Volume 27 Issue 8 | July 1 - September 20, 2022

FIVE MINUTES for Earth
Yolanda Kondonassis
Azica (yolandaharp.com/earth-at-heart)
! With its tremendous
range,
dynamic possibility
and immediately
identifiable
sonic thumbprint,
the solo harp has
the potential to
be among the
most expressive and emotive instruments in
music. This is most certainly the case when
this ancient instrument finds itself in the
capable and eminently musical hands of
multiple-Grammy Award-nominee Yolanda
Kondonassis. Recording here for the Azica
Records label, FIVE MINUTES for Earth is an
ambitious project that combines Kondonassis’
considerable and obvious musical talent with
her love for planet Earth.
Like so many, Kondonassis acknowledges
that the pandemic and lockdown provided
space and time to think deeply about what
one finds most meaningful in life. And it was
in this thoughtful place that inspiration for
this project first hit. “It seemed like a perfect
way to combine a number of missions – most
importantly, the opportunity to draw attention
to Earth conservation and climate change
through the language of music.” Tapping 16
celebrated composers representing a wide
range of ages, backgrounds and intersectionality
yet united in their connection to
environmentalism, this fine new recording
was captured in the resonant and acoustically
beautiful Sauder Concert Hall. FIVE
MINUTES should go a long way to further
solidify Kondonassis’ reputation of being
among the world’s preeminent solo harpists,
while giving listeners opportunity to experience
a musical “metaphor for the urgent and
compressed timeframe that remains for our
global community to embrace and implement
solutions to our fast-growing environmental
crisis.”
Andrew Scott
Across Time – Guitar solos & songs by
Frederic Hand
Frederic Hand; Lesley Hand
ReEntrant REN02
(newfocusrecordings.com)
! After dazzling
us with his earlier
release Baroque and
on the Street (Sony),
and his work
with his fusion
band Jazzantiqua,
Frederic Hand
returns with Across
Time and a series
of original works that have been written in
various styles, sweeping across continents,
from Elizabethan England to 20th-century
Argentina and Brazil, to utterly contemporary
music.
This repertoire is remarkable for its range
as well as for the refinement of form and
performance. Hand reveals that he has, over
time, developed a deep relationship with his
instrument, the guitar, and he morphs into a
myriad of styles while exploring various eras
in the musical continuum.
Across Time shows that Hand now has
a voice all his own. He has developed an
intimate relationship with melodic line.
He also has the ability to create remarkable
harmonic tensions with relatively spare ornamentation.
And his rhythmic impulses have
their own allure, the retardandos and accelerandos
sounding entirely natural.
All of this is reflected in all of the album’s
music – especially The Poet’s Eye, with
stunning vocals by (his wife) Lesley Hand,
and on the apogee of the album, which is
Trilogy. Drawing on plenty of variety in both
dynamics and articulation, Hand foregrounds
the tensions of his works with vivid contrasts
and also with subtle and sensitive handling
of the instrument that he has come to make
an extension of his very body – living and
breathing the music that comes from within.
Raul da Gama
Christopher Trapani – Horizontal Drift
Amy Advocat; Marco Fusi; Maximilian Haft;
Daniel Lippel; Marilyn Nonken
New Focus Recordings FCR296
(newfocusrecordings.com)
! Other than his
name and email,
the only thing on
multiple-awardwinning
American/
Italian composer
Christopher
Trapani’s business
card is, “Mandolins
and Microtones.” Both interests are reflected
in the outstanding album, Horizontal Drift,
featuring six of his compositions.
Trapani’s bespoke compositional approach
taps the soundworlds of American, European,
Middle Eastern and South Asian origin,
blending them into his own musical palette.
Certainly ambitious in its cultural diversity,
Turkish maqam and South Asian raga rub
shoulders with Delta blues, Appalachian
folk and 20th-century-influenced electronically
mediated spectral effects and canons.
Horizontal Drift also reflects Trapani’s
preoccupation with melody couched in
microtonality and just intonation. Timbral
diversity derived from the use of unusual
instruments, retuning and preparation are
other compositional leitmotifs.
Album opener Târgul (the name of a
Romanian river) is scored for the Romanian
horn-violin plus electronics. With a metal
resonator and amplifying horn, it has a
tinny, thin sound reminiscent of a 1900s
cylinder violin recording. Trapani’s intriguing
composition maps a modern musical vocabulary
onto the instrument’s keening voice, his
work interrogating its roots in the folk music
of the Bihor region of Romania.
The track Tesserae features the viola
d’amore, a Baroque-era six- or sevenstringed
bowed instrument sporting sympathetic
strings. After exploring multi-tonally
inflected modal melodies with gliding ornaments,
well into the piece Trapani engineers
the musical analogy of a coup de théâtre.
In Marco Fusi’s skillful and sensitive hands
the viola d’amore unexpectedly morphs into
a very convincing Hindustani sarangi. This
magical moment of musical metamorphosis
was so satisfying I had to play it several times.
Andrew Timar
Marti Epstein – Nebraska Impromptu,
Chamber Music for Clarinet
Rane Moore; Winsor Music
New Focus Recordings FCR324
(newfocusrecordings.com)
! Music that
follows in the tradition
of Morton
Feldman is perhaps
best suited to live
performance, an
experience to share
among an audience;
but alone by
the stereo, in a room with the windows open
for spring air is good too. The release this
month of the music of Marti Epstein features
fine performances by all participants, notably
clarinetist Rane Moore, whose rich and brilliant
sound is heard on each track.
The works display the influence of Feldman
and also Toru Takemitsu. They should be
enjoyed in a spirit of contemplation and
peace. These are calm explorations, invitations
to dream, and journeys without goals.
Three of the five pieces reference or respond
to visual inspiration. Oil and Sugar, for
clarinet, flute, violin and piano (2018), references
a conceptual video of motor oil being
poured over a mass of sugar cubes. Komorebi
for clarinet, oboe and violin (2018), is the
Japanese word for sunlight filtered through
leaves. Nebraska Impromptu, for clarinet and
piano (2013), was inspired by the landscape
of Epstein’s childhood. A visual artist herself,
she stretches her musical colours across great
expanses of “canvas.”
The debt to Takemitsu is especially apparent
in Komorebi, but Epstein is an original artist
within this aesthetic realm, and for those
who enjoy contemplative naturalist art, the
performances are delightfully in tune and in
synch. She allows remarkably long silences
to divide and set off the swatches of sound,
like negative space in a painting, allowing the
listener to savour the previous moment before
hearing the next.
Max Christie
thewholenote.com July 1 - September 20, 2022 | 53