Julia Glenn: Ink Traces
Navona Records

With Ink Traces, violinist Julia Glenn performs the music of Chinese composers, but she's no dilettante. This Boston native has immersed herself for fifteen years in the world of Chinese language, linguistics, and music and has not only visited the country many times but lived there for three years. Her affection and respect for its music comes through at every moment of this collection of solo violin performances and duets with pianist Konstantinos Valianatos. One of its pieces, Pan Kai's Ink Traces of Sigh, inspired the album title, and the cover image shows how intricately poetry, image, calligraphy, gesture, and by extension music are interwoven in Chinese culture. There are no erhus and pipas on the album, but the character of the music is genuinely Chinese.

Glenn's connection to the two countries is reflected in her professional activities. She recently became a faculty member at Brandeis University after a three-year teaching stint at the Tianjin Juilliard School, where she was also a member of the Tianjin Juilliard Ensemble. She's performed on many American stages but also at the Beijing Recital Hall and Shanghai Concert Hall. She's given talks and lecture-performances at Juilliard (where she received her D.M.A.in 2018) and Harvard (from which she graduated in 2012 with her bachelor's in linguistics) as well as Shanghai Conservatory and Beijing Central Conservatory. She's that rare artist, in other words, who's capable of comfortably straddling multiple cultural worlds. Glenn's award-wining partner on the release, Valianatos, has likewise appeared as a soloist and chamber musician on Western and Eastern stages, and the Athens, Greece native earned diplomas from schools in Greece and Paris and degrees from Juilliard.

Contemporary and twentieth-century works are featured, with the most “modern”-sounding one the set-ender, Chen Yihan's EHOHE, for its coupling of Glenn's baroque violin with electronics. While the piece originated out of the violinist's and composer's shared fascination with music and language, the work is an instrumental expression, even though it's based on material by the Tang Dynasty poet Li Bai and poetry recitation. With Glenn riding the locomotive thrust of its dynamic base, the piece jars for sounding totally unlike the pieces that precede it but taken on its own terms is a bold and engaging statement.

Chen Yi's represented by two pieces, Memory for solo violin and the two-part Romance and Dance that initiates the recording. Glenn evokes the stirring tone of traditional Chinese music in Yi's “Romance” when she delivers a series of heartfelt melodies and soaring figures alongside Valianatos's lightly dancing accompaniment. Speaking of which, Yi adapted “Dance” from a movement in her Fiddle Suite, with Glenn imitating the sound of the jinghu, a small Chinese Huqin fiddle often used to double a singer's voice in Beijing opera. As the violinist plays, it's easy to imagine the sound of the singer's voice as her acrobatic gestures appear. Yi composed Memory as an elegiac tribute to her late teacher, Professor Lin Yaoji, and the “painful cry” Glenn so convincingly articulates at the outset becomes a foundation that's built upon for the visceral outpourings that follow.

Two of the album's other solo violin settings, Yao Chen's Air and Kai's Ink Traces of Sigh, are long excursions, the former a showcase for Glenn in its broad exploration. Chen aptly describes the piece as “a poignant song longing for ethereal beauty and profoundness” that both soars skyward and roots itself in the earth; it's also interesting for the fact that the composer drew melodically from two Chinese folk songs and for inspiration from Bach and Eugène Ysaÿe. Throughout this chant-like incantation, Glenn's upper-register playing is a marvel to behold, as are other gestures such as glissandos and double-stops. By design Kai's poetic meditation Ink Traces of Sigh unfolds like the methodical etching of calligraphy strokes and lines, with Glenn's formidable technical and expressive command called upon for its absorbing realization.

A far different tonal world is delineated by Sang Tong's Night Scenery, one of the earliest attempts by a Chinese composer to incorporate atonal composition techniques (Tong apparently studied with Schoenberg and Berg students Wolfgang Fraenkel and Julius Schloss). So thoroughly does the writing exemplify the atonal style, the shadowy piece could pass for one by Berg himself. Consistent with its title, Gao Weijie's The Road wends adventurously for ten minutes, at one point sounding almost like Stravinsky but otherwise advancing through a series of wide-ranging episodes that partner violin and piano but also feature Glenn unaccompanied. From his Suiyuan Suite (Inner Mongolia Suite), Ma Sicong's “Nostalgia” also makes good on its title with the poignancy of its forlorn expression and folk-inflected charm. Known for the famous Butterfly Lovers concerto he wrote with He Zhan Hao, Chen Gang's represented by the infectiously melodic Drum and Song, the rousing “Drum” component appearing at the beginning and end and the beguiling “Song” in the middle.

December 2024