Julia Den Boer: Kermès

In this new collection, French-American pianist Julia Den Boer brings an electrifying precision to works by four of the strongest female composers at work today. Each piece conveys a bracing tactility, reveling in the materiality of sound. The album opens with “Déserts” by the Italian composer Giulia Lorusso, which is inspired by five deserts in South America and Africa. The music is both introspective in its billowing melodic shapes, but intensely physical in its rhythmic thrust, and while each subsection reflects different qualities of the various locations, as a whole Den Boer balances the dreamy and the visceral.

Canadian composer Linda Catlin Smith’s “The Underfolding” recalls the slow creep of Morton Feldman, as muted overtones, pierced by dry, terse phrases, pile up in elegant, pensive constellations. “Reminiscence” by Iceland’s Anna Thorvaldsdottir packs seven vignettes inspired by her homeland’s gorgeously rugged landscape into nine minutes, painting sonic images that don’t fret over narrative. Instead they evoke spooky environments, evoking placidity, tension, and ominous portent without a wasted gesture. The album concludes with Rebecca Saunders’s “Crimson,” the most bruising and physical work present here, larded with shattered-glass clusters, turbulent harmonies, and a wide dynamic range and delivered with ineffable clarity.

— Peter Margasak, 11.03.2021

Kermès, the latest disc on New Focus Recordings from the French-American pianist Julia Den Boer, brings together pieces by Giulia Lorusso, Linda Catlin Smith, Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Rebecca Saunders.

It’s a cleverly contrasted collection of contemporary piano music, from the bravura flourishes of Lorusso’s Déserts and the gently rocking dissonances and ghostly fragments of Catlin Smith’s The Underfolding, to the strummings and creakings of Thorvaldsdottir’s Reminiscence and the abrupt contrasts and relentless clusters of Saunders’s Crimson.

— Andrew Clements, 11.04.2021

On Kermès, pianist Julia Den Boer explores the many different possible textures of her instrument. The album features four modern works for solo piano, by composers Giulia Lorusso, Linda Catlin Smith, Anna Thorvaldsdóttir, and Rebecca Saunders, each of which exemplifies a different aspect of the piano. Saunders’ “Crimson” showcases striking dissonance, letting prickly tones explode into each other; Smith’s “The Underfolding” ruminates in a series of inquisitive colors, moving in impressionistic swaths of reverberant sound. Each piece seeks to illuminate the different resonances of the piano, highlighting the many facets of an instrument whose sound is so ubiquitous.

— Vanessa Ague, 1.12.2022

Julia Den Boer’s latest release is an invitation and a gift. The listener is drawn into a series of towering resonances and rewarded with a listening experience that redefines our acquaintance with the piano. Each of the four works on the disc extends what is sonically capable for the instrument and Den Boer’s expressive interpretations are world-class in their execution. It is through such superb performances that we are able to fully grasp the deeper communicative qualities each piece is offering the listener.

First, Giulia Lorusso’s Déserts begins with hyper-colouristic and excited brush strokes that evolve into lonesome pinpricks of brilliant colour and imagination. Linda Catlin Smith’s The Underfolding is a harmonic wonderscape. Smith’s sound world reveals itself as one of the most compelling artistic voices one can encounter: wonderfully layered sonorities create a veil of undiscovered colours in an ideal trance haven. The distant hollowness of Anna Thorvaldsdóttir’s Reminiscence produces a cerebral experience that evokes forlorn beauty. Rebecca Saunders’ Crimson uses prickly clusters and obtrusive deep interruptions that create unsettling exchanges. Den Boer’s attention to detail and expressive capabilities makes Kermes a must-listen.

