Carr-Petrova Duo: HERS
ECN Music

In purposefully alternating between pioneering and contemporary female composers, Carr-Petrova Duo's follow-up to 2019's Novel Voices both honours the past and celebrates the present and the promise it holds. The times they are a-changin' indeed, and with HERS violist Molly Carr and pianist Anna Petrova are doing their part to usher it along. Works by earlier figures such as Florence Price, Clara Schumann, Amy Beach, and Rebecca Clarke sit comfortably alongside compositions by Vivian Fung, Henrique Eisenmann, Andrea Casarrubios, and Michelle Barzel Ross, those by the latter two commissions by the recital duo. In being based on music by Hildegard Von Bingen, Fung's Prayer literally bridges the temporal divide.

As commendable as their current album effort is, the duo partners do considerably more than advocate for women composers past and present. The two, who began playing together during their time at Juilliard and the Manhattan School of Music, are both prize-winning soloists who've appeared on stages around the world. And not only at Carnegie Hall and Lincoln Center but also schools in Gaza and even in prisons. Further to that, Carr and Petrova are fervently involved in multiple social causes, from the 2018-initiated Novel Voices Refugee Aid Project, which they created to raise awareness and support for local and international refugee-aid organizations, and related non-profit Project: Music Heals Us (PMHU), for which the duo acts as an Ambassador Ensemble, to Novel Voices: Distance Learning program, whereby the duo virtually delivers lessons and workshops to refugee musicians and music organizations of limited means around the globe. Such admirable endeavours saw the two honoured at the United Nations in late 2018 and receive global news coverage for their efforts. As if that isn't enough, the two hold faculty positions at their alma maters as well as Bard College Conservatory of Music and the University of Louisville.

HERS opens on a joyful note with Price's Elfentanz, whose contrasting episodes the duo handles with characteristic affection and poise. The spirited opening and closing sections are delightful; beautiful too is the haunting and lyrical central part. Following it is Clarke's Morpheus, written in 1917 and titled after the Greek god associated with sleep and dreams. Carr's viola amplifies the sensuality and tenderness of the melodic line during the opening moments before some degree of turbulence suggests the onset of disturbance. The moment passes, however, and the combination of Petrova's keyboard-spanning runs and Carr's slow, low-register voicings again invite surrender. Perpetuating the dreamy tone, Schumann's Three Romances, written in 1853 and published two years later, opens with the thoroughly alluring “Andante molto,” the viola tremulous and piano enveloping. The alternately yearning and playful “Allegretto” is as seductive, the third romance even more so in its expressive viola melodies and rippling piano cascades. Beach's oft-played Romance (1893) beguiles in the duo's hands, with Carr singing its yearning phrases with passion and Petrova as fervent in her contribution.

The contemporary compositions make a powerful impact too. Its title taken from a line in Milan Kundera's The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Where Things Weigh Nothing at All was composed by Ross in 2020. A protégée of Itzhak Perlman, she's an an Iraqi (Mizrahi)-American violinist as well as composer and thus ideally suited for this album project. In some respects, Ross's piece, at nine minutes the set's longest, picks up where Clarke's Morpheus leaves off in also musically conjuring a dream state. Pitched at a hush and with the instruments engaged in dialogue throughout, the piece swells from its fragile beginning into a dramatically intense and harmonically bright statement, momentum passionately building to two peaks until the music falls back into a less frenzied state.

Written for orchestra in 2020, Fung's Prayer was transcribed by the composer to suit the duo's needs. Carr and Petrova nonetheless strive in their viola-and-piano rendering to evoke the sonorities and timbres of the orchestra as they make their way through their expansive, open-hearted treatment. Any listener bewitched by Beyoncé's “Halo" will be as captivated by Eisenmann's version, which isn't a straight transcription but instead a rhapsodic and infectiously swinging re-imagining. HERS culminates with Andrea Casarrubio's Magnitude, which is based on music by the Palestinian Women Ensemble “Daughters of Jerusalem.” In many ways, the mere existence of that all-female ensemble embodies many of the themes associated with the album, things such as empowerment, resilience, and tradition-breaking and the belief that change begins when one determined person steps up to make it happen. Consistent with that, the poetic meditation builds from an elegiac beginning to an emphatic, ever-ascending climax that plays like hard-won victory.

June 2024