"Douglas Knehans has produced an unforgettable symphony and one which, if all is good, just, and true, is headed for greatness."
— Fanfare Magazine
"I am happy to count Knehans among the most accomplished and original orchestral composers of our time."
— Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review
"This is what contemporary opera should be like."
— Fanfare Magazine, on Backwards from Winter
"An astonishingly visceral Winterreise for the 21st century"
— Fanfare Magazine
"the sounds of nature course through the orchestral pieces on his latest album 'Unfinished Earth,' with a primitive force and a melodic insistence that recall Stravinsky."
— The New Yorker
"An important new work for a raft of reasons, Knehans' Tempest - Concerto for Flute and Orchestra should be on every professional flutist's must-learn list."
— Performing Arts Review
"his kaleidoscopic command of color, grips the imagination and transforms consciousness."
— Performing Arts Review
"This is music of tremendous imagination. Knehans scores with a masterly hand, his sound paintbrush unerringly hitting the mark."
— Fanfare Magazine
"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"
— New York Concert Review
"transporting the listener miraculously to another world through its soaring melodic material over haunting repeated patterns."
— New York Concert Review, on Mist Waves
"I think that this is a major symphony, one that many listeners will find appealing"
— Fanfare Magazine, on Cloud Ossuary
"A stunning new recording of orchestral music by Douglas Knehans... I will be rehearing it (and other works) by this extraordinary composer."
— New York Concert Review
"this is one of the best flute recordings I have heard for a long time."
— PAN Magazine
"…an impressively vibrant compositional voice. Unmissable."
— PAN Magazine
"Knehans locates and amplifies the spiritual within the religious."
— Fanfare Magazine, on Lux Dei
THE NEW YORKER—on OPERA: Center for Contemporary Opera: “Backwards from Winter”
In Douglas Knehans’s monodrama for soprano and electric cello, a woman tells the story of devastating loss of her lover in reverse, from the grief of winter to the first blush of passion in spring. This is not the first time the composer has turned to the natural world as a metaphor for lived experience; the sounds of nature course through the orchestral pieces on his latest album “Unfinished Earth,” with a primitive force and a melodic insistence that recall Stravinsky. Jennifer Williams directs the world premiere of this ninety-minute work. May 25 at 7:30 (Symphony Space, Broadway at 95th Street. 212-864-5400.)
When Words Are Not Enough
Douglas Knehans on Music, Memory, and the Emotional Life of Music
When Words Are Not Enough
Sooner or later, everyone runs into something words cannot quite hold.
A profound loss. An unexpected joy. The quiet realization that life has changed in ways from which there is no returning. We search for words, rearrange sentences, begin again, and still find ourselves sensing that something essential has escaped us. Language, remarkable as it is, eventually reaches its limits.
Douglas Knehans became a composer because he encountered those limits early.
He told me that one reason he gave his life to composition was the growing sense that words could not always reach what mattered most. Certain experiences, emotions, and questions seemed to sit just beyond ordinary conversation. Music, he discovered, could move toward them with an immediacy speech rarely achieves. “There are a lot of things we experience as people,” he reflected, “that we just don’t talk about... But those are the real things that make us human.” Those difficult-to-name experiences have become the territory he has spent a lifetime exploring in sound.
That conviction has shaped an unusually wide-ranging career. Born in St. Louis and raised in Australia from the age of fourteen, Knehans has become a prominent voice in contemporary composition, with music performed by orchestras, chamber ensembles, opera companies, and soloists around the world. His work is known for its dramatic intensity and expressive imagination, and his leadership as founder of ABLAZE Records and codirector of the Thessaloniki Art and Music Summit has helped open doors for other composers. Yet in conversation, the résumé quickly recedes. What keeps returning is something simpler and more urgent.
"The emotional power of music."
He spoke those words without ceremony, yet they illuminate nearly everything else he shared. Styles evolve. Techniques change. Musical fashions come and go. What is left, he believes, is music's extraordinary ability to move another human being.
Listening to Knehans, I was struck by how quietly radical that position can feel. Contemporary composition is often framed through technique, systems, aesthetics, and innovation. Knehans values craft as deeply as any composer, but he refuses to treat it as the destination. Technique matters because it allows music to communicate. Without that purpose, even the most sophisticated score risks becoming an exercise rather than an experience.
Still Looking
Artists are often asked when they found their voice, as though artistic identity arrives at a single decisive moment before remaining permanently intact.
Knehans has never believed that.
While studying composition at Yale, he asked his teacher, Jacob Druckman, a question that had quietly occupied his own imagination.
"When did you find your compositional voice?"
Druckman's answer surprised him.
"I think I'm still looking for it."
Decades later, Knehans still returns to that exchange. It has become less an anecdote than a way of understanding artistic life itself. Rather than seeing artistic voice as something one finally possesses, he thinks of it as something continually pursued. Each composition opens another possibility. Each score leaves another question alive. Even now, after symphonies, operas, concertos, recordings, and decades of teaching, he smiles when he says he feels close, but is still “chasing that last rainbow.”
Writing for Real People
Ask Douglas Knehans about composition long enough, and the conversation will eventually leave the composer’s desk for the rehearsal room, where music depends on the people asked to bring it to life.
It arrives in the rehearsal room.
Again and again, he returned to performers, not simply as musicians who realize a score, but as collaborators whose artistry deserves the composer’s full attention. His advice to young composers is strikingly practical: talk to conductors, talk to instrumentalists, learn what an instrument can truly do. Make the music performable. Not easier, exactly, but playable in a way that lets performers devote themselves to expression rather than merely surviving the technical demands on the page.
There is an important distinction here. Knehans is not arguing against ambition or complexity. His own music is rich in color, structure, and technical imagination. What he questions is the habit, still present in some corners of contemporary music, of treating difficulty as proof of seriousness. Complexity by itself communicates very little. A performer should leave rehearsal challenged, certainly, but also convinced that every demand serves a musical purpose.
Listening to him, I was reminded that composition is, in many ways, an act of generosity. Long before audiences hear a single note, performers spend weeks or months inhabiting a score, solving its problems, discovering its character, and gradually making it their own. Knehans understands that relationship with unusual clarity. He writes not only for instruments, but for the musicians holding them. Perhaps that is why his music possesses such remarkable dramatic intensity. It asks much of performers yet never asks for difficulty without reason.
