Eivind Buene's Possible Cities/Essential Landscapes on Blu-Ray Audio, CD and SACD

My own journey through classical music followed the proper chronological order. I started with Vivaldi, Bach and Boccherini in college, got caught up in the Mozart craze when Amadeus came out in 1984, skipped completely over Beethoven and Schubert and was deeply into Prokofiev, Rachmaninoff and Shostakovich by the time Reagan left office. By the end of the '80s, I was confronted with the prospect of following those dark, atonal charms of Schoenberg, Bartok and Berg before I stepped back, exhausted, and let my mind wander and relax with the minimalism of Glass, Nyman and Arvo Part (especially Arvo, who understands the secrets of the universe).

But the single piece of modern music that had the greatest impact on me was Kevin Volans' modest and relatively brief White Man Sleeps. The final movement is novel because the conventional string quartet become so guttural and percussive, and therefore so unconventional. The instruments sound like hornets circling a fallen nest, menacing and swirling and trying to figure the next step. That piece showed me how far the boundaries of so-called "classical music" could be stretched. It's been twenty-five years since I first heard that piece, and nothing has sounded that strikingly innovative since--until Eivind Buene's Possible Cities/Essential Landscapes.

That bold recommendation comes with a plethora of caveats. This is supremely adventurous modern music that will probably appeal to a very narrow range of music lovers; you will not sit back and relax and listen to it with a langorous grin on your face. It's edgy, violent and startling, and you will jump out of your seat at least once. Buene (pictured below) has composed this music with the intention of capturing images of urban decay, stark industrial architecture, chaos and the ultimate surrender to organic forces. I can easily imagine hearing this music while walking through the ruins of an industrial city in the middle of the night, alone, fear rising up through my legs and into my gut. When I hear the slow, agitated bend of the notes played by the string section, I can almost see the rats running along the power lines. When the percussion strikes loudly and suddenly, I imagine rocks being thrown through the windows of an old deserted factory. Maybe it's me, accidentally knocking over some relic that crashes onto the ground, reminding me that I shouldn't be there. If I had composed Possible Cities/Essential Landscapes, I probably would have called it Places You Shouldn't Go at Night by Yourself.

I've made this music sound joyless, frightening, inaccessible and maybe even a tad annoying, but it's actually exhilarating in many ways. Because it's from 2L Recordings in Norway, it sounds spectacular. As performed by Cikada, a ten-member Norwegian ensemble conducted by Christian Eggen, PC/EL is an incredibly detailed recording that will allow you to easily decipher the individual instruments on the stage and how they interact with one another. This level of musical fidelity is absolutely essential to the interactive feeling you'll have while listening. Ten minutes in, you'll be looking over your shoulder to see who's following you. This is a challenging musical piece, and many of you will not get through it. But for those who are constantly searching for the envelope's edge, this will be an exciting, agitating, nerve-wracking and occasionally lyrical experience--and you can also use it to get those last stubborn houseguests to finally go home.

One more note: I've been admiring 2L Recordings and their commitment to delivering truly unique titles that focus on amazing sound quality and exceptional value. Well, Morten Lindberg has upped the value a notch by including an SACD/CD hybrid disc with the Blu-ray disc. I pulled out the rather hefty booklet from the case, and lo and behold there was another disc beneath it! I then went through all of the previous 2L Blu-rays to see if they all had a hidden disc and only one--Ola Gjeilo's Piano Improvisations--had it. (The upcoming David and Bathsheba also has the bonus disc.) That allows me to hear these incredible recordings on my high-quality CD player as opposed to the cheap Samsung Blu-ray player--and yes, the CD rules and yes, it's an unfair comparison. But it's much easier to make the jump to a new digital format such as Blu-ray audio when companies such as 2L give you this many choices.

The Complete Piano Works of Thomas D. A. Tellefsen on 2L Recordings Blu-Ray Audio

Remember when CDs were in their infancy, and one of the great selling points of this new format was the amount of music you could cram onto one disc? A story circulated back then that you could put 69 or 70 minutes' worth of music on a single compact disc, and that particular number was chosen so that Beethoven's Symphony No.9 wouldn't require a 2-CD set. To this day I still hear music lovers claim they don't like LPs because they don't want to get up every twenty minutes to flip the record. Lazy-ass mofo jokes aside, there is an incredible appeal to music formats that play and play and play. That's why some of us still listen to local FM radio stations while working on the Times crossword puzzle on quiet, rainy Sunday afternoons. That explains why we are so intrigued with expansive iTunes playlists and giant music servers with terrabyte hard drives. It explains the whole silly encore ritual at the end of every live musical performance--if we just stand here and clap long enough, maybe they'll come back out and play five or six more songs! We just don't want the music to stop. It's a bummer when it does.

