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WINNER OF TEN INTERNATIONAL MUSIC AWARDS

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Best Classical Music Recording
ONE EARTH AWARDS

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NEW YORK CONCERT REVIEW

Douglas Knehans – Cloud Ossuary in Review

Douglas Knehans, composer; Brno Philharmonic Orchestra, Mikel Toms, conductor;

Pavel Wallinger, violin; Judith Weusten, soprano; Katarina Knehans, text

Ablaze Records AR-00062

A stunning new recording of orchestral music by Douglas Knehans (b. 1957) found its way to me this weekend, and one can safely say that I will be rehearing it (and other works) by this extraordinary composer. Quite a lot of music finds its way to my desk (frankly, much of it not so memorable), so perhaps amid the clutter and noise one may be forgiven for never having heard anything by Mr. Knehans until now, despite his formidable credentials. Those credentials include flurries of performances by prominent ensembles and artists (Opera Australia, Melbourne Symphony, Susan Narucki, James Tocco, Awadaggin Pratt, and Gareth Davies, to name a few) and extravagant praise from the press (Audiophile, BBC Magazine, and The New Yorker), plus a profusion of awards and academic distinctions too many to name here. His educational credentials (Australian National University, Queens College – CUNY, and Yale University), have included scholarship studies with noted composer/teachers Thea Musgrave, Lukas Foss, and Jacob Druckman. To learn more about Mr. Knehans, one can visit his website www.douglasknehans.com. Meanwhile, a fitting introduction exists right on his home page, on which he states: “I just want to write music that touches people, that is immediate, that is powerful, colorful and dramatic.” Mr. Knehans, you are succeeding at precisely that.

On to the recording at hand, the word “powerful” is apt. Both of the two works included, Mist Waves (2019) and Cloud Ossuary: Symphony No. 4 (2019 – with Donemus publishing site saying 2018), are steeped in the human experience of searching and sorrow, and yet both, through the inspired writing itself, are deeply consolatory. Comparisons in music tend to do a disservice to all, but, for the sake of readers wanting a quick characterization, the noting of kinships can be helpful. Sections of both works remind one of Górecki’s Symphony No. 3 in their sheer spaciousness of harmonic unfolding and the deft handling of dissonance and bleak subject matter. There are hints at times of what resemble postminimalism in the harmonic pacing, but at other times the music seems to hearken back flickeringly to Stravinsky and Bartok (as in the more driven percussiveness in the first movement of Cloud Ossuary). The bottom line, though, is that Mr. Knehans seems to follows his own star and cannot be lumped in with any particular school or movement. What makes his music compelling is the thoroughness and sensitivity with which he develops ideas and emotions of importance to him – and to us all, one imagines.

The opening of this CD, Mist Waves, is a piece for solo violin and strings, with the solo part here played superbly by violinist Pavel Wallinger. Slightly under eight minutes in length, it is arguably the most immediately appealing piece of the release, transporting the listener miraculously to another world through its soaring melodic material over haunting repeated patterns. The composer himself describes it as a “kind of loose chaconne” and continues as follows:

“Mist Waves is really about land-based cloud and how this forms in waves, sometimes thick and predictable and at other times lightening up and revealing more to us. This serves as a metaphor for me of a type of human consciousness and how things are known and unknown to us in mixtures of known and ungraspable.”

It is surprising on first hearing to read that Mist Waves was originally conceived as a piano-violin work, because its pacing seems to cry out for instruments of a more sustained nature, such as the strings heard here; clearly much is owed, though, to the violinist of its original piano-violin version, Madeleine Mitchell, who was also the dedicatee. In this orchestrated version, it is hard to imagine it played more exquisitely than Mr. Wallinger does in collaboration with Maestro Mikel Toms and the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra. The balance of timbres is masterful, and the sound places the listener somewhere between the heart of the ensemble and the heavens, undoubtedly thanks in part to the engineering of Jaroslav Zouhar and mixing and mastering of multi-Grammy Award-winning Silas Brown.

The second work (and title work for the CD), is Cloud Ossuary: Symphony No. 4, and it is as harrowing as the title suggests in its three movements of increasing depth, darkness and duration (with the third movement lasting twenty-six minutes). The final movement, entitled Bones and All, is, as the composer states, the “center of gravity” of the work. He writes that he composed it first, having been seized with inspiration after reading the poem of the same name  by his daughter, writer Katarina Knehans.

