(++++) KEYBOARD INSPIRATIONS

Charles-Valentin Alkan: Complete Piano Music, Volume 8—1^er Nocturne; 1^er Recueil d’Impromptus; 2^e et 3^e Nocturnes; 3 Airs à cinq temps et 1 à sept temps, 2^e Recueil d’Impromptus; Le Grillon, 4^e nocturne; Impromptu; Réconciliation; Zorcico, danse ibérienne (à 5 temps); Une fusée, introduction et impromptu. Mark Viner, piano. Piano Classics. $19.99. 

Prayers for a Feverish Planet: New Music about Climate Change, Vol. 1. Ann DuHamel, piano. New Focus Recordings. $20.99. 

     The unique complexities of the piano music of Alkan are everywhere apparent. The eighth volume of a projected 18-or-so-volume series of Alkan’s complete piano works, powered by the utter dedication and utterly amazing pianism of Mark Viner, includes music with typical Alkan indications of performance expectations that are simply not found in other composers’ pieces: infiammatamente, rasserenato, sottilisismamente and many more. The works themselves often feature curious titles whose relationship to their content is not always obvious. And some pieces are titled so elaborately that their existence essentially as miniatures seems overweighted by the words used to describe them: the full label of Rèconciliation is Rèconciliation, petit caprice mi-parti en forme de zorcico ou air de danse basque à cinque temps. Viner wades through all these curiosities with tremendous understanding that is both musical and verbal: he writes these Piano Classics volumes’ program notes himself and personally translates all the quotations he includes from non-English-language sources. Each of the Viner discs is a treat to experience – and all the enjoyment traces back to the immensely interesting, packed-with-unique-elements nature of the music itself. Alkan’s creative spark seems to have been almost entirely internal: perhaps a commission here and there, but by and large the need to express himself – for a while as a virtuoso composer/pianist but otherwise, during his multi-decade life as a recluse, simply because music was his form of saying something that the world at large might or might not ever hear. Viner is expert at exploring the ins and outs of Alkan’s creativity, which in this latest release is in a kind of “salon-plus” mode, including works that in other composers’ hands could be light and limited but in Alkan’s (and therefore in Viner’s) are of much greater interest and of exceptional value. It is often bits of these works, more than the works in their entirety, that make listeners sit up and take notice. For example, La foi, the fourth and last of the 1^er Recueil d’Impromptus, is straightforwardly devout at first (its title means “Faith”), but its middle section is dark, spooky and genuinely strange. And Une fusée (“A Rocket” or “A Burst”) starts with well-made but largely straightforward material that meanders through several keys and then suddenly leaps into a hyper-fast mode that seems impossible to sustain – with Viner sustaining it, of course. An occasional work here, though charming, is on the obvious side: Le Grillon (“The Cricket”) features upper-register chirping sounds that are less interesting than a section marked quasi-tremante (“as if trembling”). Some pieces have forward-looking elements that are common in Alkan’s music (a couple of pieces here anticipate Satie); others explore the piano’s evocative capabilities, such as several designated as zorcicos (Basque dances featuring five-beat rhythms) – and the last work that Alkan wrote in the genre, called Zorcico, danse ibèrienne (à 5 temps), was not rediscovered until 2012 and has never been recorded before. There is a sense of a time tunnel and a “rabbit hole” experience when it comes to Alkan’s music, which Viner performs with unwavering panache and complete dedication. This composer and this pianist form a truly remarkable team. 

     Teamwork of a very different kind underlies a project created by pianist Ann DuHamel. This is the piano as “cause instrument” rather than a keyboard for making and performing music for its own sake. DuHamel has commissioned a series of works relating, at least in their creators’ minds, to the issue of climate change, and has received pieces from 170 composers in 35 countries. A New Focus Recordings release called Prayers for a Feverish Planet: New Music about Climate Change, Vol. 1, is the start of a planned CD series that will showcase these creations for the purpose of, presumably, demonstrating the composers’ concern about climate change and their desire somehow to use music to – what? Highlight it? Fight it? Create greater awareness of it? Evoke aspects of it? This is not music designed to entertain but to, perhaps, inspire or motivate or otherwise have some sort of nonmusical effect; but it is hard to see just what DuHamel’s and the composers’ expectations are. Like other cause-driven music, the eight works in this first volume have a relationship to their underlying inspiration only insofar as the composers and DuHamel say they do – advocacy tends to translate poorly into music, and effective music tends to transcend whatever advocacy may have inspired it. So this (+++) CD, which is certainly not lacking in sincerity and which showcases DuHamel as pianist as well as commissioning spirit, will be primarily of interest to audiences that understand its reason for being and that share the angles and attitudes evinced by the composers herein. The disc opens with Erick Tapia’s Solipsismo, a meandering mixture of chordal and linear material. Next is Karen Lemon’s Forgive Them Not, For They Know What They Do, whose pleasantly almost-peppy first section gives way to slower and eventually more-serious material. Laura Schwendinger’s Air (from Magic Carpet Music) uses individual well-separated notes to create a feeling of space and distance. Juhi Bansal’s Land of Waking Dreams starts with flourishes and uses prepared-piano elements to create a heightened sense of sustained sonority. Ian Dicke’s White Parasol contrasts the piano’s upper and lower registers and, in addition, its individual-note and chordal elements. Donald Blinkhorn’s avant-garde-titled frostbYte: chalk outline includes recorded nature sounds and numerous electronic modifications of those sounds and of the piano itself. Plain Song by Judith Shatin, the longest work on the CD, is also largely electronic and is verbal as well: poet Charles Wright reads four sometimes modified, sometimes repeated examples of his work (“the small crack where the dead come out and go back in,” “live your life as if you are already dead,” and so forth), while occasional piano notes (including some played from inside the instrument) provide contrast and supplementation. Then the disc’s shortest work closes it: Gunter Gaupp’s Those Who Watch, an electroacoustic layering of media voices with flowing piano accompaniment that both underlines and interferes with the increasingly incomprehensible verbal commentary. The connection of the various pieces with the reason for their being is far from obvious in most cases and is over-obvious in a few; pamphleteering makes for poor musical connections (except for the already-connected cognoscenti), but lack of clear attachment to the cause requires the music to stand on its own as music, which is not the intent of this project. The composers’ undoubted sincerity parallels that of DuHamel herself, but whether audiences will find themselves more energized or more enlightened after hearing this CD than they were before sitting through it is at best an uncertain proposition. And what listeners will then actually do after listening that they would not have done beforehand – for that matter, what DuHamel wants or expects them to do – is even less clear.