‘Hoffnung’
Samuel Hasselhorn, baritone; Ammiel Bushakevitz, piano (Harmonia Mundi)
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For Franz Schubert, 1826 was a year of peaks and valleys. Financially challenged but gaining acclaim, veering between periods of extraordinary inspiration and fallow periods of writer’s block, he nevertheless wrote some of his loveliest — and most underrated — lieder, or art songs. See the gorgeously ambivalent “Alinde” or the sensitive “Im Freien,” which opens this album by the baritone Samuel Hasselhorn and the pianist Ammiel Bushakevitz.
This release is the third entry in a five-part series called “Schubert: 200,” a collection of Schubert’s lieder output, year by year, from 1823 to his death in 1828. “Hoffnung” (“Hope”) offers some gems, displaying Schubert at his most varied; brash drinking songs rub shoulders with melancholy musings, while hymnic declamations of German Romantic poetry follow Schubert’s only settings of Shakespeare. Hasselhorn and Bushakevitz bring out the tension and tenderness in equal measure, grounded by Hasselhorn’s warm, nuanced baritone. Schubert enthusiasts may still find some less-trodden ground here, but the interpretations transcend mere music-historical curiosity. And if these songs feel too much like deep cuts, next year’s project will return to a familiar favorite: 2027 is the bicentennial of “Winterreise.” We await in “Hoffnung.”
— Gabrielle Ferrari
‘Winged in Collapse’
Martyna Basta (7K)
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On Martyna Basta’s “Winged in Collapse,” intimacy and expansiveness exist in a single gesture. Delicious whispers entrap us: “I will always remember your hands, how they held me, until nothing else,” she hisses on “Hands Want To.” Then, with a flash of roomy strings, the moment is shattered. Basta squints at the lover right beneath her nose, then revulses, suddenly aware of her surroundings, and consumed by their expanse. Such pushes and pulls drive her quiet, absorbing creation.
Basta is a Polish composer and producer based in Krakow and releases on the Berlin-based imprint 7K — home to albums, like “Hymnal” by Alif Hilal (formerly known as Lyra Pramuk), that fray the edges of composition, sound art and chamber pop. There’s a composed sensibility to Basta’s work; occasional, Arvo Pärt-like string gleamings jump out of a noisier palette closer to Salvatore Sciarrino or Krzysztof Penderecki. Three vocal contributions (Adam Markiewicz’s steely falsetto, james K’s angelic haze and Rainy Miller’s poetry) guide the album into different timbral spaces altogether.
Basta has an uncanny ability to hold listeners in a form when few things are happening. But when a muffled backbeat arrives on final track, “Say It Closely,” it marks closure, release and acknowledgment: It’s exhausting being on the edge.
— Hugh Morris
Phillip Golub: ‘Partisan Ship’
(Berthold Records)
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Technically, this is a jazz album, given its robust swinging energy and its improvisatory flights. But already in Phillip Golub’s young career, his writing and keyboard playing have revealed compositional ambitions that transcend genre, as with the avant-Baroque flourishes he pursued as a harpsichordist and pianist on the 2024 recording “Abiding Memory.”
This time out, Golub is focused on microtonality. He slices the octave anew via a specially designed Flexichord that he also plays. And yet his buoyant motifs, often cellular in the way of early Minimalist ear worms, have warmth. (To wit: His scoring for wind, brass and string players is carefully considered, alongside his keyboard’s pitch arrangement.)
In Golub’s designs, there’s a delightful feel for his ensemble’s talents, even though some parts were recorded individually. Still, a collective sensibility is there during the buzzing frenzy you’ll find in “loyalty oath,” and also in the haunting melodic quality of “blue-orange reflections” (which features Layale Chaker on five-string violin). Personally, I’m looking forward to hearing Golub and his associates present this imaginative music together live, at an album release concert on July 7 at the restaurant Sisters in Brooklyn.
— Seth Colter Walls
Martinu: The Symphonies
Bamberg Symphony; Jakub Hrusa, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)
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What a breath of joy this recording is. The six symphonies of the Czech composer Bohuslav Martinu, all written in America between 1942 and 1953, show a compositional voice as distinct as any of his better-known peers: tonally inflected, rhythmically pointed and showing a deft command of orchestral texture. Light and air abound in Martinu’s sound, and if it has its share of conflict, it also largely eschews the deep political and personal angst (and orchestral bombast) that suffuses so much other wartime music.
The symphonies are also wonderfully multifaceted, despite Martinu’s clear fingerprints. The terse melodies and busy cross-rhythms in much of the First guide a listener one way, but the somber Largo knocks those expectations sideways. Similarly, the tumultuous Third seems bound to end in hard-won victory, but an unexpected dissipation of energy leads instead to a more equivocal conclusion. The Sixth exists in its own oblique atmosphere, worlds away from the crisp, clear timbres heard elsewhere; it’s as if, having spoken so clearly in earlier works, the composer was suddenly hesitant to reveal too much. All of it repays engaged listening, and Jakub Hrusa and his virtuosic orchestra are enthusiastic and committed guides.
— David Weininger
Prokofiev: ‘Peter and the Wolf’
Los Angeles Philharmonic; Viola Davis, narrator; Gustavo Dudamel, conductor (Deutsche Grammophon)
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Most listeners encounter “Peter and the Wolf” at an age too young to recognize what makes it so remarkable: neither the fable nor the pastoral charm, but the astonishing economy with which Prokofiev transforms orchestral color into characters. An oboe becomes a duck, a clarinet a cat, a bassoon a grandfather, three horns the wolf. The result is a master class in how timbre becomes the story.
This live recording, narrated by Viola Davis at the Hollywood Bowl, emerges as a souvenir of Dudamel’s tenure as music and artistic director of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, which ends this August. Under his baton, every instrument acquires an inner life and an uncommon depth, enriching the score’s familiar warmth with cooler, moodier shades. And yet it is Davis who binds these disparate colors into a coherent drama. She recites with the gravity of someone who understands that fairy tales are never entirely for children, without condescension, enabling the music to do what Prokofiev intended: assign personality to sounds — bright, exact and capable of expressing more than words. It’ll make you feel like a child again.
— Arya Roshanian
