The brand new album by the Aizuri Quartet presents musical contemplations of earth and sky by 4 disparate composers.
Shervin Lainez/Courtesy of the artist
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Shervin Lainez/Courtesy of the artist
The brand new album by the Aizuri Quartet presents musical contemplations of earth and sky by 4 disparate composers.
Shervin Lainez/Courtesy of the artist
On its new album, Earthdrawn Skies, the Aizuri Quartet convincingly connects the dots in wildly various music stretching over eight centuries. There are moments of serene reverie, clamorous esprit and sober self-scrutiny, even a people dance or two — but all of it is smart on a recording that features as effectively on paper because it sounds in apply.
Within the liner notes, the band factors to an mental theme that threads the album’s disparate items collectively. Earthdrawn Skies, it writes, is a showcase of “deep connections between humankind and the pure world by way of the distinct lenses of 4 composers forging private relationships with the soil and the celebrities.” Whereas which may be true — and engaging in itself — you do not want that data to listen to how effectively the person works circulation naturally from one to the subsequent, like a superb mixtape.
The opening, chant-like music by Hildegard von Bingen, the twelfth century abbess, visionary and scientific writer, units the muse that can assist the album’s reflective temper. An association of her Columba aspexit presents a sedative drone, crystalline transparency and a beautiful meandering, lyrical line.
The ear-opening discovery on the album is unquestionably the String Quartet No. 1 by Eleanor Alberga, now in her early 70s and worthy as ever of a far better stage of visibility. The music was impressed by a physics lecture whereby Alberga was stunned to study that each one matter, together with ourselves, comes from star mud. On the coronary heart of the piece is a tremulous but meditative central part, which the composer describes as “stargazing from outer house.” Rhythmically spasmodic flanking actions come off as so many luminous cosmic particles colliding to kind melodic cells, solely to burst aside once more.
Planting the listener solidly again on earth are 5 quick preparations of Armenian people songs by the singer, instructor and ethnomusicologist Komitas Vardapet. They vary from bittersweet and lyrical ballades (“It is Cloudy”) to punchy hoedowns (“Dance from Echmiadzin”). You possibly can nearly odor the loamy soil in these pretty homespun items, composed within the early years of the twentieth century.
The ultimate work on Earthdrawn Skies brings us deep into the Nordic forest — and into the unsettled thoughts of the honored Finnish grasp Jean Sibelius, circa 1909. Determined to curb the composer’s heavy ingesting, Sibelius’ household devised one thing of an intervention: Transfer away from Helsinki, with its big-city temptations, and right into a newly constructed villa throughout the huge pine forests some 25 miles north. Right here is the place Sibelius wrote his solely mature string quartet, “Voces Intimae,” a subtitle that implies an intimate dialog, maybe with oneself.
Whereas the general impact of this 30-minute quartet is all shadowy self-reflection, there are temporary flashes of nervous optimism within the two scherzo-like actions, performed with additional zest by the Aizuris, and within the finale, which presents a whiff of people fiddling. Nonetheless, the darkish soul of the quartet smolders in a brooding adagio which, close to its finish, reveals a grim soliloquy for the cello — an outline, maybe, of a tormented man looking for course.
In a little bit over an hour, Earthdrawn Skies has completed its work effectively — arousing solemn contemplation, cosmic curiosity, folksy delight and introspective scrutiny.
