Christopher Tyler Nickel: Concerto No. 1 for Cello; Reflections on Requiem; Echo of Tranquility Nos. 1 and 2. Christoph Croisé, cello; Vancouver Contemporary Orchestra conducted by Clyde Mitchell; Oxana Shevchenko, piano. AVIE. $19.99.
Brahms: Piano Sonata No. 3; Schoenberg: Drei Klavierstücke, Op. 11; Inna Faliks: Wandering Stranger; Old Belltower. Inna Faliks, piano. Navona. $16.99.
At least in theory, composers write music intended to connect outward, to communicate with audiences. In practice, the music connects first, if not solely, inward, with its feelings and expressions groping toward outbound understanding only after fulfilling aims that are more self-directed. Just what those aims are differs substantially from piece to piece, as is clear from the latest AVIE release featuring music of Christopher Tyler Nickel (born 1978). The major work on the CD is Nickel’s Cello Concerto No. 1, so designated even though to date, this 2023 work is Nickel’s only cello concerto – indeed, his only concerto for a stringed instrument. The concerto is conceived on a large scale and seems designed to explore the emotive capabilities of the cello, albeit without the depth of feeling and expressiveness heard in some other composers’ concertos for the instrument. Christoph Croisé takes an expansive view of the material, bringing forth its mixture of lyricism and bite to very good effect, and he is ably abetted by the Vancouver Contemporary Orchestra under Clyde Mitchell. The concerto is in four movements that collectively provide a thorough exploration of the cello’s acoustic and emotional range, all within a more-or-less-traditional structure that includes an extended and rather rambling first movement, a short and energetic second, a warm but not overdone third that is marked Cantabile con rubato, and an upbeat if not especially biting finale. It is a well-made work that, however, seems to want to be more than it is: it contains passages of depth, elements of virtuosity, and forays into lyricism, but lacks a convincingly evocative overall tone, a clearly delineated central feeling. In this respect it stands apart from the cello-and-piano material that fills out the disc. The seven-movement Reflections on Requiem (2025) and two short pieces called Echo of Tranquility (also 2025) evoke thoughtfulness and quietude throughout – indeed, they are monochromatic in feeling to such a degree that they tend to fade into the background and become a kind of poised “mood music.” Nickel knowingly treads the same path again and again in Reflections on Requiem, with two movements marked Reflectively, two Andante, one Andante (reflectively), one Andante misterioso, and a finale designated Solemn, which is a pretty good description of all the contemplative placidity here. The persistent sameness of tempo is coupled with a crepuscular feeling throughout – understandably, since the work’s title refers to Nickel’s Requiem, from which Reflections on Requiem draws its thematic material. Knowledge of the original is scarcely needed to be drawn into this gentle world of thoughtfulness and instrumental balance, but there is no attempt here to engage in any depth with the concerns and mysteries of life and death that lie at the heart of Nickel’s Requiem and so many others. The two Echo of Tranquility miniatures lack any thematic connection to earlier Nickel works but are cut from the same emotional cloth as Reflections on Requiem: they are pleasant pieces that invite a kind of drifting, undirected perception without any specific goal beyond an evanescent sense of pleasant peacefulness.
The connectedness of a new Navona CD featuring Ukrainian-American pianist Inna Faliks is of a different type. Faliks seeks in this recording to connect listeners with her own personal journey, both familial and musical, by playing works that she finds highly meaningful as well as some she created herself. The disc opens with two short Faliks-composed pieces that are similar to Nickel’s Echo of Tranquility works in some ways, including length, but that have about them a more distinct feeling of Impressionism. Neither of them is profound or claims to be, but both provide a sense of where Faliks was coming from both literally and musically when her family relocated from Odessa to the United States in 1988, when Faliks was 10 years old. These two short pieces are followed by an even shorter one, Wagner’s 90-second Elegy for Piano of 1858, whose modest chromaticism sounds more forward-looking than anything in Faliks’ own little pieces and serves as a bridge to the next work on the CD, Schoenberg’s 1909 Drei Klavierstücke. These are actually bridge pieces within Schoenberg’s own compositional life, the first two, moderately paced ones extending post-Wagnerian harmony to a point close to atonality, and the third and most forward-looking moving at a quicker pace into a soundworld more closely approximating out-and-out serialism. Faliks plays the works with a solid mixture of sensitivity and bite, allowing the angular rhythms and fragmentation of the third piece to come through especially clearly. But then the CD lurches in a different direction, to a work that is longer than everything else on it combined: Brahms’ Piano Sonata No. 3. This is Brahms’ last piano sonata but is distinctly early Brahms, written five years before Wagner’s Elegy, and it is a sonata seeking grandeur (and often finding it) through a large-scale design encompassing five movements. Classical structurally and Romantic in temperament, it is a far more emotionally complex work than anything else on the CD, and Faliks takes to it with all the understanding and intensity it deserves. From the grandly proclamatory opening of the first movement to the gentleness of the second, emphatic rhythmic display of the third, pervasive thoughtfulness of the fourth, and complexities of the finale, Faliks explores Brahms’ writing expansively while keeping the sonata’s tendency to sprawl well under control. It may be that she includes this sonata on this recording because of the brief fourth movement’s designation as Rückblick (“Remembrance”), in line with the connections she is trying to use the CD to communicate for her own purposes and as a way of reaching out to listeners. Whether the various interconnections heard on the disc provide a cohesive emotive sense is, however, very much a matter of opinion and of taste. The CD’s full title – “Stranger Things: Piano Works from a Young Refugee’s Backpack” – clearly indicates what Faliks thinks she has included here and why. And she certainly plays all the music with considerable skill. But audiences seeking musical cohesiveness in this recital will be more disappointed than ones with experiences paralleling Faliks’ and therefore taking a subjective personal journey akin to hers.
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