Orientale

Album review

Pianists Anthony Goldstone and Caroline Clemmow have turned eastward for inspiration for the disc entitled Orientale. It's a great exploration of music for two pianos or piano four-hands that incorporates the sounds of or evokes the atmosphere of Eastern musics and cultures. First is Adam Gorb's Yiddish Dances, five dances inspired by klezmer music. Put all together they have a structure similar to Liszt's Hungarian or Enescu's Rumanian Rhapsodies, and they also have a gypsy-ish tinge to them, a passion for expression through music. That same intensity of feeling is present in Joseph Achron's Hebrew Melody, which concludes the disc, although Achron's piece is deeply mournful. The best-known composers here are Saint-Saëns, Borodin, and Holst. Saint-Saëns uses rhythmic patterns from Arabian music, rather than scales and harmonies in his Chanson Arabe, so that the work is more about pianism than creating a musical picture of Arabia. Holst's suite, Beni Mora, on the other hand, is very Arabian sounding. It and Borodin's In the Steppes of Central Asia aren't quite as effectively colorful as the orchestral versions, but neither loses any of its flavor. The brief, melodic Orientale by Reinhold Glière is very similar in harmony and character to the Borodin. Both Colin McPhee's Balinese Ceremonial Music and John Mayer's Sangit Alamkara Suite successfully transcribe the sounds of Eastern instruments to the piano while using Eastern melodic and harmonic ideas almost exclusively. McPhee imitates the gamelan and Mayer the sitar and tambura. McPhee relies on the resonance of the pianos to replicate the ringing sonorities of the gamelan. The sound of this recording isn't quite deep enough to complete that bell-like sound. In the both works, Goldstone and Clemmow are just as compelling even though the music seems more static and transparent, or less emotionally charged, than even the other works here, at least in the way Western music conventionally expresses emotions. Mayer in particular still is able to generate a variety of moods. The opening movement, where the piano strings are strummed and plucked to sound like the sitar and tambura, is very mysterious, while the second is elegantly majestic. The middle "Jawab-Sawal" is a dialogue between a steady voice with Bach-like purposefulness and a higher, lighter voice that flies off capriciously in response. The last two movements are based on raga treatments, the finale again imitating the sitar and tambura. Goldstone and Clemmow have found interesting works -- both new and old -- that unite the music of different cultures and present them to listeners with a high level of musicianship and artistry.
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