Kermès

Album review

As with her earlier album, Lineage (2020), pianist Julia Den Boer here offers four works, diverse in construction but linked by a single abstract quality; this time out, all the composers are female. The title Kermès requires some explanation in the booklet; kermès or kermes was (and is) an insect whose body, when dried and ground in large quantities, produced red dye; later it was replaced by the cochineal bug. The abstract quality that for Den Boer links these works is that they seem to "extract" deeper pianistic colors from basic materials stated at the outset of a work or of its individual movements. The interest lies in the differernt routes the four composers involved take toward this goal. Giulia Lorusso's Déserts has a program of its own; its five movements are inspired by five different deserts around the world, and it has a minimalist quality despite some virtuoso passages. Linda Catlin Smith's The Underfolding is a study in overlapping planes of pitch and rhythm. Anna Thorvaldsdottir's Reminiscence, in seven short linked movements, uses strumming and other extended techniques to create the ghostly quality suggested by the title. And Rebecca Saunders' Crimson is a work of rich contrasts exploring the etymological link between its title and that of the album, originating in the Arabic language. Den Boer has achieved a novel program here, and one can easily imagine her album being used in composition courses.
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