Composer Eric Chasalow releases ...arching, reaching, breathless featuring several pieces for strings in chamber and electroacoustic settings. Featuring performances by the Lydian String Quartet along with several leading freelancers, Chasalow's music is rich in timbral invention, cohesive structural organization, and programmatic inspiration drawn from literary sources, providing a compelling snapshot of one part of this veteran modernist's catalog.
This collection of Eric Chasalow’s music for strings balances his extensive work in electroacoustic contexts with his straight chamber music, touching on two core components of his output. The inclusion of two Wallace Stevens settings and a work inspired by Greek mythology points to another important strain in Chasalow’s work, the integration of literary sources. Chasalow’s music revels in character juxtaposition, expressive use of timbre whether acoustic or electronic, and a deft management of structure, all of which can be heard in various ways in these pieces.
The myth of Icarus and Daedalus is the inspiration for The Wings That Bear the Night Away for violin and fixed media, performed by Mari Kimura. The electronic part is fashioned from preexisting string quartet material that Chasalow subjected to granular synthesis. The result is a percolating, textural environment within which Kimura’s Icarus takes flight. Impetuous ascending scalar fragments and tremolo figures in the violin are juxtaposed against nervous figures in the electronics. As the flight becomes more challenging, Icarus’ electronic environment becomes more unpredictable, pivoting to glitchy timbres and interruptions. The contour of the violin lines turn towards descending passagework, implying Icarus’ fall, before an otherworldly, ethereal passage of microtonal sonorities sets up another reinvigorated, virtuosic ascent. The piece ends with a swirling texture, brilliant against the backdrop of a sonic blinding sun.
Read MoreThird Piano Trio: Rock Hill Variations, performed here by violinist Clara Lyon, pianist Steven Beck, and cellist Hannah Collins, is dedicated to Aaron Copland, and opens with a nod to the great American composer’s expansive musical vision, with sonorous sustained octaves in the piano that explore a broad register. The first ensemble section is pointillistic, with darting figures passing through the ensemble, nimble keyboard gestures, punctuated accented pizzicati, and stark high register violin sustains. A mournful line in the cello establishes a short, slow middle section featuring languid string lines, but is interrupted shortly by a furioso string of keyboard notes. An alternating figure passes from strings to piano, eventually leading into airy, weightless sonorities. The trio closes with a reprise of the energetic, darting material dancing between the three players, and finishes with a wry final staccato attack.
For his setting of two poems by Wallace Stevens, The Snow Man and Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock, Chasalow calls for a performing cellist to recite and sing the poem while playing, with live electronic accompaniment. There is a unique intimacy to the sound of a performing instrumentalist delivering text, and Chasalow builds in subtle shaping of the spoken text in addition to explicitly sung phrases. In The Snow Man, David Russell’s cello plays translucent harmonics and pointed pizzicati, supporting the poem with a halo of sustained sound and punctuated commentary. Throughout, the live electronics creating an enveloping embrace, a cloak for the icy timbres Chasalow has conjured. Russell’s voice is occasionally processed in Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock, creating shadows of delays and altering its timbre, enhancing Stevens’ haunting poem. Steady pizzicato lines pause between short phrases, an anxious over-the-shoulder glance in a spooky environment.
Chasalow’s Second String Quartet exists in different temporal extrapolations. One is an hour long and is designed to be performed by a spatialized ensemble in a gallery space. Loops are developed in the quartet while the audience circulates and then the players convene for a fifteen minute version that is collated from the material. The fifteen minute concert version is what we hear on this recording, played by the Lydian String Quartet. The work opens playfully, with a gentle passage of pizzicati supporting a poignant sustained line passed between instruments. Petulant outbursts begin to interrupt the revelry, growing in frequency and extending into full phrases, establishing a dichotomy between stable and unstable impulses. The piece develops with canonic dialogue, becoming frenetic and angular, before a forceful cadence indicates a structural arrival. Tentative material is exchanged between the members of the ensemble until it coalesces around a steady cantus firmus in the violin, dotted by gentle, tutti pizzicato chords. A vigorous, climactic section best characterizes what Chasalow calls metaclassicism, as memories and associations with the iconic string quartet repertoire are obliquely triggered and used as a jumping off point for further invention.