The same philosophy runs through his work as an educator. He urges students to look outward as well as inward, to consider not only what they wish to say, but how listeners might receive it. Music, he believes, is not diminished by communication; it is fulfilled by it. Young composers can become preoccupied with being different before asking whether their ideas can truly be understood. Originality matters, of course, but originality without communication can become a private language spoken to an empty room.
Giving Music a Home
That commitment to communication extends well beyond Knehans' own compositions.
For more than three decades, he has devoted substantial energy to creating opportunities for other composers. As founder and Artistic Director of ABLAZE Records, he has helped produce more than ninety commercial recordings representing over one hundred and fifty composers, many of whom might otherwise have struggled to find space in a crowded recording landscape. What began in Australia as a way to support colleagues gradually became an international label dedicated to giving contemporary composers a professional platform from which their music could reach performers, presenters, and audiences around the world.
When I asked why independent labels still matter, his answer was refreshingly direct. Without them, many composers simply would not be heard. Established names will usually find their way to recordings. Emerging voices rarely have that certainty. Independent labels help keep contemporary music a living conversation, rather than a catalogue reserved for those who have already achieved broad recognition.
That same conviction is evident in the Thessaloniki Art and Music Summit, which he co-directs with Diogo Carvalho in collaboration with the Thessaloniki State Symphony Orchestra. Rather than championing a single aesthetic, the festival brings together composers from different countries, traditions, and musical perspectives, placing their works side by side in rehearsal and performance. Knehans spoke warmly about hearing those voices come alive through the orchestra, and about the value of composers learning from one another in real time. Diversity, for him, is not a slogan. It is something heard.
Across these roles, composer, teacher, producer, artistic director, a remarkably consistent philosophy emerges. Whether writing a concerto, producing a recording, or helping organize an international festival, Knehans keeps returning to the same essential question.
How can this music find the people it was meant to reach?
Music as Remembrance
As our conversation drew to a close, I asked Knehans what he hoped his work would leave behind.
His answer surprised me.
Although he has led conservatories, founded institutions, produced recordings, and devoted decades to teaching, he did not hesitate.
His legacy, he said, is his music.
Among his works, one stands apart with particular significance: his Shoah Requiem, a monumental seventeen-movement meditation on the Holocaust. He spoke of it not as a professional milestone, but as an act of remembrance. Some chapters of history, he believes, must be kept present because they reveal the terrible consequences of forgetting our shared humanity. Music cannot undo those tragedies, but it can preserve memory with a depth that facts alone often cannot.
Perhaps that is why the phrase that stayed with me throughout our conversation was not about orchestration, awards, or compositional technique.
It was about being human.
"There are a lot of things we experience as people that we just don't talk about."
Those words seem to illuminate everything Douglas Knehans has spent his life creating. His symphonies, operas, concertos, recordings, and festivals vary widely in subject and scale, yet they share a single purpose: to give voice to experiences ordinary conversation cannot fully hold. The craft is there, but it never feels like the point. What matters is what the music asks of us: to feel, to remember, and perhaps to recognize something of ourselves in the lives of others.
That is no small ambition.
For listeners encountering Knehans for the first time, that may be the most compelling place to begin. Not with reputation or category, but with the question at the center of his work: what can music say when words fall short? His answer has taken the form of symphonies, operas, concertos, recordings, and opportunities created for other composers. Together, they point toward an artist still searching, still listening, and still trusting that music can reach places language cannot.
ALL ABOUT THE ARTS—on Douglas Knehans: Cloud Ossuary
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 Toms 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
FANFARE MAGAZINE—on Douglas Knehans: Cloud Ossuary
Douglas Knehans was born in St. Louis in 1957 but describes himself as an American/Australian composer. He studied at Australian National University, Queens College in New York under Thea Musgrave, and Yale University under Jacob Druckman. He currently lives in Cincinnati and teaches at the College-Conservatory of Music at the University of Cincinnati. His music inhabits a world that goes back and forth between tonality and atonality, always to serve an expressive purpose. Knehans creates a very wide range of orchestral color, but he is otherwise hard to pigeonhole because of the varied musical grammar he employs. What makes his music so successful is how well he ties everything together.
Mist Waves is a brief and lovely work for violin and strings. Knehans calls it “a kind of loose Chaconne whose veiled repetition of the initial eight bars forms the basis for the work.” Descriptively, he says that 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.” The music’s diaphanous qualities reflect a deft compositional hand at instrumentation, which is combined with a genuine melodic gift. This would make a beautiful work for solo violinists to include on an orchestral program in combination with Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending, whose mood it mirrors to some degree. Here Czech violinist Pavel Wallinger plays it beautifully, and the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra strings accompany with delicacy.
The major work on the disc is Symphony No. 4, “Cloud Ossuary.” At 47:39 it requires much more of its listeners than Mist Waves, but it rewards that attention. The symphony was inspired by a poem, “Bones and All,” by the composer’s daughter Katarina. Her poem is an intriguing combination of despair and hope, and the entire symphony reflects this dichotomy. The first two movements are purely orchestral and serve almost as prelude to the finale which occupies more than half the total length of the piece, In it, a soprano sings Knehans’s setting of “Bones and All.” He describes the finale as “a kind of anti-Abschied: where the protagonist has lived in a desperate and grimy world and by every right should choose to leave it, but instead finds a place of light and love, nurturement and peace.” I’m not so sure, though, about “anti-Abschied.” The protagonist in Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde reflects on a more beautiful world than Knehans does, and the ending of “Der Abschied” finds light and love and peace, if not merriment.
I think that this is a major symphony, one that many listeners will find appealing. The music reflects the wide range of contrasting emotions in Katarina Knehans’s poem, expanding even further the impact of her words. Soprano Judith Weusten sings with authority and a quite extraordinary range, which the part demands. One does need the provided text to be able to follow along, which may be the fault of the writing as much as the singing. Overall, the performances by the singer, orchestra, and conductor Mikel Toms are deeply committed.
The booklet includes excellent notes by the composer, and Ablaze’s recorded sound is clear and well balanced.
