Signs, Games & Messages (CD review)

Music of Janacek, Bartok and Kurtag. Jennifer Koh, violin; Shai Wosner, piano. Cedille CDR 90000 143.

American violinist Jennifer Koh is an adventurous sort, leaning to performances of new and contemporary compositions as well as robust interpretations of old favorites. On Signs, Games & Messages she teams with Israeli pianist Shai Wosner for an album of twentieth-century works by Janacek, Bartok, and Kurtag that amply demonstrates her flexible playing style and enterprising spirit.

Koh and Wosner tell us in a booklet note that “Each work on this album inhabits two worlds: the influence of folklore on one hand and the composer’s striking originality on the other. As a duo, we wanted to create a program that explores these intertwined stands of musical DNA, the tension between the visionary modernism of these masterpieces, and the visceral pull of folk and cultural memory that is so essential to the language of these composers.” Each of the composers on the disc embraces modern musical techniques while also acknowledging the traditional music of their native lands.

The first thing the duo tackle is the Sonata for Violin and Piano, JW VII/7 by Czech composer Leo Janacek (1854-1928). He wrote it in 1914, at the outset of the First World War in Europe; Janacek said of it, "...I could just about hear the sound of the steel clashing in my troubled head...." In the Sonata, Janacek plays with the rhythms of speech-melody, taken he said from the cadences of indigenous folk tunes. You hear in Koh and Wosner's playing abrupt stops and starts, just as Janacek intended and which give the music a distinctively different quality from most music of the era. The pair of performers do justice to the Sonata's free-flowing ideas, from an aching melancholy through a quick, excitable agitation, all the while maintaining the composer's melodic lines.

Next, Koh and Wosner offer a series of short items, mostly for violin and piano and a few for piano alone, from Hungarian composer Gyorgy Kurtag (b. 1924). With these miniatures we hear Kurtag at his most ambitious and most risky, the music at once creative yet fairly accessible. Sometimes the music sounds distinctly European; other times it seems almost American folklike. Koh and Wosner give it plenty of time to develop, creating wonderfully colorful little sound pictures: eerie, haunting, playful, many as soft as a whisper, a few more loud and clamorous. Like me, you may enjoy "Fundamentals No. 2," especially, a thirty-second piece featuring vocal sounds, one labeled "unpleasant." Likewise with "A Hungarian Lesson for Foreigners." They made me smile.

Finally, we get the First Sonata for Violin and Piano, Sz. 75 by Hungarian composer Bela Bartok (1881-1945). As with the previous selections, Koh and Wosner play the Bartok with passion and repose, even though the music itself is perhaps the most consciously "twentieth-century modern" of the works on the program. Odd, perhaps, given that Kurtag is obviously more contemporary than Bartok, yet Kurtag actually sounds more traditional, for all his inventiveness. Anyway, Koh and Wosner provide a good deal of pleasure with their intimate intertwining of instruments, from stormy to quiet to almost meditative.

Producer-engineer Judith Sherman and editor Bill Maylone made the recording at the American Academy of Arts and Letters, New York City in April and October, 2012. If you've been following my reviews of Cedille products over the years, you know I think highly of their audio reproduction. This one is no exception and sounds splendid. Both the piano and violin appear well focused and well balanced with one another, neither too close nor too far away. There is in addition to the fine clarity a small but helpful hint of room resonance, which provides a pleasant ambient bloom to the sound. Add to that a wide dynamic range, a quick transient response, and a realistic decay time, and you get a recording that pretty much puts the artists in your living room.

JJP

To listen to a brief excerpt from this album, click here: