Reviews

Billboard

Top 10 Artist

“Stirring. Lyrical. Passionate. Award-winning musician Bruce Wolosoff dove headlong into works of visual art that moved him, then he created equally adroit musical compositions to complement and augment them. The intersection of music and art is a mysterious one, but it has been laid bare by this contemporary classical, jazz and blues composer.…”

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Stirring. Lyrical. Passionate. Award-winning musician Bruce Wolosoff dove headlong into works of visual art that moved him, then he created equally adroit musical compositions to complement and augment them. The intersection of music and art is a mysterious one, but it has been laid bare by this contemporary classical, jazz and blues composer. Whether he’s capturing Eric Fischl’s impressionistic water-color male/female dancers in “The Loom”, or Milton Resnick modern art in “The Astronomer’s Key”, Wolosoff manages to stare into the matrix and see the woman in the red dress, then score her raw emotional story with his music. He brings the stark, lonely trees of April Gornik’s charcoal drawings on paper to life in the passionate piece “for April.” The Montage Music Society is superb bringing these works to life, balancing equal parts passion with delicacy and a light touch. A truly pianissimo Steinway and a cello that’s equal parts exuberant and joyful human voice are particularly noteworthy. If you like art and music, no, if you love art and music, “MORE MUSIC INSPIRED BY VISUAL ART: MUSIC OF BRUCE WOLOSOFF” is a must-listen.

L’eco di Bergamo

International Alfredo Piatti Cello Festival, Bergamo, Italy

MOSKOVITZ-AYERS Duo Breathless at Piatti Hall

“Cellist Moskovitz played with an overall expressive, beautiful sound, intense but never excessively passionate, with great attention to the musical line in his phrasing. At his side, pianist Ayers played securely and with skill, bringing to light a precise ability to accompany, even in the expressive moments…”

Gramophone

MONTAGE MUSIC SOCIETY Starry Night Project: Music Based on Visual Art

“Richly colored music inspired by some equally colorful art.…illuminating (Starry Night)…absolutely delicious (Seurat)…sumptuously lyrical (O’Keeffe)…purely joyous and exuberant (Gauguin)…”

“..an effective and natural unifying idea which musical organizations and concert presenters frequently use to inspire both their audience and themselves.”

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Starry Night Project
Montage Music Society (Bruce Creditor, cl; Sarita Uranovsky, vn; Stephen Dyball, va; Marc Moskovitz, vc; Debra Ayers, pf)
MSR Classics | MS1264 (63’)

Richly colored music inspired by some equally colorful art Although the Montage Music Society’s Starry Night Project is one of those scary-sounding not-for-profit projects that involve more logistical support than small naval skirmishes, any commissioning initiative that results in such lovely music written exclusively about works of visual art is its own justification. In fact, it’s an effective and natural unifying idea which musical organizations and concert presenters frequently use to inspire both their audience and themselves.

In this case, the featured paintings belong to prominent collections including New York’s Museum of Modern Art, Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, and the Art Institute of Chicago. Matthew Harris leads off the night with illuminating and perspective sketches based on paintings by Van Gogh, Rousseau, Picasso, Ensor, Matisse, Dali, and Mondrian, their brevity making this an excellent game for classical music parties.

Stephen Paulus contributes a beautiful adaptation for cello and piano of his rhapsodic, hypnotic song-cycle Art Suite, inspired by Bruegel, Degas, Seurat (absolutely delicious) and Larry Rivers. Libby Larsen’s “portrait” of six George O’Keeffe paintings are suitably ominous and spare, and every now and then sumptuously lyrical. Andrew Lists’s Noa Noa, inspired by a monumental tableau by Gaugin, is the most purely joyous and exuberant music on the program.

The recordings were made in 2008 at Merrimack College’s Rogers Center for the Arts in North Andover, Massachusetts. The sound is full of life and detail, just the way composers like it. The booklet-notes by the composers or collaborators is a historic document in itself.

—Laurence Vittes, December 2009
©Copyright 2009 Gramophone

Fanfare

STARRY NIGHT PROJECT • Montage Music Society

“Stylish…(the) playing is elegant …well conceived and presented… recommended for lovers of new chamber music who don’t necessarily prefer the avant-garde, and who like some programmatic spice.”