— Adam Scime, 12.06.2021

Kermès? The practice of grinding up the bodies of the female Dactylopius coccus insect to produce the red pigment cochineal became widespread from the 15th century, superceding a similar process involving the Kermes vermillio, a scaly parasite found on the Mediterranean Kermes Oak. A brilliant and durable crimson colour, kermes dye was used as a currency in the Middle Ages. I'm telling you this because pianist Julia Den Boer's solo album is "a quest for deeper, richer, subtler, stable sources of colour". Déserts, by Giulia Lorusso is a sequence of five miniatures, each one evoking a different desert landscape. The sections aren't individually banded, but you can sense the shift from a desolate Bolivian salt plain to Atacama, a desert between Peru and Chile which fills with flowers every five years. Linda Catlin Smith's The Underfolding exploit's the piano's ability to sustain notes, the overlapping compared to an artist superimposing different colours to create new ones. The longest work here, it's enthralling.

Anna Thorvaldsdottir's Reminiscence has Den Boer duetting with herself, intermittently plucking and scraping the piano's strings. Crimson, by Rebecca Saunders, is more strident and percussive, Den Boer required to repeatedly tap the instrument's body just before the nine-minute mark, a brilliantly theatrical effect. Offbeat repertoire, but Den Boer's performances are compelling, each work feeling as if it's been recorded in a single take.

— Graham Rickson, 3.05.2022

Last year, I praised Den Boer's solo piano debut, Lineage, for its "sparkling and contemplative" nature and for its smart curation of four Canadian composers. I also called it a "go-to "morning album" - and, what do you know, she's gone and done it again - with only one Canadian this time. Featuring works by Giulia Lorusso (Italy), Linda Catlin Smith (Toronto, via NY), Anna Thorvaldsdottir (Iceland), and Rebecca Saunders (London), she's gathered together pieces that work well together, with enough contrast to avoid monotony, but also enough shared resonance to make for a complete whole. She's also received the deluxe recording treatment from Oktaven Audio so you can hear her sublime control of dynamics with even more clarity than on Lineage. It was also a coup to feature the first studio recording of Thorvaldsdottir's Reminiscence, a 2017 piece premiered in 2020 by Justin Krawitz. It's an almost skeletal work, held together only by Den Boer's deft pedal work, and seems to explore a world of deep interiority and features some sonic touches that will expand your idea of what the piano can do. This wonderful collection continues the establishment of Den Boer as one of the finest pianists working in new music.

— Jeremy Shatan, 11.02.2021

The ever opening panorama of New Music shows no sign of fading away. And there are some strides being made out there for novel and encouraging works appearing before us in a pretty steady stream of new releases. One to take seriously and listen to with absorption is pianist Julia Den Boer's Kermes (New Focus Recordings FCR311). It introduces to us four women composers and four new works deserving our attention— Deserts by Giulia Lorusso, The Underfolding by Linda Catlin Smith, Reminiscence by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, and Crimson by Rebecca Saunders.

These are composers not yet household names. I've covered quite a few by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, and a piece here and there by Linda Catlin Smith and Rebecca Saunders (type their names in the search box above for reviews).

The music has an adventuresome streak, It avoids the atonal bleep-bloop pointillism of High Modernism, though its harmonic-melodic sense embraces everything from ritualistic radical tonality to an edgy expansionist ambiguity. In a way it is beyond Modernism per se but also does not fall directly into the post-Modern Minimalist possibility. It does not ignore all of that which went before but nonetheless carves out a series of personal niches that are eminently pianistic and nicely suited to Julia Den Boer's virtuosity in latent potency and her genuine dedication to the piano as a kind of art form necessary and sufficient unto itself.

The Underfolding has a hypnotic continually recurring chord cluster that plays off a Satian-Cagean-Feldmanesque melody line that evokes without imitating, that converges in its paradoxically moving stasis. It is a wonderfully suspended temporary anomaly so to speak Ms. Den Boer handles beautifully the dream-like suspension that underpins the stricture of the work. It is an enchanted world we find our way into and it ravishes.

Reminiscence has a matching cosmic outlook of suspensions and repetitions interspersed with unique note responses that vary and open up the aural field.

Crimson sets up a more jagged sounding of clusters that interrelate at the same time as they unfold in ways that surprise and stray far beyond simple repetition.

Last but not least there is the opening Guilia Lorusso Deserts which adopts the pointillistic High Modernist rangy leaps and silence, and then makes something more hypnotic out of it. From, there the work rolls into a continual two-handed rhythmic density that has just the continuity needed thanks to Julia Den Boer's acrobatic virtuosity. This is a work to savor!

