RAHA Duo (Amelia Hollander Ames, viola and Elaine Rombola Aveni, piano) release Swirl, a collection of new works for viola and piano by composers with strong links to Boston, where the duo is based. Featuring works by Curtis Hughes, Jonathan Bailey Holland, Emily Koh, Evan Ziporyn, Matthew Aucoin, and Marti Epstein, and joined by guests cellist Jing Li, hornist Hazel Dean Davis, and narrator Steve Davis, the duo has assembled an engaging and approachable snapshot of contemporary chamber music in one of the most active new music cities in the US.
| # | Audio | Title/Composer(s) | Performer(s) | Time |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Total Time | 47:25 | |||
Scenes from ShadowBangEvan Ziporyn |
||||
| RAHA Duo | ||||
| 01 | I. Dalem and Sangut | I. Dalem and Sangut | 4:24 | |
| 02 | II. Fragrant Forest | II. Fragrant Forest | 4:42 | |
| 03 | {plithe | {plithe | RAHA Duo | 6:36 |
| 04 | The Sleepers | The Sleepers | RAHA Duo | 3:56 |
| 05 | The Stone & the Milkweed | The Stone & the Milkweed | RAHA Duo, Hazel Dean Davis, horn, Steve Davis, narrator | 5:00 |
| 06 | Swirl | Swirl | RAHA Duo, Jing Li, cello | 13:33 |
| 07 | Dept. of Levitation Studies | Dept. of Levitation Studies | RAHA Duo | 9:14 |
RAHA Duo’s debut album features six premiere recordings of works for viola and piano, with guest musicians joining on two pieces. Theatrical music plays an important role in three of the six, with two works that are adapted from original theatre contexts (a puppet opera and a human opera) and one which sets a poem with narration. The three works of absolute music balance out the program with diverse approaches to the fruitful possibilities available in this instrumentation.
Evan Ziporyn’s puppet opera ShadowBang was composed in 2001 for amplified sextet and Balinese puppet master, in line with the traditional Indonesian genre of wayang kulit. Two of the lyrical movements are heard in transcription here. The first, “Dalem & Sangut”, depicts common figures in Balinese theatre who display both comic and wise characteristics; this dichotomy is reflected in the alternation between vigorous and reflective qualities in the music. “Fragrant Forest” opens with a jaunty, modal viola solo and settled into a lilting harmonized melody primarily in rhythmic unison between the two instruments. Throughout, Ziporyn’s music preserves an innocent storytelling character, conjuring the unfolding puppet drama.
Emily Koh’s {plithe for viola and toy piano opens on a stuttering, nearly imperceptible repeated viola pitch which gradually gains intensity. When the toy piano joins the viola, Koh continues to focus on the tactile mechanism of sound production on both instruments. Gestures that initially call the listener’s attention to the physicality of the instruments increase in density, punctuating arrivals that mark a shift to a new central pitch.
Like the Ziporyn, this excerpt from Matthew Aucoin’s The Sleepers is an arrangement of music from an opera. Delicate arpeggios in the piano establish the context for the rhapsodic material entering in the viola. As the short work intensifies, the keyboard part becomes equally impassioned, driving towards a climax before a reflective coda.
Jonathan Bailey Holland’s The Stone & the Milkweed for horn, viola, piano, and narrator sets a Richard Wilbur poem that describes a meadow from two perspectives, one of the stone and the other of the weed. Bailey Holland arranges the setting such that the narration usually is heard alone or with spare accompaniment, with the instrumental trio setting the scene and subsequently commenting on each new fragment of text. The music elegantly captures the living universe within the microcosm of the meadow, subtly painting text excerpts that suggest musical analogues, such as “the great wind”, “as casual as cow dung”, or “why should I move.”
Marti Epstein’s expansive, meditative music establishes fields of sonority, exploring the corners and intersections that open up within them. Swirl for viola, cello, and piano opens with a circular gesture that ascends into the highest register of each instrument. The piece subsequently zeroes in on fragmentary material and examines its properties from different angles. Repetition with subtle variation and expressive silence play an important role in Epstein’s music, with the forward direction of the work always balancing itself with sonic memories of material just heard. A striking tremolo section in all three instruments at the work’s midpoint shatters its iridescent surface.
In composing Dept. of Levitation Studies, Curtis Hughes took inspiration from works already in RAHA Duo’s repertoire. The piece opens with a vigorous solo viola passage featuring taut double stops and inquisitive single note bursts. Imported into the piano part, the bursts soften and become wave-like gestures, while the viola hovers above with airy harmonics. A driving rhythmic motif on cluster chords emerges near the work’s three minute mark, over which the viola plays a disjunct figure that culminates in a sustained tremolo. The instruments chase each, canon-like, around slinking passagework, eventually careening into a second viola solo, this time more spacious and embellished by trills, timbral contrasts, and poignant silences. The transition gives way to an inward closing to the work, as it finishes with an ephemeral ascending gesture in both instruments.