—Henry Fogel
FANFARE MAGAZINE—on Douglas Knehans: Cloud Ossuary
I have reviewed a goodly amount of music by Douglas Knehans for Fanfare, including one disc that also features soprano Judith Weusten in Backwards from Winter (Fanfare 43:5), plus, a choral disc (Fanfare 40:4), the remarkable cello concerto Soar (39:4), the flute concerto Tempest (41:5), and an Ablaze disc shared with music by Edward Smaldone (44:3). The piece for solo violin and orchestra, Mist Waves, strikes me as Knehans’s equivalent to Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending. Mystical in intent (and realization, via Pavel Wallinger’s superbly expressive, warm-toned violin and the Brno strings’ dark, cloud-like shiftings below), Knehans’s 2019 piece is constructed as a “loose chaconne” (the composer’s own words). Land-based clouds form in waves, with the occasional revealing of new areas. Knehans likens this to the relationship between the mind’s conscious aspect and deeper sub/unconscious strata. The piece works supremely well for violin and orchestra; it came as a surprise to learn that the original was for violin and piano and that the orchestral version (strings only) was prepared expressly for this recording. That version was premiered by Madeleine Mitchell and Michael Delfin. There is a recording by Mitchell and pianist Nigel Clayton on Naxos (a disc called Violin Conversations), and for all of the sensitivity of that performance and Mitchell’s impressive control of her instrument, it is the Ablaze version that seems to penetrate to far deeper spaces of the psyche, and to touch the heart far more, and Wallinger is every inch Mitchell’s equal in terms of technical command.
Knehans’s Fourth Symphony is entitled Cloud Ossuary, continuing the cloud theme. It began life as a setting of a poem by his daughter, Katarina Knehans, called Bones and All. The first movement (of three) was composed last. It is immediately clear we move into symphonic territory. The music begins quietly, in no rush to find itself; any search for purchase is unhurried. This is “The Ossian Cage,” a movement envisaged as a “somewhat failed rant against a containment.” The orchestra’s kitchen department certainly has much to do in the earlier stages, but lest that implies a cliché it is worth reassuring the reader that this is highly inventive, gripping music. The performative challenges of this opening passage must be huge, and all credit is due to the Brno forces for bringing it off with such palpable confidence. Melodic strands strain to emerge, as the dynamics and textures swell.
The second movement, “Breathe Clouded,” is (again in the composer’s words) “a dream in the clouds—the dark clouds of something coming.” The registral chasm between suspended high violins (that shift and yet remains somehow static) and the sustained lower strings creates a real feeling of unrest. While this movement is in many ways preludial to the last (and sets up various pitch elements to be used later, while focusing the symphony’s trajectory towards that final panel), it has an aura all of its own, and a very special one at that. Knehans is very aware of the power of mild dissonance, and exploits that perfectly, including in the sustained-note trumpet solo. There is certainly something Mahlerian about the final swells.
Knehans refers to the finale as a “sort of anti-Abschied” without specifically invoking Mahler. This is implicit, of course, but Knehans’s take is different in that the protagonist remains on the corporeal plane. There is, though, something of Mahler’s final movement of Das Lied von der Erde about the finale’s darkly growling opening. The soloist, Dutch soprano Judith Weusten, enters early on, superb in her delivery of Katarina Knehans’s poem Bones and All (from which the movement derives its title). Weusten’s voice soars like a bird. The poem is a major piece of writing in itself. Its graphic imagery striving towards a release reminded me of Mat Collishaw’s unforgettable film Sky Burial, designed to be performed alongside a live performance of the Fauré Requiem (even more intriguingly, Katarina Knehans has herself penned a poem that includes the text of the Requiem Mass, Earth Requiem). Douglas Knehans’s setting is remarkable in its underpinning, enhancement, and non-intervention. Weusten positively lives each word; the Brno strings’ stabbing accents around the lines “The world had not been kind to you, / I thought this would be enough” are perfectly judged, as is the compositional gesture itself. An instrumental interlude quickens the tension between the second and third stanzas of Katarina Knehans’s remarkable poem
Knehans knows when to restrict the music to a mere sonic trickle (a sort of foregrounding that Mahler used also in his “Der Abschied”); Judith Westen knows when to let the music fly (“I reconstruct you,” she sings, with glorious melismas). A searing trumpet glistens in its silver light alongside searing strings, culminating in the vocal phrase “I have buried so many in this wasteland.” That trumpet has a really significant structural part to play, and the lines are stunningly delivered: whoever plays it absolutely should have been credited alongside Weusten and Wallinger on this disc. This is a tiny, tiny quibble, though. Douglas Knehans has produced an unforgettable symphony and one which, if all is good, just, and true, is headed for greatness.
I searched in vain for a purchasable collection of poetry by Katarina Knehans, although her excellent website furnishes other examples of her work.
—Colin Clarke
FANFARE MAGAZINE—on Douglas Knehans: Lux Dei
The main piece on this disc is the Missa brevis, but it is preceded by a number of other works. Knehans has previously been described as reminiscent of Britten and Stravinsky in his choral writing, and this seems fair, particularly the Britten reference. Born in 1957 in Missouri, he was actually educated at Canberra School of Music (Australia) before gaining his Master Degree at Queen’s College, City University of New York and received the first Luigi Dallapiccola Composition Award (in 1991). From there he went to Yale for his doctorate, studying with, among others, Jacob Druckman and Lukas Foss. His most relevant academic appointment is dean of the College-Conservatory of Music (CCM) at the University of Cincinnati, for it is this establishment’s choir that recorded the present disc. The actual recordings are split pretty evenly between two venues, Cathedral Basilica of the Assumption in Covington, New York, and Armstrong Chapel, Cincinnati.
Entitled Lux Dei, this disc celebrates Knehans’s work for a cappella choir over almost a quarter of a century. Knehans’s own background in Catholicism informs his writing heavily. The opening Panis angelicus is a slow moving but radiant hymn in which the upper voices are tested somewhat in the work’s more agile section (the CCM copes well). But it is the rich, sonorous blend of the CCM Chorale that is most impressive, heard in a beautifully balanced recording. The Three Psalms (66, 19, and 150, in that order and sung in Latin) was a prize winner at the First International Sacred Choral Music Festival in the Czech Republic. The sheer joy of Jubilate Dei is palpable here; even more impressive is the superb diction of the choir. The more restrained Caeli enarrant glorium Dei finds climactic relief even within the mounds of what is at most a healthy mezzo-forte before the famous Psalm 150 (Laudate eum in sanctis ejus) reveals a rhythmic life and delivery that indeed occasionally conjures up Stravinsky.
The brief Epicedeum Hathumode of 1991 is a “Lament for Hathumode, Abbess of Gandesheim,” and is a slow-moving expression of profound grief. The choir’s crescendos are like swells of emotional pain; the Two Looks at Silence take a text by A. S. Kilne, setting it first in Latin and then in English. The work is dedicated to the composer’s daughter. The florid writing of the first setting, Silentium, leaves one in no doubt as to just how at home Knehans is writing in this medium; the more restrained “Silence” seems to interiorize the text further, perhaps reflecting the closer proximity to the choir’s home language. The two effectively operate as different sides of the same coin.
