(+++) VOICES, MASSED AND SINGLE

Margaret Bonds: Credo; Simon Bore the Cross. Janinah Burnett, soprano; Dashon Burton, bass-baritone; The Dessoff Choirs & Orchestra conducted by Malcolm J. Merriweather. AVIE. $17.99.

Henriëtte Bosmans: Three Songs; Élisabeth Classe: 4 Mèlodies; Irène Fuerison: Les Heures claires, Les Heures d’après-midi, Les Heures du soir; Nadia Boulanger & Raoul Pugno: Les Heures claires—Nos. 1, 3, 4, 6; Marion Bauer: Four Poems. Susan Narucki, soprano; Donald Berman, piano. AVIE. $17.99.

     The human voice has communicative and emotive capabilities of different types when heard in grouped form, on the one hand, and as a solo, on the other. Composers tend to be instinctively sensitive to the differing capabilities of choruses and individuals, with choral compositions often used to bring forth grand, world-spanning and world-affecting themes, while single-voice creations often focus on highly personal emotions and inward-looking contemplative thoughts. The differences can be quite apparent in familiar music – the choral finale of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, say, compared with Schubert’s Die schöne Müllerin – but audiences will encounter them as well in less-known works, and even in world première recordings, such as those on two new AVIE releases. The first of these CDs features two choral works by Margaret Bonds (1913-1972), both with avowedly religious themes but both using words modified in significant ways from more-typical treatments of the Catholic Mass and the life of Christ. Bonds’ Credo uses a text by W.E.B. Du Bois (as edited by Rollo Dilworth) that asserts the special character and importance of “the Negro Race,” as the words have it. In fact, of the seven movements of this Credo, six have titles that begin with the words “I believe,” but the second has an extra-emphatic title: “Especially Do I Believe in the Negro Race.” The other elements of belief focus, in this order, on God, Pride of Race, the Devil, the Prince of Peace, Liberty, and Patience – a particularly telling sequence that produces a feeling quite different from that of the standard Credo in Unum Deum and what typically follows it. The music, sensitively and effectively presented by the Dessoff Choirs & Orchestra under Malcolm J. Merriweather, is by turns assertive, passionate, lyrical, and hopeful, and it draws quite clearly on spirituals and other African-American-derived musical forms. The plea for “a kingdom of beauty and love,” called for by the bass-baritone soloist and contrasted to the choral elements of Credo, is all the more affecting in the way it personalizes verbiage that is otherwise societal in scope and broad in engagement. The same stylistic blending, the same effective juxtaposition of individual and choral material, is found throughout Simon Bore the Cross, which uses texts by Langston Hughes as edited and arranged by Merriweather. Here it is left to the soprano soloist, singing as Mary, to ask plaintively for the identity of the man who helps Jesus carry the cross, while the full chorus identifies him to Mary as Simon of Cyrene, a “dark man” who “has come to share [Jesus’] heavy load,” because “black men will share the pain of the cross.” Here as in Credo, Bonds effectively knits together large and well-known thematic concepts with ones that are made more intimate, first, for an audience of “the Negro Race,” and, second, for individual members of that audience and that race. This is music intended to uplift and acclaim a specific downtrodden group, yet it is notably and refreshingly free of claims of victimization and demands for redress. These are works permeated by faith, both in the texts and in the music, and the spiritual uplift provided through the words and music – and through these highly effective performances – offers hope for a promise of healing that speaks as clearly and impressively today as it did when Bonds wrote these pieces in the 1960s.