The three movement String Sextet engages in metaclassicism of its own, specifically in the opening movement’s reference to lines from the fourth movement of Brahms’ Op. 36 Sextet. Chasalow takes Brahms’ material and spins out vigorous contrapuntal interactions. The second movement, "Beautifully imperfect, as if droned on sympathetic strings,” is suspended and mysterious, as the viola plays improvisatory gestures over a bed of luminescent harmonies. Growing intensity leads to an accumulating dialogue with the other strings and the addition of percussive timbres, before the movement recedes back to the hollow fog from which it emerged. The final movement merges three contrasting energies, a rhythmic march, a dreamy interlude with poignant, closely spaced sustains, and an agitated scherzo.
Originally a flute and piano work, To the Edge and Back is heard here in a transcription for violin and piano by violinist Julia Glenn, heard here with pianist Steven Beck. The work features coquettish dialogue between the instruments that occasionally turns adversarial, as the two voices vie for prominence. Just as quickly the mercurial music becomes wistful and reflective, before shifting back to raw vigor or a coy wink. These impetuous expressive changes characterize the piece, which never settles in one mood for long, preferring to weave with glee, keeping the listener on their toes.
– Dan Lippel
Tracks 1, 3, 4, 8 recorded at Dimension Sound, Jamaica Plain, MA
Engineer: Dan Cardinal
Tracks 2, 5, 6, 7 recorded at Slosberg Music Center, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
Engineer: Antonio Oliart
Track 9 recorded at Slosberg Music Center, Brandeis University, Waltham, MA
Engineers: Eric Chasalow and Giuseppe Desiato
All tracks produced, edited and mixed by Eric Chasalow (except track 1 edited by Mari Kimura)
Mastering: Antonio Oliart
Design, layout & typography: Marc Wolf, marcjwolf.com
Cover image: Photo by Sathyaprabha Rakkimuthu (pexels.com)
Eric Chasalow photo: © Aleks Karjaka
Eric Chasalow is a composer, sound artist, multi-instrumentalist, record producer, teacher, and advisor to non-profits. He is well known for works that combine instruments with electronic sound but has collaborated on a wide range of projects with many artists including Tony Arnold, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Lucia Bova, Tim Brady, Collage New Music, Sharon Harms, Mari Kimura, Stephanie Lamprea, The Lydian String Quartet, Musicatreize, New York New Music Ensemble, Vicki Ray, Bruno Schneider, Talea Ensemble and many others.
Irving G. Fine Professor of Music at Brandeis University, and Director of BEAMS, the Brandeis Electro-Acoustic Music Studio, Eric Chasalow studied at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, and holds the D.M.A. from Columbia University, studying composition principally with Mario Davidovsky and flute with Harvey Sollberger. Among his honors are awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, Koussevitzky Music Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, Fromm Foundation at Harvard University, New York Foundation for the Arts, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His scores are published by Suspicious Motives Music, G. Schirmer, C.F. Peters, and Edition Bim (Switzerland) and recordings appear widely, including on New Focus Recordings, New World Records, Neuma Records, ICMC, SEAMUS, and Suspicious Motives Records. The Eric Chasalow collection in the Library of Congress was established in 2009.
https://www.ericchasalow.com/Violinist/Composer Mari Kimura, hailed by The New York Times as a “virtuoso playing at the edge,” captivates audiences with performances that seamlessly blend virtuosity and innovation. A master of subharmonics—a revolutionary technique producing pitches an octave below the violin’s lowest string—she expands the instrument’s sonic possibilities in breathtaking ways. Kimura has premiered major works by John Adams, Luciano Berio, Tania León, and Salvatore Sciarrino, performing with orchestras including the Hamburg Symphony and Tokyo Symphony. Her performances graced many prestigious festivals including Bartók Festival in Hungary, Chigiana Festival in Italy to Lincoln Center. As an improviser, she collaborates with Henry Kaiser, Elliott Sharp, and Jim O’Rourke; Strings Magazine calls her work “simply stunning... a rare level of excitement and grandeur.”Her performances now feature MUGIC®, her pioneering wearable motion sensor that transforms gesture into sound. Recipient of the 2025 SEAMUS Lifetime Achievement Award and honored by Carnegie Corporation as “Immigrant: Pride of America,” Kimura continues pushing boundaries on stages worldwide. Her latest album, MUGETSU (2024), showcases improvisations Elliott Sharp describes as displaying “a sense of inevitability.”
