Nadia Shpachenko: The Poetry of Places
Reference Recordings

The Poetry of Places could easily pass for the final part of a trilogy, so complementary is it to Nadia Shpachenko's previous Reference Recordings releases, Woman at the New Piano (2014) and Quotations & Homages (2018). In all three cases, the intrepid pianist tackles challenging new works by a host of innovative composers, and while the concentration is on solo piano, pieces featuring two pianos, percussion, electronics, voice, and toy piano aren't uncommon. As she's done before, Shpachenko shows herself to be one of today's foremost promoters of contemporary music.

One thing does, however, set the latest release apart from the earlier ones: its architectural theme. Having developed an appreciation for the environmental spaces of performance venues, Shpachenko decided to assemble a collection that would center on architecture and, after approaching composers she admired with the idea, soon found herself inundated by pieces inspired by places as diverse as Frank Gehry's house in Santa Monica and Louis Kahn's National Assembly Building in Bangladesh. Of the eight compositions featured, six were written for the project by Amy Beth Kirsten, Hannah Lash, James Matheson, Harold Meltzer, Lewis Spratlan, and Jack Van Zandt, the others works by Andrew Norman and Nina C. Young. While solo piano dominates The Poetry of Places, the Norman and Young settings, Frank's House and Kolokol respectively, augment Shpachenko with pianist Joanne Pearce Martin and percussionists Nick Terry and Cory Hills.

The latter two weren't added to Frank's House for colour only as many of the materials Gehry used to build the structure, including plywood, corrugated metal, and chain link fence, also function as musical resources. Norman's creation is one of the album's more rambunctious settings, with the percussionists punctuating the pianists' runs with explosive flourishes, the material as a whole effectively accentuating both the asymmetricality of the building design and exuding in the stately waltz playing of the pianists a sense of nostalgic affection for an earlier time; just as Gehry added new layers to a Dutch Colonial bungalow in his architectural plan, Frank's House does much the same in the flow of its disruptive episodes. Inspired by a residence stay at Aaron Copland's house in upstate New York, Lash's Give Me Your Songs is suitably song-inflected (even, in its closing moments, hymn-like) yet also includes declamatory moments that could be interpreted as allusions to the rocky ground on which the home sits. Kirsten, on the other hand, drew for inspiration for h.o.p.e. from Baltimore's American Visionary Art Museum and specifically a recent exhibition called The Big Hope Show. In supplementing piano with toy piano and voice passages, the piece naturally individuates itself from the others and, in the chiming sonorities of the toy piano, brings a quasi-magical radiance to the recording.

Not surprisingly considering his stature, Gehry's represented twice on the release, the second time by In Full Sail. For this eight-minute piece, Meltzer references the architect's NYC-based IAC Building, located by the High Line and the Hudson River. Prompted by by a critic's likening of the building to “a tall ship in full sail,” the composer visualized the building launching into the open sea and thus wrote the material with motion in mind. Shpachenko's alternations between jaunty and ruminative passages might be seen as reflecting High Line walkers pausing to admire the building before speeding on to their workplace destinations. Wending its way without pause through five interlocking sections, Spratlan's fifteen-minute Bangladesh celebrates the power of Louis Kahn's National Assembly Building of Bangladesh in Dhaka, the awe-inspiring performance by the pianist as towering, encompassing, and majestic as the architectural structure itself.

Arranged for piano and fixed electronics, Van Zandt's Sí an Bhrú takes as its subject matter one of the oldest buildings in the world, Sí an Bhrú (known in English as Newgrange), built around 3200 BCE and situated along Ireland's Boyne Valley. Consisting of a large earthen mound encircled by a stone wall, the construction includes a slit above the entry through which the sun shines each year on the winter solstice and floods the interior with light for seventeen minutes. Electronics envelop the piano with mist during the opening part, after which aggressive gestures evoke the stonecutting involved in the building stage and jagged figures allude to the shapes decorating the stones. The piece advances without interruption through six parts during the twelve-minute presentation, each one signaled by a dramatic change in character and the range extending from a raucous dance segment to peaceful moments suggesting timeless wonder. Matheson's three-part Alone, in waters shimmering and dark doesn't pay homage to any grand architectural structure but instead a house sitting alone on an island in the middle of a lake in Pine Plains, NY. The loneliness that image conjures is belied by the rollicking, Gershwin-esque “Capillary Waves” movement though it certainly is intimated by the plaintive passages in “Island” and “To Sky.”

Arranged for two pianos and electronics, Young's four-movement Kolokol was inspired by a study of traditional Russian Orthodox Church bell-ringing practice, the composer in this case having developed a fascination with the seventeen Danilov Bells originally hung at a monastery in Moscow and that now hang in a replicated form in the bell tower at Harvard University's Lowell House (the original set was moved to the US in the 1930s but was returned to Moscow in 2008). Field recordings of the bells appear within Kolokol both directly and indirectly, with their seventeen distinct harmonies translating into both piano writing and electronic material. For each movement, Young used a specific ringing style as a starting point for further compositional development, the result a piece that evokes the reverberant shimmer and chime of bell-ringing even when the sounds aren't overtly present.

April 2019