     The personal elements are deeper and without reference to specific racial concerns in a series of mostly French-language works created decades before Bonds’ pieces by little-known composers. Part of the inward-looking nature of these pieces stems from the lyrics, part from the music – and an important part derives from the composers’ decision to use a single voice with piano, a time-honored art-song tradition, to communicate with listeners. The disc actually opens and closes with non-French works, starting with songs by Dutch composer Henriëtte Bosmans (1895-1952) and concluding with ones by an American, Marion Bauer (1882-1955). Bosmans’ three songs, which date to 1947, have titles that translate as The Island, In the Rain, and Draw the heavens in the sand of the sea, and are introspective, alienated and resigned (“All these things have been and…they have gone, they have left no trace” – a reflection in its own way of Shelley’s Ozymandias). Bauer’s English-language Four Poems, here in a world première recording, were written earlier (1924) and have a more pastoral feeling about them, and a somewhat more hopeful (perhaps naïvely hopeful) air: “But they who shared with me my life’s adventure…somewhere they with songs are building/ Golden towers more beautiful than my own.” Between these musical bookends, whose feelings Susan Narucki presents with just the right emotional balance, are works drawn in large part from the works of Belgian symbolist poet Émile Verhaeren (1855-1916). The 4 Mélodies by Elisabeth Claisse (dates unknown) were written in 1922-1923 and include a wide range of feelings, from interpersonal difficulties to a genuinely moving (verbally and musically) exploration of what it feels like to be truly poor. Next is the world première recording of an extended work from 1918 by Irène Fuerison (1875-1931), a Belgian composer here presenting French texts by Verhaeren that focus on love as a long-enduring emotion that feeds on and grows past youthful passion to become, at the end of life, a promise to “preserve so fiery a love for you/ that the other dead will feel its glow.” Narucki’s handling of this cycle is particularly compelling, and Donald Berman, a fine accompanist throughout the disc, here uses the piano part to especially telling effect. The only composer on the CD with whom audiences will likely be familiar is Nadia Boulanger (1887-1979), who in 1909 created an eight-song cycle called Les Heures claires with her onetime Paris Conservatory teacher, Raoul Pugno (1852-1914). Unfortunately, only four of the songs are presented here – the full cycle would have provided better balance to the disc, since these compositions are more transparent than the other works on the CD, more balanced and elegant. The contrast between this version of Vous m’avez dit and the one to the same poem by Fuerison is especially intriguing. The expressiveness of all these songs, of all these composers, is communicated with considerable skill thanks to the creators’ decision to use a single voice to present the various texts – and thanks to the ability of Narucki and Berman to extract the full, deeply personal elements of both the words and the music.

(++++) WORLDS’ END

5 Worlds, Book 5: The Emerald Gate. By Mark Siegel, Alexis Siegel, Xanthe Bouma, Boya Sun, and Matt Rockefeller. Random House. $12.99.

     In almost all grand fantasy adventures, from The Odyssey to The Lord of the Rings, the ending is in a sense a foregone conclusion: the grand quest will come to a successful end, the protagonist will gain his or her just reward, and the world that has been destabilized by the events that set the quest in motion will be restored to its rightful state of being. An apt stopping point is a necessity: there is no Book 25 of The Odyssey, and no exploration of life in the Grey Havens after Frodo leaves Middle-earth forever and joins Bilbo, Gandalf, Galadriel and Celeborn. The fascination with these stories lies in how the conclusion will be reached more than with what the conclusion will be.

     The creators of the marvelous 5 Worlds series have this formula down pat, to such an extent that there is nothing formulaic-feeling about it. The underlying quest, to re-light five mysterious “beacons” located on five different worlds and thereby save those worlds and all their peoples while transforming all the civilizations, is certainly grand enough. And the portrayals of the individual worlds and the many races living upon them are handled with great skill and considerable depth: these may be graphic novels aimed mainly at preteens and young teenagers, but their characterizations go well beyond what is usual in the form. The young people who, against the feckless and often venal forces of their elders, make the re-lighting possible, have real personalities and real inner lives – and some conflicts among themselves, which are typical in fantasy quests but handled here with considerable sensitivity.