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STARRY NIGHT PROJECT • Montage Music Society • MSR 1264 (62:44)
HARRIS Starry Night. PAULUS Art Suite. LARSEN Black Birds, Red Hills. LIST Noa Noa: A Gaughin Tableau

This is a stylish concept album. All the pieces are inspired by specific paintings. Starry Night (1984), by Matthew Harris (b. 1956), provides the album’s title, and is a suite of seven pieces for piano trio based on paintings by Van Gogh (obviously), Rousseau, Picasso, Ensor, Matisse, Dali, and Mondrian. Harris has a real melodic gift and great wit. His take on Matisse’s “The Piano Lesson” is that it’s the lesson from hell; frantic arpeggios, metronomes, wrong notes stopping things cold. His “Broadway Boogie Woogie” (after Mondrian) is sneaky and funny. He also has a lyric gift, as in the way the Van Gogh movement opens up “cosmically” near the end, and the genuinely dark mystery that gets under your skin in James Ensor’s “Masks Confronting Death.” Harris, taking something of a cue, perhaps, from the historical window of his source paintings, tends to use a harmonic language that I’d call French Chromatic. I was reminded of both Fauré and the Stravinsky of Firebird.

Stephen Paulus (b. 1949), in his 1999 Art Suite for cello and piano, leans much more towards Debussy as a modwel. Indeed, at times I thought I was hearing a second Debussy cello sonata, except that there’s no obvious plagiarism involved, just a reanimation of the spirit. The work is a free reworking of a song cycle (the original song texts are given in the booklet), and it does have a free-flowing lyricism that suggests that earlier incarnation.

Libby Larsen (b. 1950) presents a trio for clarinet, viola, and piano, Black Birds, Red Hills (1996), which is based on paintings of Georgia O’Keefe (though one truly strange detail is that the title clearly says six paintings, and there are only five movements). I like this composer’s music very much, but this work seems a little faceless to me—though perhaps that may be a mark of originality, in that I didn’t detect as much of antecedent voices and practices as I did in the other works.

Andrew List (b. 1956) was commissioned by Montage to write his Noa Noa: A Gauguin Tableau (2008) for a quintet of clarinet, string trio, and piano. This is a three-movement work depicting different aspects of Gauguin’s monumental eponymous painting. I found the first two movements not as compelling as I’d like, but the final one (which is longer than the other two combined) projects a deep serenity and beauty. Again, there’s a ghost in the score, this time Ravel, in particular the composer of such works as the Duo, Piano Trio, and Chansons madécasses (again not surprising, considering the tropical associations of both those texts and the painting).

The Montage Music Society is a collective of five musicians: Sarita Uranovsky, violin; Marc Moskovitz, cello; Stephen Dyball, viola; Bruce Creditor, clarinet; and Debra Ayers, piano. Their playing is elegant and scrupulous throughout, and they make these newer pieces sound like the repertoire I suspect they’d like them to be. The whole project, in its multidisciplinary approach, is very well conceived and presented: many of the paintings are included in full color reproductions in the booklet. I admit that while I find all the music superbly crafted and full of genuine expressive intent, much of it sounds “second-hand” to me, perhaps both because the languages used are already quite familiar and because all the pieces are playing off another pre-existent source (but of course that’s the point). I think for my money the best and most personal balance between all these constraints is achieved by Harris. But all the music is good enough that different listeners will, I suspect, have different favorites.

Lawrence Vittes, January–February 2010

Fanfare

STARRY NIGHT PROJECT • Montage Music Society

“…consistently excellent music that can easily stand on its own without reference to the artworks that presumably inspired it…Harris’s Starry Night suite and Andrew List’s Gauguin-inspired Noa Noa, constitute some of the finest chamber music of recent vintage I know… Performances are top-notch, especially the focused expressiveness of cellist Marc Moskovitz. The recording… deserves special mention for its exceptional clarity, perfect balance, and natural sound environment…”

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STARRY NIGHT PROJECT • Montage Music Society • MSR 1264 (62:44)
HARRIS Starry Night. PAULUS Art Suite. LARSEN Black Birds, Red Hills. LIST Noa Noa: A Gaughin Tableau

At last! A program devoted intentionally and exclusively to the relationship between music and art. Yes, there are countless CDs of Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition as well as recordings of numerous other compositions inspired by art like Rachmaninoff’s Isle of the Dead (after a painting by Böcklin), Schuller’s Seven Studies on Themes of Paul Klee, Respighi’s Botticelli Triptych, Herrmann’s Currier and Ives Suite, and Martin’s Fresques de Piero della Francesca. But until now, if there has been a full program on CD that specifically addresses this fascinating relationship, it has eluded me.

