The Azure Ensemble, led by flutist Susan Glaser and violist Karen Ritscher, is a chamber ensemble that has operated out of New York City since 1999 and its basic instrumentation consists of flute, viola, harp, piano, and cello. While it has a tiny repertoire of works drawn from established literature, the group exists primarily to perform new music, and the post-1990 repertoire it regularly plays dwarfs the older stuff at a ratio of about 3-to-1. On the New World disc Invisible Curve, the Azure Ensemble essays chamber music of two contemporary Asian women composers,
Chen Yi and
Karen Tanaka.
Chen will be a known quantity to many followers of twenty-first century music;
Tanaka's orchestral compositions have been performed by the
Brooklyn Philharmonic, the Los Angeles Philharmonic, and are played with some measure of frequency by the
NHK Symphony in her native Tokyo.
Chen's Wu Yu (2002) is a two-movement study in contrasts; the first movement is gentle, loose, and elegant, whereas the second is swift and rhythmic and transmits the giddy enthusiasm of the traditional Chinese rain dance that inspired it. Night Thoughts (2004) is a slightly menacing and low-key piece that, by comparison, is more personal and experiential; like
Elliott Carter's famous piano piece of that title, it represents the nocturnal ramblings in the mind before one passes into a state of sleep. Unlike the
Carter, its form is more intuitive, less rigidly defined in terms of its rhythmic construction, and the sleeper manages to cross the threshold into an Alpha state far earlier. Whereas
Chen's music is built out of sensory experience,
Tanaka's seems more concerned with landscape. Her Frozen Horizon (1998) is a luxurious, mysterious frozen wilderness, and Water and Stone (1999) combines the coolness and calm of sitting in the presence of a rock fountain; in Invisible Curve (1996-1999),
Tanaka works with indefinable, yet mutable forms in various places within the acoustic space.
Although they are quite different in mood and form, one is struck by how nicely these pieces blend into one another. The one case where this does not apply is the transition between the last two tracks, where one might consider taking a short break. The lively and discordant opening of
Chen's ...as like a raging fire... might well jolt the listener right out of his/her seat, given the somnolent dream world of the
Tanaka work that precedes it. On the other hand, perhaps such an interruption would be desirable; that is up to you. Although
Chen and
Tanaka are both Asian, these pieces are not distinguished by their "Asian-ness" so much as by the special properties of the chamber scoring and the level of attention paid to individual events and gestures within the music. For that, the Azure Ensemble is surely to be congratulated; all of the pieces are very clearly defined in terms of the performances, which are polished, disciplined, and thoughtful. Invisible Curve is a highly enjoyable, even transcendent, disc of contemporary music.