(+++) IN TUNE WITH EMOTIONS

Richard Strauss: Sonata for Violin and Piano; Ernest Bloch: Sonata No. 2 for Violin and Piano; Fauré: Après un rêve, Op. 7, No. 1; Schubert: Ave Maria. Danbi Um, violin; Juho Pohjonen, piano. AVIE. $19.99.

Études for Piano by Boston-based Composers. Jihye Chang, piano. New Focus Recordings. $16.99.

     Although most closely associated with the Romantic era, emotional evocation in music existed before that time period and most certainly continued to exist after it, right up to the present day. Works that invite and receive emotive playing do, however, pose something of a quandary in recorded form: even when they come from more or less the same time period, they are appealing as a total package only to listeners who respond to them in the same way that the performers who arranged the recital do. The personal nature of a recording such as a new AVIE release featuring Danbi Um and Juho Pohjonen is apparent throughout: the four pieces offered, two of them extended and two very brief, have little to do with each other and will be effective for audiences only to the extent that listeners bring with them a response pattern parallel to that of Um and Pohjonen themselves. Richard Strauss’ sole Sonata for Violin and Piano is an early work (1887) and scarcely groundbreaking, but it is filled with lyrical beauty that is interestingly complemented by considerable technical demands. Its emotions vary widely, not only in the sonata as a whole but also within individual movements: the first movement is dark-hued at the start and bright at the end, while the concluding third movement opens with quietly thoughtful feeling before becoming very decidedly outgoing. Um and Pohjonen explore the contrasts within the sonata skillfully, but the highlight of the performance is actually the central movement, marked Improvisation, which is the only one with a consistent mood: its meditative quality is here explored with considerable sensitivity and understanding. The other major work on this disc is the second and far less aurally challenging of Ernest Bloch’s violin sonatas, whose simplicity and lyricism – abetted by the inclusion of themes associated with both Judaism and Catholicism – produces a sense of uplift and mysticism, the latter reinforced by the sonata’s title of Poème mystique. Dating to 1924, Bloch’s sonata contains stylistic elements of its time combined with ones that Bloch said came to him after a mild barbiturate overdose. Um and Pohjonen play the sonata with sensitivity and understanding, but it is not as compelling a work as Bloch’s first violin-and-piano sonata and is not an especially felicitous juxtaposition with Richard Strauss’ sonata. Perhaps aware of this, the performers separate the two works with an arrangement for their instruments of Fauré’s Après un rêve, the first of the composer’s Trois melodies (1870-1877) for solo voice and piano. This is a pleasant enough work but not a particularly substantial one, serving here more as a placeholder than anything else. The CD concludes with another arrangement of a vocal work, Schubert’s ever-popular Ave Maria (Ellens dritter Gesang), which dates to 1825 and was not written as a setting of the “Ave Maria” prayer but as the sixth of seven songs in a cycle for various voices based on Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake. The spiritual elements underlying the material are nevertheless the ones most associated with Schubert’s setting when, as here, it is heard out of context; and the piece is played by Um and Pohjonen with a suitable sense of uplift and devotion. The fact remains, though, that the four offerings on this disc fit at best uneasily with each other, and the recording will be most appealing only to listeners who hear it in the same spirit and with the same spiritual attentiveness that the performers themselves bring to all the music.

     Two hundred years on from Schubert’s work, the desire to express emotion through music remains as strong as ever, and contemporary composers reach for connections through various forms and at various lengths. Pianist Jihye Chang commissioned a series of études from Boston-based composers during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdowns and depredations of 2020-2021, and a New Focus Recordings release showcases her performance of eight of these works. Aside from being thoroughly immersed in contemporary compositional techniques, the pieces have little in common: the feelings they seek to evoke and explore are as disparate as the composers themselves. A Bit of Noise in the System by Dan VanHassel skitters up and down the piano amid quick punctuation-point notes and chords. Nam-Ok Lee by Eun Young Lee jumps about the keyboard in exploratory fashion. Mind Stretch by Yu-Hui Chang is a kind of mini-encyclopedia of sounds and techniques that tumble over each other willy-nilly, while belletude (spelled without a capital letter) by Ketty Nez sounds mostly like background material above which interjections appear, and bariolage (no capital there either) by Marti Epstein is delicate, evanescent and often sounds barely there at all. Fleetude by John McDonald is thoroughly disconnected from itself through stop-and-go pacing and fragmented themes whose emotions change in quicksilver fashion, while Idée fixe by William David Cooper is emotionally split in two with its comparatively rigid first portion and more fantasia-like second part. The longest work here is three pieces in one under the title Lowell Études: Three Etchings on Solitude by Stratis Minakakis. Full understanding of the material requires familiarity with the poetry of Robert Lowell, but listeners to whom contemporary musical approaches are appealing will have little trouble recognizing the many uses of extended techniques, such as juxtaposition of the piano’s extreme registers and an emphasis on the piano as a percussion instrument through pedal-performance participation rather than simple enhancement. Chang plays all the études as if she believes thoroughly in their emotive constructs and their composers' sound worlds. Like-minded audiences will enjoy this journey to, through and around Boston’s musical scene, although it is only fair to point out that nothing in the recital bespeaks any particular element of location except insofar as technical and emotional engagement themselves create individualized aural geography.