Rachel Lee Priday: Fluid Dynamics
Orchid Classics

Inspiration can strike in the most unexpected ways, a prime illustration Rachel Lee Priday's Fluid Dynamics, which augments scintillating solo performances by the violinist with a duet featuring esteemed pianist David Kaplan. Serendipity struck when she attended an orientation day for new faculty after joining the University of Washington's School of Music in fall 2019 and met Georgy Manucharyan, a fellow new faculty hire from the School of Oceanography. As someone who researches ocean currents and their motion, his area of study couldn't be further removed from Priday's; even so, after the intrigued violinist learned he'd paired videos of his fluid dynamics experiments with classical music and after he asked her to suggest other pieces that might suit his film content, she moved from selecting pre-existing works to contacting composers about creating new pieces to complement his visuals.

To that end, she utilized works by Gabriella Smith, Paul Wiancko, Cristina Spinei, Timo Andres, Leilehua Lanzilotti, and Christopher Cerrone for the project, the result a fifty-minute collection of world premiere recordings. The composers, given complete latitude in how they chose to respond to the challenge, did so in different ways. Whereas Smith built performance flexibility into her score for Entangled on a Rotating Planet, Spinei synchronized her music for Convection Loops to the video “to the second,” in Priday's words. In two cases, writing of the musical material preceded its coupling with the visuals, namely Andres' Three Suns, commissioned by the violinist in 2018 and premiered during the pandemic, and Cerrone's Sonata for Violin and Piano, written for her in 2015. The material that Priday ultimately paired with Manucharyan's visuals is dramatically unlike the music he'd originally used and also makes great physical demands on the performer. The ferocious pitch of certain pieces is so incredible, one pictures her, post-performance, not just emotionally drained but physically spent. Her spectacular technique is called upon throughout the disc, the result mesmerizing renderings of the composers' works.

To simulate the interplay of wind and water at a surface level, Smith's Entangled on a Rotating Planet has the violinist bowing furiously and sliding woozily between pitches as the music aggressively contracts and expands. With nary a pause, Waterworks by Kronos Quartet cellist Wiancko perpetuates the ferocity of Smith's opener with an even more relentless attack. Composed as a standalone entity that the video was then cut to match, Waterworks is a whirling dervish of energy that loops and cycles obsessively, the violinist's double stops burning hot. Delivered at a slower pace and exuding the solemnity of a lament, Spinei's rhapsodic Convection Loops finds Priday building layers of solo violin into a hypnotic swirl.

In contrast to the compact five-minute durations of many settings, Andres' Three Suns luxuriates in its eight-and-a-half-minute running time. The cyclical rhythms generated by high-velocity patterns call the early days of Glass-styled minimalism to mind as the violinist rides the repeating waves of the music. A violinist as well as composer, Lanzilotti is represented by two pieces, ko'u inoa, which translates to ‘my name is' and which she wrote to feel connected to her home country of Hawaii while in Germany, and the second, to speak in a forgotten language, a short three-part work lasting five minutes. In the first piece, Priday creates shape-shifting timbres and textures by moving the violin's bow from its regular position up to the fingerboard and down to the bridge. The result is free-flowing material that feels airy and ethereal, such qualities strengthened when the performer is directed to augment the violin with breathy vocal hums in the closing section. As it progresses through its three mini-movements, to speak in a forgotten language inhabits an even more ethereal space in its deployment of white noise, overtones, and over-pressured bowing.

Kaplan joins Priday for the disc's closing piece, Cerrone's Sonata for Violin and Piano, but is present for about two-and-a-half of its three movements. That's because he enters halfway through the opening part, marked “Fast and focused, with gradually increasing intensity,” before remaining in place as her partner for the “Still and spacious, but always moving forward” and “Dramatic, violent, rhythmic, very precise” sections. In having Priday perform alone before being joined by Kaplan, the opening movement swells incrementally in volume and intensity until its intense throb blossoms into a radiant, majestic chorale. The pianist immediately initiates the second movement, with the violinist building on his notes with sweeping, high-pitched bow strokes. Slowly falling out of sync before snapping back into position, the instruments' movements mirror those in the video to which they were conjoined that shows light illuminating turbulent movements on the surface of a soap bubble. The final movement reinstates the character of the opening, this time with stabbing chords and lightspeed bowing part of the design, until the action subsides and the resonant chorale harmonies of the first re-appear.

A rich audio-visual presentation such as Priday's sets a very high bar for other performers to match, especially when the visuals on the release package show the brilliantly coloured imagery that forms the backdrop to the performer in the live setting. In its completed form, Manucharyan deemed the project "an exceptionally fulfilling experience,” and one expects anyone would reach the same conclusion after being exposed to this totally gripping recording. On both conceptual and performance grounds, Fluid Dynamics qualifies as a triumph.

September 2024