This is the exciting debut recording on Centrediscs of the music of Canadian composer Brian Current. Featuring a selection of his orchestral works written between the years 2000 and 2006, and as Evan Ware’s introductory note says “this disc is filled with music that has direction, music that has much to say, music that should be listened to...music that will stay with you long after the sound has faded.”

Brian Current (1972 –)

At any given moment in time there are challenges peculiar to it that make being a composer a difficult proposition. I don’t mean the financial and physical trials of writing music which are already well known and probably eternal. I mean the mental trials, the aesthetic trials… the personal trials. Forty years ago a composer had to choose between utter conformity to the narrow strictures of the avant-garde, or face repudiation. These days the problem is reversed: the composer is faced with a myriad different compositional possibilities without the sort of framework that the previous generation had. Creating a unified style in this setting is a serious and difficult undertaking that can only occur in the hands of composers who respect their responsibility towards their works’ unity of expression. One composer who exemplifies this responsibility is Brian Current. There is little music out there that achieves such an incredible synthesis of the last sixty years as his does. On this CD and you will find all the trappings of the avant-garde: squeaks, screeches, dense clusters, aleatoric passages, unusual bowings, quarter tones, and inscrutable musical atmospheres. But you will also find towering major chords, waves of sound passing stereophonically across the orchestra, octaves grounding the music with a sense of arrival, unstable tempi that speed up and slow down so constantly that the state of change feels normal (a technique Brian refers to as “slanted time”). But most importantly, you will find a deep human quality that binds all of these disparities together in some of the most exhilarating music being written in Canada today. Nothing here is done for blandly intellectual reasons or simply for getting a rise out of the listener. Brian constructs his works on all sorts of levels simultaneously, reflecting a lively and active intellect, a commensurate knowledge of compositional craft, a strong sensitivity for being alive, and the will to write boldly about it. The five recordings gathered on this disc are representative of these realities. From impetuous and audacious beginnings in This Isn’t Silence and For the Time Being, through the more delicate and subtle Concertino, to the profoundly existential Kazabazua, to the apotheosis of his technique in Symphonies in Slanted Time, this disc is filled with music that has direction, music that has much to say, music that should be listened to… music that will stay with you long after the sound has faded.

This Isn’t Silence

The piece begins with sharp cries of pain heard over aggressive percussive attacks; this isn’t silence, this is total panic. A long downward glissando coupled with rapid chromatic runs ushers in the first breath, a resounding C# minor chord. After this chord decays, the music transits to a slowing arpeggio. An E minor chord begins building in the strings. It is, at first, a simple statement in eighth notes that slows down. There is a rest, then a second statement, both accelerating at the outset, while the chord expands to a fill a greater register, then decelerating as it finishes. There is another rest. Then the orchestra lets loose, careening inexorably from one expansion of the chord to another, always louder, always pushing or pulling the pulse, always reaching higher and diving lower until it breaks into a development section. The music weaves between styles - Copeland-esque fiddling, marches, fanfares – out of which that imposing E minor chord ultimately crystallizes again. As previously, the chord expands and contracts with growing intensity and wilder changes in tempo. The woodwinds break off into chaotic overlapping material while the orchestra hammers with increasing urgency until the music splits apart into an orchestra-wide unhinging. The chaos is gradually absorbed into rapid string runs that slow down, losing their identity almost completely and disappear into a gently changing chord that settles, finally, on a very quiet D major.

For the Time Being

The work opens with a central yet mercurial gesture: all strings except the basses play an alternating figure consisting of a glissando that enlarges asymmetrically. As the gesture accelerates, the chord grows, as it slows down, the chord recedes. The gesture is repeated several times as the music builds to a climactic quarter-tone trumpet solo before fading.

The middle section features a similar gesture as the opening, which quickly fizzles, leaving the solo trumpet. The orchestra intervenes in increasingly raucous versions of the piece’s beginning, which lead to a frenetic ‘concertino for trombone’, which glissandos up to a high D as the orchestra lets out a rich Db major chord. A series of similar chords dismantle themselves into dense chromatic runs before reconstituting themselves again. The contrast of resonance and interference becomes the driving force of the music.

