Catch SomewhereJohn Liberatore & Zohn Collective

Composer John Liberatore teaches at Notre Dame, and has traveled widely through the benefit of various fellowships, including those from MacDowell, Millay, Tanglewood, Yaddo, the Brush Creek Arts Foundation, and a Presser Music Award to study in Tokyo with Joe Kondo. His music has traveled widely too, with many contemporary ensembles commissioning and performing it. As a performer himself, John Liberatore has revived an old and esoteric instrument, the glass harmonica.

Catch Somewhere, a portrait CD of Liberatore’s chamber works on New Focus, is well performed throughout by the Zohn Collective, a sinfonietta-sized ensemble containing some of the most prominent contemporary performers in the United States. Various subsections of the group are utilized in the programmed selections.

The recording opens with “A Very Star-Like Start,” a capriccio for eight instruments that demonstrates well Liberatore’s general approach: rhythmically vibrant with frequent ostinatos, and a chromatic pitch language that at times hews close to tonality and then veers towards shadowy post-tonal sections. “A Very Star-Like Start” is an excellent curtain-raiser, with compound melodies built between strings, winds, and percussion that then unfold into fleet ostinatos and angular lines.

Flutist Molly Barth plays “Gilded Tree,” a four-movement solo piece with titles from the poetry cycle “Fable” by Randall Potts. Here as elsewhere, there is a poetic impulse that operates alongside the musical one in Liberatore’s creative approach. Even in instrumental pieces, the resonances found in word groupings provides a generative role. Barth plays in a number of demeanors: slow delicacy in “dark inside secure,” punctilious rapid passages in “black twig lips,” mysterious lyricism moving to brash high notes in “silence lost to echoes,” and liquid trills paired with repeated melodic cells in “quivering with light.” Barth’s dynamic control and virtuosity are most impressive.

The title work is an eight-movement suite for guitar, prepared piano, and percussion, which alternate prominence in the various movements. Once again, a poem, Walt Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” which Liberatore found while at MacDowell Colony, serves as inspiration. “Catch Somewhere” includes particularly beautiful writing for prepared piano, not at all Cagean but entirely its own preparation. In the first movement, “vacant, vast, surrounding,” motives, many timbral, that will be used throughout are introduced. Pianist Daniel Pesca plays a beautiful cadenza in the second movement “surrounded, detached,” which then becomes a soft duet with guitarist Dieter Hennings. Hennings continues with a cadenza of his own, featuring snapped pizzicato, in the third movement “little promontory.” This too is succeeded by a duet, this time with percussionist Paul Vanillancourt, whose motifs are responses to the guitar’s riffs. The movement then erupts, with piano, unpitched percussion, and guitar playing thick passages fortissimo. Repeated notes from the piano initially signal a dialing back, but the trio continues in vigorous fashion to its close.

“thread 1” returns to mallet instruments and guitar harmonics, creating a brief, undulating groove. The longest movement, at six minutes, “O my soul,” begins with an arpeggiated guitar solo with rich tone from Pesca. Mallet instruments are featured in the next solo, gradually shadowed by the other instruments. The guitar’s cadenza then returns with gongs providing resonance behind it in a hushed close. “thread 2” is another brief piece for mallet instruments, once again with guitar harmonics joining, this time at the close. “filament, filament, filament” opens riotously, then juxtaposes various instrumental deployments in a brisk moto perpetuo, dissipating at its conclusion. The piece’s final movement “catch somewhere” features bright harmonies and repeated notes, particularly prominent in unpitched percussion. A strong, arcing melody presses the music forward towards its conclusion. Repeated patterns then succeed this, with thunderous repeated bass notes from the piano juxtaposed against gentle guitar lines. A denouement ensues, in a decrescendo to niente. “Catch Somewhere” is a well-crafted, engaging, and entertaining piece.

The only piece that includes a singer is the CD’s final one, Hold Back Thy Hours, a setting of fragments of seventeenth century English poetry. Tenor Zach Finkelstein performs the four songs that comprise the set with precision and expressivity, his high notes suffused with easy lightness and his phrasing thoughtfully unpacking the aphoristic texts. The ensemble accompanies him with a complex thicket of pitch slides and knotty tunes, out of which offset attacks provide a sense of surprise that supports the nonlinearity of the textual fragments. My favorite among these is perhaps the most traditional, “violets pluck’d,” which includes a lamento bass. Its imaginative scoring, however, is fully of the present.

