ABLAZE’s fourth volume of exciting and diverse new works for Pierrot Ensemble by composers from around the world.

The disc opens with Singaporean Jon Tho’s dreamlike portrait of Iceland in ICELANDIC SEA BREEZE II. The focus of this work is to evoke the beautiful imagery of Iceland through Tho’s compelling and inventive aural landscapes inspired by the stark beauty and timeless organicism of Iceland.

Multi-award winning composer Joungmin Lee’s work ABANDONED also draws on imagery as a catalyst for his sound world. Unlike Tho’s work preceding it, Lee’s vision is a darker one of an abandoned world of deserted industry and emptied buildings, displaced persons and homeless animals existing in a lonely and despairing landscape. Despite this evocation, Lee’s sonic world is brilliant, abstract and surprising without covering the main theme of his intriguing and world of textures, themes and ideas.

Kristin Kirk’s multi-movement work THE ENDING SUITE—LAST OF ITS KIND pays homage to the idea and reality of extinction as a theme with the central idea that no creature knows when it is the last representative of its species. This is overtly address in the first movement NO CREATURE EVER KNOWS IT’S THE LAST OF ITS KIND which explores a single idea rooting and re-rooting itself in different contexts. In IT JUST IS is a more lively movement as if to say the now is all that there is with its focus on jaunty rhythms and sparkling colors. The final movement AND THEN IT ISN’T recalls music from the first movement yet in a deeper context that unfolds, much like extinction itself, until a sudden stop.

Hugh Collins Rice (United Kingdom) draws on Medieval and Renaissance music and blends this with a modern lyricism that is striking in its individuality. It is unsurprising therefore that his COELI (Instrumental motet) transforms a traditionally vocal form into and instrumental one while modeling the whole work on the plainsong Easter hymn Regina Coeli Laetere (Rejoice, O Queen of Heaven).

Peruvian composer Claudia Alverez’s AVERNO CITADINO (CITY HELL) drives us into the frenetic world of the modern city, specifically that of Lima, Peru and even more specifically to one of that city’s business streets Javier Prado Avenue. Between the sheer volume of vehicles, the congestion, noise, tense jockeying for progress through the congestion and all accompanied by the noise and stress of brakes, car horns, police whistles, and engine noise, the work seeks to paint a picture of the ever pulsating ebb and flow of congested city life or, in this case, city hell!

South Korean composer Boram Kim’s THE DARK CITY is based on William Carlos William’s poem The Great Figure:

Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.

In this work Kim has sought to track to Williams’ masterful evocation with a particular focus on its closing couplet in seeking recreate in sound the unstable atmosphere created and felt both in the poem and through the composer’s music.

American composer David Lipten’s DOUBLE DOWN is modeled on the idea derived from blackjack but appropriated today mostly by politicians—that os underscoring or doubling down on a weak bet or false claim in the hope that it will be perceived as true. In Lipten’s work there is an artful doubling of instruments and instrumental lines converging to create new sonorities as they fold into and out of each other creating their own type of sonic lie—being not one instrument nor the other but a type of new instrument conceived through doubling down on a line or musical idea such that we are made to aurally believe the falsehood of the combination as a singularity. Lipten deploys this technique with an immense and masterful naturalness and ease giving the work an organic inevitability that it simply could not be any other way or take any other form. The expressive world of the piece is also one of immediacy and brilliance, drama and color all wrapped up in a musical expression that is both serious yet immediately and always engaging.