It is not clear what took Sony Classical five years to issue these performances, recorded by violinist Joshua Bell and the Singapore Chinese Orchestra in 2018. Having had it in the can, it would have made ideal pandemic-era listening. However, better is certainly late than never, and the recording is a real find. It made classical best-seller lists in the summer of 2023. Most musical fusions have one tradition or the other at the core, but in this one, the trips between Western and Chinese are so numerous that one loses track.
Teacher of Rachmaninov and Scriabin, Anton Arensky (1861-1906) divided his life between metropolitan St Petersburg and provincial Moscow – during the second half of the 19th century, as Stephen Coombs points out in his excellent notes, ‘a city of sharp contrasts, fiercely religious, noisy and mournful… [of] sober days… followed by riotous nights’. A contemporary recalled him as ‘mobile, nervous, with a wry smile on his clever, half-Tartar face, always joking or snarling. All feared his laughter and adored his talent.’ Rosina Lhevinne remembered him being ‘shy and rather weak’. Tchaikovsky, like Prokofiev and Stravinsky, had time for his art, but Rimsky (whose pupil he’d been) thought he would be ‘soon forgotten’. Maybe Arensky, drunkard and gambler, was no genius, and he was demonstrably lost among the elevated peaks of Brahmsian sonata tradition. But that he could turn a perfumed miniature more lyrically beautiful than most, more occasionally profound too, is repeatedly borne out in the 27 vignettes of this delicate anthology (Opp. 25, 41, 43 and 53 in full and excerpts from Opp. 36 and 52 ).
The subtitle of "A Bridge of Dreams," a 2011 album with Ars Nova Copenhagen and Paul Hillier, is "a cappella Music from the Pacific Rim," and it includes the works of composers from Australia, New Zealand, California, and China, all of which draws in part, if not entirely, on non-Western musical traditions. Lou Harrison left the accompaniment for his Mass for Saint Cecilia's Day open-ended and here Andrew Lawrence-King provides a discreet undergirding using medieval harp, psaltery, and hurdy-gurdy. It bears a strong resemblance to Medieval plainchant mass in its predominantly monophonic, melismatic writing, and its modal character. The modes, though, are Harrison's own, based on traditional Indonesian and Chinese scales. The mass is a beautifully expressive, immediately engaging piece that reveals a fresh facet of the composer's brilliantly expansive imagination.
This one is a bit special. Last we heard from Seigen, he was introducing us to his very jazz-influenced take on Japanese New Age music. On the follow up to that epic debut, The Green Chinese Table, we find Seigen dividing his time up between recording sessions in Tokyo and New York City. It’s impossible to stress how that meeting of western and eastern minds really seasons the conditions that make this record sound like it does.
In BIS' Chinoiserie, pianist Jenny Lin brings one of the most compelling and relevant themed recitals to be heard on disc in years, a collection of pieces by Western composers that attempts to explore the subject of China in some regard, not only musically but culturally.
The guitar music of eminent 20th-century British composer Benjamin Britten (1913–1976) comprises three works, all of them written with the great guitarist Julian Bream in mind. Two of these are sets of songs for high voice, for which Britten’s vocal model was of course the famous English tenor – and Britten’s long-time personal and professional partner – Peter Pears.