Diana Golden: Tanbou Kache
New Focus Recordings

In presenting a collection of classical works by twentieth and twenty-first century Haitian composers, cellist Diana Golden and pianist Shawn Chang provide a public service to both the artists involved and listeners who heretofore might have had little exposure to the composers in question. In being exposed to material representative of Haiti's art music traditions, said listener not only gains insight into the country's musical culture but also spends a thoroughly rewarding sixty-six minutes in the company of Golden and Chang. Of course they too benefit from the project in showing themselves to be interpreters of the first rank.

Golden is eminently qualified to take on the project. Though she's NYC-based, her doctoral research at Rutgers University focused on Haitian art music. In 2011, she began working at a Boston music centre with cello students who had left the country after the 2010 earthquake and a year later taught at the École de Musique Dessaix-Baptiste in Jacmel, Haiti. Through such endeavours she discovered that many Haitian composers' works have been neither performed nor recorded and so she and Chang decided to create the album to bring recognition to the artists and introduce the public to their compositions. Tanbou Kache (Hidden Drum) was chosen, by the way, as the title because it references the Vodou drum part that appears in traditional Haitian folk songs and that was transcribed by ethnographer Werner Jaegerhuber, whose efforts inspired generations of Haitian composers.

Space limitations allow for only a modest amount of detail to appear here about the recording; included with the release, however, are liner notes by Dr. Claude Dauphin, a Haitian music scholar, that provide extensive background. As mentioned, composers from both centuries are represented, with material by the influential early figure Justin Élie (1883-1931) followed by the next generation's Jaegerhuber (1900-1953), Frantz Casséus (1915-1993), and Carmen Brouard (1909-2005); completing the portrait are pieces by Julio Racine (b. 1945), Daniel Bernard Roumain (b. 1970), and Jean “Rudy” Perrault (b. 1961). A mix of standalone pieces and multi-movement works makes for a satisfying programme.

Originally composed for violin and piano and based on the folkloric children's song “Zonbi bann mannan,” Élie's five-minute appetizer Légende créole engages with affectingly melancholic melodies and a playful game of hide-and-seek between the instruments at its centre. Jaegerhuber's four-movement Petite Suite for solo cello follows, its baroque stylings strongly suggesting a J.S. Bach influence. As with other pieces on the recording, Petite Suite reminds us that Haitian composers don't create in a vacuum but are influenced by artists in the Western classical tradition too. After a scene-setting opening movement (not given a title but nonetheless acting as a prelude), the three others are concise contrapuntal meditations that capture Golden traversing the cello's upper and lower registers and ostensibly conducting an engrossing dialogue with herself.

Written in 1953 for solo guitar and performed here in an arrangement by Racine, Casséus's four-part Suite haïtienne comes next, with Golden giving expressive voice to a plethora of folkloric melodies and its energetic third part incorporating the cinquillo rhythm (five syncopated beats in a duple meter) associated with the Haitian méringue. Racine appears again, this time with his own Sonate à Cynthia (2014), a three-part work dedicated to his daughter and structured with two frenetic allegros framing a plaintive cantilena. Born in Port-au-Prince and a Montreal resident since 1977, Brouard is represented by Duo Sentimental, a tempestuous single-movement setting that sees twelve-tone rows and Haitian pentatonic scales reconciled, the gesture symbolic of the composer's own embrace of multiple stylistic traditions and cultural influences.

Rounding out the release are Femiel by Roumain and two by Perrault. The former, which derives from the eighty-minute multimedia work One Loss Plus, features Golden combining pizzicato and bowing in a five-minute piece whose sombre quality's intensified by sparse piano accompaniment and an insistent cello soliloquy. Perrault used the conceit of an imaginary talk between Martin Luther King and Malcolm X about Obama's ascendancy as a springboard for Brother Malcolm… How precisely the musical design corresponds to that idea might be open to interpretation, but there's no discounting the forcefulness of its expression. Against dreamy piano cascades, Golden unleashes an impassioned outpouring, the instruments' pairing perhaps suggesting the animated to-and-fro between the speakers as they discuss the ex-president's tenure.

October 2020