REYNOLDS Violin Works (Gabriela Díaz)
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Genre:
Orchestral
Label: BMOP Sound
Magazine Review Date: 07/2022
Media Format: Super Audio CD
Media Runtime: 83
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: BMOP1086
Tracks:
Composition | Artist Credit |
---|---|
Aspiration |
Roger Reynolds, Composer
Boston Modern Orchestra Project Gabriela Díaz, Violin Gil Rose, Conductor |
Kokoro |
Roger Reynolds, Composer
Gabriela Díaz, Violin |
Personae |
Roger Reynolds, Composer
Boston Modern Orchestra Project Gabriela Díaz, Violin Gil Rose, Conductor |
Author: Jed Distler
For two minutes one hears an unaccompanied violin playing jagged short phrases, upwardly slithering long lines and discreetly deployed double-stops. Softly snarling brass chords follow, spiced with quick percussive strokes. The solo violin enters again, with similar yet more agile and playful material. The accompaniments remain somewhat fragmented, yet grow increasingly colourful, where staggered glissandos and wispy arpeggios evoke images of rain falling on glass or paint melting downwards on a canvas. You never know what solo instrument will sneak out from the opulent yet never cluttered textures: a piccolo shriek, an acerbic trombone slide or a strategically placed bass drum hit. At the same time, it’s hard to ascertain which of the four sections of Roger Reynold’s Personae for violin and orchestra you are experiencing in the moment without looking at your playback device, because the music plays continuously.
The 12 solo violin pieces encompassing Kokoro also proceed without interruption, despite the music’s stop-start nature. The composer subjects the violinist to all kinds of postmodernist gestures, from aggressive fast chords and quicksilver runs in harmonics to asymmetric phrases where widely leaping intervals must suavely connect.
While the six sections of Aspiration for violin and orchestra are cut from the same stylistic cloth as Personae, the scoring appears thicker and fuller, with more attention to bass lines. Reynolds’s music grips your attention moment to moment, yet somehow doesn’t lodge into your brain. One recalls myriad colours and textures but not rhythms, and forget about any tunes. What lingers forever in one’s memory, however, is the extraordinary virtuosity of violin soloist Gabriela Díaz, the customary point and precision that Gil Rose elicits from his Boston Modern Orchestra Project musicians and the scintillating sound world.
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