The poem, sung from the viewpoint of one tending to a land of death and grief, is harrowing in its explicit imagery of bones and destruction (“blood-soaked fingers” and “rotting carcass, burned and branded by the world”), but after reaching a cataclysmic frenzy a transformation begins, which – despite the devastation – eventually arrives at the closing line, “We are loved by the sun, bones and all.” It is not exactly a “feel good” ending (as, after around twenty minutes of agony, we hardly trust happiness), but it is, nonetheless, a post-cathartic relief of sorts as the protagonist chooses not to leave this wasteland but to find what the composer describes in his liner notes as “a place of light and love, nurturement and peace.” This work seems especially timely right now, despite the fact that death and tragedy are not a recent invention – it is music of healing.

The singing, by Dutch soprano Judith Weusten, is nothing short of mind-boggling. Each time this reviewer asked herself, “is such writing truly idiomatic for the human voice?” the answer would come, “but Ms. Weusten did it – ask no more.” In stratospheric leaps, piercing wails, and tremulous swooning descents, she showed that she can nail any pitch while traveling to Hades and back emotionally. Her range dynamically is staggering and in need of no manipulation; the one place, in fact, in which a decrescendo seems simply too extreme to be natural (end of the first verse on the word “you”) one wonders whether there wasn’t perhaps some audio manipulation that could have been subtler. Ms. Weusten’s diction is excellent throughout as well, though in the few places where the music is simply too high or melismatic to make out the words exactly, that fact may be merciful. One can always read the text separately and grasp the meaning filtered through the music. Just as the music embodies the pain of a painful text, it also transforms it, just as the protagonist in the poem transforms death and grief.

The rest of the Symphony No. 4 truly seems to exist to serve the above-described final movement, though the first movement, The Ossein Cage is spectacular in its own right. Intended to suggest efforts to escape “an imagined cage of dead bone” as described in the composer’s notes, it employs claves and other percussion to evoke the rattling of the cage, building to a fever pitch. To describe the second movement, Breathe Clouded,  Mr. Knehans suggests “a dream in the clouds – the dark clouds of something coming.” He also states that he did not want to overshadow the last movement but to create a “foggy antecedent” – which is just what it does, and quite atmospherically. All in all, for music lovers who are not “faint of heart” but seeking an experience as cathartic as a powerful play or film, this recording is highly recommended.  

Kudos to all involved in this exciting release.

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Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review

Douglas Knehans, Cloud Ossuary, Brno Philharmonic Orchestra, Mikel Toms

Living and thriving composer Douglas Knehans exemplifies a certain aspect of New Music today. That is, he does not attempt to occupy a genre so much as to create the music inside him. His latest album gives us that in all its finery, Cloud Ossuary (Ablaze Records ar-00062).

It is a program very well played by the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra under Mikel Toms, Pavel Wallinger nicely appearing on solo violin, with a beautifully wrought soprano performance by Judith Weusten for the single movement that calls for the vocal part.

The album contains two vibrant and essential works, A brief but mysterious "Mist Waves" for solo violin (Pavel Wallinger) and Douglas' "Cloud Ossuary--Symphony No. 4" which is a major work of our present-day to my ears.

When I listen to Douglas Knehans' music (type his name in search box for more reviews) I come away with the feeling that the music coming out of him has a kind of organic singular inevitability--that he has a full-blown melodic-harmonic-orchestrational personality that is eloquent and original, that speaks directly to one's listening muse in ways that keep you focused on the flow of lyric and dynamic articulateness.

So the symphony builds in the three movements very beautifully contrasting sound evocations of clouds. Each fulfills a will to form, so to speak, a sincere expression of the experience of cloud-dom. And too in the best ways the music is lucidly a commentary on itself, on its self-presencing service of looking out upon the world as a musical human. Maybe that seems obvious but this music succeeds in expressing the musical self in a complete and satisfying way and, perhaps, not all that many composers you can say that of. A key is the sureness of orchestration, almost a kind of second nature of one who has explored the inner realms of sonic possibility in considerable depth.

So the contemplative continuance of "Mist Waves" works within itself as a complete being, as does the rhythmic unfolding of the first movement of the 4th, "The Ossein Cage." Then we get transported to the gorgeously hovering sustains of "Breathe Clouded" And then the longer final movement centers upon the beautifully apposite soprano floating above a singular series of orchestrational aural poems. It is a rich and complex tapestry of a movement, something to sink into with absorption.  For a moment you may call to mind the gargantuan enormity of a Mahler, the orchestrational sensuality of a Ravel, but then no, this is music of the present, music of the present as fertilly imagined by Douglas Knehans, not quite Modern in the typical way, nor a backward leaning in a reverse mirror on it all. It is K-n-e-h-a-n-s.

And that is a wonderful thing to me. Dive into this one of you will. There is much to live with, to grow into. Bravo!