By far the most extended composition on the disc, the Missa brevis adds organ to the mix, immediately dramatic in the opening Kyrie and certainly extending that sense of the dramatic in the ecstatic opening of the ensuing Gloria. Solo voices are used effectively at Et in terra pax, but the work’s crowning moment exists in the contrast between the shining, exultant close of the Gloria, caught simply magnificently in this recording, and the gentle, otherworldly organ opening of the Sanctus, the twin gently unfolding lines in the organ heard against quiet statements of the word Sanctus that drip downwards like rain. The darkest terrain is saved for the Agnus Dei, where the most advanced harmonies of the work create an atmosphere of what might be described as transcendental desolation that undercuts even the final dona nobis pacem (superb control by the upper voices in those final moments).
The final piece on the disc is Symbolum apostolorum (Credo in Deum Patrem omnipotentem), a setting of great contrasts, where fragile solo voice suddenly finds itself set against full-on choral blocks. Dynamics themselves are clearly rehearsed to the last degree, so skilful is the delivery here. Strangely, this is the work that evoked the least emotional response in the present writer; the level of inspiration seems just a touch down on the rest of the disc’s exalted standards.
With loads of space given to artist and composer biographies and full choir listing of personnel, perhaps it would have been nice to have more information about the pieces themselves in the booklet. The date 1991 for the Epicedeum came about because of a publisher’s web site, not from material on hand, for example. Small caveats apart, this is a radiant disc of music by a composer who is blessed with a tremendous imagination and who clearly has great affinity with writing for choir. There is a huge amount of beauty to be found here. Put simply, Knehans locates and amplifies the spiritual within the religious.
FANFARE MAGAZINE—on Douglas Knehans: Backwards from Winter
An astonishingly visceral Winterreise for the 21st century, Douglas Knehans’s Backwards from Winter is a single woman’s reflection on a love relationship—a space for grief, and her negotiating of that grief. It is scored for solo soprano (“Woman”); there is a part for “Man” as exteriorized in the form of an electric cellist who also sings, and an electronic component. There is also a video, which sadly is absent in this audio release, although its contents are described in the booklet and a YouTube video of the Australian premiere is available.
The superb libretto is by Juanita Rockwell: Each scene is cast in three Tanka verses (a 31-syllable precursor to Haiku; the word “tanka” means “short poem”). The journey begins with “Winter” and moves through the seasons, with the first three seasons followed by a section that remembers it (so, “Winter” is followed by “Remembering Winter” and so on); with the coming of “Spring,” however, the music moves to “Remembering Everything.” The setting is “the landscape of memory and presence.”
Tracing a year backwards, from the grief through to the loss itself (“Autumn,” where she lost him in a storm) through to a passionate “Summer” to their budding love in “Spring,” this is a remarkable journey. The emotional effect of the time-reversal is astonishing, as it enables us to hear the joy of first encounter and subsequent love in a totally different manner. The shimmering “Summer” is nevertheless underpinned by a palpable sadness, and when the two voices (soprano and singing cellist) enter together, the effect is stunningly powerful. The opening out into “Spring” is superbly managed through the active electric cello; later, a dark processional around the lines “we stand on the shore, / lilac blossoms ev’rywhere,” with muffled percussion-like sounds (imagine the dead thwacks of Mahler’s 10th Symphony, but on a gong, if you will). It is here the electronica makes its presence known most obviously—swirling lines interacting with the electric cello as the voice swoops hither and thither, sometimes to stratospheric regions. If the repetitive phrases of the electronics and cello refer to Minimalism, it is a highly individualized Minimalism. (One might posit that the repeated slow scales towards the end make reference to Satyagraha, for example, with Knehans grounding the sound through a registrally-emphasized bass note.)
This performance took place in Tasmania in June 2018, shortly after the work’s world premiere in New York’s Thalia Theater on 25/5/2018, during the New York Opera Fest. The recording is stunning, as is the standard of performance from both live musicians; it is hard to credit that this is indeed live from that perspective. Weusten in particular seems to have limitless stamina. One of Knehans’s finest musical statements, this is a stunning release.
This is what contemporary opera should be like.
NEW YORK CONCERT REVIEW —on Douglas Knehans: Mist Waves
For me, the absolute standout of the evening was The Collective’s founder’s piece, Mist Waves, by Douglas Knehans, a poignant, succinct modern passacaglia for violin and piano. No tricks, just beautiful soulful material, played with heart by Cara Tweed and Nicholas Underhill.
CLASSICAL MUSIC DAILY—on Douglas Knehans: Cloud Ossuary
An evocative journey into the delicate and emotional world of composer Douglas Knehans and writer Katarina Knehans.
This disc explodes with electric performances by the Brno Philharmonic, violin soloist Pavel Wallinger and stunning young soprano Judith Weusten under the propulsive and imaginative baton of conductor Mikel Toms.
NEW YORK CONCERT REVIEW—on Douglas Knehans: Cloud Ossuary
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.
LIMELIGHT MAGAZINE—on Douglas Knehans: Cloud Ossuary
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.
MUSIC WEB INTERNATIONAL—on Douglas Knehans: Concertos
American-Australian composer Douglas Knehans has a great facility for melody and these works amply demonstrate that. Soar, his cello concerto started life as a work for cello and piano and was orchestrated in 2006. Remarkably there is little indication while listening that it could ever have existed in another form since it works so well for cello and orchestra. Despite its short length of 14 minutes this single movement concerto not only fully exploits the cello’s many and varied colours but is a highly charged and emotionally rich work that also belies its American origins in that it has a distinctly European sound, at least to my ears. The emotionally dark and disturbed nature is immediately apparent from the very beginning and the powerfully stated argument is maintained throughout leaving a lasting impression on the listener.
Drift for solo oboe and strings is an ocean of calm by contrast and beautifully stated. Knehans explains in the booklet notes that his inspiration in part was a mental picture of clouds against sky dissolving into each other as they move across it and it certainly conjures up such an image. His hope in writing it was that the listener can appreciate this in such a way as to have the impression that time has been suspended and that all that remains “is the beautiful sounds of stillness hanging in the air” and I can concur that that was precisely the impression it had on me.
