Composer John Aylward Reinterprets Ovid’s Transcendental Writing in New Album Celestial Forms and Stories

Celestial Forms and Stories

Composer: John Aylward (b.1980)
Label: New Focus Recordings
Release Date: February 4, 2022
TRT: 54:00
Works: Daedalus (2016), Mercury (2014), Ephemera (2014), Narcissus (2018), Ananke (2019)
Performers: Members of Klangforum Wien: Vera Fischer (alto/bass flute) Olivier Vivarès (clarinet/bass clarinet), Sophie Schafleitner (violin), Andreas Lindenbaum (cello), Markus Deuter (oboe), Bernhard Zachhuber (clarinet/bass clarinet), Dimitrios Polisoidis (viola), Björn Wilker (percussion), Florian Müller (piano), Finnegan Downie Dear (conductor)

New York City, NY (For Release February 4, 2022) — Described by The Boston Globe as “a composer of wide intellectual curiosity,” John Aylward today announced the release of his latest album Celestial Forms and Stories (New Focus Recordings). Inspired by the stories of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Aylward attempts to rewrite the myths that Ovid immortalized through a five-piece suite of atmospheric chamber music. The acclaimed Viennese ensemble Klangforum Wien interpret the visible, sometimes clouded textures, gestures, instrumental counterpoints, and delicate and poetic harmonies beautifully led by one of the ensemble’s many guest conductors, Finnegan Downie Dear. 

Aylward has always been enraptured by Greek mythology, having already sought new pathways of musical interpretations in previous works. Aylward’s fascination with the Metamorphoses dates back to his youth in the Sonoran Desert where one of his brothers was studying the classics. Unlike other artists who have mined Ovid’s imagination for subject matter, Aylward is more interested in the writer’s narrative strategies. “Just as Ovid reduced improbably and fantastical transformations down to simple processes, I thought perhaps there was a way to build a musical world from similarly simple musical materials,” Aylward explains. As expounded in Italo Calvino’s essay “Ovid and Universal Contiguity” (1979) and Six Memos for the New Millenium, Ovid was a master of lightness, quickness, and precision—the same qualities that are central to Aylward’s musical storytelling.

What started as musical analogs soon became short studies and subsequently vivid musical transformations. The album begins with Ephemera for clarinet and cello, which sets forth the ideas that are expanded and developed through the varied forms and differing stories in the works that follow. The middle three movements embody figures from Ovid’s tales: Mercury, Daedalus, and Narcissus. The album closer, Ananke, blends mythological impulses with a contemporary French harmonic palette. Ananke is a work of fractured continuities evoking the impulses and desires of the Three Fates: Clotho, the spinner, Lachesis, the giver, and Atropos, the inflexible. In timeless conversation, the music embodies these characters as tensions rise, perhaps as a destiny unfolds.

This mark’s Aylward’s second release during the COVID pandemic. The first, Angelus (Released 2020, New Focus Recordings), was hailed as “a triumph (Classical Modern Music Blog), and “a perfectly recorded…engrossing sonic experience (Oberon’s Grove).”

Unlike Angelus, Celestial Forms and Stories was entirely produced, recorded, edited and mastered remotely due to COVID restraints. “Aside from the challenging time difference between me and the European-based musicians, this unique recording process was much more efficient!”

A child of an immigrant mother from Germany (herself a World War II refugee) and in circumstances of both tremendous diversity and economic instability, Aylward musically processes the impacts of his earlier life, filled with a deep sense of community, rich expressions of converging cultural histories, and the otherworldly landscapes of the desert. According to The Boston Globe, he is “trying to recreate an intensely communal encounter for our own time.” Listeners and critics agree that his music is “of fascination and profundity (Arkiv Music).” “This kind of compositional eloquence comes only from a combination of discipline and intuitive formal mastery.” (Boston Musical Intelligencer)

About John Aylward (composer)

John Aylward is a pianist and composer of solo works, chamber works, orchestral works, opera, and music for film and multimedia. He is a founder of the Ecce Ensemble and of the Etchings Festival. He has received awards from the John S. Guggenheim Foundation, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Radcliffe Institute at Harvard University, the Koussevitzky Commission from the Library of Congress, the Fromm Foundation, the Fulbright Foundation, MacDowell, Tanglewood, the Aspen Music School, the Atlantic Center for the Arts, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts, the International Society for Contemporary Music, and many other foundations and arts organizations. He lives in Northampton, Massachusetts, and currently teaches composition at Clark University (Worcester, MA).

About Klangforum Wien (performers) 
24 musicians from 10 different countries represent an artistic idea and a personal approach that aims to restore to their art something that seems to have been lost – gradually, almost inadvertently – during the course of the 20^th century, which gives their music a place in the present and in the midst of the community for which it was written and for whom it is crying out to be heard. Ever since its first concert, which the ensemble played under its erstwhile name “Societé del’Art Acoustique” under the baton of its founder Beat Furrer at the Palais Liechtenstein, Klangforum Wien has written musical history. The ensemble has premiered roughly 500 new pieces by composers from three continents, giving a voice to the notes for the first time. It could - if given to introspection - look back on a discography of over 70 CDs, a series of honors and prizes and around 2000 appearances in the premier concert houses and opera venues in Europe, the Americas and Japan, for renowned festivals as well as youthful and idealistic initiatives. Over the years, strong artistic and affectionate links have developed with outstanding composers, conductors, soloists, directors and dedicated programmers.