Of Time and Place
Dimitri Atapine, cello; Hyeyeon Park, piano.
James Winn, piano.
Argenta Trio; Panoramicos;
Mary Kay Robinson, flute; Don Better, guitar.
Cleveland Chamber Collective; Halida Dinova, piano;
James Umble, saxophone; Cleveland Duo
Navona Records 6162
Total Time:  65:24
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

In this new collection of chamber music, Navona introduces us to the music of Monica Houghton.  Currently residing in Nevada, Houghton has traveled widely with multiple performances at festivals around the world.  Her experience inspired her to incorporate non-Western instruments and musical approaches into the fabric of her music.  The current collection of eight chamber works combines her interest in poetry with the various landscapes and cultures she has experienced while also exploring different textures: a couple of works for solo piano, several for mixed ensemble or duets, and even a text setting for soprano and chamber trio.

Two works on the album focus on natural vistas.  The first is the Andean Suite (2014) which opens the album and is set for cello and piano.  Across the four movements, the music has a somewhat romantic tone.  The first movement “With the Condors” has a nice soaring line and gentle grace.  In “Lacuna”, Houghton limits her pitch level as she explores four distinct pitches for her melodies against a somewhat impressionistic piano line.  The movement features moments of lyricism and a brief burst of rhythmic energy.  The descriptive writing continues in “White Horse” with a beautiful burst of piano color in a dialogue between the instruments.  The harmony has these rather open qualities that are not quite modal.  It sets things up nicely for the final “Dance” which more overtly explores folkish rhythms and melodic gestures.  In the second nature-inspired work, Houghton turns to Nevada with music that bookends a landscape with first a movement inspired by a Shoshone legend, and then concluding the work with a movement reflecting on the pioneers who travelled through the state on their way West.  The resulting piece, Wilderness Portraits: Three Places in Nevada (2012) is for string trio (violin, cello, and piano).  The opening movement has a bit more sinuous chromatic writing that lends to the more dissonant quality of the harmony.  A few more contemporary techniques add to the level of eeriness in the music.  These blend between little motivic statements in this mostly story-like movement.  The central movement allows for moments of lyricism in the first part with the violin working its way upward in the texture.  The piano adds a denser harmonic fabric as the two solo instruments move back and forth across the texture.  The final movement, “High Rock Canyon”, begins in the lower regions of the piano with a motif that is soon picked up by first cello, and then violin.  The two string instruments provide a more incessant forward motion and discussion that alternates between longer lines and little fluttering motions while the piano tends to provide transitional flourishes.

James Winn performs the first work for solo piano, The Twelve Causes from the Circle of Becoming (2013).  Inspired by Tibetan Buddhist tradition, the music explores this visual idea of the “Wheel of Life” creating its own circular form.  An austere opening becomes one of the repeated concepts that sets up an almost modified rondo.  Each of the “causes” is then a branch off of this idea.  The music shifts between moments of dark, ominous writing and a more wistful and reflective shimmering of colors a la Satie, but minus the minimalist inflections.  After all the ominious beginning though, it tends to become gradually more peaceful and restrained.  Corpo Sonoro (2007) was composed for pianist Halida Dinova who performs it here.  The four movements take their inspiration from the poetry of Maria Davico, a Brazilian poet.  Each of the four movements is quite brief, poetic essays of their own.  Of the pieces on the album, this one tends to be the most modern of the batch with more clusters and dissonance in the music.  There are some slight suggestions of folk rhythms in the midst of more intricate writing.  Houghton likes to balance her music with these contrasts of darkness and light.  Here this takes shape as lines that move into brief, chromatic themes in the higher register of the piano, and low clusters and open harmonies that menace in the lower ranges.  These sometimes undulate with a simple melodic thread over the top, including use of thematic quotation.  Indeed, the piece does tend to emphasize the sonorities of the piano here culminating in the slightly more atonal final movement.

Panoramicos commissioned Stay, Shadow (2012) which appears in the central part of the disc.  The work is for soprano, flute, viola, and piano.  The text is a sonnet by the 17^th-Century poet Sor Juana Inez de la Cruz.  Houghton incorporates a bit of music from de la Cruz, who was also a composer, by framing the text with the quote.  This concept of encircling heard in the Tibetan-inspired piece, to some extent informs this work as well within the textual scheme.  The vocal line has a more lyric style while the accompanying instruments provide some interlude moments to set a bit of tone.  Sometimes the flute line has an almost Baroque-like outline.  The instruments themselves can be somewhat lost when the vocal line appears.  Houghton solves this by using the flute to flow out of the vocal line and adding the viola for a more emotional edge to the music.  Inspired by poetry of the Tang Dynasty, the following Three Songs Without Words (2010) are brief brushstrokes for flute and guitar.  Here too are these long lyrical lines with the guitar providing a bit of rhythmic drive in this rather intriguing, intimate work.

