Montage: Great Film Composers and the Piano— Gloria Cheng, piano (Harm Mundi 907635)
Jim Svejda’s Fanfare review of this disc is found on the ArkivMusic website. Here are excerpts: “Gloria Cheng is one of the most adept and indefatigable champions of modern music for the piano and one of the few who can make the thorniest pages of Messiaen, Ligeti, Saariaho, Boulez, and Carter seem both completely comprehensible and startlingly attractive. Her latest album offers recent piano music by six distinguished film composers, almost all of it written specifically for her. The anthology opens very strongly…Bruce Broughton’s Five Pieces for Piano from 2010…[T]he suite is inventive, charming, powerful, and richly various, and is—as Cheng’s bravura performance makes unmistakably clear—an important addition to the repertoire. Michael Giacchino’s Composition 430 from 2013 is—in its composer’s words—“the reflection of a memory I have from a particular moment in time while growing up in New Jersey. I remember the freedom I had while riding my bike around the neighborhood and the sense of self that it brought me.” In a language not far removed from that of his Oscar-winning score for Up, the six-minute piece projects a similar wide-eyed wonder with a touch of nostalgic melancholy at its heart…Alexandre Desplat’s exquisite L’Étreinte (The Embrace) from the Trois Études premiered in 2012 by Lang Lang, unfolds with all the delicate perfection of its composer’s best film music, with subtle references to both Debussy and jazz. Randy Newman’s Family Album: Homage to Alfred, Emil and Lionel Newman is a touching, frequently amusing tribute to his musical uncles, all of whom spent their greatest days at 20th Century Fox. With its effortless fusion of tenderness and wit—the titles of the individual movements, from Carmen Miranda: “How Many Times Do I Have To Tell You I’m Not Mexican!" to Lionel Teaches Marilyn Monroe How To Sing, are nearly as good as the music itself— Family Album, of all the works in the collection, comes closest to the voice we hear in its composer’s films. For anyone with the slightest interest in new music for the piano or the work of some of the great film composers of our time, this is clearly one of the most surprising, revealing and entertaining albums of the year.”
Featured Mon 6/8, Wed 6/17, Fri 6/26