Liberatore’s Catch Somewhere is one of my favorite recordings thus far in 2023. Highly recommended.

— Christian Carey, 6.16.2023

The music of John Liberatore (b. 1984) is that of an expert composer who knows exactly how to achieve what he hears. I enjoyed his piano piece She Rose, and Let Me In: Scottish Variations and Fugue on a Centaur disc (called She Rose, and Let Me In, in fact) reviewed in Fanfare 40:3. It is wonderful to have the opportunity to get to know Liberatore’s music better, and he does not disappoint.

The first piece here, A Very Star-Like Start, is proof positive of this. Surfaces glisten in a very un-Schoenbergian pointillism. The piece is constructed as a mosaic, invoking the image of a field of fireflies. Zohn finds inspiration in poetry, here Robert Frost’s poem Fireflies in the garden. The piece flickers in the Zohn Collective’s superbly alive performance, captured in stunning sound.

The recorded perspective for the solo flute for Gilded Tree is just right, too. The inspiration here was Randall Potts’ cycle of poems, Fable, itself a response to the multimedia sculptures of Esther Traugot (whose Unearthed is found on the cover of the album). The soloist on this occasion is Molly Barth, who finds the expansive lyricism of “dark inside secure,” the first movement, and also locates the flitting, angular core of “black twig tips.” Textural contracts in the third movement, “silence lost to echoes,” are in use against a backdrop of silence. I say this as it does feel the music refers to an original state in the silences, in the gaps between sounds. Finally, there comes “quivering with light,” with its tremolandos and almost hesitant gestures

It is Walt Whitman who inspired Catch Somewhere, notably his "A Noiseless Patient Spider". Written at the MacDowell Colony, the poem spoke loudly to Liberatore. Written during the pandemic, Catch Somewhere is, in the composer’s own words, “imbued with the circumstances under which it was created.” Scored for guitar (Dieter Hennings), prepared piano (Daniel Pesca), and percussion (Pail Vaillancourt), this is a piece of great beauty. Cast in eight short movements, it presents the most elusive music so far. There are links, though; the delicate textures of the second piece, “surrounded, detached” seem like a quieter version of A Very Star-Like Start. The next movement, “little promontory,” is highly rhythmic, but also gentle until the most remarkable guitar and piano break (Hennings and Pesca are on fire). Perhaps the most touching movement is the guitar solo of “O my soul,” a quiet but potent meditation, exquisitely rendered by Hennings. The sheer composite virtuosity of “filament, filament, filament” (for all three players) is impressive enough, but the result is a tapestry of sound that is the most extraordinary latticework. All credit is due to all three performers for achieving such unanimity. The finale, “catch somewhere,” has more forward trajectory than the other movements, with repeated notes acting as energy generators.

Finally, Hold Back Thy Hours sets four fragments of English poetry from the 17th century. But by stripping down the poems to their barest bones, they become modernized and, occasionally, unstable. Liberatore does reference Baroque Affekt, but within his own modernist context. The high tenor is Zach Finckelstein, and Tim Weiss conducts the full Zohn Collective (some 14 players, with Daniel Pesca playing both piano and harpsichord). The second movement, “gentle river,” seems particularly potent, with its repetitions of that phrase sometimes contradicted by the instrumental activity. Certainly, there is a sense of Purcell-like gravity and loss to “violets pluck’d,” heightened by the use of harpsichord. This sets a text by John Fletcher, from The Queen of Corinth. Fletcher also supplies the text for the last song, “‘till we have done” (from The Maid’s Tragedy), wherein pointillism is tempered down to just voice and percussion.

There is such beauty here; the recording is ideal, as are the booklet presentation and detail. Recommended.

— Colin Clarke, 8.03.2023

Among American composers on the current scene, John Liberatore has an unusually light, even ethereal, touch—one of his stated aims is to achieve “poignancy through levity.” Liberatore’s piano music has been favorably reviewed in Fanfare, but this is my first encounter with him, and I had elevated expectations after I read in his bio that his music has been performed hundreds of times and that he has been a fellow at The MacDowell Colony, Tanglewood, and Yaddo. (His bio also includes that he is among the few contemporary performers on the glass harmonica, a fact not insignificant in Liberatore’s airy compositional style.)