Two works on the album reflect Houghton’s connections to Ohio (she studied at the Cleveland Institute of Music) and feature musicians from the Cleveland area.  First is Epigram (2008) for string quartet.  A single movement work, Houghton here explores again the concept of brief musical pitch material, in this case, the three-note motive from Beethoven’s last quartet connected to his statement “muss es sein”.  With its Romantic musical inspiration, the music here tends to be an extension of this style with an essay that further elaborates on Beethoven’s idea.  In that respect, it is somewhat like a theme and variation technique with the music sometimes deconstructing the idea and creating an often impassioned plea.  The last work on the album features saxophone, violin, and piano.  Sky Signs (2005) has one of the larger pitch collections that Houghton explores in these works.  Here it is a seven-note idea that is introduced at the start and then becomes a sort of fantasia that features some structural arrivals where repeated ideas occur.  This too has this concept of circularity, inspired by changing clouds in this case, that feels wrapped around itself and constantly is evolving.

The music on the album was recorded over the past nine years and is well-equalized here from the many locations and instrumental combinations.  The soprano recording seems to have the roughest go in terms of overall balance, but this is more likely a compositional issue for a work that may be most effective live.  The quartet has some slight performance noise but nothing terribly distracting.  The music here is all quite accessible with the complexity growing to some extent as the album progresses.  Houghton’s exploration of small cells of material often results in very concise pieces that listeners can easily discern the way these are explored.  The pieces tend to pull back at the end with more reflective finales.

 Musical Images for Piano

Yoko Hagino, piano.
Navona Records 6144
Disc One: Total Time: 72:57
Disc One: Total Time: 61:33
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

Last year, Navona released an orchestral album featuring a large-scale piano and orchestra work by Australian composer Mark John McEncroe.  This new release is a massive two-disc set of his piano works of Reflections and Recollections.  Helen Kennedy recorded these previously and the first set has also been recorded by John Martin.  This is a new release for Parma featuring pianist Yoko Hagino.

The titles are essentially launching points for the listener who is invited to let the music stir their own imagination and images.  The collection plays like a modern impressionist set featuring nice melodic content and traditional harmony which, in one way, sort of answers the question, “What if Satie wrote a couple hours of Gymnopedie?”  Here, it results in a couple of hours of relaxing, unobtrusive piano music.

Disc one begins with a gentle waltz, “Introspective Moments”—a style that continues in the following in the next few works.  Occassionally, the harmony will move to more open sounds a la Satie (especially apparent in tracks such as “The Pendulum” or “Shades of Autumn”).  These are mostly bright sounding works.  “The Gargoyle’s Fountain” takes on a slightly darker tone and moves in a few unusual directions.  Arpeggiated ideas form the basis of the harmonic and forward motion as slight motifs are interchanged with longer themes in each of these delicate works for piano.  The texture tends to be fairly sparse with the left hand lines providing chordal outlines while a simple right-hand line floats above them.  The effect over time is rather mesmerizing in its own way as each gentle melody wafts across the soundscape.  There is not much suggestion of minor mode directions until the final track, “Shadows of an Old Memory.”  Sometimes more jazz-like inflections will appear as in the final bars of “A Fish With the Blues” or more pronounced in “A Lazy Summer’s Afternoon” or “Daybreak” which opens the second disc.  A few more personal connections occur in the salon-like “Cyndy’s Song” and later in “Natalie’s Theme”.  The latter appeared on McEncroe’s earlier Navona release as well.  The second disc continues along a very similar trajectory across eleven brief brushstrokes with mostly diatonic ideas and a slight bit of chromaticism here and there, though nothing too alarming.  Tempo has a slight give and take in these little pieces and this results in a wistful jazzy vibe from time to time.  McEncroe’s music though tends to shy away from too much dissonance, even when things become slightly more intricate in selections like the darker minor-mode “Penny For Your Thoughts”.  The pace picks up slightly in the more classical-like “Dance of the Pagans”, and also begins to expand harmonically with slightly unexpected directions and chromaticism as the disc moves into “Fleeting Images.”  The music in this last portion thus turns toward more dark reflections, however slight, and the music begins to feel more introspective than before.

This particular release hovers in that New Age crossover realm of classically-shaped works whose utter simplicity tends to invite a more relaxed background listening in these mostly unassuming pieces.  There does not seem to be any larger overarching concepts here to this 24-movement set in terms of tonality or key relationships.  Many feel like they hover within the same key.  Harmonies tend to be mostly tertiary with a few moments when these might open up to a fourth.  There is not much extended harmonic language or even a sense of virtuosic exploration of the piano either as the music tends to stay fairly central in the keyboard.  The music becomes a sort of backdrop to whatever relaxed activity one might be involved with while listening.  The recording itself offers a rich piano sound and Hagino’s performances are often quite moving.