Nadia Shpachenko: Quotations & Homages
Reference Recordings

Most photos of pianist Nadia Shpachenko show her beaming with joy. And why shouldn't she be? Her previous Reference Recordings album, Woman at the New Piano, was nominated for three Grammy Awards, her creative life is flourishing, and she's nourished by the love and support of friends and family, including twin seven-year-old boys. Shpachenko has now harnessed that joyful spirit and distilled it into a fine sophomore effort, one that presents her performing recent works by Tom Flaherty, Missy Mazzoli, Vera Ivanova, James Matheson, Nick Norton, Adam Borecki, Daniel Felsenfeld, and Peter Yates.

In keeping with the album title, the composers drew for inspiration from a huge cast of characters, among them Beethoven, Brahms, Messiaen, Stravinsky, and even The Velvet Underground. The results are strikingly personal: not only do the works themselves, which range from solo and electronics-enhanced pieces to two written for six pianists (one involving two toy pianos), reveal the close connections the composers have for those who inspired their material, they're intimates and associates of Shpachenko herself. Adding to the recording's collegial spirit is the involvement of Ray-Kallay Duo (Vicki Ray and Aron Kallay), HOCKET (Sarah Gibson and Thomas Kotcheff), and Genevieve Feiwen Lee.

Rare, not to mention refreshing, is the classical recording that balances seriousness with humour. Certainly one composer who embodies the principle is Tom Flaherty, whose two pieces bookend the release. Their origins bespeak a scholarly mind at work, but as homages they're delightfully irreverent, flamboyant even, with the first, Rainbow Tangle, using the opening of the seventh movement from Messiaen's Quartet for the End of Time, “Fouillis d'arcs-en-ciel, pour l'Ange qui annonce la fin du Temps” (“Tangle or jumble of rainbows, for the Angel who announces the end of time”), as its springboard, and the second, Igor to Please, indebted, obviously, to Stravinsky. In Rainbow Tangle, Flaherty uses electronic treatments (delays, transpositions, reverberation) and borrows pitch-related procedures from Messiaen to replicate the oft-mystical character of the Quartet and amplify its dazzling quality.

For his second contribution, Flaherty again selected mystery-laden material as the basis, with in this case the seven-note “Augurs” chord from Le Sacre du Printemps as the prompt. Igor to Please is even more daring a construction than Rainbow Tangle, with its arrangement for two pianos, two toy pianos, and electronics ably performed by Shpachenko, Genevieve Feiwen Lee, Ray-Kallay Duo, and HOCKET. After chirping birds establish a spring-like ambiance, the keyboards emerge, their patterns intertwining rambunctiously and the toy pianos imbuing the material with a magical, bell-like quality that Flaherty astutely notes might remind listeners of Les Noces. A rather gamelan-like feel surfaces, due to the metronomic feel and chiming sounds, but Igor to Please is far too chameleonic to root itself stylistically in any one place. The composer's also correct in noting that the “Augurs” chord is only obliquely hinted at, but the piece in no way suffers as a result; if anything, it's all the better for wending so imaginatively far from its origins.

Reflecting his life-long affection for The Velvet Underground, Felsenfeld's Down to You is Up presents three ‘fantasias' (his term) that respectively reference “All Tomorrow's Parties,” “Pale Blue Eyes,” and “Beginning to See the Light,” the outcome being the composer's own “walk on the wild side.” Rock'n'roll's definitely part of “Good Times Just Seem to Pass Me By” (though those repetitive block chords suggest minimalism's in the mix also) and “So Cold / So Lonely” is appropriately brooding in its late-night NYC feel, but no familiarity with the originals is required for satisfaction to be derived from Felsenfeld's parts, which as stand-alones hold up perfectly well.

As irreverent as it might be to root a composition in material by The Velvet Underground, the album's most audacious pieces are Norton's fifteen-second Piano Piece for Mr. Carter's 100th Birthday (despite its brevity, a remarkably challenging miniature) and Borecki's mirthful Accidental Mozart, which generates an increasingly woozy series of variations from a well-known theme. It's first voiced in its familiar form, after which it's stretched into increasingly destabilized form, the idea being that each variation is paired with a different substance. To give an idea of the work's flavour, cheap wine induces a sentimental treatment, whereas German beer generates a robust response.

Of the eight composers, the one who draws from the greatest number of inspirations is Ivanova, whose 6 Fugitive Memories references through quotations and allusions Ustvolskaya, Prokofiev, Feldman, Gubaidulina, Kurtág, Debussy, and Satie, and as such is the most stylistically wide-ranging of the works included. The Feldman setting is austere and meditative, whereas the Kurtág piece, in keeping with the instrument referenced in the title “Cimbalom Játék,” is folk-inflected; “Debutie,” on the other hand, conflates the styles of its two figures deftly. Epitaphs and Youngsters, Yates's “mélodrame for solo pianist,” proves to be something of an outlier in featuring Shpachenko as both player and speaker; further to that, the inspirations here aren't only musical figures such as Ives, Bach, Gershwin, and Glenn Gould but Robert Louis Stevenson and W. C. Fields, too. Ruminations on life and death are spoken arrestingly by the pianist, though truth be told one part of me would have preferred the texts included in written form only so as not to distract attention away from the piano playing.

June 2018