Slotchiver’s “Americana” Debut on Zoho

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording begin discussed

Earlier this month Zoho (last discussed this past May for its release of two albums of guitarist Sharon Isbin) released its first CD of solo piano music performed by Jeni Slotchiver. The title of the album is American Heritage, and it surveys 125 years of music by American composers. The “early bookend” for this recording is the nineteenth-century composer Louis Moreau Gottschalk, represented by one of his best-known works, “The Banjo” (Opus 15), as well as the thematically innovative “Paraphrase de Concert,” the Opus 48 “Union.” The other end of the survey is occupied by Frederic Rzewski with a recording of “Down by the Riverside” from his North American Ballads collection.

Just as important, if not more so, is the overall scope of the album. Two of the composers are women, both of African descent: Margaret Bonds and Florence Price. Four of the male composers are also of African descent: Samuel Coleridge-Taylor, Harry Burleigh, Robert Nathaniel Dett, and William Grant Still. Only the “bookend” composers fall into the “White American male” category.

As a result, the album, taken as a whole, makes for a stimulating journey of discovery; and that journey applies as much to my own listening experiences as to those of any readers! Most of those readers hopefully cultivated some awareness of Price as a result of learning about Rae Linda Brown’s biography of her, The Heart of a Woman. On Slotchiver’s album she is represented by the three-movement suite Dances in the Canebreaks, listed as composed in 1953, which was the last year of Price’s life. Actually, the suite was composed in 1933 and was not published until twenty years later. Brown also observes that the second of the three dances, “Tropical Noon,” may have originally been entitled “Little Cabin Lullaby.” Mind you, none of this factual background should interfere with the delightful rhetoric of all three of this suite’s movements.

Where technique is concerned, Slotchiver does a far-more-than-creditable job of managing the superposition of familiar tunes in Gottschalk’s “Union.” I just hope she had fun playing it, since it is difficult to listen to that piece without at least chortling. On the other hand I was a bit concerned that, by paying too much attention to technique, Slotchiver may have smoothed over some of the sharper edges of the Rzewski selection. This was unabashedly political music that deserved more than just a “faithful keyboard account.”

Taken as a whole, however, the album is a valuable reference resource; and, for the most part, it makes an excellent case for music that deserves more attention in the “standard repertoire” than has been accorded to date.