.

By the time we get to Lyrics II, the ear has become accustomed to the expressivity of Karchin’s writing, both on vertical and horizontal axes. There are two sections to the piece, the first formed of elongated, restful lines, the second decidedly more agitated (if stopping short of traumatized). The two shorter pieces the close the disc work well together, and also reintroduce the oboe’s voice in Reflection, thus bookending the disc with this instrument. First, though, there come Prayer for solo violin of 2004, written at the time for a festival whose subject was world peace (including for its venue, South Korea). The solo lines seem to invite meditation—reflection on our actions as a human race, perhaps. Talking of reflection, the oboe and violin piece named Reflection (2017) begins with a tremolo gesture that links back to the opening of Dreamscape. The sheer resonance between Leclair (on this outing one of the finest, most musical of oboists around) and Cuckson is remarkable.

Detailed booklet notes by the composer himself round off a splendid release. In terms of recording, everything is perfectly judged, including perspective. I’m going to balance the symmetry of the disc’s program with a symmetry of my own in this review and remark, once more, that Louis Karchin’s talent clearly requires wider acknowledgement.

— Colin Clarke, 1.26.2021

Considering the "shift" described by Phillips, does the world actually need another collection of modernist chamber works by a white male composer in his 60's who has spent most of his career in academia? The only answer I will give to that is to say that as much as I demand more diverse voices in programming, isn't reducing people to their demographic part of the problem? Either way, this music is exquisite and deserves to be heard. "Dark Mountains" presents premiere recordings of seven chamber works written by Karchin between 2004 and 2017, in stunning sound and in brilliant performances by Jacqueline Leclair (oboe), Miranda Cuckson (violin) and Steven Beck (piano). Reading his liner notes is also worth the price of admission as he eloquently describes the two ends of his process, from being inspired by poetry or other artworks to collaborating closely with musicians to realize the sounds he's hearing in his head. And now that he's put these alternately tart and rhapsodic pieces out into the world, they are available to inspire others.

— Jeremy Shatan, 4.01.2019

[edited for length]

American composer Louis Karchin has written more than 90 pieces, appeared as conductor with several ensembles, and co-founded new music groups including the Chamber Players of the League-ISCM, the Orchestra of the League of Composers, the Washington Square Ensemble, and the Harvard Group for New Music. This CD spotlights his chamber music, most of it featuring young violinist Miranda Cuckson and some of it pianist Steven Beck.

Dreamscape opens with the oboe playing long-held notes over violin tremolos, then slowly moves into faster, somewhat edgier themes with a bitonal base. The music shifts tempi and moods back and forth, weaving a strange tapestry through the mind. Upper harmonics are used as thematic and development material and the music jumps around skittishly with frequent long pauses, yet always with some definite form behind it.

The Rhapsody for violin and piano also contains a skittish restlessness behind it; in terms of mood, it is, to my ears, much more like an active night of bad fairies than a rhapsody in the strict sense of the term, with dark-sounding piano chords leading the edgy, nervous-sounding violin, but good music nonetheless. When the piano gets his own solo, some of the edginess is mellowed, leading to soft, spaced-out chords, which also temporarily tames the violin. Then the tempo increases again, the violin plays rapid, serrated figures, and the harmony finally comes together in a tonal manner, though no less edgy and unsettled in mood before returning to bitonality. This frenetic “rhapsody” thus moves towards its conclusion, finally resolving itself once again in Eb major.

Prayer for solo violin is more lyrical than usual for Karchin, using a broad, rather slow melodic line written in his usual bitonal fashion. Cuckson plays this with particularly good phrasing and feeling, and to a certain extent this work slightly breaks the mold of the others. So, too, does Reflection, with which this recital ends. This work is primarily tonal and, in places, quite lovely in the modern sense, meaning emotion without sentimentality. Yet Karchin again gives the violinist widely-spaced intervals to play, albeit in slower tempi, and the interplay of violin and oboe is quite interesting, sometimes giving the lyric line to the reed instrument while the violin flutters above.

An interesting album, then, with some very fine pieces in it.

—© 2019 Lynn René Bayley

— Lynn René Bayley, 3.21.2019

In the liner note to Dark Mountains/Distant Lights, an album of seven new and recent compositions of his, Louis Karchin describes one of the pieces as having been inspired by lyric poetry’s capacity to convey the moods and emotional states of an individual sensibility. In fact many of the other works in the collection are lyrical not only in the sense Karchin describes, but also in the original sense of something meant to be sung. This should come as no surprise, given the substantial amount of vocal music, including the opera Jane Eyre, that Karchin has written.