     The basic idea is that these five interrelated worlds were settled long ago by obscure, poorly understood ancient figures called Felid Gods, about whom many mysteries remain. Each world supposedly has its own giant colored beacon, built for no known reason and now dark after having presumably been lit and important in some significant way in the dim past – but the fifth and final world, strangely named Grimbo (E), appears not to have a beacon at all. The focus during the search for that final beacon is on the peculiar challenges facing the protagonists as they look for it, and in particular the difficulties facing Oona Lee, goodhearted but initially not-very-skillful student at a prominent school called the Sand Dancer Academy, who has led the quest and gained steadily in stature and self-assertiveness through the first four books. The other two members of the initial trio of protagonists have their own well-developed roles to play in the series’ conclusion. An Tzu’s mysterious illness – in which parts of his body are constantly fading to invisibility – proves crucial here, not only by providing a link to the Felid Gods but also by giving an entry point to the chief villain, a revenge-seeking entity known as the Mimic. Of somewhat less consequence in this final volume is Jax Amboy, a star athlete in a highly popular game called Starball, originally an android construct but now fully human – thanks to symbiosis, earlier in the sequence, with a strange spiritual creature known as a Salassi Devoti. In The Emerald Gate, as in all the books, additional characters join the central three, here including Vea and Vector – returning from earlier volumes – and new characters from the races that live on Grimbo (E), especially a plant person called Samphire who becomes the latest character to learn that unquestioning obedience to authority and unthinking following of long-established customs are not the way to do what is right and what is needed in current times and circumstances.

     It is interesting that Oona faces both internal and external challenges in The Emerald Gate, but scarcely surprising that she overcomes all of them and is able – with assistance, since friendship and teamwork are key elements of the 5 Worlds stories – to light the final beacon. It is also interesting that the expected runup to a massive cataclysmic battle with the Mimic turns out not to be the climax of the quest: Oona fascinatingly realizes that even the Mimic has a place to be and a part to play in the continuing existence of the worlds, and she finds a way to limit that role instead of trying to eliminate the Mimic altogether. Once that happens, all that is left is the very end of the successful quest – which in this case involves a transformation of Oona that is at once unexpected and unsurprising: it just seems like the right way for these graphic novels to end. Throughout the 5 Worlds books, mystery after mystery is introduced and solved – only to whet the appetite for the new ones that keep coming up. The Emerald Gate continues that pattern: even the explanation of this final world’s name is included and neatly handled. The book brings the series to a thoroughly satisfying conclusion by drawing on many classic elements of fantasy quests and illustrated storytelling, using the graphic-novel medium skillfully and bending the tropes of heroic fantasy while remaining firmly within that long and storied tradition.

(+++) GETTING TOGETHER

Robert Carl: From the Ground Up; Surge; Blues Box; Excavating the Perfect Farewell; What’s Underfoot; John McDonald: Snowfall in Two Parts; At Pelham Lookout; Carl/McDonald: A Gift…and an Invitation. John McDonald, piano; Robert Black, double bass; Scott Woolweaver, viola. Bridge Records. $15.99.

Guy Barash: The Space Between Silence and Enough; Confessional; Tattoo; Jesus Knew; Saint Augustine; The King of Fire; Parrot/Killdeer/Poem to Be Whispered by the Bedside of a Sleeping Child; I Will Destroy You; Pied Piper. Guy Barash, electronics; Nick Flynn, spoken word; Frank London, trumpet; Eyal Maoz, guitar; Kathleen Supové, piano. New Focus Recordings. $16.99.

