Vicky Chow & Jane Antonia Cornish: Sierra
Cantaloupe Music

With three separate solo albums scheduled for release, 2022 is shaping up to be an especially productive year for Brooklyn-based pianist Vicky Chow. A fine complement to the recordings featuring music by Philip Glass (Piano Etudes Book 1) and Michael Gordon (July) is Sierra, a forty-four-minute collection of material by BAFTA award-winning composer Jane Antonia Cornish. While it presents five distinct pieces, all are world premiere recordings that could be mistaken for parts of a single work. Bolstering that impression, four are presented in arrangements for four or six multi-layered pianos, all performed, of course, by the Bang on a Can All-Stars pianist.

As often happens, the origin for the album derived from another art form, in this case a painting by Noah Buchanan called Symphony. When he approached Cornish to compose a piece of music to “paint into the work,” she responded with material that would, she hoped, “not only sound beautiful but look beautiful in the painting as well.” As would be expected from an album featuring multi-layered piano parts, Cornish's beguiling music is densely textured and its effect often hypnotic. A peaceful, introspective tone pervades the material too, such aspects perhaps attributable to the fact that it was conceived and composed during the early days of the pandemic when the pace of life slowed and the world folded in on itself. Sierra isn't, by the way, the first time composer and performer have worked together, as Chow played on Cornish's album Into Silence in 2017 and have collaborated steadily ever since.

Consistent with the music's panoramic sweep are titles such as Sky and Ocean. A sense of wonder develops as the layers accumulate in Sky, some sparkling and others rippling. Glimmerings of melody are present, but Cornish's focus here is primarily on generating texture through the careful layering of tones and patterns. In fact, with so many appearing simultaneously, the music takes on a shimmering quality that could be mistaken for the application of electronic treatments but is more likely a simple consequence of piano layering. It would be misleading to describe Sky as ambient music, yet there is a sense in which it has the capacity to ease the listener into a state of restful calm. Also scored for six pianos, Ocean ebbs and flows like the movements of cresting waves. In contrast to Sky, the music in Ocean repeatedly swells from near-silence into billowing masses of sound. Connecting the two pieces, however, is a common textural character that makes the music feel epic—even though intimate moments emerge too.

August 2022