An intimate relationship between music and the visual arts has existed ever since the first cave man scrawled an image of a drum on a rock wall. Down through history, countless works of art have focused on or included musical instruments. Assyrian bas-reliefs featured harpists. Greek vase paintings often showed the kithara and the aulos. Fra Angelico depicted choirs of angels, Vermeer favored the virginal, Chagall the violin, Picasso the guitar, and Dufy the orchestra.

Any number of famous composers have also doubled as artists, some of them quite good: Mendelssohn was a talented draftsman and watercolorist; Weber was a painter; he even referred to himself as a Tonkünstler (tone-artist) to distinguish himself from Beethoven, a Tondichter (tone-poet); Schoenberg seriously pursued a career in painting as a young man; Gershwin, too, was a respectable painter. Turning the tables, we note that Georges Braque was also a flutist and violinist, and Kandinsky was a cellist and pianist. Adolf Hölzel, Odilon Redon, Delacroix, Matisse, and Paul Klee were all violinists. Matisse practiced every day until he was 50 before going to his easel. And then there is the case of the Lithuanian Mikalojus Konstantinas Ciurlionis, who was equal parts composer and artist. He created about 300 paintings in addition to his numerous musical compositions, which included symphonic poems, choral works, and piano pieces.

As you may well have surmised by now, this subject has been of keen interest to me over quite some time, and I was expecting much from the intriguing program put together by the Boston-based Montage Music Society. Perhaps too much. The degree of equivalency perceived between a painting and its musically inspired counterpart is of course highly subjective, but try as I might, I could not detect much relationship between most of the 18 paintings invoked (every one a famous masterpiece) and the music they supposedly inspired, either in tension, balance, form, color, texture, or mood—all areas of possible commonality.

First up on the program is Matthew Harris’s Starry Night (1984), also the subject of the first of his seven musical portraits for piano trio. Van Gogh’s iconic painting is a striking, even violent exhibition of blazing stars, swirling clouds, highly energized movement, and intense color. Harris’s music for piano trio is nothing like this. It consists of a series of separate fragments, a few of them gently suggestive of swirling stardust but not at all like the continuous series of powerful images in the painting. The music to Rousseau’s Sleeping Gypsy contains far too much activity to evoke the nocturnal aura and sense of mystery that infuses the painting. Picasso’s Harlequin is full of whimsy and playfulness but it also contains a streak of violence, a quality not usually associated with this character. Matisse’s Piano Lesson is replete with Czerny exercises, scales, and hands being slapped for mistakes, all accompanied by an implacable metronome. It’s a riot, but it’s hardly Matisse’s inscrutable lesson with its juxtaposed color planes and strangely interacting lines of curves and angles.

More successful is the treatment of James Ensor’s Masks Confronting Death, a gruesome, eerie canvas to be sure, though painted in bright pastels, not the dusky, murky colors Harris uses. Dali’s Persistence of Memory vaguely evokes a haunted dreamscape and Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie is appropriately quirky and jazzy, though again, the squares, angles, and motion of the painting are not in Harris. And so it goes also with Stephen Paulus’s Art Suite (1999) to paintings of Breughel (The Kermesse), Degas (Dancer), Seurat (A Sunday at the Grand Jatte), and Rivers (Washington Crossing the Delaware); and with Libby Larsen’s Black Birds, Red Hills (paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe) for clarinet, viola, and piano.

Am I being too harsh here? I think not. Montage Music Society’s professed goal is to produce a “multi-disciplinary initiative that features music of prominent, living American composers written exclusively about works of visual art.” A key component of the project is the connection of ear to eye, eye to ear; thereby encouraging the audience to observe, notice, and gain more appreciation and understanding for the respective art forms. In this respect, I fear, they have mostly failed.

