December 9, 2016

  • 21st Century Serialism for Piano Duo

     But Now the Night
    Kyoung Cho, soprano. Ars Nostra (Sang-Hie Lee and Martha Thomas, piano duo)
    Ravello Records 7945
    Total Time: 69:02
    Recording:   ****/****
    Performance: ****/****

    This new release features a concert by duo pianists Sang-Hie Lee and Martha Thomas.  It was recorded last March in Tampa at the University of South Florida Concert Hall.  That means that applause often bookends the pieces here.  Works by five different contemporary composers are featured.

    First up is a brief piece, Chera in Nain (2009), inspired by the story of the widow’s son of Nain being raised from the Gospel of Luke.  It is composed by Eun-Hye ParkThe music features brief rapid passages with flashes of rich harmony against the closer intervallic chord clusters.  The soprano voice has a brief opening plaintive cry but shift to more Sprechstimme-like style later in the piece before returning to this lyrical statement at the end.  There are some brief moments of lyricism along a row-like exploration.

    The album takes its name from the second work on the program, ,,,aber jetzt Die Nacht (2013).  Lewis Nielson was inspired by a journal entry from a concentration camp diary.  The nearly 20-minute work explores sonorous qualities of the piano using the sustain pedal and bowing of the strings to create unique qualities.  This is another intense atonal work with often dense textures.  Clusters in lower regions of the piano are accompanying often rapid angular lines that jump about.  These dense sections create a great deal of tension as they play out with very little let up as it continues.

    Gerald Chenoweth’s Celestial Phenomena (2008) opens with a huge wash of sound in the appropriately named “Big bang” portion of this four-section work.  It too features a great deal of dense chordal clusters and pitch sets lending it an often stark, intense sound.  The piece continues this program of very cerebral atonal music.  It has a good sense of drama though that allows for some slight relaxation across the piece’s brief playing time with an arrival on a major-chord being like a breath of fresh air.

    A Sonata for Two Pianos (2008) follows.  This is a work by Paul Reller who has his own rock band, Clang.  The three-movement work is a sort of hodge-podge of American piano styles of the 20th Century.  The opening movement features suggestions of ragtime and jazz rhythms, though cast in a more dissonant musical language.  Some of the cadential gestures feel inspired by 19th-Century Romanticism.  A sense of this begins to assert itself slightly in the central portion of the sonata, and again in the more contemplative finale.  For the most part though the many leaps and dissonant moments tend to create a rather unsettling work.

    The last piece on the program is Windhover (2009) by Daniel Perlongo.  A windhover is essentially a European bird similar to the kestrel.  The composer also took inspiration from a poem by Gerard Manley Hopkins.  The music here tends to be more reflective and less dissonant, though by this point in the release any continuous major-minor harmonic construction does stand out starkly.   Perhaps this is the most easily accessible of the works on this program with several quite stunning moments.

    Indeed, this series of pieces for piano duo all tend to fall into the chaotic sense of mid-century serial music.  These are often intense pieces that can feel a bit overlong when packed together like this in one CD.  Any one of these would be a good companion to a more varied program.  The Perlongo tends to stand out as a result of its gentler musical wistfulness, though that does not diminish the other works on the program.  They are all incredibly dramatic and the recording captures this sense of tension.  The album is not for the faint of heart by any means, but anyone who appreciates serial, or latter 20th Century atonal music will find some 21st Century kindred spirits in these works.