Borderlands Ensemble: The Space in Which To See
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Genre:
Chamber
Label: New Focus
Magazine Review Date: AW21
Media Format: CD or Download
Media Runtime: 71
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: FCR299
Tracks:
Composition | Artist Credit |
---|---|
The Space in Which To See |
Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, Composer
Borderlands Ensemble |
Passing Ships |
Jay Vosk, Composer
Borderlands Ensemble |
Songs and Arias |
Viviane Fine, Composer
Borderlands Ensemble |
Dream Machine |
Charles N. Daniels, Composer
Borderlands Ensemble |
Ometéotl |
Alejandro Vera, Composer
Borderlands Ensemble |
La Llorona |
Traditional, Composer
Borderlands Ensemble |
Sin un amor |
Alfredo Gil, Composer
Borderlands Ensemble |
Sobre las Olas |
Juventino Rosas, Composer
Borderlands Ensemble |
Author: Laurence Vittes
This new album by the Tucson-based Borderlands Ensemble represents the efforts of horn player Johanna Lundy, five gifted string players, a guitarist and a historian to explore ‘the shared cultural identity of Arizona and Mexico through the lens of newly composed classical chamber music’ and a selection of older classics.
The sad, angular beauty of Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti’s title-track sets a powerful tone, exploring the composer’s indigenous identity with an unconventional sense of time (ending one movement with 20 seconds of silence), beautiful writing for the horn and a sequence in which Lanzilotti’s already spectral harmonies are themselves haunted by untuned ghost harmonies alongside.
Jay Vosk’s Passing Ships features extended horn solos, the last of which culminates in an extraordinary trill. Charles Daniels’s Dream Machine takes a while to get going but by the end suggests a mobile music unit à la Monty Python – for horn quintet. Alejandro Vera’s Ometéotl is a spectacularly angry tour de force based on Aztec and Mixtec mythologies about creation energy.
Vivian Fine’s Songs and Arias from 1990, commissioned by David Jolly for Portland’s Chamber Music Northwest, has a wonderful 20th century warmth and generosity about it, for the string players as well as for the horn. Her Rabelaisian ‘Rupert’s Aria’ from a non-existent opera is a show-stopper.
Borderlands offer three encores including Lundy, sultry in the Los Panchos bolero hit ‘Sin un amor’ from 1948 and reasonably graceful in Juventino Rosas’s circus tune ‘Sobre las olas’ from 1888. The CD cover is illustrated with intense, vivid paintings by Jessica Gonzales inspired by the four new works.
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