https://www.mugicmotion.com/Three-time GRAMMY-nominated violinist Clara Lyon is an acclaimed artist whose work sparks imaginative pathways by interlacing sonic languages with diverse artistic disciplines. Celebrated for her stylistic versatility, she thrives as a collaborator across contexts—from chamber music and recital programs to interdisciplinary projects that blend music with literature, visual art, and community-based practice. A prizewinner of the Irving M. Klein and Schadt International Competitions, Clara has appeared worldwide at venues and festivals including Carnegie Hall, the Kennedy Center, the Library of Congress, NPR’s Tiny Desk Concerts, and the Reykjavik Arts Festival. Her artistic vision has been recognized with a Music Academy of the West Alumni Enterprise Award and a Ragdale Foundation Residency with the Theorem Collective. Clara is Co-Artistic Director of Decoda, Carnegie Hall’s only Affiliate Ensemble. Her work spans concert halls and recording projects as well as sustained community partnerships in schools, hospitals, shelters, and correctional facilities. She also performs as a member of the Lydian String Quartet and the chamber orchestra A Far Cry, and teaches at Brandeis University, the Decoda Chamber Music Festival, and Greenwood Music Camp. A dedicated recording artist, she appears on New Amsterdam, Sono Luminus, New Focus, Sideband, and other labels. She holds degrees from the Juilliard School and SUNY Stony Brook and is an alumna of Carnegie Hall’s Ensemble Connect fellowship.
Cellist Hannah Collins is a multifaceted artist, educator, and arts-in-health advocate. Winner of De Linkprijs for contemporary interpretation, she is committed to championing compelling new works for cello. Resonance Lines, her solo debut album on the Sono Luminus label, is an “adventurous, impressive collection of contemporary solo cello music,” negotiated “with panache” (The Strad). Over the past decade, New Morse Code, her “remarkably inventive and resourceful duo” (Gramophone) with percussionist Michael Compitello, has developed projects responding to our society’s most pressing issues. Hannah is a member of Decoda and the A Far Cry chamber orchestra. She holds degrees in biomedical engineering and music from Yale, The Royal Conservatory of the Hague, and City University of New York. She serves as the executive director of the Longwood Symphony, the orchestra of Boston’s healthcare community, which is devoted to promoting the role of the arts in health.
Pianist Steven Beck has recently appeared with the orchestras of Austin, Princeton, and Chattanooga, been heard in chamber music in Chicago and Oklahoma City, and repeated his annual Christmas performance of Bach’s Goldberg Variations at Bargemusic, which has become a New York institution. As a soloist Mr. Beck has performed with the New York Philharmonic and the National Symphony and has appeared at Carnegie Hall, David Geffen Hall, Alice Tully Hall, the Kennedy Center, and the Library of Congress. As an orchestral musician he has played with the New York Philharmonic, the New York City Ballet Orchestra, and Orpheus. Steven Beck can be heard on over 40 CDs, including the first complete recording of George Walker’s piano sonatas, for Bridge Records. Mr. Beck is a member of the Knights, the Talea Ensemble, Quattro Mani, and the Da Capo Chamber Players. He is on the faculty of the University of Massachusetts, Amherst and the Sewanee Summer Music Festival. A Steinway Artist, he is a graduate of the Juilliard School, where he now teaches orchestral piano.
https://nyphil.org/about-us/artists/steven-beckHailed as "superb," “incisive," and "sonorous and panoramic” (Boston Globe), David Russell maintains a vigorous schedule both as soloist and as collaborator in the U.S. and Europe. He was appointed to the teaching faculty of Wellesley College in 2005 and currently serves as Lecturer and Director of Chamber Music. He has served as Principal cello of the orchestras of Odyssey Opera and Opera Boston since 2010 and performs regularly with many ensembles based in New England such as Cantata Singers and Ensemble, the Worcester Chamber Music Society and Emmanuel Music. A strong advocate of new music, Russell has performed and recorded with contemporary ensembles such as Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Firebird Ensemble, Ludovico Ensemble, Callithumpian Consort, Music on the Edge, Dinosaur Annex, Collage, the Fromm Players at Harvard, and entelechron. Recent projects include recordings of cello concertos by Chen Yi and Lukas Foss, recordings of solo and chamber works by Lee Hyla, Eric Moe, Tamar Diesendruck, Donald Crockett, Andrew Rindfleisch and Roger Zahab as well as premieres of music by David Lang, Barbara White, Marti Epstein, Daron Hagen, José-Luis Hurtado, Robert Carl, Gilda Lyons,and Jorge Martin. Russell has also recently premiered works for cello and orchestra by Laurie San Martin and Samuel Nichols, as well as works for solo cello by Tamar Diesendruck, Andrew Rindfleisch, and John Mallia. Russell has recorded for the Tzadik, Albany, BMOPSound, CRI, Centaur and New World Records labels.