On the other hand, and more importantly, they have succeeded in offering us a program of consistently excellent music that can easily stand on its own without reference to the artworks that presumably inspired it. Both Harris’s Starry Night suite and Andrew List”s Gauguin-inspired Noa Noa, in fact, constitute some of the finest chamber music of recent vintage I know. Each of Harris’s seven, three-to-four minute movements is well crafted, exudes character, and stimulates the imagination. Noa Noa by Boston-based composer List was commissioned especially for Montage Music Society. Scored for piano, clarinet, and violin, it combines the lush textures redolent of a tropical landscape with the neoclassical scoring of a Ravel with the vibrant colors of Gauguin to create a work to which I will surely return often. In some intangible way, List has captured the essence of Gauguin’s grand tableau Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? to a greater extent than any other composer on this program, save perhaps a couple of Harris’s interpretations. And I can’t imagine any cellist turning his or her back on the intense, flowing lyricism and the delightful rhythms of Paulus’s Art Suite for cello and piano. All four composers have created felicitous blends of the instruments at hand in music that reflects more the world of Walter Piston and Roy Harris than that of any avant-gardist (all works on this program date from 1984 onward). Performances are top-notch, especially the focused expressiveness of cellist Marc Moskovitz. The recording, made at Merrimack College in North Andover, Mass., deserves special mention for its exceptional clarity, perfect balance, and natural sound environment (no clanky piano, no squealy clarinet, no wiry violin).

Eight paintings are beautifully reproduced in the inlay booklet. The program notes attempt to steer the listener in the right direction but not very successfully. Skip the paintings and the notes and just listen to these pieces as pure music. You won’t be disappointed.

—Robert Markow, April 2010

MusicWeb International

“Technically and emotionally, the performance is perfect.”

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MONTAGE MUSIC SOCIETY Starry Night Project: Music Based on Visual Art

Sight and hearing meet in one’s mind. Parallel input from the eyes and the ears, when carefully prepared, may result in much more than the sum of its parts. Ballet and opera explore one possible way to combine the visual and the audio. But why not set music to a picture? That’s what the Starry Night Project is about. It presents music of contemporary American composers, written about paintings. Most of the color reproductions (regrettably, not all) are printed in the booklet in good quality, so you can enjoy the compete experience; for the rest, you have your memory - and Google!

The four sets by four composers are diverse and attractive. The disc opens with the Starry Night suite by Matthew Harris, for violin, cello and piano. The mood of Vincent van Gogh’s Starry Night is marvelously conveyed in the opening piece. As the composer says in the sleeve notes, “The piano and the violin create the dizzy, swirling sky of oversized stars while a plaintive cello melody reveals the painting’s inner torment”. And believe me, he does not only say it: he really means it. This is Music, not just an illustration to a picture! Without a break we move to the Sleeping Gypsy by Henry Rousseau (le Customs Guy). Still rather impressionistic, the piece reflects the picture’s naive style and dark, mystic color palette. This night is calm, without van Gogh’s distress.

The 20th century rushes in with Picasso’s Harlequin. The music is built of simple blocks, just like the cubist picture. Still, it does not describe the painting - but the character, with his unhinged movements, careless laughter and, hidden inside, a thoughtful, observing soul. It’s like Mussorgsky’s Gnomus, which adds dimensions to a simple drawing by Hartmann. The next picture is Ensor’s Masks Confronting Death. The horrid, grotesque Venetian masks attempt to scare the Death itself; and, I daresay, in the music they probably succeed. At least, if I were Death I would run away. It becomes really creepy towards the end.

But some of us may remember the next thing as the scariest ever: The Piano Lesson, to a painting by Matisse. Especially when the teacher scorns and corrects you after every your fault, as he does here! This is a tiny genre scene - like the Limoges Market, if we continue the Mussorgsky analogy. It must be difficult to add something to Dalí’s Persistence of Memory: it has so many layers already. This could be a task for a large-scale work; in three minutes we get one slice, one impression. Somehow, it matches well with the persistence, the memory, and the limp clocks. There are waves, ticking clocks, recurrent motifs, and liquid, melting transformations. It could be a nice idea to play it in the background at some Dalí exhibit.

