Volume 28 Issue 1 | September 20 - November 8, 2022

works, all, except for Benjamin’s Concertino,
here receiving their first-ever recordings.
Michael Schulman
Carl Vine – Complete Piano Sonatas
Xiaoya Liu
Dynamic CDS7931 (xiaoyaliupiano.com/
press)
! Australian Carl
Vine (b.1954) has
written at least
eight symphonies,
nine concertos,
six string quartets
and 40 scores for
dance, theatre, film
and TV, but “only”
four piano sonatas,
ranging from 15 to 19 minutes in duration.
Vine’s two-movement Piano Sonata No.1
(1990) was commissioned and choreographed
by the Sydney Dance Company,
where Vine was resident composer and
pianist. Beginning gloomily, it soon erupts
with driving, irregular rhythms, repeated
rapid phrases over syncopated thumping, glittering
sonorities, headlong accelerandos and
booming climaxes.
Distant echoes of Debussy and
Rachmaninoff inhabit the first movement
of No.2 (1997). Propulsive, jazzy syncopations
fill the concluding second movement
until a slow, suspenseful interlude leads to an
enraged plunge to the sonata’s final, brutal
explosion. No.3 (2007) is in four movements:
Fantasia opens with slow drips over dark
chords, followed by distorted Chopinesque
melodies; in Rondo, meditative passages
separate surging, percussive rhythms;
Variation presents elaborations of Fantasia’s
drips and chords; Presto begins and ends
violently, interrupted by a gentle, disquieted
ambulation.
The three-movement No.4 (2019) starts
with Aphorisms, its slow, aimless melody
wandering over burbling arpeggios. In
Reflection, delicate droplets over low rumbles
bookend a restless, yearning central section.
Pummelling barrages surround plaintive lyricism
in Fury, expressing, says Vine, “relentless
and unfocused anger,” ending in a
ferocious prestissimo-fortissimo.
Pianist Xiaoya Liu, top-prize-winner of
several major piano competitions, brilliantly
surmounts all the extreme virtuosic challenges
of these intense, turbulent works –
gripping music that definitely deserves your
attention.
Michael Schulman
Trios from Contemporary Chicago
Lincoln Trio
Cedille CDR 90000 211 (cedillerecords.org)
! My
November 2021
WholeNote review
of a CD containing
trios by two Chicago
composers praised
“the vivid colours,
dramatic expressivity
and sensational virtuosity” of the
Lincoln Trio, here returning with compositions
by five living Chicagoans.
Sensual passion fills Shulamit Ran’s eightminute
Soliloquy, derived from an aria in
her opera Between Two Worlds, in which the
tenor (here, the violin), yearns for his beloved.
Less satisfying is Augusta Read Thomas’ …a
circle around the sun…, five minutes of enigmatic
fragmentation.
Three works written for the ensemble
receive their first recordings. Shawn E.
Okpebholo’s 11-minute city beautiful celebrates
three Chicago architectural icons.
Dribbling, undulating melodies evoke the
82-storey Aqua Tower’s wave-like exterior.
Long-lined, pastoral lyricism reflects the horizontal
planes of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Robie
House. Okpebholo calls Union Station “an
amalgam of neoclassicism and modernism;”
his similarly styled music expresses, he
says, the terminal’s “century-old hustle
and bustle.”
Mischa Zupko’s three-minute Fanfare 80,
honouring the Music Institute of Chicago’s
80th year, exists in versions for orchestra,
woodwind quintet and the Lincoln Trio.
Rambunctious seven-and-11-beat measures
create, writes Zupko, “a savage celebration.”
One wonders why.
The best comes last. Sanctuary is Stacy
Garrop’s two-movement, 23-minute,
emotion-wrenching memorial to her father.
In Without, brooding anguish, urgent desperation
and a “pseudo-Jewish folksong”
describe, she writes, a girl “searching for
her lost parent.” Within’s hymn-like solemnity
and gentle piano wind-chiming represent
the girl (violin) finally reuniting with
her father (cello) “within the sanctuary of her
own heart.”
Michael Schulman
When Dark Sounds Collide: New Music for
Percussion and Piano
Pathos Trio
Panoramic Recordings PAN24
(newfocusrecordings.com)
! These specially
commissioned
works are so
unusual and
remarkable that
they demand an
equal share in the
limelight of this
debut album, When Dark Sounds Collide by
the Pathos Trio. The stunning music expertly
interlaces a wide world of time and space, and
musical traditions, into extraordinary repertoire
for percussion and piano.
In each work, the Pathos Trio have closely
collaborated with the composers – Alyssa
Weinberg, Alison Yun-Fei Jiang, Finola
Merivale, Evan Chapman and Alan Hankers,
who is, of course, also the pianist of the trio.
This has resulted in some truly inspired
performances by the members of the trio,
who demonstrate – in soli as well as in
ensemble – each composer’s heightened skill
at conjuring a spectrum of sonic worlds. The
collision of metallic, wooden and electronic
percussion instruments – performed by Felix
Reyas and Marcelina Suchocka – alternate,
blend and often enter into outright battle
with the plucked, strummed strings stretched
taut across the brass frame of the concert
grand piano, which is also softly hammered
and variously pedalled by Hankers.
The music veers from delicate washes
of sound in Jiang’s Prayer Variations and
Hankers’ Distance Between Places to somewhat
cataclysmic eruptions such as those that
inform the mysterious strains of Merivale’s
oblivious/oblivion, often punctuated by
prescient and even foreboding silences.
Meanwhile, the musicians also revel in the
passagework – both delicate and fierce – of
Chapman’s fiction of light and Weinberg’s
Delirious Phenomena.
Raul da Gama
Allison Cameron – Somatic Refrain
Apartment House
Another Timbre at196
(anothertimbre.com)
! Somatic
Refrain is another
in the English
label Another
Timbre’s extensive
series of recordings
of contemporary
Canadian
composers’ works
performed by Apartment House, a distinguished
British ensemble dedicated to
performing contemporary music. The works
here, composed between 1996 and 2008,
spring from different creative impulses but
share a certain probing calm, a deliberated
tone of sensitive inquiry, as if the pieces were
already there and Cameron was examining
why and revealing their graces.
Somatic Refrain (1996) is a solo piece for
bass clarinet. Originally commissioned by
Torontonian Ronda Rindone it’s played here
by Heather Roche of Apartment House. The
instrument’s extraordinary timbral possibilities
have been more extensively examined in
improvised music than in composition, and
the intrepid Cameron explores the range of
Rindone’s mastery of multiphonics, creating
a piece that demonstrates the instrument’s
thewholenote.com September 20 - November 8, 2022 | 59