Seunghee Lee, clarinet; JP Jofre, bandoneon; Steven Beck, piano; London Symphony Orchestra, Enrico Fagone, conductor.
JP JOFRE: Primavera
Astor PIAZZOLLA/arr. Jofre: Tango Étude No. 3
Heitor VILLA-LOBOS/arr. Lee: Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5 Aria (Cantilena)
JP JOFRE: Double Concerto for Clarinet, Bandoneon and Orchestra
JP JOFRE: Como el Agua
JP JOFRE: Sweet Dreams
JP JOFRE/arr. Hazama: Tangodromo
JP JOFRE: Taranguino
Musica Solis MS202208
Release Date: August 26, 2022
Duration: 56:00
Giorgio Koukl | 20 JUL 2022
The ten tracks of this album depict all the facets of the two extremely talented musicians, Seunghee Lee and her spectacular clarinet and JP Jofre and his bandoneon, in a kaleidoscopic manner. It is a well-crafted presentation of their talents and pristine musicality.
Ms. Lee has a crystal-clear clarinet sound, which can reach the highest notes without any audible effort or pitch problems. In this sense, she is certainly a superior musician, with her sound perfectly adaptable to the musical material she is supposed to interpret. In this case, it is mostly Argentinian tango music, with some 21st-century diversions in the compositions of the bandoneonist, Mr. Jofre.
The disc, probably out of a need to have some appealing names on the cover, also features arrangements of Piazzolla and Villa-Lobos, a more than obvious choice. These arrangements, especially the Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5, tend to be a little too obvious and maybe musically not so interesting. Still, this album has enough good music to forget this minor glitch quickly.
Let’s start with the last piece, called Taranguino, with its more than seven minutes, the longest track: an absolute highlight. Here the two musicians are joined by the pianist Steven Beck. The structure of the composition is a peculiar one. With frequent mood changes and long interwoven silences between the single parts, the atmosphere can abruptly change from brilliant, nervous, and quasi-ironic to silent, meditative and languid. The mixture of piano, bandoneon, and clarinet seems theoretically impossible, but despite the composition books that would speak against such a combination, it works splendidly. The sound capture is also of great help, being well balanced and treating all three instruments like soloists.
The main work on this disc is the Double Concerto for Clarinet, Bandoneon and Orchestra with its three movements: “Vals Irreal,” “La Noche,” and “Aboriginal.”
Unfortunately, the London Symphony Orchestra and its conductor Enrico Fagone have only a secondary function of a musical carpet for the two soloists, which are, once again, brilliant, rhythmically near perfection, and musically complementary to each other. The work itself is less impressive, with many places where even the use of some exotic percussive sounds cannot conceal the partial lack of inspiration. This is surely also caused by the sound engineers’ strange choice to keep the orchestra very low and distant in the sonic panorama. But despite this, there are moments of fascinating interplay between clarinet and bandoneon, which are highly original and appealing.
There are other shorter pieces written by Mr. Jofre, like Como el Agua and Sweet Dreams, where the clarinet takes on the role of melancholic melodist, and the bandoneon is reduced to an accompanying function only. This music has a charm on its own, being suave with some bittersweet melancholy certainly worth noticing but also discovering the limits of such an aggregation of instruments, which certainly would not be enough for a whole CD. Thus, the need for some more tango-like music, which the composer Jofre writes with great ease, as in the opening track called Primavera.
Primavera is first-class music, witty and spectacular as far as the two soloists are involved. Strangely the orchestra intervening only in some small-scale moments is not very impressive, probably partly caused by the less than perfect sound recording.
The same impression remains in the other tracks with orchestra: Astor Piazzolla’s Tango Étude No. 3, which Mr. Jofre arranged for clarinet and orchestra, and Villa-Lobos’ Bachianas Brasileiras No. 5, Aria (Cantilena), arranged by Ms. Lee. Especially with the latter piece, there are far too known in many excellent arrangements to be acceptable in this version. Simply doubling the cello melody in octave with a clarinet is not a good idea. Still, it is technically well-played, and the lead cellist is excellent.
Ms. Lee owns the Musica Solis label, so it can experiment with risky forms of art that no big commercial label would accept. That surely can make the musical world panorama much richer and is per se a good thing and an achievement. The two featured soloists are certainly well worth hearing. ■
EXTERNAL LINKS:
- Seunghee Lee: seungheeclarinet.com
- Juan Pablo (JP) Jofre: jpjofre.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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