Alan Rinehart: Dreams Laid Down
Navona Records

Dreams Laid Down presents an appealingly intimate portrait of classical guitarist Alan Rinehart. Not only does the hour-long recording feature him playing alone, the material is marked in many cases by deeply personal touches: for the 2012 title work, composer Michael Karmon drew for inspiration from a book of poems by Rinehart's wife Janice Notland, and other pieces were written for and commissioned by the guitarist. As much as the release earns its recommendation for the strength of his performances, it resonates all the more memorably for exhibiting such personal dimensions.

A one-time faculty member of the music schools at the University of British Columbia and Vancouver Community College and co-founder of The Vancouver Guitar Quartet, the now Kelowna, British Columbia-based Rinehart brings to this latest recording forty-five-plus years of experience as a professional classical guitarist. A number of solo albums preceded Dreams Laid Down, one of them, Verdi's Guitar, selected by the US-based Classical Guitar magazine as one of the top recordings of the year.

“Swirl of Finches,” Dreams Laid Down's opening movement, immediately engages with its jubilant blend of folk and classical forms, whereas the second, “Change,” wonderfully captures the guitarist's sensitive rendering of gentler material. The material alternates between spirited (“Wind Musician”) and reflective (“Dreams Laid Down”) moments, and Rinehart's facility is, naturally, evident throughout the six-movement work, though always deployed in service to the material at hand.

Twenty-two tracks are presented on the release, many of them in the one- to two-minute range; only once does the material stretch out, specifically in the nine-minute opening part of Beginning of the Day, a 2017 work by Canadian composer William Beauvais. That movement parts company from much of the other tracks in exemplifying an open, improvisation-like feel, as well as an explorative quality that sees ostinatos and harmonics woven into its fabric; in like spirit, the work's second movement distances itself from the first in setting its three energized minutes in 7/16.

Like Beauvais's a Rinehart commission, the six-part Ancient Heroes Suite by John Oliver draws upon ancient music conventions, with four of the six pieces' titles directly referencing earlier composers such as Gaspar Sanz and François Couperin. Oliver's own characterization, that the music “echoes the past through a resonating chamber of the present,” proves apt as Rinehart charts a methodical path through refined, at times dance-inflected settings such as “Dowland's Spanish Galliard,” “Passacaille,” and “Canarios De Gaspar.” At album's end there's the 2003 work Soliloquies and Dreams by Vancouverite David Gordon Duke, seven succinct miniatures that while stark in design nevertheless convey clear contrasts in mood, be they lyrical or ponderous.

Finally, Variaciones Sobre un Tema de Juan Lennon, the 2013 setting New Brunswick composer Richard Gibson wrote as a wedding gift for his daughter Julia, draws upon the well-known ballad by John Lennon and re-imagines it with adjustments in key signatures, shifting from major to minor modes, and the use of harmonics. Anyone familiar with the original from 1968's White Album will, of course, recognize Gibson's version as a close cousin to Lennon's, however different the spin brought to it. Dreams Laid Down is very much Rinehart's project, but it's enhanced when personal resonances by others associated with it infuse the release, too.

October 2018