Well, I have some news for you. I was listening to yet another Blu-ray Audio disc from 2L Recordings of Norway, Thomas D. A. Tellefsen--Complete Piano Works, and after a while I noticed something strange. The music just kept playing, hour after hour. At first I thought I had hit the repeat button, even though each solo piano piece sounded new and fresh. I picked up the Blu-ray case and there it was, printed right on the back: "3 hours and 18 minutes of music on 1 disc." That's a lot of music. And, in essence, it's another important reason why Blu-ray audio should be a competitive music format in 2012.

It certainly makes sense to use a digital format originally designed for movies as a convenient, compact way to store huge chunks of music. Let's face it--box sets are for wacky, obsessive collectors. For most of us, space is at a premium. We don't want our music collections taking over an entire room, much less our entire house. That's why so many of us are ripping our entire CD collections to our computers and selling all of our discs on eBay. We want our listening rooms to look like the ads in high-end audio magazines...a pair of speakers, an amp, a MacBook and a chair from IKEA. That's it. Blu-ray audio is a magnificent compromise for people who still love physical formats--like me--yet are starting to wonder how they're going to contain their ever-expanding music collections.

None of this would matter, however, if the content and the sound quality weren't up to par. This is 2L, after all, and Morten Lindberg is certainly on the cutting edge when it comes to exploring the sonic potential of the hi-rez formats--including vinyl (heh heh). Lindberg recorded Norwegian pianist Jorgen Larsen at the Ringve Museum in Trondheim, Norway, and as usual he captures the essence of the space with unusual precision. So far, most of the 2L recordings I have heard were recorded in Norwegian churches, and I immediately noticed that the Tellefsen recordings sounded closer, more intimate and within in a slightly smaller space. The cavernous qualities of the churches were replaced with something tighter and more streamlined, although the space still provides a wealth of air and transient decay.

I've yet to address either the pianist or the composer; I'm reluctant to admit that I'm a stranger to both. Tellefsen was a mid-19th century composer who was a friend and contemporary of Chopin, and you can hear some of Chopin's rolling flourishes throughout the music, albeit with a much firmer hand. I also find Tellefsen to be more upbeat than many Scandinavian composers I admire, although Colleen did pop in once or twice to comment on the "sad music" coming from the listening room. Jorgen Larsen, who has deep connections to the Trondheim music scene in Norway, is famous for premiering important new works from Norwegian composers. He is a confident, relaxed pianist whose interpretations are imbued with composure and knowledge.

The sound quality, of course, is superb. Even with the new modest Samsung Blu-ray player in the role of the Weak Link in the Chain, I am once again astonished by the sweetness of the treble and the depth of the decay. I'm also starting to get a strong feel for the lower bass capabilities of Blu-ray audio, even with a solo piano recording such as this. Blu-ray seems to capture the low frequency information that accompanies the sheer movement of air within a space almost as well as analog recordings, and much better than redbook CD. How much of this is due to the format, and how much is due to Morton Lindberg's recording prowess? I'll be able to answer that with more certainty now that I have two of 2L's titles--Souvenir and Quiet Winter Night--on both LP and Blu-ray Audio. I can't wait to sit down and perform some real comparisons, although a couple of people have informed me that the two formats sound surprisingly similar. We shall see.

Further Adventures in Blu-Ray Audio: Ola Gjeilo's Piano Improvisations from 2L Recordings

Morton Lindberg of 2L Recordings in Norway has been sending me quite a few of his new releases on the Blu-ray Audio format, and that has presented me with a dilemma. When I received my first Blu-ray audio disc for review, Patricia Barber's Modern Cool (which you can read here), I had to figure out how I was going to play a Blu-ray disc. I didn't have a player per se, but I realized that I did have a Blu-ray transport built into my laptop. All I needed was an outboard DAC--which I no longer had. The Wavelength DAC I used last year for my Blue Computer Solutions music server project was on loan, and I had already returned it. All I had left was a Sound Blaster external sound card, which offered decent sound quality (roughly the equivalent of a mid-fi Denon CD/DVD player I had on hand), but nothing approaching the musical beauty of the tubed Wavelength.

