Brad Mehldau: Formation (Book Review)

by Karl Nehring

Brad Mehldau: Formation: Building a Personal Canon, Part One. Equinox Publishing Ltd., Sheffield, UK/Bristol, CT. 2023. 293 pp.

 

The American pianist Brad Mehldau (b. 1970) is best known for his work in the jazz arena, perhaps most widely as the leader of his own trio, but also for his work with other prominent jazz musicians such as guitarist Pat Metheny and saxophonist Josh Redman. If you really want to hear some peak jazz Mehldau, a good place to start would be his “The Art of the Trio” albums from the 1990s, especially The Art of the Trio III – Songs, which is a captivating listening experience from start to finish, but very hard to find these days, alas, so you might try Vol. IV, Back at the Vanguard, which is also excellent. However, Mehldau’s musical interests are not restricted to jazz alone. For example, he has composed songs and performed recitals with classical singers such as Renee Fleming, Anne Sofie von Otter, and Ian Bostridge. Other examples of his wide musical interests and talents include an album titled Taming the Dragon, on which he plays a variety of electronic synthesizers while paired with drummer/percussionist Mark Giuliana, and an album in which he performs what is essentially a classical piano concerto of his own composition, accompanied by the Orpheus Chamber Orchestra. Our review of that album, titled Variations on a Melancholy Theme, can be found here. Among the other albums of his that we have reviewed previously are the classically-oriented After Bach II (reviewed here) and Après Fauré (reviewed here).

 

His aptly titled musical autobiography Formation: Building a Personal Canon, Part One offers a remarkably – at times shockingly – candid look at the forces and influences that shaped his musical and personal development. “Part One” signifies that in this volume, Mehldau covers how his personal musical canon came to be formed, or as he puts it in his preface, “how that process played out in tandem with my development as a jazz musician throughout the first twenty-six years of my life. In a second book that is underway, I will focus more directly on the canon itself.” Some of the personal details that Mehldau reveals are on the sordid side. As he explains, “there are detailed descriptions of drug and alcohol abuse in this book. I want to stress that although I describe the pleasure of using them, I hope I will have shown that they were a mistaken path, one that injured me and almost took my life. They are a part of my story. I do not know why I survived when close friends of mine did not. Perhaps because of this, I feel an obligation to tell that story honestly. Drugs and alcohol were painkillers which only caused more pain, and I want to underline: they offered no insights musically, in the least.” 

 

As a child, Mehldau of course enjoyed the rock music of the time – Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd, Rush, Billy Joel – from the latter came his interest in the piano. His first exposure to classical music were a couple of cassettes the family had of Rudolf Serkin playing Beethoven – the 4^th and 5^th Piano Concertos with Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra plus another with him playing the “Moonlight,” Pathétique,” and “Appassionata” Sonatas. Later, he would go on to take piano lessons for a teacher who would introduce him to the classical repertoire, beginning with Bach, Beethoven, and Chopin, then soon moving on to Mozart, Brahms, and Bartók. “Brahms was my favorite and Bach pissed me off then – it was just too damn hard. There was just no place to hide. I came around eventually to Bach and he still provides endless edification and nothing short of spiritual nourishment. Beethoven was and is the model for a paradoxical creature, one with a certain willful inspiration. Brahms gives solace and consolation. The three Bs as they’re called – I’m a happy member of that cliché.”

 

Although the book will doubtless appeal more to the jazz fan than to the classical fan, there is much in its pages to appeal to both. To those with an academic background, I would suggest that you might find his discussion of Adorno to be of interest. It’s a fascinating discussion, covering jazz, swing, Brahms, Beethoven, capitalism, totalitarianism, upbeat, downbeat, Black music… all in a few pithy pages. Mehldau gets worked up, Adorno gets skewered, and bebop lives.

If you’re a jazz fan, you really ought to check this book out. Or if you are a classical fan with at least some interest in jazz, well, you might want to give it a look. It’s fascinating story.

Adam Abeshouse: An Appreciation and Lament

by Karl Nehring

While preparing my recent review of Intermezzo, clarinetist Seunghee Lee’s traversal of music by the Italian composer Michele Mangani, I discovered in reading the liner notes that seven of the tracks were edited, mixed, and mastered by Adam Abeshouse. His is a name that I am always glad to see listed on an new release, for Abeshouse is a top-flight engineer; in fact, I have mentioned his name in some of my past reviews (such as this one), acknowledging his role in bringing satisfying sound into my listening room. Looking back through the Classical Candor archives, I can also find Abehouse’s name mentioned numerous times by John Puccio, acknowledging the engineer’s production values (you cans see some examples of John’s reviews here, here, and here).