Clearly his desire to describe the natural world in music is a major motivating factor in his aim as a composer for the next work ...Mist, Memory, Shadow... seeks to articulate his reaction to Tasmania where he was resident for eight years between 2000-2008 and indeed he regards Australia as his second home. He points out in his notes that mist is a key feature in Tasmania, one which cloaks the island in a shroud of mystery along with its majesty. The element of memory comes from his feelings of contemplation heralded by the mists, encouraging him to reflect upon that majesty that is Tasmania’s natural wilderness and how it fits in with past, present and future which is something we should all reflect upon given the impact we humans are continuing to have on the fragility of the Earth and its natural features and resources. The violin emerges as if it is part of the mist rising up into the sky and is a powerful image. It is so heartening that gone are the days when composers fought shy of writing tuneful music and that they recognise that how they say what they want to say can embrace all methods of expression without fear of disapproval. Knehans’ rapturously gorgeous melodies are a delight to listen to.
Cascade –Concerto for Orchestra is an orchestrated version of a work originally written for two pianos and once again it seems a perfectly natural approach for this music that falls into three short movements, Drift echo, Waves and Torrent. There is a relentless energy here in the opening movement, less so in the first half of the second and on my first had me wondering if the titles of the two would not have fitted better reversed so I mentally discounted them and concentrated on the music which once again is extremely satisfying with lots of ideas being thoroughly exploited. Then the music burst out of its more languid mood before once again subsiding and becoming calm once more. The third movement has some more superb writing for strings with expressive themes which are worked through in highly attractive ways and which sweep the listener on towards the concerto’s exciting conclusion. Knehans seems full of ideas his music is never less than totally engaging and I found this disc a marvellous introduction to his musical world as I am sure you will too. It is also very pleasing to hear two less wellknown orchestras, both of which play so brilliantly with each conductor in firm control of these forces while each of the three soloists clearly admir the music and admiration through their committed playing. All in all a fascinating disc of engaging music from another composer whose music needs wider circulation.
PIZZICATO—on Douglas Knehans: Unfinished Earth
Von überbordender Einfallskraft sind die beiden Werke dieser CD. Der aus St. Louis stammende australisch-amerikanische Komponist Douglas Knehans (*1957) weiß, was er mit einem Orchester anfangen soll, und es gelingen ihm immer wieder überraschende Formulierungen in Registern, wo man sie nicht erwartet.
Sein klassisch-dreisätziges Flötenkonzert ‘Tempest’ wurde von den Winden inspiriert, die in großen Strömen die Erde umkreisen. Der erste, recht dramatische Satz heißt ‘Ostro’, benannt nach dem mediterranen, warmen Südwind. Der zweite, ruhige Satz ist mit ‘Mistral…Funérailles’ überzeichnet, während der dritte Satz, ‘Etesian’ sich auf den ‘Meltemi’, den vorherrschenden Wind der Sommermonate in der Ägäis bezieht, der als trockener Nordwind vom griechischen Festland in Richtung Kreta im östlichen Mittelmeer stets heiteres Wetter mit sich bringt. Nach der Trauer des zweiten Satzes ist dies ein phänomenal quirliger Satz, unablässig angetrieben, unbeschwert und übermütig. Wenn Gareth Davies, Solofötist des ‘London Symphony Orchestra’ in den beiden ersten Sätzen schon vollauf überzeugt, so ist er in diesem hoch virtuosen Satz absolut phänomenal. Auch das Orchester aus Brünn unter dem britischen Dirigenten Mikel Toms ist engagiert und inspiriert dabei, und so ist dies eine spannende und wirklich spektakulär Aufnahme.
‘Unfinished Earth’ hat der Komponist so beschrieben: « … a longer and deeper work, (…) delving into the constant degradation and reformation of earth and sea. Just as the earth slowly changes and evolves, we ourselves are constantly evolving through the deepening of our life experience, the processing of life’s joys and tragedies, and the inner passage of our turmoils and triumphs. »
‘Unfinished Earth’ ist ein starkes, musikalisch-narratives Stück mit wunderbaren und wirklich originellen Klangformen, leicht zu erfassen und dennoch keineswegs trivial.
Wenn bei etlichen zeitgenössischen Komponisten, die weitgehend tonal komponieren und sich traditioneller Techniken bedienen, Tondichtungen nicht selten an die Gattung der Filmmusik erinnern, so ist das bei Knehans nicht der Fall. Elementare Gewalt mit Stürmen der Leidenschaft ist stets Ausdruck von dramatischen Empfindungen, genau wie Anmut, Grazie und zarteste Poesie Ausdruck von Sensibilität ist.
‘Unfinished Earth’ zeichnet kein besonders schönes Bild der Erde, sondern eher ein bedrohliches. Das brillant orchestrierte Stück basiert stark auf Klangfarben, ist geheimnisvoll mystisch und hinterlässt einen etwas unheimlichen und unwirklichen Eindruck. Auch in diesem Stück spielt das Orchester aus Brünn mit viel Hingabe und hörbarer Freude am produzierten Klang.
The two works on this CD are brimming with inventive power. St. Louis-born Australian-American composer Douglas Knehans (b. 1957) knows exactly how to handle an orchestra, repeatedly crafting surprising musical turns in registers where one least expects them. His flute concerto *Tempest*—structured in the classical three-movement form—was inspired by the winds that sweep across the globe in vast currents. The first, highly dramatic movement is titled "Ostro," named after the warm Mediterranean south wind. The second, tranquil movement bears the heading "Mistral…Funérailles," while the third movement, "Etesian," refers to the "Meltemi"—the prevailing summer wind of the Aegean; blowing as a dry northerly from the Greek mainland toward Crete in the eastern Mediterranean, it consistently brings fair weather. Following the sorrow of the second movement, this is a phenomenally lively movement—ceaselessly driven, lighthearted, and high-spirited. While Gareth Davies, principal flute of the London Symphony Orchestra, is thoroughly convincing in the first two movements, he is absolutely phenomenal in this highly virtuosic finale. The Brno-based orchestra, under British conductor Mikel Toms, plays with equal commitment and inspiration, making this a thrilling and truly spectacular recording.