But then it all has plenty of substance to sink oneself into. Julia Den Boer triumphs and each work stands out as a worthy new gesture in high art. Do not miss this! New piano music thrives here! Listen!

— Grego Applegate Edwards, 10.21.2021

The French-American pianist Julia Den Boer returns with a sophomore album, and it’s comprised of 4 absorbing pieces from experimental female composers that are executed with a sublime and technical ability.

Giulia Lorusso’s “Déserts” starts the listen with bare, precise keys that cultivate a very distinct mood as each of the 5 pieces identifies with a specific desert, i.e. the Wadi Rum in Jordan, carved out by the river; the Uyuni salt desert in Bolivia; the Atacama, a flowering desert located between Southern Peru and Northern Chile; the Murzuq in Libya, the sand sea; and the Hammada, the rocky desert, in the Western Sahara.

The middle track, Linda Catlin Smith’s “The Underfolding”, then manipulates pitch and rhythm with a very unique layering skill that emits much ambiguity, while “Reminiscence”, by Anna Thorvaldsdottir, blends 7 quick movements into a very intimate and focused display of stirring key work that puts emphasis on timbre.

Rebecca Saunders’ “Crimson” exits the listen, and is the most firm track present, where the frame of the instrument is even used to highlight the dramatic, animated environment.

A New York City resident who has made quite a global impression as both a soloist and chamber musician and who is always commissioning new works, Boer is constantly challenging the boundaries of her instrument, and here she’s redefining contemporary classical sounds with awe and wonder.

— Tom Haugen, 1.03.2022

First things first: Kermès derives its title from two Mediterranean kermes oaks-located insect species from which red pigment can be ground. The works on French-American pianist Julia Den Boer's second album aren't literally about red kermes dye, however; the idea of seeking out rich, deep, and diverse hues and the tints and shades thereof is something the pieces share. In their respectively idiosyncratic ways, Giulia Lorusso, Linda Catlin Smith, Anna Thorvaldsdottir, and Rebecca Saunders explore the piano's capacity for colour and texture in the material presented on the hour-long release, which Den Boer recorded at Oktaven Audio in Mt. Vernon, New York in October 2020.

The choice of material is in keeping with the NYC-based pianist's reputation as a contemporary music interpreter and advocate. While Kermès features her alone, Den Boer, a graduate of McGill University and SUNY Stony Brook University, also has established herself as a valued collaborator and chamber musician, as well as a member of Wavefield Ensemble. While only four works are performed, they encompass a substantial amount of stylistic territory and provide superb showcases for Den Boer's technical and interpretative command. Whereas Lorusso's Déserts (2018), for example, wends dynamically through its five parts, Smith's The Underfolding (2001) is an explorative travelogue of twenty-one-minute's duration and emblematic of the composer's distinctive style.

The five parts of Déserts, indexed as a single track and performed without interruption, were written with specific deserts in mind: the Wadi Rum in Jordan, carved out by the river;the salt desert Uyuni in Bolivia; the Atacama, a flowering desert located betwixt Southern Peru and Northern Chile; the Libya-located sand sea desert Murzuq; and the Hammada, the rocky desert, found in the Western Sahara. The character of each desert differs, of course, which Lorusso exploits as a creative springboard for her poetic treatments. Beginning pensively, the piece progresses into rippling undulations that evoke the rolling plains of a desert landform until, again, notes grow few in number and the pauses between them become as central to the expression. There's a patience to the pianist's approach that shows a deference on her part to the material, a commitment, in other words, to allow their essences to declare themselves and operate in humble service to that.

In The Underfolding, Smith emphasizes a number of things simultaneously, firstly harmonic ambiguity created by using, in her words, “chords and clusters to shade pitch and rhythm,” and secondly the layering of sound through the use of sustain to approximate in sound the underpainting technique of the visual artist. In this way the piece teases at melody whilst also generating an almost tectonic quality in its accumulating layers. Such material demands a painterly sensitivity from the pianist when it's delivered at a slow, measured pace. A delicate handling of touch and sustain is needed to allow the shadings to crystallize into multiple hues as notes and chords combine. There's momentum here, but it's of the gentle, reflective, and contemplative kind.

