Meridian Arts Ensemble is a standard brass quintet with an added drummer. The group favors hard-driven, aggressive new music, frequently representing the “downtown” school of New York composers. Meridian has made eight recordings on Channel Classics. All those I’ve heard are well worth owning. Meridian’s releases have tended to be albums of short modern pieces with arrangements of avant-garde rock. (Frank Zappa is the composer most often represented on their discs.) For this release, however, Meridian commissioned three larger-scale works, aiming to gain extended compositions for the group’s repertoire. On all of its discs Meridian has displayed a talent for discovering nuggets of good music amid much modernist dross. Happily, this trend continues here: all three works, while modern and dissonant, are well-made and exciting. Stylistically, they tend to remain tonal yet sometimes jump over the line into atonality with extensive use of progressive jazz/rock rhythms.
David Sanford’s Corpus is a six-movement piece just shy of 20 minutes long. It is structured on an underlying chorale theme using a blues-oriented tonal harmonic structure in a free jazz style. The percussionist in some places improvises to “embellish and extend relating riffs,” to quote Sanford’s notes. Elliott Sharp’s commentary provides little concrete information about his one-movement work Beyond the Curve. It is relatively more introspective than the other two works, and seems to have faint whispers of electronic sound in the texture. (These might, however, be cunning imitations played by the instruments.)
Nick Didkovsky says less about his piece Slim in Beaten Dreamers than he does about the “JMSL” computer composition program that he co-authored. The piece, the first substantial composition produced with JMSL, is a stunner, with a sense of freedom that perhaps derives from JMSL’s ability to transcribe improvisation. The odd title and those of all of the work’s 15 movements are anagrams of each other. The many movements coalesce into a compelling structure that charges ahead with exhilarating energy.
Channel Classics is one of the best of several small labels that continue to trump the so-called “major” classical labels in all important aspects: artist development, imaginative repertoire choices, and clean, powerful sound. It’s difficult to imagine any other company better suited to ideally exploit the multilayered aspects of the Meridian’s individual technical skills and precision ensemble. All of this is presented in multi-channel SACD that is as brilliant and natural as you will hear anywhere. If you have an interest in good new music, I recommend this release highly; if you are a brass fanatic, the disc is mandatory. (By the way, “Brink” is the name of the pedestrian square in Deventer, Netherlands, on which the recording venue is located.) [9/27/2006]
