Paul Barnes, piano; Kirk Trevor, conductor; Slovak Radio Orchestra (Bratislava); Bohuslav Martinů Philharmony (Zlin).
Victoria BOND: Illuminations on Byzantine Chant
Victoria BOND: Ancient Keys (2002)*
Victoria BOND: Black Light (1997)*
Byzantine Chant: Potirion Sotiriu
Byzantine Chant: Simeron Kremate
Traditional Jewish: Tal
Byzantine Chant: Enite ton Kyrion
*reissued tracks
Albany Records TROY1880
Release Date: November 19, 2021
Duration: 01h 04m 54s
Giorgio Koukl | 14 MAR 2022
The New York-based label Albany Records published a monographic disc of composer-conductor Victoria Bond (b. 1945) with a significant title: Illumination. The album is intended to celebrate 25 years of collaboration with the pianist Paul Barnes and contains some world premiere recordings.
Victoria Bond (victoriabond.com)
The two major compositions here are Ancient Keys (2002) and Black Light (1997), both works for piano and orchestra. Both tracks are re-issues from previous albums: Black Light from a Koch Schwann disc (3-1333-2) released in Austria in 1998, Ancient Keys on a previous Albany album (TROY878) on 2008. Those albums presented Bond’s works with piano concertos by other American composers.
Surely the most impressive production here is the first of the above, recorded with the Slovak Radio Orchestra (Bratislava) under the direction of Kirk Trevor.
The massive structure of about 17 minutes contains no dull moment, is very well-conceived, and has a fully convincing development, a thing today scarcely found between living composers.
Ms. Bond certainly has an outstanding sense of orchestral colors. She is in full command of the so-difficult art of orchestration, sometimes reaching rather impressive heights of a Ravel or Stravinsky. She is much helped by a very good orchestra and the precise work of the conductor. The orchestra is certainly not spared with rhythmic difficulties, a necessity to interact with the wild cascades of the pianist and finest dynamic details. All that coupled with a very convincing work of the sound engineers guarantees an excellent moment of quality music.
A special mention must be made about the pianist.
Paul Barnes (credit: Peter Barnes)
Mr. Barnes is a real war machine in terms of technical abilities. His concept of a broad array of dynamics helps him achieve a rare thing for an interpreter of new music. He seems so confident with the score that the listener has the impression he is, in reality, improvising the piano part creating it from scratch.
The second orchestral piece, Black Light, is divided into three movements: “Aggressively driving,” “Forcefully” and “Presto.” All three movements total a slightly longer duration than Ancient Keys and have a very different character.
This music is even more concentrated, but despite the incredible technical artistry of the pianist and his out-of-the-world precision in the most difficult rhythmical passages, the overall impression is a little less convincing than the precedent work.
This is due mainly to a lesser degree of refinement of the orchestral part, here played by the Bohuslav Martinů Philharmony of Zlin (Czech Republic).
The orchestral colors are well respected, but a small hindrance is a lesser rhythmic precision, especially the strings. The conductor being the same as the precedent piece, it is probably more of a problem with rehearsal times. The technical quality of the sound image is a slightly lesser one, too.
The rest of the disc is dedicated to works for piano in a cycle called Illuminations on Byzantine Chants.
Here the pianist plays and partly sings three works called Potirion Sotiru (1999), Simeron Kremate (2019), and Enite ton Kyrion (2021). Despite the distance of about twenty years between the single parts, the musical style of Ms. Bond is not changed significantly. It is still granitic, highly original, and likely a real challenge for any pianist.
As in his appearance as soloist with orchestra, Mr. Barnes is brilliant, powerful, and fully confident; perhaps even better focused on detail. He is certainly a good architect in the tiniest graduations and always convincing.
Then there is an odd sort of coda to the album: four short presentations of the original Byzantine chant melodies, which constitute the primary inspiration source for Victoria Bond.
A few more considerations can be made at this point.
As fascinating as it can be, the orthodox melodies were probably only inspirational for the composer but are practically never heard in the actual piano pieces. There is no effort towards archaization or the use of modal harmony, which is probably good fortune.
As much as I admire Mr. Barnes as pianist, he is far less impressive in his other hat as Orthodox chanter, despite all his efforts to produce an oriental, melismatic, and semantically correct voice style. The strange use of an artificial electronic choir in the last four tracks, probably meant to create a suitable base for Mr. Barnes’s voice, obtains a very cheap effect of New Age without any real contribution. Ontologically there is a need for this.
But despite this minor glitch, the disc remains a great occasion to know, appreciate and admire the compositional art of Victoria Bond and the pianistic fireworks of Paul Barnes. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Paul Barnes: paulbarnes.net
- Victoria Bond: victoriabond.com
Giorgio Koukl is a Czech-born pianist/harpsichordist and composer who resides in Lugano, Switzerland. Among his many recordings are the complete solo piano works and complete piano concertos of Bohuslav Martinů on the Naxos label. He has also recorded the piano music of Tansman, Lutosławski, Kapralova, and A. Tcherepnin, amongst others, for the Grand Piano label. Koukl has most recently completed recording a second volume of the complete solo piano music of Polish composer Alfons Szczerbinski.
(photo: Chiara Solari)
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