The composer describes *Unfinished Earth* as follows: "... a longer and deeper work, (...) delving into the constant degradation and reformation of earth and sea. Just as the earth slowly changes and evolves, we ourselves are constantly evolving through the deepening of our life experience, the processing of life’s joys and tragedies, and the inner passage of our turmoils and triumphs." *Unfinished Earth* is a powerful, musically narrative piece featuring wonderful and truly original sonorities—accessible yet by no means trivial. While the tone poems of many contemporary composers—who write largely tonally and employ traditional techniques—often evoke the genre of film music, this is not the case with Knehans. Elemental force and storms of passion invariably give expression to dramatic emotions, just as grace, elegance, and the tenderest poetry reflect a sense of sensitivity. ‘Unfinished Earth’ paints a rather menacing picture of the Earth rather than a beautiful one. This brilliantly orchestrated piece relies heavily on tone color; it is steeped in mystery and mysticism, leaving an impression that is somewhat eerie and surreal. Here, too, the Brno orchestra performs with great dedication and an audible delight in the sound they are creating.
PERFORMING ARTS REVIEW——on Douglas Knehans: Unfinished Earth
American/Australian composer Douglas Knehans has enjoyed worldwide recognition for his imaginative, often whimsical, occasionally apocryphal but never superfluous sound visions and compositional style; music that is at once demanding yet easily understood, charming but not a little haunted. A post-primordial prescience informs the composer’s worldview that when conflated with his kaleidoscopic command of color, grips the imagination and transforms consciousness.
Such is the stunning takeaway from Unfinished Earth a 2018 premiere recording of two substantial and also substantially diverse Knehans works on this beautifully engineered Ablaze Records disc. Tempest For Flute and Orchestra (2014) performed by the extraordinary Principal Flute of the London Symphony Orchestra Gareth Davies and Unfinished Earth for Orchestra (2016) a three-movement journey to the center of Knehans’ molten muse, offer fascinating takes on the Greeks’ five elements - earth, water, air (winds), fire and aether (the void).
The Norman Dinerstein Professor of Composition Scholar at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, Douglas Knehans is also the director of Ablaze Records, founded with the intention of representing todays living composers across a range of media. Unfinished Earth has already garnered five international recording awards for good reason; the sound quality is crystal clear, particularly important considering the sometimes dense orchestrations, fascinating layers of sound color, moody narrative subtexts and virtuoso riffs for not just flute but other instruments in the orchestra - Knehans’ compositional calling card. The performances are executed with uniform virtuosity by the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra and managed throughout with style and finesse by conductor Mikel Toms.
An important new work for a raft of reasons, Knehans’ Tempest - Concerto for Flute and Orchestra (2014) should be on every professional flutist’s must-learn list. It will disappoint neither the artistic priorities of soloist and orchestra, nor at the box office. In three beautifully constructed movements that describe Ostro, a southerly, Mediterranean/Adriatic wind; Mistral Funérailles, the cold, strong northwesterly winds that roar down the Rhone Valley and into the northern Mediterranean and Etesian, the annual summer winds that blow over Greece and the Aegean, Tempest is as fresh and breezy as the currents swirling above the planet it describes; a bright and fascinating new concerto for flute and orchestra that speaks with narrative clarity and an adventurers sense of virtuosity and excitement. Not since John Corigliano’s Pied Piper Fantasy has a flute concerto been so chock-a-block with narrative action and disciplined mischief for both soloist and orchestra; a delight at several levels of pleasure. Kudos to flutist Gareth Davies for a thoughtfully definitive, technically virtuoso world premiere recording of this powerful new addition to the flute concerto repertoire.
Unfinished Earth is an orchestral Earth Abides, focusing energy and color on the catastrophic forces that have shaped the universe, our planet and the collective psyche of its sentient inhabitants since before knowledge. Tempering, Eternal Ocean and Tearing Drift, the three movements of Unfinished Earth afford Knehans a spacious compositional canvas for his dystopian vision of a planet in peril. The first movement Tempering, describes the roiling lava that forms from the void and becomes land, water, air - sustainers of life. The second movement Eternal Ocean “evokes the shifting currents of the deep ocean,” in the composer’s words, but is also a metaphor for the churning subconscious. Tearing Drift, it’s metallic colors and percussive chord clusters imagining seismic disaster, is a swirling maelstrom of chaos and grief, “the Munchian silent scream of isolated man,” according to the composer. The result for listeners is edgy, apocryphal, exciting and satisfying.
FLÖTE AKTUEL—on Douglas Knehans Tempest Flute Concerto
The inside of earth inspired Douglas Knehans for the two compositions that Mikel Toms and his Brno Philharmonic orchestra recorded here. Next to the title giving piece it’s the composition Tempest and its three movements for Flute and Orchestra that are impressive. Contrasting parameters on a dynamic level and almost spherical sounds that change with forceful tutti passages, build-ups with almost dramatic tension, dizzying technical parts as well as and a broad ambitus of the incorporated instruments are putting natures wonders into impressive musical use. The virtuoso solo part played by Gareth Davies, who plays the flute for the London Symphony Orchestra, is flawlessly mastered, as if he could withstand every storm.
Expressive, fearless and incredible energetic he plays with the Brno Philharmonic, especially in the stormy movements of Ostro (a wind in the Mediterranean) Mistral (south of France) and Etesian (Region next to Greece). Lyrical scenes are strengthening the deceptive calm, that erupts into violence and ever so strong winds. No surprise that the Album received three silver medals at the Global Music Awards.
GAPPLEGATE CLASSICAL-MODERN MUSIC REVIEW—on Douglas Knehans: Unfinished Earth
Often formally akin to Stravinsky's "Rite" and perhaps certain Ruggles works, in the best Modernist tradition of thickly and boldly underscored orchestral dissonance with a powerful series of gestures, we have Douglas Knehans' two-work CD Unfinished Earth (ablaze Records 00036). It is a very dramatic program, nicely performed. It gives us a catbird's seat on Knehans' pronounced orchestral flair.
The Brno Philharmonic under Mikel Toms take matters in hand for an ideally dynamic and dexterous tensile-strong presence throughout.
The Concerto for Flute and Orchestra, "Tempest," sports a very mercurial and sound-colorful flute performance by Gareth Davies. The solo part has wonderful presence and drive--and sets off an orchestral score that expresses alternately tenderness and power. The music embodies according to the liners the presence of wind as it courses through our planet. Indeed that seems apt.
The title work "Unfinished Earth" has a rhythmic insistency and a brashly dissonant demeanor that carves out a sound universe unique to Knehans yet paradigmatically High Modernist, with a level of expressive feeling that might be identified partly as Romantic but not backward leaning so much as chasm spanning. As the earth slowly evolves so does our life, the liners assert. And perhaps no more so than now do we feel the constancy of change and the need to take on fresh challenges and survive with a dignity and consistency that rises to whatever comes.
The three movements exude alternately strength and mystery as does our earth. It is an extraordinary work.
