FANFARE MAGAZINE Issue 45:2 (Nov/Dec 2021)

IT TAKES ONE TO TANGO: Works of Contemporary and Recovered Voices Composers

Jeanne Golan (pn) • STEINWAY & SONS 30164 (70:43)

ORTIZ 3 Pieces. LANDOWSKA Rêverie d’automne. MOE Laminar Flow in Upsidedown Creek. GROSZ Tanzsuite II. BISCARDI Incitation to Desire. WIPRUD Pacita’s Lunch. SCHULHOFF Études de jazz. TWINING An American in Buenos Aires (arr. Golan)

If you’ve had your fill of tango-inspired discs, you might balk when you see the title of this one. In fact, though, this is not another Piazzolla-infused collection, like Gidon Kremer’s Tracing Astor. Rather, Jeanne Golan—aptly described by Robert Carl as “a formidable pianist … with a deep intellectual and aesthetic curiosity” (Fanfare 33:4)—has crafted an illuminating journey through works by eight composers, interleaving contemporary music with selections by “recovered voices” that the Third Reich attempted to silence.

All eight works have roots in popular music. But the range of sources is wide, including the blues, the shimmy, the Charleston, and the Boston as well as the tango—and the vestiges of those origins are sometimes fairly obscure. The range in idiom is wide, too, from the sweetly innocent harmonies of Wanda Landowska’s Rêverie (post-Fauré with a Spanish or Latin American twist) to the fractures of Schulhoff’s closing toccata (a hallucinatory send-up of Zez Confrey’s Kitten on the Keys), from the angularity of Pablo Ortiz’s “Piglia” (the pointillistic middle panel of his Three Pieces) to the dreamy nostalgia of Eric Moe’s tonally meandering Laminar Flow in Upsidedown Creek. To add to the sense of variety, more than half of the bands are advertised as first recordings—so there’s very little sense of familiar ground. It’s certainly the first time I’ve run into Landowska as a composer.

Yet for all the aesthetic sweep of the repertoire, there’s a consistent interpretive voice that keeps it from sounding simply random. Scott Noriega praised the “lovely sense of lyricism” in Golan’s Ullmann (36:3), and it’s her often-seductive grace that comes across most strongly in this new collection, a collection you’re more likely to remember for its poise (listen to her soufflé performance of the Tango from the Grosz Suite and her seductive reading of Chester Biscardi’s evocatively slow-burning Incitation to Desire) than for its power. Similarly, you’re more likely to remember it for its smile than for its slapstick. It’s not that, say, she ignores the irony of the Schulhoff—but she never batters us with it. And while she doesn’t flinch when she takes on Grosz’s wacky “Quasi Fivestep” (which, often calling for different meters in the right and left hands, would force any dancers to collide), she also doesn’t bang. It’s appropriate, then, that she closes with Toby Twining’s bluesy An American in Buenos Aires, a nostalgic work (with, perhaps, a few hints of Albéniz’s Tango) for piano and toy piano that serves as an amiable farewell.

Fine sound, illuminating notes. Strongly recommended. Peter J. Rabinowitz