Odd name for a
disc – perhaps it refers to the elegant carpentry of the instrument,
its swanlike curve. But as usual Crystal comes up with a programme
that is unique and entertaining if a little short at fifty-two
minutes. And as so often with Crystal artists the Rodland-Mokatsian
duo is devoted to propagating new work and doing so with taste
and discrimination.
Kenji Bunch’s Suite
was written in 1998. Bunch is himself a violist so knows the
instrument intimately. It’s a five-movement suite, ranging from
romantic, rather rhapsodic Bloch-like expression to a kind of
Piazzolla-cum-jazz profile in the “silly” (the composer’s word)
pizzicato-laced second movement. The core of the work is the
Lament – soft dynamics, and affecting as we enter the cadenza.
Dan Coleman, an almost exact contemporary of Bunch, contributes
Summer a “bittersweet love song.” It’s a useful and important
feature of Crystal’s documentation that, wherever possible,
the composers contribute their own notes, so we can take it
on Coleman’s own authority that he means the piece to begin
innocently and then increasingly to fragment and diverge. The
nature imagery and associated bell chimes are part of this narrative
scenery; and so are the moments when the lines grown longer
and more fractious, when the answering phrases between the two
instruments becomes ever less cordial.
Flow My Tears
was written in memoriam for Christopher Theofanidis’s mentor,
the composer Jacob Druckman. It embraces pitch bending and takes
the viola up vertiginously high on the fingerboard but ultimately
suggets a lyric, and stoic, intimacy that perhaps deliberately
evokes Britten’s Lachrymae.
After which it’s
time to let down one’s hair with Gershwin and Porter. I Got
Rhythm has a bluesy, slow tempo tension and then really
opens up, though I wish that the arranger Deborah Holden-Holloway
(I assume it’s her) hadn’t introduced a quotation from Stormy
Weather. Begin the Beguine, arranged by Kenji Bunch, is
a nuanced and superior arrangement and is full of harmonic interest.
There’s some Ragtime left over for Anything Goes.
Odd name or not
this is an enjoyable disc. It’s been sympathetically recorded
in a good but frustratingly unnamed location. This is one aspect
where Crystal could do more, as many of their releases come
bereft of recording details. I shouldn’t complain because it’s
less for me to type but, as the magazine has it, I think we
should be told.
Jonathan Woolf
Carol Rodland
(viola)