Similar to Lorusso's piece, Anna Thorvaldsdottir's Reminiscence (2017) comprises seven short sections performed in a seamless flow. Her work often evokes the austere grandeur and mystery of her native Iceland, and certainly one can hear echoes of that in Den Boer's realization. In a piece that conveys the barrenness of an ice-covered landscape, minimal note voicings appear alongside groaning bass rumbles plus icy glissandi sourced from the instrument's inner strings.

Saunders returns us to the long-form spirit of The Underfolding with Crimson (2005), its title aligning with the blood-red colour of the magnified brushstroke on the album cover; reference is also made to Molly Bloom's closing monologue in Ulysses, in which appear the words, “and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and ... yes.” In contrast to the mounting ecstasy Molly experiences, Saunders's material develops more methodically across its eighteen minutes, moving as it does through sharp explosions of chordal splashes, sprinklings, and clusters. Witnessing her blend high-pitched note clusters with swipes of the instrument's insides and percussive tapping on the piano proves engrossing.

Den Boer possesses virtuosic command of her instrument, but virtuosity here is exemplified as much in the sensitivity she shows in her examination of these oft-introspective works as in bravura displays. Probing too is her exploration of not just the piano's keys but its entire physical being. The degree of concentration she applies to the renderings is intense, and when so much attention is directed to space, sustain, dynamics, touch, and tempo, the results have the potential to mesmerize, as they do here.

— Ron Schepper, 1.21.2022

Contemporary music around the theme of sources of colour are found here in brilliant performances by a pianist who is obviously at home with contemporary repertoire. The album takes its name from insects which are the source of the brilliant red pigment used to create vermillion. There are four pieces, each by a contemporary experimental female composer – Linda Catlin Smith’s The Underfolding, Crimson by Rebecca Saunders, Reminiscence by Anna Thorvaldsdottir and Giulia Lorusso’s Deserts. An enjoyable disc of new music for immersive listening.

— SR, 12.16.2021

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 links these works for Den Boer 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 different routes taken by the four composers involved 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. 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.

— James Manheim, 12.14.2021

A surprisingly fascinating introduction to this recording speaks of how the color red is obtained by grinding the dead bodies of the female scale insects Kermes ilicis and Kermes vermilia (parasites of the Mediterranean kermes oak). Before this, red could be produced via red ochre, a clay mixture of ferric oxide and sand, or cinnabar, a mineral mined in Almandén, Spain. The premise for the disc is that each of the four composers here seeks deeper shades of color.

The musical mining of the color red begins with Giulia Larussa’s 2018 piece Déserts, a collection of five pieces inspired by deserts. Each piece focuses on a specific desert: “Wadi rum,” the desert carved out of the river in Jordan; “Uyuni, the salt desert” (the largest expanse in the world, located in Bolivia); “Atacama, the flowering desert” (between Peru and Chile, one of the driest places on Earth that around every five years turns into a valley of flowers because of El Niño); “Murzuq, the sand sea” in Libya, characterized by the evenness of its dune landscape; and “Hammada, the rocky desert,” an ecosystem in the Western Sahara. Larussa’s music is compelling. Her music contains significant repetition, but not in a derivative post-Minimalist way. Julia Den Boer plays brilliantly, unafraid to let the music speak and resonate. We enter into the sonic equivalents of these vast physical spaces, the landscape sometimes colored by prepared elements of the piano.