     Virtually all performed music is a collaboration between, at minimum, two people: the composer and the performer. There are exceptions for composers who perform their own music, of course, but when they participate in a performance in which their music requires input from additional people, the net result is collaborative after all. And sometimes there are compositions that, in and of themselves, partake of a collaborative nature. Robert Carl and John McDonald are longtime musical partners, and a new Bridge Records release shows just how strongly intertwined they are. Most of the music is by Carl, written during a two-decade period from 1987 to 2018, but there are two works by McDonald (from 2016 and 2017) – and McDonald plays piano for all the works on the CD, Carl’s as well as his. The music is mostly of a fairly straightforward contemporary type. Carl’s From the Ground Up, described as a “sonic etude,” is a moderately paced dissonant piano excursion, while McDonald’s Snowfall in Two Parts is an etude of a different sort – not quite as dry-sounding and indeed employing contrasts in presentation, as is hinted at in the title. Carl’s Surge includes a double bass, which growls along with the piano’s lower register to suitably dark effect, while Carl’s Blues Box is another piano solo, not particularly bluesy but mostly on the quiet and restrained side. Carl’s Excavating the Perfect Farewell is a two-movement piece for viola and piano: the opening Digging has an evanescent quality to it and lies very high on the viola, while Leave-Taking dips quietly into near-lyricism and treats the two instruments more equally. McDonald’s solo-piano At Pelham Lookout mixes a hesitant quality with a sense of questing, although for what is not particularly clear. What’s Underfoot, heard here as a 15-plus-minute piano declamation, is vaguely Impressionistic, but its pervasive delicacy wears thin rather quickly. The disc concludes with much-shorter material for piano solo: the two movements of A Gift…and an Invitation run between two and three minutes apiece. They call vaguely on long-established forms: the first, by Carl and McDonald together, is titled Free Prelude, while the second, by Carl alone, is simply designated Fugue. There is a touch of the Romantic – certainly not of the Baroque – in the first, and a passing resemblance to fugal construction in the second; together, the two movements make for a pleasant and interesting contrast, and have more musical substance and more character than many of the other pieces on the disc. As a tribute to collaboration, the CD will certainly be of interest to listeners already familiar with Carl and McDonald, but the music itself is not sufficiently distinctive to bring in new audiences for either musician or for them as a pair.

     The collaboration is of a different sort on a New Focus Recordings release featuring music by Guy Barash. Here too there is a creative get-together – in this case involving Barash and Nick Flynn – but the difference is that Flynn provides words and presents them throughout the disc, while Barash, with some additional support from trumpet, guitar and piano players, performs the notes and sounds that circle, underline, and sometimes penetrate Flynn’s words. This is one of those discs that asserts its avant-garde nature at every opportunity: from Flynn come words including “trees jeweled with ice,” “having, at last, someone else breathe for me,” and “no one, as you know, sets out to lose their mind” (all those are in just one of these pieces, Confessional); from Barash come the usual beeps, boops, blips, bonks, boings, bangs and other sounds typically associated with electronic accompaniment. The trumpet, guitar and piano play distinctly subservient roles, to such an extent that they seem nearly electronic themselves rather than offering a traditional acoustic contrast to the electronic material. The CD starts with an instrumental introduction and includes nonverbal outbursts from time to time in its other tracks, but the guiding principle here is verbiage with strong contemporary twists. There are musings on Christ’s death in Jesus Knew, dreamlike contemplations in Saint Augustine, memories of a long-ago house fire in I Will Destroy You, and so forth. Aural distortions abound in the instruments, with Barash’s use of microtones adding to the impression of a world divided and subdivided to a point beyond any possible analysis and understanding. Much of the music for the acoustic instruments plays against their inherent form of sound production: inside-the-piano notes are only one element of the soundscape here. The overall effect of the CD is one of extreme diffusion: certainly Barash and Flynn are twined together through the electronic-music and spoken-word elements of this material, but because the material itself is so wide-ranging and so determined to be up-to-date and frequently self-referential, there is nothing cohesive in the individual tracks or in the disc as a whole. This is clearly not a mistake: Barash deliberately casts a wide net musically and Flynn an equally wide one verbally, the net effect being a sense of life being adrift, uncertain, disembodied and frequently eerie. There is nothing wrong with any of this, but there is nothing very unusual or unexpected in it, either: this kind of “woe is me, the world is too much with us” mixture of language and sound is scarcely something with which modern listeners will be unfamiliar. The Barash/Flynn collaboration works quite well to communicate the ideas and feelings that Barash puts into his music in support of and expansion of Flynn’s words. But neither the words nor the feelings come across as unique or even particularly unusual. This is a short CD, running barely 39 minutes, that makes its basic verbal and musical points early on and then continues to make them for a time that, if not interminable, comes across as longer than it needs to be.

(++++) ASSORTED AMAZEMENTS

Amazing Animals Around the World. By DGPH Studio. Penguin Workshop. $17.99.

Amazing Insects Around the World. By DGPH Studio. Penguin Workshop. $17.99.

