The Midwest American Piano Project

Album review

"Midwest American Piano Project" might seem a title indicative of some attempt to define commonality among the contemporary composers featured on this disc, but it's hard to discern (and nor do the notes by University of Saskatchewan professor Gregory Marion suggest) specifically Midwestern traits in the music. The composers are all associated with Midwestern academic institutions, and two of them, David Karl Gompper and Luke Dahn, represent a generational chain descending from one of the region's best-known composers, William Albright of the University of Michigan, and reflect some of his atonal but lyrical and even jazz-inflected style. The title of Dahn's Downward Courses refers not to technical devices but to a poem by, of all people, neo-agrarian writer Wendell Berry. Marion's notes, however, are almost exclusively formal in content. The most "Midwestern" and perhaps the most enjoyable work of the group is the four-movement Lake Sonata of David Maki, another composer associated with the University of Michigan's program. The sonata's water imagery might be characterized as neo-impressionist, but the phases of the lake's existence are shown in fresh and unusual ways. Also engaging is pianist Stacey Barelos' rendition of her own Free and Unticketed, a sort of hitchhiking tour through a variety of contemporary piano styles, including the extended techniques of Henry Cowell. Barelos adjusts well among the stylistic variety on hand and gives each work a fair hearing, and the program as a whole may be of interest to audiences within the specific orbit the composers inhabit.

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