From its beginning in 1980, the Lydian String Quartet (Andrea Segar and Judith Eissenberg, violins; Mark Berger, viola; Joshua Gordon, cello) has been acclaimed by audiences and critics across the USA and abroad for embracing the full range of the string quartet repertory with curiosity, virtuosity, and dedication to the highest artistic ideals of music making. In its formative years, the quartet studied repertoire with Robert Koff, a founding member of the Juilliard String Quartet who had joined the Brandeis University faculty in 1958. Forging a personality of their own, the Lydians were awarded top prizes in international string quartet competitions, including Evian, Portsmouth and Banff, culminating in 1984 with the Naumburg Award for Chamber Music.
In the years to follow, the quartet continued to build a reputation for their depth of interpretation, performing with “a precision and involvement marking them as among the world’s best quartets” (Chicago Sun-Times). Residing at Brandeis University in Waltham, Massachusetts since the group’s founding, the Lydians continue to offer compelling, insightful, and dramatic performances of the quartet literature. From the acknowledged masterpieces of the classical, romantic, and modern eras to new remarkable compositions written by today’s cutting-edge composers, the quartet approaches music-making with a sense of exploration and personal expression that is timeless.
The Lydian String Quartet has performed extensively throughout the United States at venues such as Jordan Hall in Boston; the Kennedy Center and the Library of Congress in Washington, D.C.; Lincoln Center, Miller Theater, and Weill Recital Hall in New York City; the Pacific Rim Festival at the University of California at Santa Cruz; and the Slee Beethoven Series at the University at Buffalo. Abroad, the Quartet has made appearances in France, England, Italy, Switzerland, Germany, Russia, Armenia, and Taiwan.
The Lydians have long championed the commissioning, performing and recording of new works. They enjoy work- ing with young composers at the quartet’s Brandeis home as well as in mini-residencies at universities across the US. Since 2012, the Lydians have expanded the string quartet repertoire through their biennial commission prize, one of the largest chamber music commissioning prizes in the country, resulting in newly commissioned, large-scale works by Kurt Rohde, Steven Snowden, Saad Haddad, Vijay Iyer, Riccardo Zohn-Muldoon, and Lembit Beecher. In recognition of their work, the quartet has received numerous ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming, commission grants from the Fromm Foundation, Chamber Music America, Meet the Composer/Rockefeller Foundation/AT&T Jazz Program in partnership with the National Endowment for the Arts, and the Aaron Copland Fund for Music.
Praised by the Boston Globe as a “committed and dynamic” performer, violist Dr. Samuel Kelder’s interpretations of contemporary repertoire and virtuosic technique have led him to become a sought-after soloist and chamber musician, traveling widely to work with many prominent artists and ensembles of today. Sam is a member of Sound Icon, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Callithumpian Consort, East Coast Contemporary Ensemble, and is a founding member of Shizuka Viola Duo. Sam is core violist with the Sandbar Chamber Series, Appalachian Chamber Music Festival, Outer Cape Chamber Festival, and frequent guest with Galatea Series. In 2024 Sam launched Queer Ensemble Project with co-founder Mina Kim. Their mission is to uplift and celebrate queer artistry; amplifying the voices of queer artists and creating concert spaces with the intent of building a stronger community around music. Sam is the most recent addition to the viola faculty member at Boston University.
With a deep love for music new and old and exploring crossroads between music and language, Boston native Julia Glenn performs internationally on modern and baroque violins. Called “remarkable,” “gripping,” and “a brilliant soloist” by the New York Times, she joined the Naumburg-winning Lydian String Quartet after teaching for three years at the Tianjin Juilliard School. In January of 2016 she gave the world premiere of Milton Babbitt’s violin concerto to critical acclaim; her article on the work was published in 2022 in Contemporary Music Review. Glenn received her doctorate from Juilliard in 2018, her master’s from New England Conservatory in 2013, and her bachelor’s in linguistics magna cum laude from Harvard University in 2012. Her solo album The Road featuring new and recent works by Chinese-speaking composers was released on Navona Records in October 2024. She is currently on the faculty at Boston Conservatory at Berklee.