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Douglas Knehans: Symphony No 4 (Cloud Ossuary), Mist Waves (Brno Philharmonic Orchestra, Mikel Toms)

Douglas Knehans’ powerful Fourth Symphony reaches for beauty.

by Michael Quinn on 24 June, 2022

Don’t be betrayed by the beguiling New Age gentility of Mist Waves into thinking its composer, American-Australian Douglas Knehans, is cut from the same cloth as the Holy Minimalists it readily evokes. His robustly imagistic Fourth Symphony, Cloud Ossuary, puts paid to such lazy, fanciful notions.

Both works date from 2019, and both are influenced by cloud formations, making the disc immediately appealing to musically inclined nephologists. Both also receive first performances on disc here in sensitive, committed performances by the Brno Philharmonic under the meticulous but lightly worn guidance of Mikel Toms.

There is no denying (or refusing) the hypnotic thrall of Mist Waves, described by the composer as “a kind of loose chaconne whose veiled repetition of the initial eight bars forms the basis of the [eight-minute] work”. Originally composed for violin and piano, its discrete debt to Vaughan Williams’ The Lark Ascending is beautifully articulated by orchestra leader Pavel Wallinger’s singing violin, the serene, slow-moving accompaniment a thing of cosseting beauty.

The three-movement Symphony No 4, Cloud Ossuary, the title alluding to a place in which bones are placed, finds Knehans at his most assured: a modernist in comfortable rapprochement with his inherited classical-romantic tradition. It’s a work of carefully calculated contrasts skilfully interwoven by Toms. The Ossein Cage opening is a suppressed rage against confinement, its seven, dyspeptic sections pulsing with the pent-up violence of rattling, bone-like percussion that ultimately breaks free before subsiding into unresolved optimism. An extended search for the epiphanic as the material stretches itself into near-evaporating vapours, Breathe Clouded draws from the same ecstatic reverie of Mist Waves before suddenly coalescing into thick, enveloping fog and pregnant, darkening clouds threatening to burst.

Longer than the first two movements together and the symphony’s “centre of gravity”, the 26-minute finale takes its title, Bones and All, from a poem by Knehans’ daughter, Katarina. There’s a sense of something at risk here in what Knehans calls “an anti-Abschied.” A sense of possibility, too, even as subterranean orchestral lines exert a dark gravity on soprano Judith Weusten’s superbly sung, high-lying vocals. Pleasingly the work ends with a moment of release and a slow dissolve into silence.

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Wednesday, 19 January 2022

Beauty and bleakness: Douglas Knehans' Cloud Ossuary from Brno Philharmonic Orchestra and Mikel Toms

Douglas Knehans Mist Wave, Cloud Ossuary; Brno Philharmonic Orchestra, Mikel Toms, Pavel Wallinger, Judith Weusten; Ablaze Records
Reviewed by Robert Hugill on 19 January 2022 Star rating: 3.5(★★★½)
A requiem for our times, Katarina Knehans bleak poetry in an intense new setting by her Australian/American composer father

This new disc from Ablaze Records features two works by the Australian/American composer Douglas Knehans, Mist Waves for solo violin and strings, and Cloud Ossuary: Symphony No. 4, recorded by the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra, conductor Mikel Toms, with Pavel Wallinger, violin, and Judith Weusten, soprano.

Mist Waves was originally written for violin and piano, and premiered in that form by violinist Madeleine Mitchell and pianist Michael Delfin. This version for violin and strings was created for the recording and for Pavel Wallinger (who is concert-master of the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra). Knehans describes it as a 'loose chaconne' and the first eight bars form the basis for the whole work. The result is slow and thoughtful, with Wallinger's rather aetherial violin hovering over the darker, lower textures of the strings. The way Knehans repeats his material, but never the same each time, gives the work a contemplative, timeless quality. He describes the work as being about land-based clouds, but rather than being purely descriptive, the piece is much more metaphorical.

Cloud Ossuary began as a setting of a poem by Knehans' daughter, Katarina Knehans. The setting of the poem, Bones and All, forms the final movement of the symphony with the other two movements created subsequently. All three movements, The Ossein Cage, Breathe Cloud and Bones and All are based on the same material though with very different results. 