Finally, Mondrian’s Broadway Boogie Woogie brings us to the crowds and dancing lights of Times Square. Suddenly we look up - and see the starry sky from the first movement: a nice touch to unify the cycle. As a whole, the suite is well conceived and executed, the composer is not afraid to go further and deeper than the image on the painting. And, what is important, he does it differently each time, so it does not become boring. The three instruments are used smartly, like three actors changing their masks to play many roles. I enjoyed this set immensely.

Stephen Paulus has adapted his vocal cycle Art Songs to cello and piano and called it Art Suite. The texts are in the booklet, so you can easily match them to the music. The first tableau is Brueghel’s peasant dance at a fair (The Kermess), and the music is a swirl, with clamping and stomping, but staying in one plane - maybe because of its origin as a song. Degas’ Dancer comes next - actually, slides in like Saint-Saéns Swan. The dance (or exercise?) becomes more energetic, and we enter a Grande Valse, which ends up in a few wide gestures and a graceful cool-down. The music is humorous, as is the underlying poem.

Seurat’s Grande Jatte is a long monologue of the cello over the impressionistic glittering of the piano. It is a lazy idyll, reflecting the sunny calmness of the painting. The cycle is closed by River’s Washington Crossing the Delaware: appropriately heroic. Apart from the Seurat piece, which definitely has musical value on its own, the parts of the suite seem to be derivatives of the paintings, and don’t really open new horizons. More or less, they are art-songs without the text being sung, and this is very much being felt. The text could give different meaning to lines; without it they are monotonous.

There is no impressionism in Libby Larsen’s Black Birds, Red Hills, with a subtitle A Portrait of Six Paintings of Georgia O’Keeffe. The parts here are better viewed together as a whole. In contrast to other works on this disc, here the paintings were created during the composer’s lifetime. Accordingly, the musical style is drier, sparser, its lyricism is simple - just as Georgia O’Keeffe sang the beauty of a single line, a pure color, a small and simple object. It seems fitting that the creator of such paintings as Blue and Green Music herself rouses musical inspiration. Although there are remarkable moments, the work as a whole is not as memorable as other works on the disc. Georgia O’Keeffe’s are has its king of magic. The music does not rise to these heights, but it goes in the right direction, and sets the mood which is really close to the mood created when contemplating O’Keeffe’s artwork. Simple, serene. pure.

The work that ends the disc - or, I better say, crowns it - is Andrew List’s Noa Noa: A Gauguin Tableau for violin, clarinet and piano. The three eternal questions of Gauguin’s picture - Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? - are interpreted by the composer “as representing three facets of human consciousness”. I hope the Mahlerites won’t kill me if I describe the parts as “What the body tells me” (aggressive, determined, forceful - our Past), “What the mind tells me” (ever-changing, fluent, searching - our Present), and “What the soul tells me” (spiritual, peaceful, and blissfully beautiful - hopefully, our Future). This last movement is sublime. It also serves as an answer to the unsettling questions of the first track, the Starry Night by Gauguin’s friend van Gogh. If you know these moments when the music ends and you stay in silent awe and then exhale “Aaah!..” - this is one of them.

I cannot imagine a better performance of these works than by the MONTAGE ensemble members. They seem to blow life into every note. Technically and emotionally, the performance is perfect. The recording quality is very good. The booklet is excellently done: the composers themselves supplied revealing notes about the works, and the reproductions are high quality. In my opinion, the works by Harris and List stand head above the rest - but the entire disc is like a modern “Pictures at an Exhibition”: a wonderful, unforgettable journey.

—Oleg Ledeniov

American Record Guide

MONTAGE MUSIC SOCIETY Starry Night Project: Music Based on Visual Art

“this whole program has a feeling of quiet grandeur about it that is quite moving…this is beautifully played and recorded”

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MONTAGE MUSIC SOCIETY Starry Night Project: Music Based on Visual Art

“Music Based on Visual Art” is the subtitle of this release. The program is made up of chamber pieces that describe specific art works, some of which, though not all, are portrayed in the liner. All four composers were born in six years, 1949-1956, giving the program a further unity.

