Susana Gómez Vázquez: Sisters of the Moon
Eudora

With Sisters of the Moon, Spanish pianist Susana Gómez Vázquez (b. 1995) has fashioned a bewitching collection featuring material by female composers such as Fanny Mendelssohn, Amy Beach, Nadia Boulanger, Florence Price, and even Vázquez herself. The inspiration for the solo piano recital primarily derives from the Pleiades (or Seven Sisters) that are metaphorically embodied by the composers on the album. Greek mythology has it that these nymphs, also known as the dancers, served the goddess Artemis but after being pursued by the hunter Orion were freed and transformed into doves and then a cluster of stars. Even in this abbreviated form, the story clarifies why most of the works on the album have links to night-time or relate to dancing. Enhancing the album content, the pieces are by composers from around the world, France, the United States, Spain, Argentina, and Germany.

While the Madrid-born Vázquez is young, she made her debut in 2006 at the National Auditorium of Music in Spain and subsequently studied at the Royal Academy of Music, the Conservatori Liceu, and the Hochschule für Musik. A multiple award-winner, she's performed throughout Europe and Latin America and as a soloist with numerous orchestras and chamber music ensembles. She's well-versed in the traditional repertoire but also a champion of contemporary composers. For her Eudora follow-up to 2021's Ad Illam, Vázquez has not only crafted an imaginative and original set-list, she's sequenced the works thoughtfully too. About halfway through, the focus shifts to pieces with ties to dancing, festivities, and joy before Price's Fantasie Nègre concludes the set by redirecting attention away from the sky to the harvest season, a move that in a single gesture accentuates the symbiotic connection between earth and sky.

Vázquez initiates the journey with two etudes from Hélène de Montgeroult's Cours complet pour l'enseignement du forte-piano. It might appear that in opening with material by Montgeroult (1764-1836), the pianist is hewing to a chronological order, but the album's sequencing is not so strict: while it does generally advance from earlier pieces to contemporary ones, works by Iluminada Pérez (b.1972) and Vázquez are followed by ones from Claudia Montero (1962-2021) and Price (1887-1953). Montgeroult's sparkling “Piano Étude No. 37” is fleeting yet strongly revealing of Vázquez's pianistic prowess, something her effervescent rendering of the “Piano Étude No. 111” shows all the more powerfully.

Those scene-setters lead into two excerpts from Mendelssohn's 1841 cycle Das Jahr: 12 Characterstücke. Derived from a work Fanny regarded as something of a second diary, “June” and “September” convey dignified tenderness in the former and autumnal melancholy in the latter. Composed during a stay at an artists' colony, Beach's poetry-inspired “A Hermit Thrush at Eve” and “A Hermit Thrush at Morn” likewise explore contrasts, with the reverie-inducing first echoing the bird's plaintive song with bright trills and the hushed second cloaking those same vocalizations in sadness. Nadia Boulanger, whose music Vázquez also included on Ad Illam (alongside pieces by Nadia's sister Lil, Chopin, Ginastera, Ravel, Piazolla, and others), is represented by Petites pieces por piano, three pretty miniatures that remind us of Nadia's credentials as an accomplished composer as well as revered teacher.

It's with Alicia de Larrocha's Festívola that Sisters of the Moon enters its second phase. Taken from a collection the Spanish composer dubbed “Pecados de Juventud” (“Sins of Youth”), Festívola, one of four premiere recordings on the release, immediately flips the album script by animating its folk melodies with rousing rhythms and a general feeling of uplift. Festívola serves as something of a prelude to Pérez's Le Sette Sorelle dal Cielo (The seven sisters from the sky), a work written for Tenerife planetarium and the only album piece to augment piano with electronics. Entering in a sweeping whoosh, the nine-minute setting instantly distances itself from the others and expands on it with twinkling, New Age-styled atmospheric textures and explorative piano ruminations.

Opening with an inner-piano flourish and sprinkled with upper-register figures, Vázquez's Interlude (Oda a Kassia) forms a seamless bridge between Festívola and Montero's Rondo but also impresses as an engrossing standalone of dramatic scope. The album's dance dimension comes pronouncedly to the fore in the polyrhythmic thrust of Rondo, but it also evokes the composer's native Argentina in its nostalgic passages. Vázquez ends Sisters of the Moon memorably with Price's blues-drenched lament Fantasie Nègre, which, written in 1929, drew for inspiration from the Negro spiritual “Sinner, please, don't let this harvest pass.”

January 2025