     There are innumerable books for young readers including more-or-less-random collections of critters large and small, and there is a good reason for this: we live on a fascinating planet whose sheer variety of life is, and should be, a source of continued amazement. Kids and adults alike can benefit from developing a sense of wonder – and thus a sense of appreciation – for the variegated creatures that live with, around, adjacent to or distant from us. Books of this sort vary in focus, with some featuring endangered species, some looking at very large or very small creatures, some focusing on specific types of living things (ones that fly, for instance) – the possibilities are virtually endless, and all the books tend to be worthwhile as long as their presentations are consistent and their information accurate.

     Amazing Animals Around the World and Amazing Insects Around the World are much less targeted than most books of this type: the authors/illustrators collectively designated DGPH Studio have simply picked and chosen living things that can be effectively pictured (the illustrations are simple and clear) and readily discussed (the descriptions are brief, correct, and inclusive of various interesting tidbits of information). By casting a very wide net, the books invite young readers to dabble in the material, searching here and there for items of interest without expecting any particular entry to be connected strongly to any other. Take the “flying” notion in Amazing Animals Around the World, for example. There is a single section intriguingly titled “They Fly, but They Are Not Birds,” within which the flying fox (the world’s largest bat), sugar glider, paradise flying snake and common flying dragon (a small lizard) are among the animals shown and discussed. Another section, “Armor and Scales,” has brief discussions of the armadillo and echidna – and a full two pages on the pangolin, which the authors clearly find fascinating, calling it “one of the most amazing creatures on earth” and explaining that it is the only scaled mammal, is named from the Malay word for “roller,” eats 70 million ants every year, and more. The organization of each of the book’s sections varies: “Living Fossils” is one chapter, “Giant vs. Tiny” another, and then there is “Now You See Me, Now You Don’t,” a chapter about camouflage that spends more time on the little-known potoo or ghost bird (a genuinely weird-looking avian that, among other things, lays its single egg out in the open atop a log or broken branch) than on any other animal. Again and again, the chapter focuses are unpredictable, and that is one attraction of Amazing Animals Around the World: young readers may think they already know about, for instance, animals with “Long, Sticky Tongues,” but the specific ones featured in this book may still come as a pleasantly intriguing surprise (numbats, anybody?). Some concluding thoughts on conservation, plus a two-page glossary, complete this engaging tour of Animalia.

     Amazing Insects Around the World is quite similar in layout, appearance and content, even to the same back-of-book material on conservation and this volume’s own concluding glossary. This book has somewhat more introductory material than does the one on animals – chapters explain, among other things, how to define an insect and how insects develop. Once the specific insects begin to be discussed, though, matters proceed as in the book on animals. Kids will likely meander through Amazing Insects Around the World with the thought that the critters here are largely familiar – bees, caterpillars, butterflies, and so on – only to be brought up short by a two-page chapter entirely devoted to the scorpionfly. This “strange combination of fly, butterfly, and scorpion” is little-known but by no means rare, with 400 species found in dense forests throughout the world (but scorpionflies are just an inch long, which helps explain why readers of this book may know nothing about them). Incidentally, although a 400-species insect may sound impressive, that number is nothing compared to the speciation of the largest order of insects, Coleoptera, which has 400 thousand species identified so far (and surely others not yet known). Amazing Insects Around the World scatters details like this throughout its pages. It also provides comparatively in-depth discussions of topics such as insect homes and defense systems, plus two-page explanations of the characteristics of the praying mantis and fire ants – and several pages on spiders, which are not insects (as the book quickly states). The material on spiders does a good job of countering the sometimes negative impression that people have of arachnids, which “are among the most feared creatures on the planet.” The book talks about using spiders to control insect pests in apple farms and rice fields, for example – but does mention spiders that are dangerous to humans, including the black widow and the funnel web spider. Amazing Insects Around the World is scarcely an in-depth look at insects – the material is hit-or-miss, presented in no particularly apparent order – but just like the very similar Amazing Animals Around the World, it is a genuinely interesting foray into real-life information. Although not especially challenging to read, both books are packed with enough intriguing elements to draw young readers in and perhaps encourage them to seek out greater breadth of material elsewhere after sampling the facts in these easy-to-enjoy presentations.

