Dan Flanagan: The Bow and the Brush
MSR Classics

Like many a musician, violinist Dan Flanagan found himself stuck inside during the pandemic shutdown, unable to perform face-to-face with colleagues or in public. What to do? Play alone at home, naturally, though in his case the ordeal was alleviated by the dozens of paintings on his walls before which he played. These images turned out to be more than an imagined audience; they inspired him compositionally too and prompted the writing of pieces in response to specific artworks. Doing so was inevitable when, for him, the “colours of paint relate to the colours of tone, and the texture of brush strokes relate to the articulation of bow strokes.” The obvious next step involved commissioning composers to write pieces for him in response to their own artwork selections (paintings, two pastel drawings, and a sculpture), which led, of course, to the recording of the works on The Bow and the Brush, including two by the violinist (the project actually comprises twenty-three pieces in full, of which sixteen were given their NYC premiere in October 2022). Recorded in the summer of 2022 at Hertz Hall in the University of California, Berkeley, all fourteen are world premiere recordings.

Flanagan, who plays a violin made in 1840 by Jean-Baptiste Vuillaume, brings impressive credentials to the project. Highly regarded as a soloist and orchestral musician, he's currently Concertmaster of the Sacramento Philharmonic and Opera, Concertmaster of West Edge Opera, and Instructor of Violin at the University of California, Berkeley. The list of ensembles and companies with which he's played includes the San Francisco Opera and Ballet, Oakland Symphony, the Farallon Quintet, the Eco Ensemble, and Trio Solano.

The album concept lends itself to an abundance of expressive possibilities for writing and performing. Even though each composition has been written in response to a particular image, there's no limit as to what a composer might create. Building on that, the pieces call upon Flanagan's technical command and allow for a broad number of effects and techniques. A few photos in the booklet show a couple of the artworks that inspired the pieces, but visual references for all fourteen aren't included; for that, a QR Code is included that links to the images (all are also displayed on a page at The Bow and the Brush site). The booklet does, however, include brief bios of the composers and artists plus illuminating details for each of the pieces.

Representative of the release is Nathaniel Stookey's opening Shadow Breaking, which, created in response to Rachel Dwan's same-titled grey-scale painting, was designed to invoke, in the composer's words, “the play of light in water” and speak to “the quiet, often solitary struggle to find light in periods of darkness.” Beginning solemnly with slow, double-stopped patterns, the material gradually grows impassioned but also playful with intense bowing accented by plucks. After escalating into a dizzying series of concentric swirls, the piece reaches a well-earned peaceful resolution. Animation also permeates Jose Gonzalez Granero's Cadenza II, appropriately so as, inspired by Robert Antoine Pinchon's Bruxelles, pluie sur la Grand-Place, the work is intended to suggest a gypsy violinist playing at the site.

Shinji Eshima went in a slightly different direction by basing his plaintive setting The Collection on a Paul Gibson painting that's, in fact, a portrait of the violinist titled Dan Flanagan #2. Resembling in moments a Bartók-Glass mashup, Flanagan's own Monterey Sentinels, inspired by a Joaquin Turner painting, is described by the violinist as beginning “with a wispy melody in the trees, slid[ing] down the trunks to roll around in the ocean, then climb[ing] back up to climax in the sky.” Slightly programmatic too is Trevor Weston's Notre Dame au milieu de l'eau et du ciel for the way the composer deliberately evokes the sky, Seine, and Cathedral using gestural effects, such as energized rhythms and flutterings to mirror the sky's brush strokes and water undulations, respectively.

The bow scrapes that burrow through Linda Marcel's Raven's Dance feel wholly complementary to the violent brush strokes in Nina Fabunmi's In the Shallows; the fragile hush of Cindy Cox's Into the Light likewise captures the calm of the landscape in Victoria Veedell's same-titled painting. Things take a markedly bluesy turn in Evan Price's Blue Swan, the artwork that inspired it, Sean O'donnell's Sculpture from a cello, looking like a lost Man Ray creation. Using Albert Malet's Path in winter, sunset as a springboard, Jessica Mays' And miles to go… (its title, of course, from Frost's “Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening”) conjures a number of different impressions in response to the snowy setting—desolation, mystery, and eerie stillness. Inspired by Jean-Baptiste Armand Guillaumin's pastel drawing Cour de Ferme, Breuillet, James Stephenson's Guillaumin adds lightness to the album with a series of dance jigs.

September 2023