Jennie Oh Brown: Giantess
Innova
Though she didn't compose them, the works Jennie Oh Brown selected for her second solo album resonate at a deeply powerful personal level for the flutist. Dedicated to her late grandmothers and inspired by their remarkable lives, Giantess honours Brown's forebears, who demonstrated remarkable fortitude during a time when Korea was wrestling with war, oppression, and poverty. Carter Pann's title work mirrors their lives in its expressions of strength and tenderness, and is suitably complemented by Brown's performances of material by Shulamit Ran, Valerie Coleman, Misook Kim, and Augusta Read Thomas.
While Giantess is a solo release, Brown's flute and alto flute aren't the only sounds heard on the sixty-four-minute recording. Pann not only composed three of the seven pieces, he's also the pianist on four, his three and the opening Birds of Paradise by Ran. Kim likewise plays piano on her Amazing Grace, while contributions by cellists Kurt Fowler and Paula Kosower, pianist Daniel Paul Horn, violinists Elizabeth Brause Brathwaite and Cristina Buciu, and violist Amanda Grimm appear elsewhere. Jennifer Parker Harley also adds memorably to Coleman's Wish Sonatine when she introduces it with a recitation of Fred D'Aguiar's poem Wish.
Envisioned by its composer as an imagined vision of a fantastical, multi-hued bird capable of soaring at different speeds, Birds of Paradise serves as an ideal vehicle for Brown's considerable gifts, especially when it begins with a vibrant opening part that fluctuates between high-energy flights and ponderous episodes. Performed without breaks and with Pann providing sterling accompaniment, the three-movement piece unfolds as a fast-slow-fast journey packed with many detours, contrast evident in its oscillation between effervescent and contemplative moments. Created as an homage to flutist Robert Vincent Jones (1920-2016), Pann's Melodies for Robert brings Fowler into the flute-and-piano fold for a spirited tribute, the first part “Sing” a stately, lyrical exercise sweetened by the cello's, yes, singing tone and elevated by touching interactions between it and the flute. “Listen” by comparison is as affecting but for presenting outpourings of yearning and rapture between the three instruments.
Setting the scene with recited text describing the passage through which Africans were sent by ship across the Atlantic to be sold into slavery, Coleman's Wish Sonatine evokes the struggles peoples endure as they try to overcome inhuman circumstances. For thirteen minutes, Brown and pianist Horn evoke the determination exemplified by the oppressed in a tone poem imbued with moments of triumph and turbulent others emblematic of anxiety and desperation. For Amazing Grace, Kim drew naturally upon the familiar hymn but also the Korean folksong Arirang, making for an unusual hybrid. Brown introduces the performance unaccompanied, her playing designed to capture the sound of the Daegeum, a large bamboo transverse flute used in traditional Korean music. Segueing from the wide vibrato and spit attack used in the opening, her playing turns lyrical as she's joined by Kim on piano, traces of the hymn subtly emerging in the material as the piece advances.
The combination of alto flute and string quartet distinguishes Thomas's Plea for Peace from the others. Composed to mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the world's first nuclear reactor, the work originally was written as a vocalise but was transcribed by the composer for alto flute for this presentation. A marvelous exercise in nuance and counterpoint, this heartfelt plea pairs to startling effect the elegant expressions of the flute soloist with the sustained, vibrato-rich harmonies of the string players. Giantess concludes with two contrasting works by Pann, the title setting an heroic rhapsody that makes great demands on both flutist and pianist as it wends its forceful way for ten minutes through declamatory and tender episodes, and the second, Double Espresso, an over-caffeinated (by design) encore that caps the album with a frenzied roller-coaster ride for flute and piano.
Much of the recording's appeal has to do with the variety of the set-list; each piece, it seems, has something about it that distinguishes it from the others, whether it be mood, style or arrangement. Yet while the album's boosted by the diversity of the works featured, it's the unerring playing of Brown, a faculty member at Wheaton and Elmhurst Colleges and a founding member of the Chicago-based chamber ensemble Picosa, that ultimately recommends Giantess most.March 2020