The Ossein Cage begins with just the distant clicking of percussion, the rhythmic pulse then joined by quietly intense strings, there is a sense of constrained anticipation, 'something's coming'. Knehans describes the movement as being about seeking escape from an imagined cage of dead bone, and the music builds in an unrelenting way, gradually becoming more intense and more rhythmic, more constrained if you like. It builds to an intense climax, featuring a lot of percussion, but this does not hold and the movement slowly unwinds. The second movement seems to return us to the cloudy, aetherial world of Mist Waves, yet without the sense of structure of that piece so the opening is high, free and fluid in form. Textures become richer, darker but always fluid with that sense of free-floating as details emerge from the mist, and disappear again, but gradually the movement solidifies and builds, leading inevitably to the final movement. By far the longest movement of the three, Bones and All is the point to which the other two movements have been leading. Katarina Knehan's poem is darkly evocative, it opens:

    I tend to the land grief
    It started as barren and broken waste,
    So I watered it.

The vocal line has quite an instrumental feel about it, wandering and intense, over rather concentrated, dark, orchestral lines which create a close-weaved texture. The vocal writing is often high and challenging and the words simply fail to come over, you have to listen to this with the text in hand to catch any of the way Knehans hands his daughter's words. The overall structure is arch shaped, and you sense the way Knehans builds and propels his structure towards a climax. The focus is on the expressive beauty of the vocal line, but the orchestral underpinning feels as if there is a clear sense of structure and focus.

Weusten does wonders with the challenging vocal writing and Knehans' apparently instrumental approach to the voice, though there are moments which feel almost uncomfortably intense and on edge. But the the rather bleak poem is hardly comfortable material. I have to confess that I did wonder whether we needed a soprano voice at all. Given that Knehans' approach to writing the setting seemed to be intended to evoke emotions, rather than project words, perhaps a solo instrument might have worked better. What he does do is catch the atmosphere and the bleak intensity of the words, creating something of a requiem for our times and the state of our planet.

Cloud Ossuary is a striking and fascinating work, full of gorgeous textures and colours, yet throughout it is clear that Knehans brings a strong structural underpinning to the beauty, making for a satisfying symphonic work.

Knehans training was divided between Australia and America. His undergraduate study at the Australian National University focused primarily on European music. His subsequent studies in America at Queens College focused on American music, though as he studied with Thea Musgrave this period also underscored his European roots, and then he subsequently studied at Yale with Pulitzer prize winning composer Jacob Druckman. Having worked at the University of Alabama in the USA and the University of Tasmania Conservatorium of Music in Australia, he is currently professor at College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati in the USA.

Douglas Knehans created Ablaze Records in 2008 and the company specialises in music by living composers, with regular calls for music and scores. The Donemus publishing website features PDFs of the scores of Mist Waves and Cloud Ossuary.

Douglas Knehans (born 1957) - Mist Waves (2019) [7:41]
Douglas Knehans - Cloud Ossuary: Symphony No. 4 (2019) [47.39]

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Ever-challenging, ever-surprising Douglas Knehans.

January 2, 2022

Douglas Knehans’ lovely composition for solo violin and orchestra Mist Waves(2019) is in the words of its composer “…about land-based cloud and how this forms in waves, sometimes thick and predictable and at other times lightening up and revealing more to us… a metaphor for me of a type of human consciousness and how things are known and unknown to us in mixtures of known and ungraspable.”

The work was given its premiere in the original version for violin and piano by violinist Madeleine Mitchell and pianist Michael Delfin. The current orchestral version was prepared for the ABLAZE CD that features a superb rendition by the Brno Philharmonic, led by Mikel Tom with violin soloist Pavel Wallinger.

The album’s longest work is Cloud Ossuary, a three-part symphony, whose third movement features a haunting poetic text by Katarina Knehans, lovingly sung by soprano Judith Weusten.

As much of Knehans’ work, Cloud Ossuary is at first seemingly atonal though not lacking in melodic sweep, even in its most dramatic moments, like in Breathe Clouded the work’s second movement in which the strings are at first summoned to create a seamless, ethereal sound by mining the uppermost reaches of their range, at times sounding less like acoustic instruments and more like electronic devices.

A kind of perpetual motion melody rises from the lower strings to then combine with an assembly of woodwinds and muted brass in, again, a sound that mimics electronics, but one that is at once softened and made more lyrical.

Bones and All is the title of the third movement. In it the composer proves himself once more a past master of writing for the voice, setting the complex text by Katarina Knehans with perfect command of the genre. The 26-minute-long movement – the longest in the work – is filled with musical turmoil that effectively echoes the ranging emotions expressed in the text.

It is not until the very final moments of the final movement that a hard-earned peace reigns, with the words “… we sit together eating tropical fruits, shrouded by sunlight, a greenish-golden glow bouncing off my skin and refracting off their exposed bones. They cannot be touched here, things are clean, soft. We are loved by the sun, bones and all.”

Those words give closure to an impressive work by Douglas Knehans, an ever-challenging, ever-surprising musical artist.