I was all set to wait for the new Unison Research outboard DAC that's scheduled to appear soon, but a delay in manufacturing has put that product on the back burner for a few more months. So the last handful of Blu-ray Audio discs I've reviewed have been performed on the laptop/sound card combination, hardly an optimal solution sound-wise. Since my brother Mat, my partner in Blue Computer Solutions, has been borrowing the Sound Blaster to continue work on his music server, I've been struggling to find a way to listen to all of these new Blu-ray discs. I've been looking at solutions such as the Oppo BDP-95 univeral player, which plays just about every optical disc known to mankind, but I balked at spending a grand just to hear a format I may or may not embrace.

Finally, Mat offered an intriguing compromise: "Why don't you just go down to Wal-Mart and buy a cheap Blu-ray player? You can get one for like $59." I had no idea Blu-ray player prices had sunk so low, so I started shopping around a found a cheap Panasonic player at the local Target for $75. It was the last one they had in stock. I took it home, plugged it in...and nothing happened. No power. I returned it for a full refund and pondered my next step. While grocery shopping at my local H-E-B, I checked out their electronics section and found a modest little Samsung on sale for $68.

Again, I took it home and struggled with getting it to work. The LED display kept saying "SETUP," and evidently I needed to hook the player up to a monitor so that I could view the various menus and get everything set up for simple audio playback. I longed for the days when you bought a CD player, inserted a disc and started listening to music. And unlike the Panasonic player, the Samsung didn't even include batteries for the remote, which was needed to program the player. I was getting frustrated with my Blu-ray adventure.

In my eight years in the telecommunications industry, we had something we called PFM. The P stood for "pure," the M stood for "magic" and I'll let you figure out what the F stands for. We used this term whenever we were troubleshooting and everything just started working right out of the clear blue for no particular reason. Well, after three tries of turning the player off and on, pressing play and letting the disc initialize (which takes a lot longer on a Blu-Ray player than on a garden-variety CD player), music starting flowing into the room.

The disc I had inserted was Ola Gjeilo's Piano Improvisations, something Morton Lindberg had sent to me at least a couple of months ago. I didn't have an immediate point of reference for the overall sound quality, so I couldn't tell you whether or not the Samsung player was better, worse or equal to my old Wavelength/laptop set-up. But I did notice that Ola Gjeilo's piano sounded quiet, smooth and very relaxed, all the usual earmarks of high-quality, hi-rez digital audio. This soothing, easy-going sound didn't obscure detail, either; all of the wonderful decay of Gjeilo's singular notes were preserved, and while the placement of the piano was set far back into the soundstage, I could still hear all of the spatial cues from the recording venue (the Sofienberg Church in Oslo, Norway.)

Mr. Gjeilo, a young Norwegian pianist who began his composition studies at Julliard in 2001, calls Piano Improvistaions a sequel to his 2007 2L recording Stone Rose and notes that "improvisation is where my heart is." While many such improvisations can have the impression of riding along the edge of creativity, susceptible to trains of thought that can derail musical coherence, Gjeilo keeps these selections unusually tight and organized. It's hard to believe that these pieces weren't carefully orchestrated in advance. He judiciously avoids dissonance and concentrates on studied musical beauty that prizes melody, imagery and solace. I first listened to this generous 2-disc set on a rare rainy Sunday afternoon in Central Texas, and it was the perfect companion.

The sound quality is nothing short of superb, as I expect of Morton Lindberg and 2L, and is enhanced by the majestic Steinway Model D that Gjeilo used for this recording. "It's the best grand piano I have ever experienced," he says in the liner notes. "Just incredible." All of these serendipitous factors--the piano, the extraordinary acoustics of the church, and Morton's visionary skills as a recording engineer and producer--add to one of the most worthwhile solo piano recordings I own.

As far as my technical compromises go in terms of this new and somewhat exciting digital format, I look forward to making improvements to my playback equipment so that I can do justice to these recordings. Morton has enabled me to make more cautious and informative comparisons in the future by supplying me with both the LP and Blu-ray versions of at least a couple of his new titles. Since my analog playback capabilities have increased exponentially with the addition of the Transfiguration Phoenix cartridge and the PureAudio Vinyl phono preamplifier, two of the finest pieces in their respective categories that I've ever used, I can hopefully add more insight into the sheer genius of the 2L recordings. Until then, this $68 Samsung Blu-ray player ain't half-bad.

The Latest Vinyl Anachronist Column Is Up...

The latest Vinyl Anachronist column in up on the Perfect Sound Forever website at http://www.furious.com/perfect/vinyl87.html. This one is about Blu-ray Audio and whether or not it's a viable format in 2012. I also speak some more about 2L Recordings from Norway, and how they are leading the Blu-Ray charge. Enjoy!