The Indianapolis Commissions: 1982-2014
Jinjoo Cho, violin. Hyun Soo Kim, piano.
Azica 71321
Total Time:  74:04
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

There are a number of international competitions for aspiring young artists to compete at throughout the world.  Perhaps the most notable is the Van Cliburn Piano Competition which has launched many pianist’s careers.  There are an equal number of these for violinists as well.  The International Violin Competition in Indianapolis is one of the most noted.  It convenes every four years and features artists from the ages of 16-29 who come for 17 days of performances over four rounds of competition.  Since its inception in 1982, several winners (Kyoko Takezawa, Pavel Berman, Barnabas Kelemen) have gone on to international careers.  Jinjoo Cho was the winner of the 2014 competition and was awarded the opportunity to record all nine original commissions from the organization’s history.  These are collected here and represent a wide range of modern composition.  Each of the works on this album explores the virtuosic possibilities of the instrument presenting unique challenges of technique but also of expression and interpretation.

Joan Tower’s (b. 1938) String Force (2010) opens the album.  It is for solo violin and explores a variety of motives that become unifying forces between a variety of difficult passage work often requiring leaps across strings and registers coupled with rapid passagework.

We transition into the modern romanticism of Richard Danielpour (b. 1956) in his more ethereal As Night Falls in Barjeantane (2001).  The nocturne style creates intriguing piano harmonies while the violin moves songlike above them.  The piece requires subtler nuance in expressiveness making for a great contrast to the opening work.  There is some really gorgeous music that floats out of the darkness.

In George Rochberg’s (1918-2005), Rhapsody and Prayer (1989) the music has both this sense of struggle between dissonance and tonality and to some extent rhythm with metrical shifts that appear in the first part of the work.  A quieter moment than follows with as pizzicato signals the move into the second section which has a moment of virtuosic display before things quiet back down.

Blending Asian and Western cultural expressions is part of composer Bright Sheng’s (b. 1955) style.  For his A Night at the Chinese Opera (2006) he quotes material from a 1918 Chinese opera, Farewell My Concubine.  The violin takes on the role of Consort Yu, the soprano voice in the music.  The piano adds the rhythmic support and unique Asian harmonic ideas.  The soloist is written to create added bends and slides to lend the impression of Asian melodic phrasing.  There is a bit more interaction with the accompanist here who provides rhythmic ideas that the violinist then picks up on and explores.  The music grows in intensity as the piano line also adds gradually denser harmony and a seemingly more random reiteration of motives.

We return to a work For Solo Violin (1985) by Leon Kirchner (1919-2009).  The piece is a distillation of the composer’s style of exploring motivic development which allows for compressing these ideas and then allowing them more expressive outlets.  The ideas have an almost improvisational feel here.  The piece, interestingly enough is somewhat similar in approach to Tower’s opening work.  (There is one odd edit, though this is only slightly off putting.)

Though Kirchner was noted early on for his interest in serial technique, we see this applied in the following Improvvisazione (1982) by the Finnish composer Joonas Kokkonen (1921-1996).  He is noted for finding a more expressive means of communication of tone rows that links aspects of romanticism and expressive writing while maintaining connections to the unfolding row.  Within this theoretical style, Kokkonen creates some truly beautiful expressive music that requires playing at the extreme upper register of the instrument.  It is worth noting Cho’s exquisite tone in these passages that require her to play very quietly with great control.

Witold Lutoslawski (1913-1994) is perhaps the most familiar composers to a wider 20^th Century music audience.  Subito (1992) was among the last pieces he composer and was premiered after his death at the 1994 competition.  It would be the last work he wrote for the violin and is an exploration of rondo form with an exciting conclusion that is bound to make this a repertoire work.

Of the mid-century American composers, Ned Rorem (b. 1923) is noted for his cultural and critical writing as well as his art songs.  He was among the composers who studied in France, even staying there well into the 1950s where he hobnobbed with the likes of Cocteau and Poulenc.  His music tends to remain mostly tonal with splashes of polytonality and modified serial approaches.  His Autumn Music (1996) is perhaps the most tonal of the pieces here, being a fine companion to the earlier Danielpour work.  The lines are more lyrical here and provide a link to the neo-romantic trends that were beginning to gain in popularity by the end of the 20^th Century.  There is a sense though of the composer looking backward reflecting on the latter time of life amidst the picturesque music that seems a bit dark and macabre at times with repeated ideas that seem to incessantly move us forward.

The album concludes with the last commissioned work to date, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s Fantasy for Solo Violin (2014), a piece one assumes Cho shined at when she participated that year in the competition.  Here is a blend of Zwilich’s compositional approach of blending somewhat romantic and modern harmonic ideas with dance-like moments and tinges of jazz.  It proves to be a fitting virtuosic conclusion to the album.

