Described as a concept album, Polyglot seeks to address questions of language and identity through pluralist programming that strives for – and often reaches – fascinating heights. Released Oct. 4 on Navona Records, the album sees clarinetist Eric Schultz, pianist Han Chen, and cellist Clare Monfredo tackling a wide variety of mostly contemporary repertoire with a splash of Brahms.
As the album title suggests, the compositions play through broad questions of language in various ways while also focusing on specific localities. Polyglot is most clearly occupied with the work of Puerto Rican composers; the island is a crossroads for many different (though related) cultural and political milieus: Hispanic and Latine, Caribbean and American, Spanish and English. With three of the five composers on the album being from Puerto Rico, this allows for a more intricate exploration of that richly varied context. Even Brahms, on this album, feels refreshed; his work is made distinct, rather than simply acting as a neat and boring fit on a tracklist already filled with Germanic Romantics, as often happens.
The album opens with Sonata Santera, the more significant of Iván Enrique Rodríguez’s two works, which seeks to bend the traditional three-movement solo sonata form to invoke and portray the rituals of Caribbean Santería. With this approach, Rodríguez creates a sort of historical negation: whereas Santería was created through the subjugation of the Yoruba religion by European colonizers and slave traders, this work sees the European sonata now conform to Santería.
Each movement is based around a specific rhythm, such as the Holandé featured in “Despojo – Cleanse,” which begins mysteriously before opening up into a more lively texture that is cast in an attractive chromatic tonal language. The second movement is more sentimental and sweet, with tender piano playing from Han Chen and a keen sense of lyricism in the clarinet part. The final movement, “Bembé – Summoning of the Orichas,” is immediately eager and bold before drifting into an introspective middle that leads to a virtuosic, dramatic closing.
At six and a half minutes, Johanny Navarro’s Danzón is relatively short but filled with engaging and memorable melodic writing. Navarro takes a nostalgic approach, with mid-century harmonic sensibilities underlying a clarinet part that is at first sensuous before becoming more curious and light. The music eventually takes a turn for the wild, providing forward momentum into a series of refrains performed with more and more gusto each time by Schultz. The piano and clarinet play off each other until we are led to an impressively delicate cadenza that returns to the inwardly-faced approach of the beginning.
Chia-Yu Hsu’s Summer Night in a Deep Valley is inspired by the landscape paintings of Guo Xi. Chia-Yu’s music is evocative, with a strong sense of image and imagination, and deft use of timbral variety that fully exploits the clarinet’s strengths and possibilities. The music is precisely paced with welcome moments of rest and pause, generating satisfying proportionality amid the continual weaving of lines and sounds.
Eric Schultz, Han Chen, and Clare Monfredo — Photo by Scott Dean
Gabriel Bouche Caro’s Escenas is, for me, the highlight of the album, and perhaps where the concept of the project comes most into focus as it seeks to express the question of identity at the core of “polyglotism.” The piece begins immediately frantic, chaotic, and agitated – though with a tinge of happiness and enthusiasm – before breaking into moments of contrasting stillness against screaming clarinet and vicious tremolo in the cello. These alterations eventually collapse under their own weight as a new texture, based on a slow descent, takes hold.
This quiet exploration of the sound of the clarinet and cello slowly pulses as they move through different harmonic areas, gradually building in strength before dissipating, like the gesture of a breath stretched further and further until it dissolves completely. Throughout, one can sense the inexpressibility of the piece’s ideas, feelings and perspectives, whether through words or any other musical means. This provides the most distilled lesson, and benefit, of “polyglotism” – that some things can only be expressed in certain languages.
The album closes with Brahms’ Clarinet Trio in A minor, which Schultz and his collaborators play with admirable warmth, but also an uncommon sensitivity and precision of expression. Their blend and balance is commendable throughout this bittersweet work, with the second movement being a special highlight and the ending quite convincing. The larger question, though, is of programming. The piece is an outlier on this album otherwise made up of contemporary works, but within this context, Brahms undergoes a sort of “re-ethnicization” – through it, we are invited to understand the trio as not simply being ‘music’ devoid of a marked category, as work by and for the dominant cultural group so often is.
Instead, we can start to see the work in its actual cultural context: as German music, as late-Romantic music, as an expression of friendship and a lifetime of Brahms’ experiences. It is precisely in this non-universality that the music holds the most power: when it doesn’t need to speak for everyone – as is often demanded of classical music – but instead, can just speak for the people making it.
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