The press sheet that came with the CD asserts that the music is influenced by Lutoslawski, Stravinsky and Mahler. I find that quite interesting and have no reason to contest it. Those influences are fully synthesized and internalized into a special whole, however. On the basis of this program I am happy to count Knehans among the most accomplished and original orchestral composers of our time. I recommend this most heartily. It belongs in anyone's collection who follows the newest of the new. Bravo, bravo.
GRAMOPHONE—on Douglas Knehans: Unfinished Earth
There are many really fine American composers for orchestra at the moment, though few have the international presence of, say, Corigliano, Christopher Rouse, Joan Tower, Jennifer Higdon or - at least in the opera pit - Jake Heggie. Composers like Dan Welcher, Jeremy Gill and Behzad Ranjbaran (to pluck three names at random) deserve wider currency. So, too, does Douglas Knehans (b1957), a name unknown to me hitherto (although I see Presto Classical's database now lists eight other discs featuring his music which are currently available).
There is no doubt from the two works given here that Knehans is a composer of considerable fluency and instrumental imagination. The three movements of the Flute Concerto (2014) portray three winds that blow off the Mediterranean Sea: 'Ostra', 'Mistral ... Funerailles' (no specific references to Liszt that I can hear) and 'Etesian'. The outer movements are the most vivid while the central evocation of the Mistral strikes as a little more generic. It is played with impressive control by Gareth Davies, whose attractive tone is evident throughout.
Knehans describes his orchestral triptych Unfinished Earth (2016) as 'a symphony in all but name' and there is a clear community of spirit and emotional progression through the work. The inspiration lies in the tectonic and geographic features of the planet, anthropomorphised to reflect human experience. Thus, the opening 'Tempering' reflects both the formation of Earth and 'the interplay between individual and group'; 'Eternal Ocean' needs no poetic explanation; while 'Tearing Drift' - a terrific toccata - provides a roof-raising conclusion. The Brno Philharmonic give a storming account, relishing Knehans's virtuoso writing, particularly the horns (the composer's son being an apprentice horn player). However, Mikel Toms secures some sensitive accompaniment in the concerto. Good sound, too.
PAN—on Douglas Knehans Tempest-Flute Concerto
This disc contains two works by American-born composer Douglas Knehans. Tempest is a flute concerto and takes its idea from the movement of the wind around the world, and the 'deeper aspects of the human condition, the human experience, thought, reflection, psychology and emotion'. The turbulent opening is immediately arresting, and one can imagine the swirling wind flowing around powerfully. Pulsing rhythms and captivating brass lines reinforce this sense of power, before the mood breaks into a more gentle duo moment for flute and harp. Knehans' orchestration is imaginative and full of colour, making effective use of different timbral combinations and creating a transparency of texture through the use of solo lines from around the orchestra. The flute part is dazzling and takes centre stage with a sense of charismatic virtuosity. Challenging and exhilarating throughout, the first movement has the sort of energy one might associate with the opening movement of the Ibert concerto, but intensified and developed to reflect the 21st century flute and the modern world. The second movement has a greater sense of stillness, and the flute line weaves around relatively static strings, low woodwind and some beautiful playing from the Brno Philharmonic's oboe section. Despite the stillness, an underlying intensity gives the music a brooding feel; this is music that deals with profound ideas, and as such, it is vital that the music, too, has depth. Knehans has achieved this convincingly; this is a piece which demands attention and holds you in its spell. The final movement is full of rhythmic punchiness and fantastic orchestral energy. The scoring is once again highly imaginative, making use of bassoons and low brass in pounding rhythms punctuated by the strings. Over all of this, Gareth Davies astonishes and dazzles; displaying not only a phenomenal technique but also a magnetic energy and charisma which is spellbinding. I would not be exaggerating to say that this is one of the best flute recordings I have heard for a long time.
The concerto is followed by a three-movement orchestral work, Unfinished Earth, which deals with the subject of the change and evolution of the earth. Once again, Knehans doesn't disappoint; his richly microtonal language develops a powerful resonance, and the piece is full of colour and vitality. The use of dissonance is appropriate for the topic of the music, and adds to the music's emotional power. This is an excellent CD, with some world class playing and an impressively vibrant compositional voice. Unmissable.
FANFARE MAGAZINE—on Douglas Knehans: Concertos
It’s good to see a full disc of the expressive music of Douglas Knehans offered for consideration here. Various works have been reviewed previously in Fanfare’s august pages, but this appears to be the first review of a single composer disc. There was one, though: Ablaze 00003, which interestingly featured the first version of Soar for cello and piano. The excellent Jiří Hošek is the soloist on both occasions. Unfortunately I have not been able to hear the previous disc, but the performance here, from both soloist and orchestra, is radiant and multicolored. This is music of tremendous imagination. Knehans scores with a masterly hand, his sound paintbrush unerringly hitting the mark. The piece, in the composer’s words, is “rooted in firm centers around E”; he describes his language as “thorny, expressive” and “florid and exhibitionistic.” The chamber original dates from 2005; this orchestration from 2006.
Hošek’s playing in Soar, for all its faultless virtuosity, is marked by its expressive quality. The direct, involving recording emphasizes all of the positives of Hošek’s playing in a highly challenging score for soloist and orchestra alike. The orchestra under Christopher Lyndon Gee offers pinpoint ensemble and the result is offering Knehan’s piece in what seems to be the best available light. There are some gorgeous lyrical moments around the six-seven minute mark, including a miraculous, held-breath passage for solo flute against a low pedal note.
Knehans describes Drift for oboe and strings as an attempt to suspend time. Here, “drama is not a player and things slowly morph and unfold,” in the composer’s own words. Oboist Vladislav Borovka offers splendid playing, and the Brno recording engineers offer an even better recording, present yet not overly forward. This piece is absolutely beautiful. The shadowings of the oboe theme by the orchestra around the six-minute mark (when some sort of movement seems to seek to creep in) are most effective. There is an element of slowly unfolding endless melody to the oboe’s line.
Written as a commemoration of Knehan’s time spent in Tasmania (2000–2008), … Mist, Memory, Shadow … is another slow-moving piece, and very beautiful; the composer refers to it as “a kind of still elegy.” The title refers to three elements the composer links to Tasmania, the final element being that country’s “incredible natural light” There is a lovely sense of space brought alive by impassioned playing from all, particularly the soloist, Dora Bratchkova. In some ways this is reminiscent of the English Pastoral School (think Butterworth); yet the harmonies glow in a different, perhaps more intense, light and rise to more dissonant climaxes. Bratchkova’s violin at times takes on a burnished quality, and not just in its very lowest reaches, taking on some of the intensity of a high cello. This makes for a remarkably expressive performance.