Imagine, then, the shock and sadness I felt when I came across a link to an NPR story a few days ago about how a group of musicians -- including such well-known figures as Jeremy Denk, Joshua Bell, Garrick Ohlsson, and Simone Dinnerstein – had recently gathered to play for Abeshouse, who has been diagnosed with cancer and whose time on earth is drawing to a close. It is at once heartbreaking to learn of the plight of Mr. Abeshouse, yet at the same time it is heartwarming to witness the love and devotion these musicians have for their dear colleague and friend. 

We at Classical Candor wish to express our appreciation to Mr. Abeshouse for his outstanding service to music, musicians, and music listeners over these many years. We also want to express our lament and regret that his career – and his very life – has been cut short by this cruel, unexpected disease. We also wish to express our admiration and appreciation for those musicians who made the effort to show their love and appreciation for their beloved producer by gathering in his honor to play for him one final time. In the words of the late sage David Crosby, “everybody’s saying ‘music is love’…”

You can find the NPR story here.

Max Richter: In a Landscape (CD Review)

by Karl Nehring

They Will Shade Us With Their Wings; Life Study I; A Colour Field (Holocene); Life Study II; And Some Will Fall; Life Study III; The Poetry of Earth (Geophony); Life Study IV; Only Silent Words; Life Study V; Late and Soon;Life Study VI; Andante; Life Study VII; A time mirror (Biophony); Life Study VIII; Love Song (after JE); Life Study IX; Movement, Before All Flowers. Max Richter, electronics, piano, Hammond organ, electronic percussion; Eloisa-Fleur Thorn & Max Baillie, violins; Connie Pharoah, viola; Max Ruisi & Zara Hudson-Kazdaj, cellos; Martin Robertson & Paul Richards, bass clarinets; David Fuest, contrabass clarinet; Martin Williams & Graeme Blevins, tenor saxophones; Gemma Moore, baritone saxophone. Decca 587 5717 

 

In a Landscape is the ninth solo studio album by the German-born British composer and keyboard performer Max Richter (b. 1966). Our first review of a work by Richter appeared more than a decade ago, when Classical Candor’s founder John Puccio posted his review of Richter’s bold “recomposition” of Antonio Vivaldi’s Four Seasons (you can read John's review here). In 2022, Richter released another version of his Seasons recomposition, this time around one of the main differences being we have (other than Richter) musicians playing on gut strings and period instruments: the sort that Vivaldi would have heard and played in his own time. Also, this time around, Richter plays a vintage Moog analog synthesizer rather than the modern digital synth he had employed on the 2014 release (you can read our review here). Then a year later, we reviewed yet another recording of Richter’s Recomposed Four Seasons, this time performed not by Richter himself, but by the Los Angeles-based chamber ensemble Delirium Musicum. You can read our review of this delightful release, which also includes Philip Glass’s American Four Seasons, here.

 

Of course, there’s more to Max Richter’s music than his reimagining of Vivaldi’s greatest hit. One of his most highly publicized musical endeavors was Sleep, an 8-hour “lullaby for a frenetic world” to which listeners at the few liv performances were encouraged to bring cots, sleeping bags, blankets, etc. it is available as a 4-CD set, on an app, plus there is an abbreviated version, From Sleep, which is available on a soothing yet musically satisfying 1-hour CD (our review is available here). But Richter has not only been interested in making music to lull his listeners into states of quiet passivity; quite the opposite, in fact, as revealed by his releases Voices (reviewed here) and Voices 2 (to be found in this set of reviews) with their focus on human rights, plus his later Exiles, with its title composition inspired by a refugee crisis in Syria that involved many thousands of people fleeing for their lives under desperate circumstances (you can find that review here).

The music on In a Landscape is peaceful, introspective, but not somnolent. Richter says of the album that it is about “reconciling polarities, bringing together the electronic and the acoustic, the human and the natural world, the big questions of life and the quiet pleasures of living.” It’s his first solo album recorded at Studio Richter Mahr, the minimalist, eco-conscious creative retreat designed and operated by Richter and his wife, visual artist Yulia Mahr. “The whole building is like an instrument,” he says. “There's an element of exploring the capabilities of the building, how all the spaces sound, all the textures, and trying to discover the fingerprint it has.”

 

He kept the creative process decidedly minimal, writing the notation by hand and restricting the arrangements to just a few instruments: string quintet, grand piano, Hammond organ and MiniMoog, plus tape delays, vocoders, and reverbs. As you can see from the header above, the program comprises 20 tracks: ten musical pieces, which range in duration from 8:33 to 2:16, alternating with nine “Life Studies,” brief ambient field recordings that add an aura of intimacy to the proceedings. Richter’s music is relatively simple in structure, but rich in emotional resonance, capable of engaging both the head and heart of the listener. What’s more, the recorded sound is rich and full. My only quibble is the lack of meaningful liner notes. Other than that, In a Landscape is a meditative masterpiece.