ANNEA LOCKWOOD: In Our Name; Jitterbug; Thirst – David Behrman, John King, William Winant, Thomas Buckner, Theodore Mook, Simone Fattal, Kristin Norderval – New World Records 80729-2, 60:51 [Distr. by Albany] ****:
Those four stars are only if you are a fan of avant mixed media and musique concréte-type audio creations. Annea Lockwood puts together found and processed sounds of every sort and has an acute sense of timbre. She is known for her glass concerts in the 1960s and for her large-scale sound installations, such as A Sound Map of the Hudson River.
The one of the three selections after which the CD is titled, In Our Name, is a setting of three poems written by three of the terrorism suspects detained at Guantanamo. Some parts are sung by baritone Buckner and others intoned, accompanied by cello and taped sounds. Very moving and powerful. Jitterbug was commissioned by Merce Cunningham and is performed by three live musicians plus Lockwood’s own underwater recordings of aquatic insects and fish in small lakes. The performance is based on a graphic score of six images of patterned rocks from a creek bed in Montana.
Thirst mixes spoken memories of Lebanese sculptor Fattal about her family courtyard in Damascus with sounds recorded in NYC’s Grand Central Station and elsewhere. I usually skip musical recordings with a narrator, and did this one, I must admit. Jitterbug exists as a six-channel recording and Thirst is four channel, so why didn’t New World Records release this as a multichannel SACD? Only half of its income comes from sales of their actual CDs, so limiting perhaps slightly its sales (though it would still be playable as a CD) wouldn’t have made that much difference, and the works could then be heard properly.
—John Sunier
1933 Les chefs proscrits – Ernst Viebig, Conductor – Forgotten Records
A fine conductor, unfortunately suppressed by the vicious political climate of the ’30s
