Reviews

“A Great Friend and Champion of New Music”

“As was the case with Nadia Shpachenko’s previous Reference Recordings project, Quotations and Homages, this release features a broad range of contemporary voices, with a scintillating mix of daring sound, genuine beauty, and a commodity too often missing from the new music world: humor. … The CD concludes, appropriately, with a chorus of Russian Orthodox bells… It sounds like a celebration, as does the cumulative effect of this remarkably diverse and thoroughly engaging collection. Nadia Shpachenko is a great friend and champion of new music.”

“The Poetry of Places… is a celebration of new music featuring a formidable pianist in the company of top practitioners in the field... Throughout The Poetry of Places, Nadia Shpachenko valiantly navigates the now tranquil, now tumultuous waters of eight new works, six of them commissioned by and dedicated to her.

Set aside for a moment the technique and musicianship it takes to learn and then master Harold Meltzer’s In Full Sail, an intriguing study in musical pointillism. Meltzer’s work tackles a pianistic description of Frank Gehry’s IAC building in New York’s Chelsea. Then simply focus on the poetic sensibility and musicality required to play Meltzer’s music, and you will begin to get an idea of the accomplishments of Nadia Shpachenko.

Jack Van Zandt’s intense depiction of the massive Neolithic monument Sí an Bhrú and Shpachenko’s now muscular now delicate response to each of its six sections is transfixing, with composer and interpreter joining forces with splendid results.

Hannah Lash wrote Give Me Your Songs inspired by a visit to Aaron Copland’s former home, now a National Historic Landmark and a creative center for American musicians in Cortland Manor, NY. Her composition is a loving tribute to the tranquil environment of Copland’s bucolic refuge, here given a lyrical performance by Shpachenko.

Amy Beth Kirsten composed h.o.p.e, inspired by the transformative power of the 2015 art exhibit The Big Hope Show in The American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore. Her work is childlike in its unpretentiousness, and both humorous and moving: a composition for toy piano and one female vocalist, which Shpachenko plays with the necessary light touch.

Alone, in waters shimmering and dark is composer James Matheson’s musical response to a sighting of a house on an island in the middle of a lake in Pine Plains, NY. Reminiscent in its first movement of Debussy’s La Cathédral engloutie with its massive cluster chords in the bass allowed by the pianist to linger on by the use of the sustaining pedal, the intriguing three-part tocattina moves on to a syncopated scherzo in Capillary Waves, and on to a brief final movement embodying the peace of static quietude."

"This is another in an ongoing series from various labels which are publishing a selection of repertoire chosen by artists who define themselves by their individual approaches to new and recent music.  Kathleen Supove, Sarah Cahill, R. Andrew Lee, Lisa Moore, Liza Stepanova, and Lara Downes come to mind as recent entries into this field.  In the past similar such focused collections has opened many listeners minds to hitherto unknown repertoire.  One would have to include names like Robert Helps, Natalie Hinderas, and Ursula Oppens, all of whom produced revelatory adventures into the world of new and recent piano music in historical landmark recordings...

On this Reference Recordings disc Nadia Shpachenko presents a series of works, many commissioned for her, of piano music whose focus is architecture, buildings, facades, etc...

Strictly speaking this is the third disc by Shpachenko featuring new music.  Last year’s Quotations and Homages and 2013’s Woman at the Piano are doubtlessly worthy precursors to the present disc.

These works are neither trite nor easy listening.  They are new works and one can get lost in their complexity worrying about the way in which architecture is incorporated.  Or one can listen simply to hear the gorgeous sounds... of the introductory interpretations by a master musician of works which may or may not become repertory staples but whose substance deserves more than a passing listen...

Shpachenko is an important artist who, along many of the artists mentioned at the beginning of this review, is pointing the way to some of the best music currently being written."

"As shown by her own solo releases, Shpachenko's no stranger to electronics-enhanced piano compositions, and consequently she appears right at home in Future Feelings (which she commissioned and premiered). Enveloped by shimmering textures, her patterns elegantly flow, the cumulative effect of their dance-like movements lulling. The piece's Romantic character moves to the fore three minutes in, though their emotional impact's countered by the burble and hiss of electronics. A tension between old and new pervades the performance, the electronics attempting to wrestle the piano into the present and the acoustic instrument pushing back to reassert the Romanticism at the music's core. Tsai and Shpachenko are both remarkable players whose performances imbue Schankler's settings with humanity."

