San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
Harold Meltzer
New music
“Songs and Structures” may seem like a bluntly functional rubric to put on the beguiling and often beautiful works on this album, but it actually captures their essence wonderfully. The music of American composer Harold Meltzer boasts a winning transparency, one that lays bare the essential solidity of his creations while overlaying it with a vein of elegant charm. In the four pieces included here — two exquisite song cycles, a powerful string quartet and a deft duet for violin and piano — the results feel like something created out of ornate Erector set beams, with each brightly colored section firmly supporting the next. If the two cycles — settings of poems by Ted Hughes and James Wright — feel like the headliners here, that’s partly because the performances by tenor Paul Appleby and pianist Natalia Katyukova are so vibrant and forthright, letting the suave expressivity of Meltzer’s text-setting shine through. But the vivacious string quartet “Aqua,” a musical evocation of the Chicago skyscraper, also gets a strong reading by the Avalon String Quartet, and violinist Miranda Cuckson and pianist Blair McMillen team up for the irresistibly witty duet “Kreisleriana.”