It begins with Matthew Harris’s seven-movement suite for piano trio written in 1984 portraying paintings by Van Gogh, Rousseau, Picasso, Ensor, Matisse, Dali, and Mondrian. It is a fine expressive work lasting 21 minutes. This is followed by Stephen Paulus, whose four movement suite is for cello and piano and gives us Breughel, Degas, Seurat, and Larry Rivers. There is a considerable text with poetry accompanying this suite. Then we have a particularly lively depiction of five paintings by Georgia O’Keeffe written in 1996 by Libby Larsen for clarinet, viola, and piano. Finally comes Andrew List with another trio for clarinet, violin, and piano describing in three movements a Gauguin mural titled Where do we come from? What are we? Where are we going? This is another extended work of great beauty.

In fact, this whole program has a feeling of quiet grandeur about it that is quite moving. It seems a fine excuse to put together a program, reminding me of a solo cello suite I play by Robert Muczynski called Gallery, describing seven pictures by Charles Burchfield. Then there’s another piece that describes poems by North Carolina poet laureate Kay Stripling Byer, written by Harold Schiffman. The connection between the arts is stronger than we think. This is beautifully played and recorded as well.

D. Moore, November/December 2009

Santa Fe New Mexican

MONTAGE MUSIC SOCIETY Starry Night Project: Music Based on Visual Art

“players of taste and insight”

“unusual and highly recommended disc”

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MONTAGE MUSIC SOCIETY Starry Night Project: Music Based on Visual Art

The Boston-based Montage Music Society is a five-member ensemble comprising a violinist, violist, cellist, and clarinetist plus pianist Debra Ayers, who often performs with Serenata of Santa Fe and Taos Chamber Music Group. This recording shows that the MSS musicians are players of taste and insight as well as good technicians and eager to take on unusual and even conceptual repertoire, not just standards.

The four works on the CD, all by living American composers, were inspired by works of visual art. Matthew Harris’ 1984 Starry Night presents sonic pictures for piano trio of paintings by Van Gogh, Rouusseau, Picasso, Ensor, Matisse, Dali, and Mondrian. Stephen Paulus’ 1999 Art Suite for cello and piano, adapted from a song cycle, interprets famous art by Breughel, Degas, Seurat, and Larry Rivers. Libby Larsen’s 1996 Black Bird, Red Hills is a study for clarinet, viola, and piano of six works by Georgia O’Keeffe, while Andrew List’s 2008 Noa Noa, is, as its subtitle makes clear, ”A Gauguin Tableau” for clarinet trio. All the performances are solid and energetic, even eager, and all serve the pieces well. Not all the compositions are of equal caliber: the Harris and List are creatively far above the Larsen, while the Paulus is at the top of the mountain. The recorded sound is immediate and clear on this unusual and highly recommended disc.

Craig Smith

Washington Post

Montage Gives New Life To Zemlinsky’s Cello Sonata

“an impassioned performance”

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Montage Gives New Life To Zemlinsky’s Cello Sonata
October 19, 2006

If one piece of music could bring post-romantic composer Alexander Zemlinsky out of obscurity, it would be his Cello Sonata, which recently resurfaced and received its North American premiere on Wednesday at the Library of Congress. Cellist Marc Moskovitz, a self-described Zemlinsky buff, and pianist Debra Ayers, both part of Boston-based Montage Music Society, gave the piece an impassioned performance.

Ayers was agile and confident, her part often more interesting and intricate than the cello’s. Moskovitz reveled in the glorious sound of the library’s precious Stradivarius. There wasn’t any real virtuosic material in the sonata -- nothing that would make you say “wow.” But the beautiful melodies, highly romantic style and solidness of the composition made me believe that it will immediately become part of the core cello repertoire.

The remainder of the program centered on texts by German poet Richard Dehmel. A set of five songs by Zemlinsky foreshadowed jazz, using chords reminiscent of Claude Debussy. While Zemlinsky’s accompaniment was quite simple and straightforward, the mood of each of the songs by his contemporary Arnold Schoenberg was adroitly set by the piano. Soprano Janna Baty conveyed Dehmel’s pathos well with her earthy, dusky timbre, though her big sound and overly wide vibrato would have been more appropriate for a much larger concert space.

Though there is no vocal part, Schoenberg’s best-known work, “Verklarte Nacht (Transfigured Night),” is also based on a poem by Dehmel. The original string sextet version can be breathtakingly ethereal, but Montage’s choice of an arrangement for piano trio, along with unsteady intonation by violinist Sarita Uranovsky, made for an experience that was far from magical.

— Gail Wein