COMPOSERS: Bunch & Yedidia,Doors,Jarre,Nyman,Piazzolla
LABELS: EMI
ALBUM TITLE: Collection: Groovebox
WORKS: Works by The Doors, Nyman, Jarre, Piazzolla, Bunch & Yedidia
PERFORMER: Ahn Trio
CATALOGUE NO: 5 57357 2
This is a thoroughly traditional recital in the positive sense that it picks composers and arrangers who make their music sound well in the piano trio medium. Michael Nyman’s now bouncy, now calmly soaring revamp of material from Prospero’s Books makes one of his most poetic and touching statements. Other miniature successes include an arrangement of Piazzolla’s Milonga del ángel, a yearning tango dream with an angry heart. Ronn Yedidia aspires to solemnity and achieves a melancholy tune in Lullabye that would grace a Fifties ballad. The Doors’ Riders on the Storm is a sanitised blues, Kronos-style, effectively laid out and played with the energy and sensitivity that characterise all the performances.
Of the longer pieces, Maurice Jarre’s take on the four seasons format, The Engadiner Suite, uses friendly extended tonality and additive rhythms, rather unvaried at first, but loosening as the seasons roll on, the best of it in the evolving transitions between movements and in the slow ‘Winter’, whose melodic strengths will satisfy Jarre’s Dr Zhivago fan-base. Kenji Bunch’s Swing Shift, originally written for dance, is freshest in lyrical interludes. One thing it doesn’t do is swing, as it spins out its pulses and ostinati and makes hard work of its pseudo-house ‘Grooveboxes’ finale. Tradition extends to the ample acoustic, a room in Vienna. Robert Maycock