"On a different plane, at least on an immediate level, is Future Feelings for piano, played with real understanding by Nadia Shpachenko. The piece was written at the time of the birth of the composer’s first child, and Schankler wanted to create “a quiet, soothing version of noise music.” So the first part of the piece is actually built around a decidedly Romantic sound world, exuding a sense of nostalgia only underlined by the musical bedfellows on this disc. There is a sense at one point that any rose-tinted spectacles come off in an acknowledgement that a return to that past is impossible."

"There are moments in Future Feelings in which Schankler asks pianist Nadia Shpachenko to play material that is almost neo-Romantic. The composer comments that the work is “deliberately nostalgic, not just for Romantic era music but also for the time in my life when I was most engaged with that kind of music, i.e. an angsty teenager. At that time I wrote that piece my kid had just been born and it was really surreal to watch him react to music, to essentially discover music, and it brought up a lot of thoughts and feelings about the music that first really moved me. I was also thinking a lot about noise and the soothing effect noise has on babies, and I really wanted to make a quiet, soothing version of noise music.” Some readers might think the phrase “noise music” is an oxymoron, but Schankler’s works demonstrate that there is no fixed border between what is music and what is non-musical sound, and exploring that gray area can be fascinating. It can even be a beautiful place."

"As Schankler shares in an interview with liner-note author Meg Wilhoite, album closer, Future Feelings, reflects thoughts about nostalgia. Gestures from early twentieth-century piano music–some modern, and others joyfully and decadently Romantic–define the piece. Schankler takes up these musical languages with startling fluency, as does Shpachenko, whose versatility has become a defining virtue. Electronic sounds purr beneath and intrude upon the piano’s visions of a sparkling past. Initially a smear of static over Shpachenko’s ecstatic melodies, they morph into telegraph-like blips and, eventually, a menacing roar."

“The Poetry of Places is a truly fascinating collection of original music for piano that demonstrates a great variety of approaches. The thematic thread that runs through the album helps create a secondary connection to the music and invites the listener in on a journey through these different spaces. Shpachenko’s technical virtuosity is on display throughout here. She is very adept at making the requisite shifts in tone that this music demands with some rather beautiful lyrical playing that is equally gorgeous in the midst of some of the more visceral pieces. The Reference engineers have captured this in their typical stunning sound. The accompanying booklet is another great asset with pictures of each location and information about the conception of each work. Certainly this is an important album for any music lovers interested in modern piano literature.”

“Twentieth Century Brits at Boston Court Pasadena”

“We were privileged to hear [Frank Bridge’s] Quintet for Piano and Strings in D minor, Op. 49, in which the Villiers Quartet were joined by Nadia Shpachenko (waiting like Brünnhilde in the wings, fresh to meet the hero in Act Three of Siegfried!). Originally composed in 1904-05, but radically revised in 1912, the Piano Quintet’s first movement opens, after a few hushed preparatory measures from all five players, with an upward-striving and to my ears slightly sinister main theme, piano e dolce, on the viola, played with husky intensity by Ms. Flores, over deep rolling arpeggios on the piano.

Here, Bridge shows the love of viola sound that he shared with many of his British contemporaries, but soon the other strings join in developing the theme, first singly and then in varying combinations, before the piano alone introduces the memorably romantic second subject. Bridge in this movement basically follows a sonata design, but with great inventiveness and, in this performance, a teeming passion led by Ms. Shpachenko’s fresh and steel-bright fingers.

It would be particularly instructive to hear the first version of the Piano Quintet if it still exists, because in his revision from four movements to three Bridge, among other changes, combined the two original central movements into one by enclosing the scherzo within the slow movement. The entirely beguiling result means that the memorably heart-on-sleeve romanticism of the Adagio ma non troppo main theme, sung first by all four strings, has no time to outstay its welcome before the Allegro con brio scherzo section arrives, nudged in by the piano. After a powerfully athletic climax, that romantic Adagio theme returns, even more sensuously haunting, on the ‘cello alone before all the players join in a gorgeously eloquent leave-taking.

Finally, with brook-no-argument intensity, the Villiers Quartet and Ms. Shpachenko tore into Bridge’s boldly rhetorical and satisfyingly concise finale, to bring this memorable concert to a conclusion with a real sense of new battles waiting to be fought.”

“Those new forces are evident in each of these World Premiere works by eight composers, in this marvellous disc from pianist Nadia Shpachenko. Each of the works is about a special place, with music interacting with a wide range of human activities: fine and applied arts (architecture and design), the heritage arts and the natural world… Each of these works is memorable, and beautifully played by Shpachenko… This is a marvellous project, well worth exploring.”