The point of departure for Karchin’s musical vocabulary is the pitch-oriented serial and post-serial composition of the last century. His lines tend toward the complex and highly chromatic, and are characterized by sudden turns and staggering leaps and falls. This is the case for Rhapsody (2005/2011), a work for violin and piano that features a tonally convoluted, register-spanning violin line. Nevertheless, the line has a continuity and phrasing that recall the human voice, and it isn’t hard to imagine it as an aria for soprano. It’s a virtuoso piece breathtakingly played by violinist Miranda Cuckson and pianist Steven Beck.

In addition to her affecting performance on the austerely beautiful Prayer (2004) for solo violin, Cuckson has two duets with oboist Jacqueline Leclair: 2016’s Dreamscape, and 2017’s Reflections. Both are challenging works that integrate extended techniques—multiphonics for oboe, unorthodox bowings for violin—with more conventionally played, though still demanding, passages. Karchin’s decision to pair oboe and violin, whose timbres contrast in the lower registers but tend to converge in the upper registers, is inspired.

Lyrics II (2014)—the piece Karchin was referring to in the liner note—is a two-part composition for solo piano that does indeed evoke the dynamic arc of emotional cycles.

— Daniel Barbiero, 8.05.2019

The funny thing about some of these contemporary classical cats is that they can blossom in obscurity for years which is why it's so important for the right ones to get the largesse of grants and commissions. Compositions that range from 2004 to 2017, Karchin rounds up some of his usual suspects for some left leaning impressionistic tunes that aren't afraid to go where angels fear to tread. You may well draw your own conclusions as to what is being represented here, but the wheels never roll off and the scope of the playing is quite cinematic. Almost like listening to instrumental music that feels literary, this is a nice mind blower for the open eared looking for that new kick.

— Chris Spector, 3.26.2019

It is not only the young avant-garde, preoccupied with electronics and computers and with extending the range of familiar instruments, that seems less than focused on reaching out beyond a core audience. Highly experienced composers such as Louis Karchin (born 1951) seem to share much of the same temperament, even when using only traditional acoustic instruments. A recent New Focus Recordings release of Karchin’s chamber music includes seven works, two for oboe and violin and the others only for piano and/or violin. Again and again, though, Karchin seems to strive for something beyond music itself, seeking to turn notes into illustrative materials and giving performers a rationale – indeed, a requirement – to push themselves and their instruments beyond the sorts of sounds for which oboe, piano and violin were designed. There is nothing at all wrong with this and, indeed, nothing uncommon about it. But Karchin’s works on this CD, all written between 2004 and 2017, repeatedly hint that the composer could reach beyond a core group of listeners should he so choose – but he does not choose to do so. Thus, Dreamscape and Reflection, the two oboe-and-violin works, revel in violin harmonics and oboe techniques that draw attention to themselves – to how the notes are being played rather than to what they are trying to convey. The titles do not reflect anything particular about the works’ content – indeed, no title on this disc is especially descriptive. Rhapsody, for violin and piano, is certainly not rhapsodic, being jittery and rather scattered-sounding. Dark Mountains/Distant Lights, for solo violin, is insistently virtuosic without being in any way reflective of its titular visual inspiration. Prayer, also for solo violin, has little of the spiritual about it, being more concerned with the heights of the violin’s range than the heights of feeling to which spiritual belief is capable of raising people. The remaining works on the disc are for solo piano. Three Epigrams are epigrammatic enough, each lasting about three-and-a-half minutes, but are not at all reflective of their titles: “Celebration,” “Expressions,” and “Upheavals.” It is necessary to know the works’ inspiration to connect the music with the response it is supposed to provoke – to know, for instance, that “Expressions” is supposed to be a tribute to composer Luigi Nono, and to be familiar enough with Nono’s work to see how Karchin interprets and responds to it. Like so many other modern composers, Karchin insists that listeners do their homework if they are to comprehend his pieces properly; this imposes a kind of self-limitation on the music, since it is scarcely likely that listeners not already enamored of Karchin’s work will pre-invest their time in exploring its reasons for being. Lyrics II consists of two short movements that contrast comparatively slow and serious material with comparatively more-agitated music – without either movement ever delving into anything approaching poetic or sung lyrics or, for that matter, musical lyricism. Karchin’s music is clearly constructed with care: this composer knows what he wants performers to do and how he wants them to interact. But like so many other contemporary composers, Karchin seems much less concerned with what he wants from any potential audience – beyond a presumed group of listeners already familiar with and engaged by his music.

— Mark Estren, 12.11.2020