Finally, the concerto for orchestra Cascade (originally for two pianos, and again this alternative version is available elsewhere, this time on Ablaze 00009 and reviewed in Fanfare 35:5, the present version of the score dates from 2010). There is a very arresting beginning, especially when heard in contrast with preceding two pieces. The orchestral writing is magnificent (and beautifully realized here). Inspired by the idea of piano resonance and how these sounds could be interpreted as “clouds of water and the various forms these take in the natural world,” this idea is reflected in the three movement titles of “Drift Echo,” “Waves,” and “Torrent.” The fierce, feisty opening to “Drift Echo” contrasts with playful, skittering woodwind. At times the music seems to nod towards Janáček (the Sinfonietta). The second movement is truly beautiful and includes some lovely bell-like descending figures leading into its climax. There are, perhaps, hints of the Dies irae, which coupled with the bell references seems to imply some sort of reference to Rachmaninoff. The finale is energetic and serious, and again scored with a light, imaginative touch. All credit to the virtuosity of the Brno Philharmonic and the expert ear of their conductor, Mikel Toms, for delivering such a razor-sharp performance. A fascinating disc.
RALPH LOCKWOOD—on Cascade for two pianos
"Douglas Knehans has embraced a distinctive "voice," and breaks some fresh ground with CASCADE; for me a kind of Water Music Suite, or Tone Poem, in keeping with the theme of the CD. Flash floods, meandering rills, crashing waves - a veritable Niagara of notes brought to vibrant life in an iridescent reading by the Pridonoffs, who reveal the melodic nuggets underlying the technical torrents. The composer is orchestrating this work, and a CD will be forthcoming next year. Whether it will become the "La Mer" of the two piano repertoire remains to be seen, but it spoke to me, and I enjoyed the music immensely."
THE AUSTRALIAN on Five Poems to Sylvia Plath
“I was particularly impressed with Knehans's setting of the poem called ‘You're.’ His music is brilliantly catchy and eerily bright, providing an extra dimension to Plath's heavily condensed imagery.”
THE MIAMI HERALD on Night Chains
“‘Night Chains’ by Douglas Knehans, was like a Hitchcock soundtrack gone truly psycho: wildly inventive.”
THE TUSCALOOSA NEWS on Winter Steps
“‘Winter Steps’ is a witty, ambitious, inventive and passionate work ... a brief and powerful piece...”
THE WASHINGTON POST on Rive
“While a nicely shaped account of Sculthorpe's ‘Grief Singing’ opened the concert, a sometimes growling, sometimes melancholic rendition of Douglas Knehans's ‘Rive’ beautifully closed it out.”
AUDIOPHILE AUDITION on Fractured Traces—New Music for Cello
Amazing blend of cello and other sounds like you've never heard before!
The use and blend of traditional acoustical instruments and electronic sound sources is not new. The earliest pieces in the genre go back to the 1940s and 1950s. However, both electronics as well as the sound worlds that composers and performers have been listening to, "grew up" with and trained in over the past thirty years in particular have become amazingly sophisticated. Such is the case with this example of new music for cello by Douglas Knehans.
While I was not familiar with Knehans, I am familiar with some of the new and amazing works and composers represented on the Ablaze label. Douglas Knehans is a much touted composer, having received recognition from as far as Australia and Poland and throughout the United States. He has most recently been serving as a composition and new music professor at the University of Cincinnati. These pieces indicate that Mr. Knehans is a very gifted experimenter with a very high level of skill in the electronic media as well as very well versed in the possibilities and probabilities of advanced cello playing.
The opening work, "Spin", is an immediate attention getter, filled with absolutely virtuosic cello playing, in this case by the incredible Jiri Hosek, as well as some captivating, atmospheric electronic effects realized by Knehans in live performance. The very detailed booklet notes indicate that the "spin" of the title is a reference both to the other worldly demands on the cellist but on some performance time decisions regarding duration and intensity that allow this work to be culminated in as little as seven minutes or close to twenty. The net effect here, from a live performance in 2000 in Prague, is excellent and very attention-demanding.
Knehans' two works "Night chains" and "Night canticle" have some elements in common, aside from the titles. Both works do rely, quite effectively, on an almost seamless blend of electric cello and digital effects. Both pieces were composed for specialist Jeff Krieger and, according to the composer's notes, "night canticle" is based on some of the pitch elements as are found in the "night chains". Additionally, it is interesting to imagine that the "…canticle", with its somewhat quieter and more relaxed sound, would serve as the middle movement to a projected three-movement work that has yet to be realized. As they are, both pieces provide some very interesting and demanding listening. The interplay between various timbres and motion in the digital electronics is at least as fun to follow as that found between the electronics and the cello. Krieger is a very skilled, energetic player and brings energy to these works.
The remaining two works on the program have less in common with the others and are intriguing individually. "Une seule femme endormie" (a lone woman asleep) is an almost surreal setting of a poem by David Gascoyne involving obsession and love gone wrong. The musical effect is almost a post-Schoenberg sound, like perhaps Berio or Lutoslawski and the vocalizations by the cellist, sparing but unsettling, do provide for a very beautiful, but eerie, experience. The performance by cellist Paul York and modern music specialist Susan Narucki is stunning. This fairly short work contrast quite a bit with Knehans' "Soar" for cello and piano. "Soar" is the most recent work on this program and the composer comments that it stands as an example of his "distance traveled" and how he has "evolved" as a composer. Probably, the most conventional sounding work on the disc this work does 'soar' with long dramatic cello lines, distantly tonal, and ponderous undercurrents in the piano. Performers Wojtowicz and Teniswood-Harvey perform wonderfully, almost rhapsodically. Knehans also comments in the booklet notes that his most recent pieces such as his "Shoah Requiem" for chorus and orchestra or his "Glow" for violin, clarinet and orchestra do reflect a more conservative and intentional connection between the music and the audience.
That certainly does make me curious about Douglas Knehans' other works but, I admit, I rather liked the earlier, abstract, strange but captivating sounds of his electronics enhanced pieces. I recommend this disc for anyone who does like very interesting, very unusual music. The bonus is that if works like the two "night" pieces are just not your thing, then "Soar" cannot help but make you want to find out more about this composer. It did for me.
—Daniel Coombs, Audiophile Audition