— Dan Lippel
Scenes from ShadowBang recorded June 11, 2022 at First Church Boston, Boston, MA
{plithe recorded November 7, 2022 at Calvary United Methodist Church, Arlington, MA
The Sleepers recorded June 22, 2022 at First Church Boston, Boston, MA
The Stone & the Milkweed recorded June 11, 2022 at First Church Boston, Boston, MA
Swirl recorded December 19, 2022 at Multicultural Arts Center, Cambridge, MA
Dept. of Levitation Studies recorded June 22, 2022 at First Church Boston, Boston, MA
Produced and engineered by Jeffrey Means
Cover painting by Janet Hollander
Design and layout by Frank Aveni
Praised by the Boston Musical Intelligence, for their "warm, luscious tone and exchanges of melody" in a performance that was "devastating in its power," RAHA Duo is Amelia Hollander Ames, viola and Elaine Rombola Aveni, piano.
The duo enjoy expanding the repertoire for their instrumentation, through discovering off-the-beaten-path pieces, working with living composers, and via arrangements they make themselves of works by Beethoven, Brahms, Ives, Satie, and others. The two friends have been engaged in joy-filled musical collaboration since they met more than 20 years ago as students at the New England Conservatory, and have performed around New England and at Con Vivo Music in Jersey City, NJ.
For all its illustrious admirers, including Mozart, Hindemith, and Britten, the viola isn’t an exciting instrument (traditionally, at least) and often a mournful-sounding one. But this imaginative release goes some distance toward upping the instrument’s profile. RAHA Duo (named after the initials of Amelia Hollander Ames, viola, and Elaine Rombola Aveni, piano) has assembled Swirl, a collection of new works for viola and piano by composers with strong links to Boston, one of the country’s most active New Music centers, as attested at the New Focus website. Boston is also RAHA Duo’s home base.
It will appeal to general listeners that the program is dominated by accessible musical idioms, including far more tonality than one usually associates with New Music. Three of the six works, all receiving premiere recordings, have a theater connection. Even Ziporyn’s ShadowBang is a puppet opera from 2001 written to accompany a traditional Balinese puppet master. We get two transcribed excerpts, “Dalem and Sangut,” which depicts two traditional shadow puppet characters, and the mood-setting “Fragrant Forest.” Vaguely Asian and modal gestures wrap around attractive melodies. The overall effect is innocently simple, as when viola and piano play in parallel in the second piece.
RAHA Duo commissioned The Sleepers, an arrangement of an aria taken from Matthew Aucoin’s (human) opera, Crossing from 2010. The libretto for the opera is also titled “The Sleepers,” a poem by Walt Whitman. The piano begins with extended arpeggios before the viola enters with a plaintive melody. There isn’t much time in the span of three minutes to develop the music, but this is an evocative, very listenable arrangement.
I’m not sure that The Stone & the Milkweed is theatrical, as New Fous says, but Jonathan Bailey Holland’s setting of a Richard Wilbur poem does have a narrator besides its instrumental scoring for viola, piano, and horn. The poem, titled “Two Voices in a Meadow,” personifies a stone and a milkweed plant giving their separate philosophical perspective about existence. The text is memorable, the narrator (who is also one of the commissioners) sincere but amateurish. Holland’s conservative mood music holds appeal for its pleasant themes and quietly evocative atmosphere.
The title track, Marti Epstein’s 13-minute Swirl, was composed in 1994 for the Fidelio Trio and calls upon a guest cellist, Jing Li. Without quite being spectral music, the piece is a fragile, airy meditation that reaches into the highest registers of the three instruments, before “dissipating,” as the composer puts it, into terse, tenuous gestures. I seem to be falling back on the same adjective, evocative, for several pieces on the program, including this one—it has a hypnotic evanescent effect that is very skillfully created.
Closer to the typical New Music template is Curtis Hughes’s amusingly named Dept. of Levitation Studies, which features scattered cluster chords and disjunctive dissonances. The theme behind the title is a series of attempts by the two instruments to achieve take off. From this seed Hughes says that he “began to imagine a diligent yet exhilarating sort of curriculum, consisting of running, leaping, and other strenuous actions, leading to the title Dept. of Levitation Studies. At nine minutes, the piece is long enough to change gears, tempos, and moods quite often. I’d say that it is really unified by its fanciful title.
I hope that composer Emily Koh is hinting at humor when she writes of her cryptically titled duo, “Existing in time and outside of time, {plithe nixes attainability, accomplishes no end and attempts at no meaning. It does nothing, yet fails.” Or this could be dead-serious New Musicspeak. One anticipates edgy sounds, extended performance techniques, and the impression of chaos, all of which are present. This is the only challenging work on the program, and as it ended its inexplicable way, I felt a kind of nostalgia for the earnestly presented sound worlds that are a mainstay of coterie New Music composers. Yet even here, RAHA Duo has chosen an example that is far from shocking or stridently abrasive.
As a whole, the effect of this release is appealing and comfortingly conservative, each work enticing the ear and tickling the listener’s imagination. Any deeper impression is open to question. The performances and recorded sound are exemplary.
Four stars: An attractive, accessible expansion of contemporary pieces for viola and piano
— Huntley Dent, 7.24.2024
New Focus Recordings is an artist led collective label featuring releases in contemporary creative music of many stripes, as well as new approaches to older repertoire. The label was founded by guitarist Dan Lippel, composer Peter Gilbert in 2004, and composer/engineer Ryan Streber in 2004, formed …Read More …
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