May 16, 2016

  • Blurred Boundaries: Folk-Infused Chamber Music

     

    Blurred Boundaries
    Apollo Chamber Players
    Navona Records 6038
    Total Time:  69:46
    Recording:   ****/****
    Performance: ****/****

    Blurred Boundaries is an interesting collection of mostly contemporary chamber music with musical materials inspired or drawn from folk music.  Three of the works are part of Apollo Chamber Player’s “20 x 2020” commissioning project in which they hope to explore a number of ways music can be influenced by a variety of cultural traditions.  The first three of these appear on this release composed by Libby Larsen, Marty Regan, and Erberk Erilmaz.

    Libby Larsen’s Sorrow Song and Jubilee is a brief work that explores the opening melodic line of “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot”.  The phrase is sent through a few permutations across the ensemble gradually growing more agitated as it enters its final bars.  Marty Regan’s Splash of Indigo closes off the disc and explores Asian inflections within a more impressionist style in a string quartet setting that features a moving central section.  The newest of the commissions is the Thracian Airs of Besime Sultan by Erberk Eryilmaz.  It focuses on music from and around this geographic region that encompasses Bulgaria, Greece, Romania, and Turkey in an inter-connected 6-movement work that has some interesting dance rhythms and meter shifts along with an ethnic-tinged clarinet idea and percussion as well as vocalizations.

    The Apollo group has put together an arrangement of two Plantation Melodies by Henry Thacker Burleigh from 1901.  The opening “Negro Lullaby” is a gentle lyric idea with interesting lilting waltz-like moments in an otherwise touching, yet quaint piece.  The pave picks up with the rhythmical and dance like “An Ante-Bellum Sermon.”  The music has a somewhat Dvorak-Delius feel at times.  Florence Beatrice Price’s Five Folksongs in Counterpoint (1951) explores more of what Dvorak had encouraged young American composers to do in its adaptation of very familiar folk songs.  It is one of a couple string quartets Price wrote based on American folk music in a mostly Romantic style.  This is a premiere recording of the work along with that of Hajime Komatsu’s 1996 suite of Four Japanese Folk Songs for string quartet.  It is quite interesting to hear these different cultural folk expressions in close proximity to one another.

    Blurred Boundaries features just enough familiar musical ideas that most will find the release quite accessible.  The music itself provides often interesting windows into contemporary approaches to string quartet writing with a bit of percussion of clarinet added for slight variety (in the more modernist work of Eryilmaz).  The sound is rather warm and inviting and the performances are equally committed.  The result is a fascinating blend of chamber music.