(+++) KEYBOARD CONNECTIONS

Janáček: Sonata 1.X.1905; Josef Suk: Jaro (Spring), Op. 22a—No. 5; Things Lived and Dreamt, Op. 30; Dvořák: Humoresques, Op. 101—Nos. 4, 7 and 8; Vítězslava Kaprálová: April Preludes, Op. 13; Smetana: Czech Dances—Polka No. 2. Francine Kay, piano. Analekta. $18.99.

Dvořák: Slavonic Dances—Op. 46, No. 8 and Op. 72, No. 2; Mozart: Andante and Five Variations in G; Wang Jianzhong: Colorful Clouds Chasing the Moon; Gong Huahua: Mountain Harvest; Manuel de Falla: La Vida Breve—Two Spanish Dances; Amy Beach: Summer Dreams, Op. 47; Florence Price: Three Negro Spirituals; Gershwin: Rhapsody in Blue (arranged by Henry Levine). Deborah Moriarty and Zhihuang Tang, piano four hands. Blue Griffin Recordings. $15.99.

     We live in an age when fine pianism is virtually a given: interpretations and reactions to them will always vary, but the underlying quality of piano performances today is almost uniformly high – so high that what differentiates one reading from another is usually just a matter of emphasis or nuance. With pianists playing so well and so consistently, the selection of repertoire that they offer becomes ever more important for audiences to determine which recitals to attend and which recorded music to own. So when well-performed, well-recorded CDs like two recent ones from Analekta and Blue Griffin, respectively, are released, a listener’s decision-making about ownership will depend to a large extent on whether the specific works offered by the performers add up, in their totality, to a satisfying aural experience. The quality of the playing can be assumed to be very high – as indeed it is for both these offerings.

     The primary piece on Francine Kay’s new disc is Josef Suk’s 35-minute, 10-movement suite whose title translates from Czech as Things Lived and Dreamt. Dating to 1909, this is an Impressionistic work with considerable personal content and a smattering of nationalistic material: Suk quotes from some of his other pieces, employs attractive coloristic effects here and there, and uses rhythms and accents in interesting ways. Kay clearly enjoys the many and variegated elements of this suite, treating each piece as its own small-but-complete element of the whole while still fitting all the movements into a larger picture that provides an attractive view of Suk as a composer. The placement of Things Lived and Dreamt midway through the CD does create some awkwardness, though, and indeed is rather hard to understand. The disc opens with Janáček’s dramatic and tragic two-movement Sonata 1.X.1905, prompted by the composer witnessing the killing of an unarmed protester in a demonstration in the city of Brno. Kay plumbs the dramatic tension of this work effectively, bringing out the strong emotion that the composer put into it. After this, though, matters become a touch strange. The next work on the disc is a piece by Suk that dates to 1902 and is quite different from Things Lived and Dreamt and from Janáček’s sonata. It is the fifth and last number from Jaro (Spring), and is pleasantly lyrical in salon mode. It sounds more than a bit like the music of Suk’s father-in-law, Dvořák, three of whose Op. 101 Humoresques (1894) are presented next. These are small gems, especially the justly famous No. 7, but they bring an overall lightness to the disc that somewhat undermines the strength and vigor with which Janáček’s sonata opens the recording. After the Dvořák material comes Things Lived and Dreamt – and then a real shifting of gears to the four-movement April Preludes by Vítězslava Kaprálová (1915-1940), a student of Martinů whose death at age 25 (probably from typhoid fever or tuberculosis) was a genuine tragedy: she had already accomplished far more as both composer and conductor than was usual for women (or most men) at the time. April Preludes is Kaprálová’s best-known piano work: it was composed in 1937 for Rudolf Firkušný, who played it often. And certainly this is more than an occasional piece: in many ways it strives to go beyond typical slice-of-life-in-springtime music, mixing its Impressionism with considerable dissonance, strong rhythmic emphases, and even some bitonality. Listeners hearing the piece for the first time will likely want to experience more of this composer’s music – yet hearing April Preludes immediately after Suk’s Things Lived and Dreamt is a bit odd, producing a somewhat emotionally dislocated feeling. And then the CD concludes with an outright encore that dates back to a much earlier time, 1877: Smetana’s Polka No. 2 from his Czech Dances. This is a slight and pleasant two-minute work that in certain ways is foundational to the music of Dvořák and Suk; but it fits somewhat uneasily here, as the earliest work on the disc. Certainly Kay’s performances of all these pieces are worth hearing for their sensitivity and adept handling of varied repertoire; but the disc as a whole has a somewhat disconnected feeling about it, as if it lacks any underlying theme beyond geography – it would likely have been more effective if presented chronologically, starting with Smetana’s little dance and ending with Kaprálová’s April Preludes.

