Yvonne Lam: Watch Over Us
Blue Griffin Recording

On her debut solo album, violinist Yvonne Lam couples her live playing with fixed media accompaniment created by composers Anna Clyne, Eve Beglarian, Kate Moore, Katherine Balch, Missy Mazzoli, and Natalie Joachim. The former Eighth Blackbird member implicitly recognizes that such a scenario could generate a static result; in this case, however, she contends that the approach never lacked for the kind of spontaneity associated with live interactions with another performer. In her words, over time “performing with these tapes felt akin to playing with a longtime chamber music partner whose intentions you can divine with your gut and whose sounds combine with yours to become something larger than the sum of its parts.” That claim is supported by the performances when they bristle with energy and excitement and develop with the unpredictability of conventional live performance.

Each of the six pieces possesses a powerful personal resonance for Lam, none more so than the title work, written for the violinist by her Eighth Blackbird colleague Nathalie Joachim and here receiving its world premiere recording. When Lam performed the piece live for the first time in 2019, she coupled it with other works for solo violin and electronics by women composers, an experience that in turn evolved into the album proper. Further to that, Lam's treatment of Mazzoli's Tooth and Nail holds the distinction of being the first commercially recorded violin version of the work, which was originally commissioned by violist Nadia Sirota (and which explains why the electronic component is comprised of viola samples). Drawing for inspiration from traditional Uzbekistan music and its use of the jaw harp (aka Jew's harp), Mazzoli created her own version of the music based on her recollections of hearing Uzbek jaw harp players. Urgent, intense, and animated, the sinuous setting engages the listener for the full measure of its ten enthralling minutes, especially when Lam attacks the material with such gusto. The lively to-and-fro between her and the backing track also convincingly argues on behalf of her above-quoted contention.

A sonic exploration of water as an emotional healing agent and symbol of rebirth and life, Joachim's Watch Over Us was originally intended as a documentary score but the film, about an Islamic body washer, never materialized. An element from it does, however, make its way into the piece as a sample of an Islamic call to worship forms the basis for the electronic track, which also includes synthesizers and manipulated vocal articulations. Tension emerges between the fixed elements and the dynamic and at times rapturous violin part. Unlike the other pieces, Clyne's Rest These Hands eschews electronics for a purely acoustic presentation, though it does augment the lamenting solo violin with a poem written by Clyne's mother in the last year of her life and recited by Lam. Adding to the work's poignancy, Clyne composed the material on the anniversary of her mother's death. It's Lam's stunning violin cadenza that leaves the greatest mark, however.

The first piece Lam ever played with tape, Beglarian's Well-Spent was written in response to a line from Leonardo Da Vinci's notebook 1174 (in translation, “The water you touch in a river is the last that has passed and the first that is coming; so with the present moment. The well-spent life is long.”). Adding to the work's interest, Well-Spent works into its tape component Muddy Waters' 1942 song “You Got to Take Sick and Die Some of These Days.” At five minutes, the piece is short but mesmerizes nonetheless when Lam's bluesy lead's paired with rapid arpeggios by a stack of multi-layered violins. Balch's Apartment Sounds is one of two pieces the composer crafted as sonic portraits of her time during quarantine that incorporate everyday sounds from her NYC living space. A ticking clock, creaks, and a police siren are but a sampling of the details included, but it's the string plucks and bowed accents Lam drapes across them that lends the short setting its nostalgic bittersweetness. The album's longest piece, Moore's kaleidoscopic Synaesthesia Suite, comes last, a panoramic travelogue whose encompassing arc appealed to Lam instantly and made her eager to perform the piece. Driving incessantly forward and hypnotically ebbing and flowing, the music swells and spirals to oft-dizzying effect for eighteen minutes.

October 2023