Navona Surveys Chamber Music of Alberga

courtesy of Naxos of America

This coming Friday Navona Records will release a new album surveying chamber music by Eleanor Alberga. Two of the pieces are quintets, adding an instrument to a string quartet. On the album that quartet is the Ensemble Arcadiana, consisting of violinists Thomas Bowes and Oscar Perks, violist Andres Kaljuste, and cellist Hanna Sloane. The remaining two selections are duos in which Bowes is joined by Alberga at the piano. As is usually the case, Amazon.com is currently processing pre-orders for the release.

The entire album is framed by these two duos, beginning with “No-man’s-land Lullaby,” composed in 1997, and concluding with “The Wild Blue Yonder,” composed in 1995 and the source for the title of the entire album. The first of the two quintets brings hornist Richard Watkins together with Ensemble Arcadiana. The title of the piece is “Shining Gate of Morpheus;” and it is the most recent work on the album, having been composed in 2012. It is followed with the quintet “Succubus Moon,” composed in 2007 and featuring oboist Nicholas Daniel.

“No-man’s-land Lullaby” may be familiar to those readers that streamed this past November’s performance by the Left Coast Chamber Ensemble (LCCE). This was performed by violinist Phyllis Kamrin and pianist Eric Zivian. What may well be the most popular lullaby tune, the fourth song in Johannes Brahms’ Opus 49 collection, entitled simply “Wiegenlied” (lullaby), serves as the spinal cord of Alberga’s composition. However, the first part of the title is an evocation of the carnage of World War I, suggesting that, for so many of the soldiers fighting on both sides, sleep had been murdered (as William Shakespeare would have put it) by the war.

While I am not yet sure I have connected the two quintets with their evocative titles, there is no questioning the other-worldly sonorities that Alberga has evoked for both horn and oboe. As already noted, they are the more recent offerings; and they seem to suggest that Alberga is exploring sonority itself as a primary medium of expression. However, this may also indicate a broader mission that might be called the exploration of “otherness.” Early signs of that exploration can be found in the two violin-piano duos, while the quintets pursue sonority as another device for pursuing that mission.

The advantage of having a recording is that one can listen to it many times, and these four Alberga compositions definitely deserve multiple listening experiences.