Here we get four chamber works, three for fairly sizable instrumental ensembles and one for solo flute. New Focus’s online note tells us that Liberatore is a poetic composer whose work “often embeds actual poetry into the fabric of its composition” (a trait he shares with famously literary composers like Schumann and Britten). Even though only the final piece on the program, Hold Back Thy Hours, features a sung text, the other three were inspired by reading Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, and the contemporary poet Randall Potts. The poets are helpfully quoted in the composer’s note.

There are pitfalls when a composer writes as tonally as Liberatore does, in addition to his music’s gentleness and reluctance to raise its voice. These pieces could have turned out to be rehashed or banal or overly familiar. They avoid those pitfalls through several means. Liberatore has a strong feeling for mood and atmosphere. He is an instrumental colorist of considerable ability, and the emotional foundation of his music is self-evidently sincere. In a word, he puts an emphasis on the audience’s enjoyment, yet without talking down to them.

The flickering idiom of A Very Star-Like Start is rooted in the title, a line from Frost that describes fireflies. (The quoted verse features the evocative couplet, “Here come real stars to fill the upper skies, / And here on earth come emulating flies.”) The piece is described as an “ensemble fanfare,” and its quick, angular shape reminds me of similar passages in Appalachian Spring; the cheerful buoyancy of the music is like Ibert with extra focus on the pointed presence of piano and percussion among the woodwind and string instruments.

Gilded Tree for solo flute is based on Potts’s poetry, which in turn was inspired by a found-objects sculpture. The writing for the flute is lyrical and accessible, with no hint of the extended techniques New Music composers like to exploit. The four movements are so straightforward in the way basic motifs are obsessively repeated that they don’t merit the heavy weather in the booklet: “Potts sees through this [sculpture] a metaphor for the controlling impulse of an artist: an ultimately futile desire to claim ownership over the natural beauty of everyday things.” Flutist Molly Barth gives a musical, thoroughly satisfying performance, but for me Gilded Tree is too insubstantial to be memorable.

Catch Somewhere benefits from knowing that its inspiration is Whitman’s “A Noiseless Patient Spider,” in that this eight-movement trio feels patient and is constructed of gossamer filaments with an occasional sting. The instrumentation has a disembodied quality, being scored for percussion, guitar, and prepared piano. It’s a good example of Liberatore’s bent for instrumental color. At 28 minutes this is a sizable chamber work, and it holds the listener’s attention by constantly weaving a tracery of delicate sounds like musical needlepoint. A buildup in speed and intensity in the last two movements suggests the spider pouncing and overcoming its victim, but like Whitman, Liberatore isn’t out to frighten us with death in miniature but to draw a parallel between the spider’s intricate web and the creative process.

In the one work with a text, Hold Back Thy Hours, a tenor sings four fragments of 17th-century English verse in conjunction with an ensemble of 14 instruments, essentially a chamber orchestra, that ambitiously features two percussionists, harp, and the period touch of a harpsichord. This is denser, more complex, and emotionally deeper music than anything else on the program. It is also, speaking personally, the piece I most admired. Lyric tenor Zach Finkelstein gives a heartfelt performance in good voice with admirable musical instincts and some daringly achieved high notes.

The piece doesn’t emerge as four songs with accompaniment but as an ensemble piece into which the voice is woven. We are told that Liberatore incorporates Baroque musical touches, and the third movement, “violets pluck’d,” features a vocal line very close to Handel, although I also think back to Dowland in melancholy mood. There is a combination of cultivation and musical depth that also reminds me of Britten when he wove the English past into his own language. Liberatore has done the same very successfully.

Personal taste will dictate which pieces stand out, and for me, the lighter side of Liberatore’s musical imagination doesn’t linger long, while Hold Back Thy Hours strikes me as a major work with far-reaching significance—it deserves a wide audience and displays a composer who possesses far more than adroitness among his gifts. The impeccable performances are by the soloists named in the headnote or by the Zohn Collective, an ensemble at the Eastman School combining performers and composers. Liberatore himself teaches at Notre Dame, whose music faculty he joined in 2015. I would tell you where he was born and how old he is, but the inflated boilerplate that passes for a bio omits almost any information that isn’t outright puffery—a shame with someone who is genuinely talented and doesn’t need hype.