     If Kay’s geographical reach is limited by design, that of Deborah Moriarty and Zhihua Tang is very widespread, also by design. Dvořák, interestingly enough, appears here as well, with two of his Slavonic Dances (one from each of the two sets) opening the disc. Then, however, we are suddenly in a very different world, that of Mozart’s Andante and Five Variations in G, K. 501 – a lovely and too-infrequently-heard piece, and one that Moriarty and Tang present with bounce and upbeat enthusiasm throughout. The contrast with Dvořák is so marked that listeners will wonder just where this recital could go next. The answer is to somewhere very, very different: Colorful Clouds Chasing the Moon by Wang Jianzhong (1933-2016). Filled with trills and arpeggios designed to approximate the sound of Chinese instruments on the piano, this is an interestingly atmospheric setting of a traditional Chinese folk song. It actually sounds more Western than Oriental in everything but the theme itself – although its juxtaposition with the music of Mozart remains puzzling. Having established a Chinese element on this CD, the performers then offer another one, Mountain Harvest by Gong Huahua (born 1978). Twice the length of Colorful Clouds Chasing the Moon and considerably more dissonant and rhythmically irregular, the piece contrasts interestingly with the one that it follows, but just what it is doing after the Dvořák and Mozart works is not entirely clear. And after this work, the pianists bring us back to Western music, with two dances from Manuel de Falla’s La Vida Breve, arranged for piano four hands by Gustave Samazeuilh. These are ebullient, even effervescent pieces, strongly redolent of Spanish rhythms – perhaps the reason for offering them after the two Chinese-inflected works. After this, we get to something closer to an American sound, to the extent that the varied and polyglot influences on American music may be said to have a single “sound.” This is Amy Beach’s six-movement Summer Dreams, an Impressionistic work from 1901that paints a series of very brief and focused pictures, with the fourth and fifth, Katy-dids and Elfin Tarantelle, being especially evocative. After this foray into Americana – Beach’s work actually bespeaks multiple musical influences, but then so does much American music of its time – Moriarty and Tang present Three Negro Spirituals by Florence Price, in the composer’s own arrangement. These are pleasant pieces that, to some extent, mirror the interpretation-of-earlier-material approach of Colorful Clouds Chasing the Moon, although this is scarcely a significant parallel. The comparative rhythmic intricacy of Price’s third piece, Ev’ry Time I Feel the Spirit, is especially attractive in this performance. And then, at the very end of the CD, the longest piece on the disc is presented: Henry Levine’s arrangement of Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue, a work of Americana that is quite different from the pieces by Beach and Price, although related to them in certain distinctive ways. Levine’s piano-four-hands version of Rhapsody in Blue is workmanlike and careful, translating the material well enough but certainly not enhancing it in any way. The coloristic elements of Gershwin’s music, so apparent in its band and orchestral versions, seem somewhat faded here; and while the performance is certainly effective enough, it is hard not to think of this as a kind of rhapsody in very pale blue indeed. There is considerable intriguing music on this disc, and the pianists work quite well together and are attentive to the unique elements of each piece they play. But the recital as a whole, despite its overall title of “Connecting Cultures,” has an arbitrary feeling about it: the connections, to the extent that they exist, are on the forced side, and the disc will be most enjoyable only for listeners whose musical interests happen to match those of Moriarty and Tang particularly closely.