Works by Carrillo, Casarrubios, Day, Oyanadel, Quesada
Michelle Cann (piano),
Thomas Mesa (cello)
Navona NV6571 44:18 mins
This vibrant and varied album offers an appealing showcase of contemporary Black and Latinx composers.
The album’s two most introspective works are its standout tracks. In Tres Campanas de Rere, Mario Oyanadel conjures a gorgeous harmonic palette from the piano, executed with great poise by McCann, while Mesa brings a dreamlike quality to the cello line. Carlos Carrillo’s Will the Quiet Times Come takes flight from a line of poet Joseph von Eichendorff, as set by Schumann in Liederkreis, Op. 39: ‘Wie bald, ach wie bald kommt die stille Zeit’ (How soon, oh how soon will the quiet times come), which Carrillo explored in light of Schumann’s personal struggles. As such, the work opens with a sense of frenetic energy and strident dissonance, before an evocation of these longed-for ‘quiet times’.
Nerv! Toccata for Cello and Piano by Sebastian Quesada continues the theme of anxious struggle, and presents a high-energy auditory ‘visualiation’ of this state of nervous tension, while Kevin Day’s Cello Sonata is more celebratory in feel. The work moves between the warmly tonal and a more piquant harmonic range, and the dynamic first movement proves particularly successful in balancing these two compositional approaches.
The album’s most intriguing conceit is in Andrea Casarrubios’s Silbo for Cello and Piano, a broadly tonal work that explores the variety of whistling languages used everywhere from Papua New Guinea to Greece. While some of the score feels a touch familiar harmonically, the imaginative use of cello harmonics is striking and the idea as a whole is compelling.
Well performed and recorded, this is an imaginative collection that provides welcome space for five commendable contemporary composers.