— Huntley Dent, 8.03.2023

On this sixty-five-minute collection, composer John Liberatore (b. 1984) is well-served by the high-calibre musicianship of the Tim Weiss-led Zohn Collective. The care with which the nine-member contemporary music ensemble attends to the nuances of the four works attests to the simpatico tie between creator and performer. Catch Somewhere is notable also for the variety of its programme, with two pieces for large ensemble (one featuring vocals) appearing alongside a trio for guitar, percussion and prepared piano and an arresting solo performance by Grammy Award-winning flutist and Zohn Collective co-founder Molly Barth. Differences naturally abound between the works, yet connecting them is their grounding in poetry. Appreciation for the recording is enhanced by the background Liberatore provides in the booklet and his identification of the poetic material relating to the pieces.

Liberatore, since 2015 a faculty member of the University of Notre Dame's Department of Music, is a composer but also a pianist and glass harmonica player. The music he writes has been informed by a number of experiences, a stint studying in Tokyo with Jo Kondo and collaborations with Roomful of Teeth and soprano Jamie Jordan, among others. It doesn't slot itself into any particular school; instead, each piece carves out its own distinctive sound space in the way it addresses a particular subject matter and organizes its elements in concert with it. His music is accessible yet technically sophisticated, complex whilst seeming deceptively simple, and both intellectually sound and emotionally expressive.

The album's engrossing opener, A Very Star-Like Start, is indicative of his style. Scored for eight instruments, the work was created at the Millay Colony, an artist's retreat located on Edna St. Vincent Millay's property in Upstate New York. The title (which arrived towards the end of the writing process) derives from a description of fireflies by Robert Frost, the insect a familiar presence at the retreat. It's certainly easy enough to hear the fluttering interactions of the instruments as firefly-like movements; fragmentary figures begun by one instrument are completed by another, with the whole presenting a restless swarm of activity. It's also possible to hear the piece as something reminiscent of a Stravinsky neoclassical chamber work when it's so rhythmically lively and intricately woven.

For the four-part solo flute setting Gilded Tree, Liberatore used for inspiration a cycle of poems by Randall Potts titled Fable, the poems themselves written in response to mixed-media sculptures by Esther Traugot. Similar to the way her work includes natural objects such as eggshells, seedpods, and twigs, so too does Gilded Tree develop with the kind of natural grace we encounter in the outdoors, especially when Barth's performance hews to the pure timbres of the flute. No effects are needed when the instrument's sound, so rich in pastoral associations, is already so transfixing. Contrasts are plentiful between the parts, as shown when the dance-like “black twig tips” and mystery-laden “silence lost to echoes” are juxtaposed.

Inspired by Whitman's “A Noiseless Patient Spider” and its image of the creature flinging forth threads it hopes'll “catch somewhere,” the album's titular work gives voice to the composer's pandemic-related realization that the connections he seeks in the solitary act of creation are less internally directed than outwardly aimed at expressing something that'll resonate with others. While the feeling of isolation engendered by the pandemic is intimated in movement titles such as “vacant, vast, surrounding” and “surrounded, detached,” resilience and hope, however tentative, are suggested in some of the eight-part work's other titles. In keeping with the sense of separation that permeated the period, Liberatore's choice of instrumentation—guitar, prepared piano, and percussion—establishes a barren quality in the early going; elsewhere, however, animation emerges in the boisterous “filament, filament, filament” and triumphant “catch somewhere” to convey recovery and a defiant refusal to succumb to despair. Contemplation's suggested too, in the pensive dialogue enacted during “O my soul,” for example.

At album's end, the four-part Hold Back Thy Hours is the only piece that sets poetry directly, specifically fragments of seventeenth-century English poetry. Tenor Zach Finkelstein (the work's dedicatee) delivers the texts in contexts that sometimes evoke Baroque music; as Liberatore notes, however, the words might have been written hundreds of years ago yet speak universally to the experience of being human, with all the joy and sorrow that that entails. The presence of oboe, bassoon, and harp alongside strings, trumpet, and other woodwinds also does much to evoke an earlier period, as do the stately rhythms that drive “violets pluck'd.” Still, while the inclusion of harpsichord does lend “gentle river” a Baroque quality, the nightmarish musical design the composer conjures for the movement locates it firmly in the modern era. Much the same could be said of the album in general when each work draws from the past yet ultimately feels emblematic of an omnivorous and polyglot contemporary music culture.

— Ron Schepper, 8.03.2023