Canadian composer Linda Catlin Smith (b. 1957) is based in Toronto. Her The Underfolding (2001) resulted from a desire to “thicken the texture” of her compositional world: to this end, she uses layering techniques to superimpose sound “colors.” Although I have yet to see a score, one can feel the many gradations and subtleties here, no doubt due in no small point to Den Boer’s sensitive pianism. It’s good to see this composer represented several times on the Fanfare Archive: Her music is elusively beautiful, a Debussy for today, perhaps. Her As You Pass a Reflective Surface sees to use similar ideas of overlapping lines. Peter Burwasser in Fanfare 24:3 stated that he found it reminiscent of late Feldman, and one could suggest something similar here, except Feldman would not have quite so much going on. Her piano piece The View from Here, described by the composer as “rearranging a few small objects in a limited space,” also is not so far off from this piece (Fanfare 22:2). Catlin Smith did study with Feldman, so that parallel is certainly valid; and her music does indeed invoke a similar sense of peace and of the eternal—whether that eternity is internal or external is fodder for a long discussion, perhaps. Her piece Zart (recorded by Louise Bessette and reviewed in Fanfare 18:1) is a direct homage to Feldman. Her music breathes beauty, and Den Boer finds just the right living pulse inside the music. It’s an amazing piece, stunningly delivered.

The music of Icelandic composer Anna Thorvaldsdóttir has been making many waves over the last few years. So, I was amazed to find no entries currently on the Fanfare Archive, and to find that New Focus omits an accent in her surname. Her orchestral writing, from what I have heard, is remarkable; now it appears her piano writing is no less exceptional. Clearly not given to many words, her booklet note for the 2017 piece Reminiscence simply reads “This work is written in seven short movements that are performed in a seamless flow.” Perhaps “flow” is the keyword; it is like entering into a continuum. The piece is absolutely in line with this album’s core concept of textural and timbral exploration. Like the Catlin Smith piece, there is no sense of rushing on whatsoever; the music seems to have all the time in the world. There are eerie sounds here, which seem to seek to undermine the regular droplets of notes that pepper the surface, before descending arpeggiations are set against chords and simple notes that are far from grounding. This music seeks to discombobulate, and succeeds; it is mesmeric.

The British composer Rebecca Saunders’s music is markedly uncompromising; small wonder her music is so successful in Berlin, her place of residence, but far less well known in the United Kingdom. Her piece Crimson explicitly links into the album’s core idea. Her piano pieces are a vital part of her output: Her 2020 piano concerto, … to an utterance, is a major addition to the repertoire, soon to be premiered in the UK. I was present at the Berlin premiere and can attest to the music’s raw power. While there are elements of the Romantic super-virtuoso in that piece (Nicholas Hodges, a frequent collaborator of Saunders’s, is the intrepid soloist), her crimson (2005) is gentler. As so often with her explanatory notes, Saunders quotes a definition of the word in the title; she juxtaposes that with a quote from her beloved Joyce (from Molly Bloom’s closing dialogue in Ulysses): “... an O that awful deepdown torrent O and the sea the sea crimson sometimes like fire and the glorious sunsets and … yes ….” Den Boer seeks to highlight the beauty here. Some chords seem close to Messiaen and share a similar radiance; the later rhythmic knockings against high-register repetitions are stunningly recorded and performed here. The booklet notes do not reproduce the rest of Saunders’s own notes, in which she states that this piece (the bringing together of two other pieces) was to signify the end of “a time of intense preoccupation with a specific timbral palette of sounds for the piano.” The piece is in three sections, each of which share a preoccupation that the composer states she can only define in relation to the color crimson, hence the title.

Nicolas Hodges has recorded crimson for Kairos (the disc also includes choler and miniata). Hodges is closer, perhaps, to the heart of Saunders, unsurprisingly so. One feels a definite sense of curiosity at the opening, as if the composer is examining a sonority; one hears the vibrancy of Saunders’s harmonic language more acutely in Hodges’s performance as well. It seems to have an inbuilt command. That does not by any means mean that it should be the only version, and Den Boer’s reading retains her qualities of high integrity, while acting as the perfect close for her collection of pieces.

The packaging is understandably crimson, with most type in white (therefore nicely readable) but the recording details are in black, on a red and black background. I found it difficult to read, anyway. That small design caveat aside, this is a terrific disc, full of vibrant sounds, profound explorations, and invitations to explore all four of these composers in more depth.

— Colin Clarke, 6.29.2022