Beloved Chicago envelope-pushing quartet Third Coast Percussion celebrates 20 years with a characteristically adventurous album. Plus, suites by Tchaikovsky and Thomas Adès. Finally, get to know two unjustly overlooked women composers: Swede Elfrida Andrée and Brit Ruth Gipps.
New Releases Apr. 15: Suites, Unheralded Women, Third Coast Percussion
Third Coast Percussion (Photo: Saverio Truglia)
Third Coast Percussion’s 20th anniversary album celebrates ensemble’s legacy of musical collaboration and artistic growth since its founding in 2005. The program of world premiere recordings explores the passage of time, both through the eyes of percussionists charged with “keeping time” for an ensemble, and on the grander scale of time elapsed over decades. The album opens with Jlin’s Please Be Still, a piece inspired by the “Kyrie Eleison” movement of J.S. Bach’s Mass in B Minor. Tigran Hamasyan’s Sonata for Percussion is a three-movement work that bends and stretches time through the composer’s fantastically complicated rhythmic language. Zakir Hussain’s Murmurs in Time represents the late tabla master’s only composition for a classical percussion group. Jessie Montgomery’s Study No. 1 was originally composed for the Percussive Arts Society’s International Convention, where TCP’s real-time creative contributions made them a “musical laboratory” for the composer, yielding the first in their ongoing series of collaborative works. A second Montgomery work on the recording, her three-movement In Color Suite, emerged during workshops with TCP for her Study No. 1, where she used excerpts from various pre-existing works to experiment with percussion instruments, exploring timbral possibilities, and the blending of sonic colors.
Rumon Gamba’s exploration of the music of Ruth Gipps continues with these world premiere recordings of the Fifth Symphony, Violin Concerto, and Leviathan. Composed in 1943 and conceived for her elder brother, Bryan, the Violin Concerto is large in scale and shows remarkable assurance of touch for a twenty-two-year-old composer. Leviathan, for double-bassoon and orchestra, dates from the late 1960s, and demonstrates Gipps’s tremendous ability to write for wind instruments as well as her skills as an orchestrator, allowing the solo line to dominate despite its unusual tessitura. The Fifth Symphony, completed in 1982 and dedicated to William Walton, is written for large-scale forces: quadruple wind, six horns, two harps, and extensive percussion. The symphony’s final movement takes the form of a (wordless) Missa brevis for orchestra. Welsh violinist Charlie Lovell-Jones is soloist for the concerto.
Elfrida Andrée, the youngest daughter of a Swedish musical family, demonstrated early talent and at fourteen began studying organ in Stockholm. She became Sweden’s first female organist in 1857 at age sixteen and was later appointed Sweden’s first female cathedral organist. It would take 150 years before another woman would follow in her footsteps. She enjoyed remarkable success as a choir leader, teacher, conductor, and composer with a catalogue of approximately 120 works across a range of genres. In 1868, she took on the ambitious task of composing her Symphony No. 1 in C major, the first symphony written by a Nordic woman. In 1898, when the Royal Opera in Stockholm opened its new opera house, a competition was announced to encourage the creation of a new opera. Andrée’s entry was based on episodes from Frithiof’s Saga, one of Sweden’s most cherished poetic works. The opera was completed but was not successful, and fourteen years later the composer reworked the music into the orchestral suite recorded here.
Stanislav Kochanovsky began his new post as chief conductor of the NDR Radio Philharmonic in 2024. For his debut album leading the orchestra, he leads a program of music of nineteenth- and twentieth-century Russian music dear to his heart and training in St. Petersburg. The album’s centerpiece is Tchaikovsky’s Third Orchestral Suite, evocative of the composer’s melancholy Sleeping Beauty ballet and Symphony No. 5 in its opening movements and often excerpted for its last movement “Theme and Variations.” The most familiar work is Rimsky-Korsakov’s Capriccio espagnol, a flamboyant display of an orchestra’s palette of colors and timbres. Nikolay Tcherepnin, a student of Rimsky-Korsakov, composed the music to Edmond Rostand’s play La Princesse lointaine, the prelude of which is presented as the overture to the program.
London born composer, pianist, and conductor Thomas Adès is known for his extensive work with world’s leading orchestras, opera companies, and festivals. This album features performances of three of his operatic and ballet suites conducted by Adès himself. The Luxury Suite is adapted from the opera Powder Her Face and was premiered by the Berlin Philharmonic in 2018. Adès’s 1995 Powder Her Face charts the life of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, whose husband memorably divorced her on 88 counts of adultery. Five Spells from The Tempest, is an orchestral suite drawn from Adès’s 2003 opera based on Shakespeare’s play. Inferno Suite, based on Dante’s The Divine Comedy, was commissioned in 2019/20 by the Los Angeles Philharmonic and the Royal Ballet and centers on the protagonist’s journey through the fires of hell.
