May 6, 2019

  • Duo Sequenza Explores New Music for Flute and Guitar

     

    Yes…It’s a Thing
    Duo Sequenza
    Navona Records 6225
    Total Time:  67:07
    Recording:   ****/****
    Performance: ****/****

     

    Duo Sequenza is based in Valparaiso, Indiana, but has toured extensively throughout the United States and Europe.  Flautist Debra Silvert and guitarist Paul Bowman come together to promote the work of living composers and new music for this distinct combination of instruments.  In this new release, they introduce listeners to the work of five composers created over the past thirty years.

    The earliest piece on the album is David Noon’s (b. 1946) Partita, Op. 103 (1989).  Noon’s background included studying with composers Darius Milhaud and Mario Davidovsky.  His four-movement work takes inspiration from the Baroque suite with an opening prelude an then several dance forms.  His lyrical ideas float above the gentle restrained arpeggio of the guitar accompaniment in the opening “Preludio” which blends a semi-modal harmonic feel.  The music has the quality of referencing a previous musical era while maintaining some slight modernist tendencies along the way.  This proves to be the case in the beautiful writing in the “Musette” and “Pastorale” movements.

    In Jerry Owen’s Meshquanowat’ (1995), we are taken on a journey that follows the Red-Tailed Hawk.  The title infers to the Mesquakje’s word for the animal and the music also refers to this tribe and its culture.  Musically, the approach bears some slight resemblance to the opening piece with a fairly tonal language and equally wonderful lyricism.

    The Two Pieces for flute and guitar (2000) by Marc Mellits are two contrasting movements of first a slightly minimalist nature and one that is more emotional with its elegiac ties to personal loss.  The first movement is a rather mesmerizing affair with its small cells in rapid repetition that float from one idea to the other in a rather intriguing way that blends the flute and guitar timbres.

    Duets Exhibition (2016) by the Iranian-born composer Amin Sharifi is a four-movement work whose music invites some introspection.  Some select literary passages for three of the movements provide a possible direction for the listener’s imagination.  The movements have a somewhat free and fluid style with the tonal language sometimes shifting in interesting chromatic directions.  The music has a slightly more dissonant language that comes out the most in “The Game”.  Listeners can let their own imagination carry them through these pieces where the instruments tend to be in dialogue more often, though the flute still tends to be prominently featured.  Each movement has a rather melancholy feel which leads us into the mysterious final “Murdered in the Labyrinth.”

    The South Shore Suite (2016) is a multi-movement work by Jorge Muniz commissioned by Duo Sequenza.  It presents a series of musical postcards that give us aural glimpses along the South Shore of Lake Michigan.  Muniz’s work was written for the Indiana Bicentennial.  Each of the movements bears a descriptive title that links it to an important regional legend from Princess Mishawaka to local legend Alice Gray, and even John Dillinger.  The music is rather evocative in short taking us in a musical train ride from South Bend to Chicago.  Along the way, Muniz’s music references popular musical genres to add additional flavor to the work which has slightly more chromatic color than the previous works on the release.

    Duo Sequenza provide committed performances here that explore the colors of this particular combination of flute and guitar.  The compositions here all have an accessible musical language that makes for an engaging experience where listeners are taken on some fascinating journeys.