Eleanor Alberga: Wild Blue Yonder
Thomas Bowes, violin. Eleanor Alberga, piano.
Richard Watkins, horn. Nicholas Daniel, oboe.
Ensemble Arcadiana:
Thomas Bowes and Oscar Perks, violin.
Andres Kaaljuste, viola. Hannah Sloane, cello.
Navona 6340
Total Time:  49:31
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

Eleanor Alberga is represented by 4 unique chamber works on this new collection from the UK-based, Jamaican-born composer.  Beginning in the 1970s, Alberga expanded beyond her solo piano career with composition after landing at the London Contemporary Dance Theater.  Since then she has composed numerous works for that ensemble in addition to concert pieces in all genres.  Two works for winds and string quartet are set apart by pieces for violin and piano.

Her husband, violinist Thomas Bowes, is featured on two earlier works that bookend this new release and feature her on the piano as well.  (These were recorded live.) The first of these is No-Man's-Land Lullaby (1997) which is a fascinating work that hints at Brahms' "Lullaby" set against Alberga's own contemplation of war and heritage.  The album concludes with The Wild Blue Yonder (1995) which is a more modern style piece using sparse piano ideas and more atonal writing that creates a more interesting dramatic quality coupled with the slight bent pitches and glissandi in the solo instrument.  It becomes more agitated as it progresses making for a fine technical showpiece.

Shining Gate of Morpheus (2012) is a work for horn and string quartet.  It is a somewhat episodic work that takes us on a journey through dream states.  The musical language is quite accessible and dramatically engaging with some stunning work for the trio itself and interesting horn writing that opens with a fanfare idea.  There are also some interesting timbral explorations that shift ideas from the horn and back into the string lines which makes for a compelling and dramatic work.  The other similar chamber piece here is for oboe and string quartet.  Composed in 2007 under a commission from the City of London Festival, Succubus Moon explores darker realms in 0ften more experimental textures and sounds.  The piece is no less dramatic and feels a bit more visceral in its exploration of dissonances than the previous works.  The oboe line can add an often more plaintive tone at times.  The textures here are a bit denser than in the previous works which makes for fine contrast.

The album presents two sides of Alberga's musical style.  The works on the front end of the album are the more accessible musically and draw the listener slowly in to her sound world and compositional approaches.  The latter two pieces demonstrate her compositional skill in crafting dramatic music in more atonal realms.  Each has something unique to offer the listener interested in discovering a new voice.

Reimagine: Beethoven and Ravel
Inna Faliks, piano.
Navona 6352
Total Time:  76:43
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

Pianist Inna Faliks teaches at UCLA where she if Professor of Piano and Head of Piano.  Her career began with performances at the Gilmore Festival and with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra when she was a teenager.  She has garnered plenty of critical attention for her performances of standard repertoire and interpretations of Beethoven in a 2014 release.  Seeking out new repertoire to pair with more familiar fare is a hallmark of her own public concerts.  The present release is an interesting concept album that builds on that repetition.

The album at its core focuses on the Op. 126 bagatelles that Beethoven completed towards the end of his life and which were published in 1825.  The six brief pieces are believed to be more an integral work connected by the key relationships that move by major thirds from one to the next.  At another level, they can also feel like brief explorations of approaches that Beethoven was also exploring in the late sonatas and the ninth symphony.

For this release, Faliks commissioned six additional pieces from her colleagues at UCLA.  Each was given one of the Beethoven pieces to create an original response to each of the pieces.  The album presents these new works in sequential alternation.  It is a rather odd though to hear the Beethoven after each of the new works as it would have been worth being refamiliarized with each one of these before the contemporary inspirations.  That can be easily remedied with some reprogramming if one wants.  But otherwise one then hears them more as echoes of the past.  Peter Golub launches things off with a reflective jazz-like ballad take.  Taking a four-note motif as a launching point, Tamir Hendelman has a more modern perpetual motion-like approach with a moment of repose before the spinning returns. Now part of his own set of 11 bagatellles, Richard Danielpour’s “Childhood Nightmare” uses the opening of its source material and then descends into a darker realm.  On a more cerebral structural approach, Ian Krouse created an etude “on a non-octave-replicating mode” in a piece that somewhat deconstructs aspects of its source material, but stays within a tonal realm.  The extended harmonies of Golub’s approach are echoed in the intimate piece crafted by Mark Carlson that has Impressionistic qualities.  Finally, David Lefkowitz tackles the final work’s ternary structure, exploration of three-bar phrases, and interesting harmonic ideas that works to meld these seemingly disparate elements into a new cohesive whole.  The style here has an equally deconstructive feel with its more angular writing and shifts of tone.

Falkis has recorded Ravel’s Gasard le Nuit and while it would be nice to have that paired with the final three works on the album, one will need to track down her performance for another day.  Taking a similar approach to the Beethoven commissions, she turned to three different composers to craft new works based on Ravel’s different movements.  The result are three standalone pieces that can also be heard as their own triptych.   Paola Prestini focuses on the sonic qualities of “Ondine” in her two-movement work Variations on a Spell.  “Le Gibet” gets a more extensive treatment in Timo Andres’ fascinating Old Ground and things come to an exciting conclusion in Pursuit: Billy Childs take on “Scarbo”.  These three works provide some windows into Faliks’ technical virtuosity a bit more than the Beethoven pieces did.  Those tend to highlight her interpretive, lyrical playing well.  So taken together, this ample collection of pieces gives listeners a good appreciation of her skills.

Faliks performances are solid here and the works make extensive exploration of the rich sound of the piano which is captured well in this release.  These re-imaginings make a fine introduction to Falkis’ programming approaches and the Beethoven performances should stand well against any others.