Rafael de Acha ALL ABOUT THE ARTS

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An Almost Unworldly Acceptance and Peace

GEOFF PEARCE is inspired by 'Cloud Ossuary' and 'Mist Waves' - music by Douglas Knehans
'Pavel Wallinger and the Brno Philharmonic strings deliver a very beautifully controlled performance.'

Douglas Knehans (born 1957) is an important living composer whose music is quite widely performed in many countries of the world. He has written in a wide range of genres and his music is attractive and approachable. This recording presents two works from 2019, Mist Waves: a chaconne for solo violin and string orchestra, and his Cloud Ossuary - Symphony No 4. There are excellent notes in the booklet which explain the meaning of the works, and the booklet also includes the poem by the composer's daughter, Katarina Knehans - Bones and All, which inspired the composition of the symphony.

The composer describes Mist Waves as a 'kind of loose chaconne' based on an eight bar phrase, and was inspired by the clouds that appear above landscapes and form waves. The opening is quiet and gently reflective, with a soaring violin against a slowly pulsating string accompaniment. The mood is maintained throughout, and the variation showing the gently shifting quality of these cloud waves, is reflected by whereabouts in its range the solo violin is playing. This is a very meditative work that I find relaxing and satisfying. Pavel Wallinger and the Brno Philharmonic strings deliver a very beautifully controlled performance.

The Cloud Ossuary – Douglas Knehans' Fourth Symphony - is in three movements of increasing length. The first movement, 'The Ossein Cage', is described by the composer as a 'vigorous and somewhat failed rant against containment'. It starts slowly and almost imperceptively but gains in momentum and volume. This depicts an attempt to escape a cage of dead bone, at first exploratory and tentative, but rising to a state of desperation. This is a great movement displaying the composer's fine orchestration skills. The end of the movement is calm, perhaps reflecting that the escape has failed and the imprisoned is worn out.

The second movement, 'Breathe Clouded', is a veiled slow movement, in contrast to the first rather anguished movement. It presents a somewhat dark reflection with a rather dreamlike feeling of unease sometimes surfacing, before falling back into the dream-like meditation. The whole work is nebulous and veiled and there is some beautifully effective writing. There is some stand out solo writing for cor anglais in this movement and this is often mirrored by the solo trumpet.

The final movement, 'Bones and All', employs the voice of Judith Weusten and is longer than both the two previous movements. Elements of the first two movements are employed here (such as the cor anglais melody of the second movement), as well as the poem on which the symphony is based.

At the third section, following the structure of the poem, the music livens and elements of the first movement make themselves felt. There is anguish and struggle here but this subsides and becomes mournful as the narrator is looking at the dead body and rearranging it so that it looks more peaceful.

This is a deeply felt and finely conceived work, and in concept and in many places I find parallels with the last movement of Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde. There is sorrow and resignation here, but also hope. The fourth verse is almost exultant, rather in the manner of a Bach chorale prelude. The final two lines of the poem end the work with an almost unworldly acceptance and peace.

On hearing these two works, I felt inspired and hopeful for the future of classical music, as they are unpretentious and a great example of what contemporary music can be. The performances by all concerned, especially the soprano and violin soloists, as well as the direction and great orchestra leave me wanting to hear more of this composer and his works. I think this recording will have wide appeal and I hope to hear much more of the composer's works. I also commend the recording quality and informative booklet that accompanies it.

Copyright © 16 August 2022 Geoff Pearce
Sydney, Australia

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Pairing two new works for orchestra with soloist is Knehans’ newest disc Cloud Ossuary.

Recorded with tremendous fidelity and color the disc includes Knehans’ Mist Waves for solo violin and strings performed in this recording by the brilliant Czech violinist Pavel Wallinger. Wallinger’s keening lines sit wonderfully against the withheld backdrop of the Brno Philharmonic strings.

The second work on the disc, Knehans’ Cloud Ossuary is set in three related movements in a fast-slow-slow arrangement. These culminate in an extended setting for soprano and orchestra—utilizing only English horn, trumpet, two percussionists, harp and strings—of Knehans’ daughter’s poem Bones and All. Katarina Knehans, a professional writer, has already collaborated with a number of other composers and her sensitivity to vocal setting is very clear here. Her words give intensity, image, substance and philosophical depth to the work. With an extended soprano solo delivered with intense passion by rising star Judith Weusten, the work culminates in a luminous and darkly reflective mood.

The performances by the orchestra, conductor Mikel Toms and most importantly the fine soloists on this disc make it a significant and emotional statement by Knehans and his collaborators.

Highly recommended. 

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