By Nick Ostrum
Quatuor Bozzini, a string quartet featuring Alissa Cheung, Clemens Merkel, and siblings Stéphane and Isabelle Bozzini, have been at the forefront of Canada’s new music scene for over two-and-a-half decades, now. Here, they are joined by the junctQin keyboard collective, a somewhat younger but well established and distinguished piano trio – that’s three pianos – consisting of Stephanie Chua, Joseph Ferretti, and Elaine Lau in a series of realizations of composer Rebecca Buton’s Faerie Ribbon and Jason Deoll’s to carry dust & breaks through the body. These and the album title, a root or mirror, blossom, madder, cracks; together, are evocative, but in their opacity and undefined suggestiveness. And maybe that is a fitting way to lead into the review proper. The music is suggestively enigmatic.
Rebecca Burton – 'The Fairie Ribbon' (Tracks 1-4)
Burton’s 'The Fairie Ribbon' consists of four parts of glittery, romantic music that borders on the hymnic. At the same time – and maybe linked to that religious idea of calm, sacred space – it evokes an uneven saunter through a forest pathway with strings enveloping birdsongs just well enough to add an impressionistic mystery. As with any proper forest tale, it plays with light and dark, sometimes seeming more foreboding than carefree. (Leo Orenstein comes to mind in this blend of elements.) Long pauses separate the sections within each part, of which there are four. These mark transitions and escalations, but also mimic the detours and distractions of a light hike, where one stops to view a vista here, or a strange, colorful bird in a tree there, or an odd outcropping one may or may not want to risk exploring. After a quick glance, one returns to their thoughts, meandering along with the hiker’s uncertain path. The listener’s mind and attention is set wandering in a similar fashion, until, in the final part, the piece climaxes in a majestic moment of clarity.
Jason Deoll – 'to carry dust & breaks through the body' (Track 5)
The second half, loosely speaking, of a root or mirror consists of a realization of a composition from Jason Doell. This one is somewhat darker than 'The Fairie Ribbon' and relies on long doubled tones and slow progressions to achieve a sort of grandiosity. Slow melodies waft around a couple central dramatic leitmotifs. The melodies, meticulously excavated from what could otherwise have been a morass of chords, are heavy and plodding, almost menacing in their unison. But the piece shows its real power in the persistence of the drones, the heavy key strikes, the constant loop back to the foundational melody, the anticipation those elements engender. 'To carry dust' is a strong piece, more linear than the itinerant 'Fairie Ribbon.'
In this release, we see two related but diverging faces of the many-sided dice of contemporary composition, inspired by various strands of the postwar new music, but avoiding the stark minimalist or cacophonist extremes. Composers Burton and Deoll are not alone in this pursuit, of course. However, they pursue it with a rare degree of skill and confidence. As do the Bozzini and junctiQin ensembles.
Available as on CD and vinyl and as a download from Bandcamp. The download includes four alternate versions of 'The Faerie Ribbon.'
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