CD Reviews

Du Yun: Shark in You

New Focus Recordings FCR 118

Du Yun

There’s something uniquely satisfying about encountering music that doesn’t sound quite like anything one has heard before. This was my experience of Shark in You, a new CD from composer Du Yun. A rising star in the contemporary classical scene – she is a founding member of the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), and one of three composers on Boosey & Hawkes’s inaugural Emerging Composers roster – Du Yun has released a non-classical debut that matches the idiosyncratic, compelling strangeness of her concert music.

The infectious beats and breathy vocals of the first few tracks of Shark in You initially call to mind Björk. But as the album unfolds – and it is very much an album, best experienced as a whole – new dimensions continually emerge. The vocal and instrumental inflections seem to migrate imperceptibly from Asia to the Middle East. There are visceral cabaret numbers, songs that sound like Kurt Weill ballads reimagined for the twenty-first century, with Tom Waits and Jeff Buckley lurking in the wings. The disc culminates, surprisingly and effectively, in an effervescent remake of “Johnny I Hardly Knew Ye.”

While Du Yun’s sonic imagination and evocative vocals are at the heart of Shark in You, the album represents a collaborative effort among a collection of stellar musicians: Cody Brown (drums), Peter Evans (trumpet), Gareth Flowers (trumpet), Peter Hanson (kazoo/accordion), Matt Haimovitz (cello), Andy Hunter (trombone), Brad Henkel (trumpet), Daniel Lippel (guitar), E.J. Parker (bass), Erik Spangler (beats, theremin, turntable), Chris Trzcinski (drums), J.Q. Whitcomb (trumpet), and ZIYA (tabla/percussion). Spangler co-wrote four tracks with Du Yun, while Flowers and Haimovitz each co-wrote one.

The resonance between Du Yun and Björk ultimately has more to do with sensibility than sound. Their art doesn’t render genre irrelevant so much as it revels in transcending it. New Yorker music critic Alex Ross has written that Björk’s work is “free both of the fear of pretension that limits popular music and of the fear of vulgarity that limits classical music. The creative artist once more moves along an unbroken continuum, from folk to art and back again.” Shark In You reveals a similar fearlessness, a willingness to venture across stylistic boundaries in pursuit of a singular musical vision.

Lisa Bielawa: Chance Encounter

Orange Mountain Music CD 7004

Susan Narucki, soprano

The Knights

Lisa Bielawa’s 2007 Chance Encounter is a kindred spirit to the recent spate of “random acts of culture” documented on YouTube. The work is meant to be performed in public spaces, with the musicians emerging gradually from their surroundings, and audience members choosing a vantage point from which to experience the music. The piece has had notable outings in Manhattan and, during Bielawa’s residency at the American Academy in Rome, on the banks of the Tiber River.

An inventive song cycle for soprano and twelve instruments, Chance Encounter consists of texts overheard in public spaces like those in which the work is presented. Bielawa finds quiet profundity in everyday speech, questions and observations grouped into songs named for their prevailing sensibility: “Topos Nostalgia,” “Drama/Self-Pity,” “Nothing,” “Aimlessness Song.” The songs are interleaved with instrumental transitions, each of which anticipates the material of the subsequent song.

Bielawa’s vocal writing – more traditional here than in some of her other works, but no less engaging – is performed by the esteemed soprano Susan Narucki, who collaborated with Bielawa in compiling the texts. Though the words are at times difficult to understand, Narucki sings with characteristic warmth and expressivity throughout. The work’s elegant instrumental textures are expertly rendered by The Knights, a versatile chamber orchestra comprised of some of New York’s finest young musicians. The soloists featured in the interludes – Eric Jacobsen (cello), Colin Jacobsen (violin), Ben Baron (clarinet) and Lance Suzuki (flute) – deserve special mention for the clarity and conviction of their playing.

Glass Heart

Orange Mountain Music CD 7006

Maria Bachmann, violin

Jon Klibonoff, piano

When it comes to minimalism, I must admit I’ve always been more of a Steve Reich guy. But I was quite taken with Philip Glass’s Sonata No. 1 for Violin and Piano (2008), the work at the heart of a new disc on the composer’s Orange Mountain Music label. This world premiere recording by violinist Maria Bachmann and pianist Jon Klibonoff highlights a Romantic urgency I hadn’t heard in Glass’s music before. Indeed, Glass’s program note cites a childhood memory of listening to recordings of the Brahms, Fauré and Franck violin sonatas with his father, at the time a record-store owner in Baltimore.

The fundamental Romanticism of Glass’s piece is underscored by Bachmann and Klibonoff’s programming, which places his recent duo alongside nineteenth-century staples: the Bach/Gounod Ave Maria, and Schubert’s magisterial Sonata in A Major for Violin and Piano, Op. 162 (in the liner notes, Bachmann notes a “similar pathos” shared by the Schubert and Glass sonatas). The disc is rounded out by Ravel’s intriguing Sonata Opus Posthume, a work written in 1897 but left unpublished at the composer’s request, only to be discovered and published in 1975.

I first encountered Bachmann and Klibonoff on their eloquent recording of Paul Moravec’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Tempest Fantasy, a work composed for their ensemble, Trio Solisti, and clarinetist David Krakauer. The warmth and assurance of their playing is such that I would happily listen to them play most anything, canonical or contemporary, and their commitment to new American music is a boon to composers and audiences alike.