An offbeat figure played quietly and intensely accelerates to a stable tempo in the third section. A conga solo provides dramatic attacks amid the syncopated pulse of the orchestra. The trombone enters in a reprise of its concertino role, practically screaming over the congas. This motif gets taken up by the rest of the orchestra at which point it becomes obvious that it is also the opening gesture of the piece. We are, quite unexpectedly, in a coda, a miniature recapitulation of the first section which runs through its salient features in a mere 12 measures. After a brief pause, a wave of sound accompanying the tortured distant cries of the trumpet fades into the quiet; a shiver at the edge of nothingness.

Concertino

In the precipitous rush of notes that begin this piece, swirling among the sonorities of the three offstage flutes, there is a sense of bewilderment, a loss of footing. This sounds like Ravel or Debussy! But it’s isn’t exactly them either. It is almost identifiable; a well known piece from yesteryear. But it isn’t that piece. It’s like a moment that never occurred, a memory never lived… The rush of notes rapidly collapses into a gallant, almost stately gallop in slanted time by pizzicato violins and the solo flute. Incredibly, the fragile sense of recollection persists in this crystalline dance that, just like a memory, seems tangible but diaphanous, constantly on the brink of oblivion.

The music flows in and out of time, sweetened by honeyed anachronisms. A mini recapitulation of the opening material is later heard over a gradually evolving cushion of tremolos in the offstage flutes. The soloist, now on piccolo, plays an expanded version of the original flute material: the two note gallop is now a full blown arpeggiated figure that decays into fragments, and finally, through two mini-cadenzas, a single held note. As the strings drop out of a held cluster one by one and the soloist holds his last note as long as possible; the offstage flutes end the piece in a confusion of sound that dispels the gentle memory we have just listened to.

Kazabazua

In Kazabazua (Kaja-BAjua, Algonquin for “disappearing waters,” also a town north of Ottawa in Western Québec under which a river runs) moments hold, gurgle, and vanish into silence. There is a feeling of nature, of space, of night. Indeed, this sounds like night music. The opening percussion is like a trickle that is joined by tributaries of sound to become a delicately-rushing downward gesture. It eddies, disappears, and returns, ending the section on a series of slowly changing unisons.

The middle section opens with gentle textural accelerations. Notes downstream become indistinguishable from held tones; the fastest notes reaching the slowest. A loud timpani roll heralds the main idea of the piece, latent up until now, a rising scale figure. The scale is repeated, reworked, and is eventually absorbed by another wave of acceleration. And so the ideas continue, one after the other: the brass playing the scale in halting shots, cadences that melt away into motivic fragments, winds picking up the pieces and making a gentle flow of them while strings play eerie clusters underneath. As each moment sees the light of day so it fades out of existence. Everything is ephemeral; everything is being reborn.

The last section is, in a sense, a microcosm of the whole work. Waves of musical ideas pass stereophonically through the strings sometimes rising, sometimes falling, sometimes changing directions in mid-motion. All are present for only a moment before they are washed away. These broad gestures lead to an octave Eb and the final rush of the piece, the last wave, a textural acceleration which coalesces into a single concerted acceleration across the whole orchestra.

Symphonies in Slanted Time

Symphonies opens almost as an afterthought of Kazabazua. We are back in night music: crystal glasses hold an eerie D over which the piano and harp exchange rapid trickling figures. The brass ignite this calm, and explode into an opening fanfare of overlapping speeds. Once it fades, the woodwinds begin an accelerating triplet figure and the strings play an aggressively punched-out series of harmonics in an upward scale. After a descending fanfare in the brass that falls to the lower register, the harp plays a low D, like a bell tolling, closing the opening section.

But the piece seems to open again with a subdued and ethereal version of the rising scale motif. The music wanders to remote places, and all the while the imposing fanfare from the opening of the work lurks in several guises. It rasps in between episodes, it shrieks in the middle of ideas, it tears textures apart and sputters out like a daemonic machine. Towards the end of the piece, it rises out of the ensemble in a heroic and resonant brass chorale and accelerates into oblivion only to return once more before the strings take it and erupt into overlapping scales. As these get more animated, the brass ignite the ensemble once more with the incandescence of a held D, just like the beginning of the piece, before everyone explodes into a commanding version of the fanfare.

- Evan Ware