Kinan Azmeh: Uneven Sky
DreyerGaido

A more satisfying account of Kinan Azmeh's artistry than Uneven Sky would be difficult to imagine. The double-CD release not only features breathtaking performances by the clarinetist, it also pairs one disc featuring three concertos written for him by Syrian composers Kareem Roustom (b. 1971), Zaid Jabri (b. 1975), and Dia Succari (1938-2010) with another presenting Azmeh's own pieces, one of them an arresting duo performed by him and cellist Yo-Yo Ma (the clarinetist's a member of Ma's Silk Road Ensemble). On this engrossing collection, Azmeh's accompanied by the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin under Manuel Nawri's direction.

A graduate of Damascus University's School of Electrical Engineering, the Damascus High Institute of Music, New York's Juilliard School, and the City University of New York (from which he received his doctorate in music in 2013), the internationally recognized Azmeh has toured the world as a soloist, composer, and improviser and in so doing has become an ambassador of sorts for his home country. He describes himself as a “Syrian-born, New York-based, genre-bending clarinetist and composer,” and though he calls America home, his thoughts are never far from Syria. As he says, it “is present in every detail of the music, and certainly in my heart.”

The Azmeh-composed disc opens the set, but we'll consider the second one's contents first. Its three works make a powerful impression, especially when two of them, Roustom's Clarinet Concerto: Adrift on the Wine-Dark Sea and Jabri's Concerto for Clarinet & Orchestra are single-movement pieces lasting thirty and twenty minutes, respectively. Roustom and Azmeh would appear to be kindred spirits of a kind, given that the former was born in Damascus but moved to the US at the age of thirteen where he was thereafter educated. Written in 2017, his concerto draws for inspiration from two works, Homer's Odyssey and Melissa Fleming's A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea, the latter an account of the true-life saga of a nineteen-year-old Syrian refugee who, armed with two infants, was set adrift after the refugees-carrying ship she was on was attacked. Roustom's characterization of the clarinet as the Odysseus/refugee figure and the orchestra as the sea whose obstacles must be overcome is reflected in a musical design that clearly conveys the idea of an epic voyage undertaken by a lone traveler. The emotional territory traversed extends from anguish, bewilderment, terror, and despair in its first half to the gradual calm that arrives with the work's peaceful resolution. It's not uncommon for turbulent episodes to alternate with unaccompanied clarinet cadenzas in Roustom's creation, the image evoked of a resolute individual determined to survive against incredible odds.

Like Roustom's, the 2004 concerto by Jabri, who left Syria to study at the Academy of Music in Krakow (under Penderecki, among others) before moving on to the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, fluctuates boldly between moods and includes a cadenza midway through. Eschewing a programmatic design, his Concerto for Clarinet & Orchestra proves to be perhaps even more agitated than Roustom's (even if it ends at the level of a whisper and in a state of near-stillness), with Azmeh's clarinet exhibiting poise amidst destabilizing backdrops of glissando strings and sequences of Shostakovich-like intensity.

The third work, Paroles: Suite for Clarinet & Orchestra (2005-06), is by Dia Succari, who, like his younger counterparts, left Syria to study elsewhere, in his case the Paris Conservatory. While his career remained largely based in France, he also devoted himself to the study of the maqam, the system of melodic modes at the root of traditional Arabic music. Arabic rhythms thread their way through the almost half-hour presentation, though echoes of Ravel and Debussy are also audible in the refined sonorities of the writing. The turmoil of the other Syrian composers' works seems far away indeed when the mysteries of “Parole des Abimes au Soleil” declare themselves, Azmeh sinuously gliding across a luscious ground of woodwind, string, and Bolero-like percussion details for eleven minutes. Uneven Sky is at its lyrical best during the elegant central movement “Parole de l'Arbre au Vent,” while the spirited dance figures of “Parole du Matin à la Rose” close the disc on a joyful high.

As strong as the performances of the three Syrian composers' works are, the first disc makes as great an impression, Azmeh showing himself to be not only a remarkable clarinetist but composer as well. To a degree greater than the classical norm, his three settings augment the through-composed character of the standard classical work with the kind of improvising one associates with jazz. Being his own compositions, the Azmeh-authored pieces are naturally intimate, and of course the piece featuring Ma is all the more special for his inclusion.

Azmeh's Suite for Improvisor and Orchestra (2008) begins with “Love on 139th street in D,” which apparently was written to capture some of the flavour of the Harlem neighbourhood in New York where he lived for several years. Yet while that might be the case, its coupling of solo clarinet with hand drum percussion (by Bodek Janke and Hogir Göregen) lends it a Middle Eastern quality, while its rhythmic drive evokes the fury of a whirling dervish. In contrast to the American focus of the first movement, the haunting meditation “November 22nd” communicates longing for the familiar sounds of his Syrian homeland, after which “Wedding,” the composer's thoughts still on Syria, distances itself from the central movement with an ecstatic, percussion-driven dance.

Inspired by the words of Arab mystic, philosopher, and poet Ibn al-‘Arabi, the three-part Ibn Arabi Suite is elevated by the addition of Syrian singer Dima Orsho. Similar to the composer's haunting clarinet turn in “November 22nd,” her sorrow-filled performance helps make “Recitation” stirring; the closing “Postlude,” on the other hand, is elevated by the cello solo David Adorjan adds to its insistent dance. The disc of Azmeh compositions concludes with The Fence, the Rooftop and the Distant Sea, a five-part collection of memory pieces written for him and Ma in 2016 (the title derives from the fact that a fence, rooftop, and sea faced the composer's desk when he finished the piece in Beirut). Whereas light-speed unison playing in “Ammonite” and “Dance” dazzles, “Prologue,” “Monologue,” and “Epilogue” offer moments of quiet and rest that aren't unwelcome.

May 2019