Jinjoo Cho proves herself to be an amazing violinist in these many virtuosic works.  These recordings were made over the course of four days in February 2018 and must have been both exhilarating and exhausting sessions.  She demonstrates an affinity for contemporary music but her interpretations help these pieces to really sing even in their most dissonant moments while also brining out some of the rich capabilities of her instrument.  Her tone and articulations are simply jaw dropping and these pieces really help bring this out.  One feels though that she has left her own interpretive stamp on these pieces which will continue to reveal itself upon repeated hearings.  Azica’s sound here is crystal clear with good balance of piano and violin and no sudden shifts when it is just the violin alone.  This creates an invigorating, if often intense, listening experience of modern music for violin.  Some works stand out more than others, which is to be expected, but what a testament to allow listeners to hear for themselves the rich diversity of musical voices.

Soul of a Nation: Portraits of Presidential Character
Frank Almond, violin. Henry Fogel, narrator;
Roosevelt University Chamber Orchestra/Emanuele Andrizzi;
John Bruce Yeh, clarinet. David Holloway, narrator;
Mark Ridenour, trumpet. Ray Frewen, narrator;
Gabriela Vargas, flute. Adrian Dunn, narrator.
Chicago College of Performing Arts Wind Ensemble/Stephen Squires
Albany Records TROY 1723
Total Time:  62:07
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

Pairing a narrator with a large orchestra has similar challenges to the use of any soloist and orchestra.  Often the spoken text becomes set aside with the orchestra then responding to these words or being subtly underscored as they appear.  Victoria Bond (b. 1945) takes her cues from one of the great examples of this in American music, Copland’s A Lincoln Portrait (1942).  The texts here are provided by Myles Lee and focus on four of the great American presidents, two that shaped the foundations of the country and two who moved and shaped the role of the country in the 20^th Century.  Bond studied composition with Ingolf Dahl and Roger Sessions.  Earlier in her career she worked with film composer Paul Glass on some of his scores.  Her work as a conductor though has been a significant one working early on with the Pittsburgh Symphony and Houston Orchestra.  She lectures often at the Metropolitan Opera.  Her compositions are now beginning to gain more attention as we move into the 21^st century that has gained a stronger foothold after the performance of her chamber opera Mrs. President (2001).

Each work incorporates important quotations by each President that help to explore the character of each man.  Each work explores unique musical sound worlds from contemporary style, to jazz, Ives and early 20^th-Century modernism, and patriotic musical quotations. The uniqueness though lies in the use of a solo instrument to also work as an additional catalyst to these pieces being subtitles concertos.

Thomas Jefferson is the focus of the opening, and longest of the works, Soul of the Nation.  This is a work for chamber orchestra and violin.  The soloist here introduces an important four-note motif that will be one of the unifying factors of the piece.  The modern writing helps create the sense of inner struggle and turmoil of Jefferson working to lay out the important foundational tenets of a new nation.  There is a rather beautiful, lyrical moment that moves us into the final third of the work providing a gorgeous, semi-tonal line in a sparser texture.  The piece ends rather quietly All told, a fascinating work with superb playing by violinist Frank Almond.

The remaining three pieces are all scored for wind ensemble making them important additions to concert repertoire band.  First is The Indispensible Man which takes on Franklin D. Roosevelt as its subject.  Perhaps no President became a visual metaphor for personal struggle with those facing the 20^th Century.  Bond’s music takes a decidedly different approach with an immediate nod to jazz with its excellent opening clarinet line (a start reminiscent of that used in the violin).  It stands as a distant relative of the concert works that melded art music and jazz written for Benny Goodman. The ensemble then enters with its own jazz-like big band style.  This stylistic approach then becomes the milieu upon which the text is layered.  The variations also explore important sections of the ensemble with a great little dialogue with the solo clarinet.  The ideas then run beneath the narrative.  Here too the interest lies in the ways Bond passes off her motifs through the ensemble handed off from narrator to soloist to ensemble and back.

In The Crowded Hour, the period song quotation lends the music a sort of Ives-ian quality and thus perfectly connects to this shifting period that marked the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt.  The sort of unbridled enthusiasm is thus captured by both soloist and wind ensemble as these tunes become fragmented and subtly altered as the piece progresses.  It tends to be a slightly sparser work with a brass band-like focus.  The music takes on a decidedly reflective quality as the story moves us into World War I with a nice lyrical trumpet idea.  The finale does bring us back to a fun period finale reminiscent of the band music of the time.

George Washington is the focus of Pater Patriae which closes the program.  The flute provides a nice fife-like reference here with a sort of martial like opening.  Yankee Doodle flits through the music as well and one gets the sense of a slight military parade in the opening bars.  The wind ensemble’s various ensembles are also explored here in delicate writing.  The music tends to be more traditional with less dissonance.  The lines tend to move in a thread that shifts from one color to the next in the sparser moments of the piece.  Brass signal the almost public side of Washington.  It is a rather fascinating piece equally as compelling and different from each of its predecessors on the album.  The final bars are a rather exhilarating blend of high winds and percussion (though it could use a final big chord to bring it to a close).

Each narrator brings their own unique style that works well with these texts that both tell the story of each person as well as include a variety of quotations.  The pieces themselves, with their exploration of different musical styles still create a consistent musical approach that illustrates Bond’s ability to shape the overall structure of these texts.  And yet, Bond manages to add distinct qualities that perfectly match these important historical figures in her music making this a rather engaging traversal of four significant Presidents.