D’arcy Reynolds is
a California-based pianist and composer
who trained at Mills College and whose
composition teachers included Terry
Riley. Her style, though, seems to owe
little to her teacher and there is scarcely
a whiff of Californian minimalism in
the music recorded here. Reynolds writes
in a rather tough, chromatic style,
albeit with a strong touch of lyricism.
Her instrumental writing feels linear
and her music for string quartet displays
a good feel for the sense of four inter-twining
lines.
For me, the sound-world
that her music (particularly the instrumental
writing) evoked was British music in
the mid-20th century. That
sense of strength and melodic interest
combined, with a style which seems to
border on atonality but remains just
inside the world of chromatic tonality.
This CD brings together
a group of chamber works and song cycles
written between 1990 and 2000. The ‘Five
Preludes for Viola and Piano’ (1995)
are short evocative movements that use
the haunting sound of the viola to a
good extent. The composer herself accompanies
the fine violist Igor Veligan (born
in the Ukraine, he is now based in Sacramento).
‘Tweet Suite’ (1990)
is a song cycle for soprano and piano.
The work belies its rather comic title
as it is based on Pablo Neruda’s poems
from the ‘Art of Birds’, poems about
South American birds. Reynolds sets
them in translations by Jack Schmitt.
Reading through the printed texts I
found them highly evocative and appealing;
I could well understand why Reynolds
wanted to set them. Unfortunately I
find her setting rather puzzling and
a little unsatisfactory. There is something
rather unsatisfyingly wordy about Reynolds’
word setting. For me, her vocal line
never seems to match the feeling of
the words. And with its odd stresses
and stray, left-over syllables at the
ends of phrases, it felt as if the words
had been fitted to a pre-existing melody
line. The piano accompaniment is profoundly
satisfying, I wondered what the pieces
would sound like as vocalises. Others
will, inevitably disagree with my findings
and the pieces receive committed performances
from soprano Laura Decher and the composer.
But in the end, as a composer I found
Reynolds settings puzzling and as a
listener I found them unsatisfactory.
Her String Quartet
(1999) is altogether more satisfactory.
She seems to eschew classical forms
for more romantic structures; the first
movement consists of two contrasting
sections, the second is a waltz and
the final movement a tango, variations
on a theme by Ginastera. The Ariel String
Quartet give a strong performance, though
I did wonder if they were a little too
closely recorded.
The ‘Theme and Variations’
(1993) for clarinet and piano arose
out of improvisations between clarinettist
Peter Josheff and the composer. The
results are appealing and have a naturalness
that music based on improvisation can
have. It also has a welcome brevity
eschewing the wandering inconclusiveness
to which much improvisation is prone.
The final work on the
disc is ‘The Past Keeps Changing’ (2000)
a song cycle for soprano and string
trio based on poems by Chana Bloch –
poems which were originally published
in 1992. Again, these are evocative
poems, full of the poets concerns; but
I encountered the same problems as I
did in the earlier cycle. The first
poem, ‘Thirteen’, opens with the lines
‘Nobody knows how serious it is to have
such small breasts. No one knows what
you pray for’. The poet, I think, intends
a serious meditation on the concerns
of a thirteen-year-old. The composer,
in her notes, states that the song is
humorous. I’m afraid I did not find
it so, nor did it evoke for me the concerns
of a thirteen-year-old girl. Much of
the word setting in this cycle is conversational
and the lyric interest lies with the
string trio. This melodic interest is
considerable, but does not seem to carry
over into the vocal line. Laura Decher
does a sterling job on this cycle and
is well supported by the string trio.
I only wish that the music had appealed
to me more.
The pieces on this
disc are well recorded and receive strong
performances from all concerned. Anyone
who wants to explore the music scene
in Northern California should not hesitate
to buy the record.
Robert Hugill
Ariel String Quartet (William Barbini, Kineko
Okumura, Igor Veligan, Julie Hochman) 
