Review by Barry Kilpatrick
Jan-Feb 2024
American Record Guide (Vol. 87, Issue 1)
COHEN: Voyagers; Playing for Our Lives; Preludes & Debka Narek Arutyunian, cl; Colin Williams, trb; Cassatt Quartet. innova Recordings 090. 65 minutes
Here is the Cassatt Quartet in works by Gerald Cohen. Two are collaborations with soloists. The 4-movement, 29-minute Voyagers (2017) has clarinetist Narek Arutyunian playing soprano and bass in a work that pays tribute to the spacecraft that has gone through and beyond the solar system. NASA equipped it with a recording of all sorts of Earthly music and sounds, thinking, who knows? Maybe another civilization will find it, figure out what to do with it, and what it all means. Cohen incorporates some of that music into ‘Cavatina’ (with hints of Beethoven), ‘Bhairavi’ (Indian raga), and ‘Galliard’ (a Holborne dance). The final movement (‘Beyond the Heliosphere’) revisits all three elements. The work deftly accomplishes its goal of incorporating human-created music into something that sounds otherworldly.
The 13-minute Preludes & Debka (2001) is for the unusual combination of string quartet with trombone. Because New York Philharmonic trombonist Colin Williams has such power, and a tone so different from stringed instruments, it is apparent that he is holding back on the volume most of the time. The work, based on a Middle Eastern dance, is lively and colorful.
The Cassatts have the 3-movement, 22 minute Playing for our Lives (2012) to themselves. The wrenching work is about Jewish musicians who played and sang at Terezin, a concentration camp that was a holding pen for prisoners who would eventually be sent to die at Auschwitz. Cohen quotes Yiddish songs, a lullaby, and Verdi’s Requiem. The ending is ethereal.
Vivid, creative works in superb readings.