Celebrations of Self-Indulgence from Shpachenko

from the Amazon.com Web page of the recording being discussed

This past March Reference Recordings released its latest album consisting entirely of world premiere performances by pianist Nadia Shpachenko.The title of the album is The Poetry of Places; and it consists of eight compositions, all of which were inspired by either architecture or some geographical location. The contributing composers are, in order of appearance, Andrew Norman, Harold Meltzer, Jack Van Zandt, Hannah Lash, Amy Beth Kirsten, James Matheson, Lewis Spratlan, and Nina C. Young. The accompany booklet provides a mini-essay by each composer identifying the place being depicted and his/her thoughts about that place.

When confronted with many negative impressions, I try to make it a point to begin by writing about something that appeals to me. Sadly, I find myself unable to do so with this album. There is a glib and self-indulgent superficiality in the ways in which the composers frame their texts, and that superficiality seems to translate directly into the music itself. To be fair, I was put off by the very first mini-essay in which Norman referred to a masterpiece of brevity by Johannes Brahms as “an old four-hands piano waltz.” I had hoped that, after his mash-up of that classic, there would be nowhere to go but up; but I was sadly mistaken.

I suspect the problem is that each of these composers locked into a surface feature or two, let “the spirit move” him/her to write something, and then turned that something over to Shpachenko. To be fair, she gives each of these pieces her best shot. However, by the end of the album, it is hard to resist the overall impression that “there is no ‘there’ there” (which happens to be a place-related text from Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography about her childhood home in California). Perhaps the most positive thing I can say is that Norman’s piece encouraged me to go back and listen to more Brahms.