Songs for Our Times Jessie Montgomery: Divided; Michael Abels: Global Warming; plus works by Beethoven (arr. Rubén Rengel), Price, Romero, Valerie Coleman, Ricardo Herz, and Carlos Simon Sphinx Virtuosi DG (digital only) 61:34 mins
This album offers intriguing insights into Black and Latinx musical voices, with works from established figures like Price to important contemporary figures including Jessie Montgomery and Valerie Coleman, and many names new to me such as Michael Abels, Ricardo Herz, Carlos Simon, Aldemaro Romero and Rubén Rengel (arranging Beethoven).
Abels’s Global Warming, a response to the 1991 fall of the Berlin Wall, layers Irish, African and Persian musical material in an evocation of shared musical globalism. Romero’s Fuga con Pajarillo synthesises fugue with Venezuelan pajarillo in a slightly less harmonious marriage, since the fixed harmonic pattern of the dance jars against a fugue’s structural need for modulation.
Valerie Coleman’s Tracing Visions, premiered in 2022, is infused with African-American rhythms, and draws on various string textures to generate both energy and lyric expression. Price’s Andante Cantabile from String Quartet No. 2 hails audibly from an earlier time, though her evocation of African-American songs resonates well with other works.
Montgomery’s Divided is the expressive core of the album, eliciting urgent and heartfelt playing, and revealing unexpected colours and dense textures. Herz’s Sisifo na Cidade Grande – a ferocious rhythmic challenge written in 25/16 – returns to ideas of cultural fusion in jazz improvisation and West African and Brazilian rhythm. Rengel’s virtuosic arrangement of the final movement from the misnamed ‘Kreutzer’ Sonata is a well-chosen close, honouring the biracial violinist George Bridgetower for whom Beethoven wrote the work.
More brightness and spaciousness of sound would lift this exciting album, with its committed, often deeply expressive playing.
Natasha Loges