Time is the quiet architecture beneath …arching, reaching, breathless, the new release from composer and seven-time MacDowell Fellow Eric Chasalow. It is not simply that the album spans thirty years of creation, from 1997 to 2022, but that it reveals how a life in music builds, ebbs, flows, and transforms. Each piece on the new record carries the imprint of when and where it was written, and all together they form a continuous whole, like a long measured breath across decades.
When Chasalow listens to this new series of works, he describes it as an experience less like revisiting a fixed past and more like moving through a series of lived environments. A quartet composed at MacDowell in 2019 sits alongside a later work at Bogliasco Center in 2022. In response to being asked what journey he hears unfolding in …arching, reaching, breathless, he shares “...the record creates a dramatic shape starting very focused, still, vibrating and climaxing with intensity with the three movement String Sextet.”
We see this rise and fall, ebb and flow, also mirrored in Chasalow’s evolving creative process. Earlier in his career, time was something to push against. Composition meant long, uninterrupted stretches—entire days spent in the studio, driven by an urgency to complete and move forward. “My time at MacDowell, until my last two residencies, tended to be spent holed up in the studio writing every minute other than breakfast and dinner…I might work a couple of hours in the morning and call it a day, spending the rest of time taking long walks to think or reading and cooking,” Chasalow shares. Time has now softened.
Literature has been one of the constants across this span. The poetry of Wallace Stevens, with its precise musicality and philosophical depth, has long hovered at the edge of Chasalow’s work. “For years they seemed so perfectly calibrated that the idea of setting them seemed impossible. When I finally did decide to create musical treatments, a short song and the two cello pieces on this record, I knew that I had to keep things simple and make every detail count to respect the texts and use music to heighten rather than diminish them.”
When he finally began setting* Stevens’ texts, he approached them with restraint—paring the music down so that every gesture mattered. Similarly, the compressed emotional intensity of John Berryman’s Dream Songs offered a model for holding contrast within tight spaces. These influences persist across decades, not as static references, but as evolving conversations.
If time shapes the music, it is also embodied in collaboration. The Lydian Quartet has been a constant presence, performing all four of Chasalow’s string quartets and developing a deep, intuitive understanding of his voice. Their long partnership lends the album a sense of continuity—of ideas carried forward and reinterpreted over years of shared work.
In the end, …arching, reaching, breathless is not just a retrospective. It is an experience of duration and of how music can hold time, stretch it, and give it form. In a culture of fragments and interruptions, Eric Chasalow hopes listeners will find a piece that resonates with them and stay to listen through the rest. And if they listen closely enough, they may hear not just the passage of time, but the way it breathes.
*“To set (a text)” is to compose music to accompany, interpret, or enhance a literary text (The Oxford Dictionary of Music).
— Made at MacDowell, 5.05.2026
Strings are used much more sparingly and acerbically in the chamber music by Eric Chasalow on a (+++) New Focus Recordings release. Although Chasalow’s lifetime overlaps significantly with Barraine’s, the two approach string writing from very different angles. Chasalow (born 1955) is avowedly seeking a hyper-modern sound, as is apparent even in the two longest works on the disc, both of which use a traditional instrumental complement: Second Quartet (played by the Lydian Quartet) and String Sextet (played by the same ensemble plus violist Sam Kelder and cellist Hannah Collins). Just how different from more-traditional classical models Chasalow wants to be is shown by the fact that the Second Quartet not only exists in the 15-minute version on this CD but also has an hour-long form designed for gallery performance. Fifteen minutes will be plenty for many hearers, though: the one-movement work has the usual avant-garde-style mixture of angularity, disjointedness, harmonics, strong volume contrasts, and other characteristics familiar from countless works from the same aesthetic. The extended quiet stasis midway through the piece eventually gives way to matters that chug along much more feverishly, at least for a time. In the three-movement String Sextet, Chasalow first takes a bit of Brahms and creates a distinctly non-Brahmsian, devoid-of-warmth sound from it, then proceeds to a second movement marked “beautifully imperfect” and a finale labeled “asymmetrical march,” appearing to enjoy the evocative verbiage as much as the associated sounds, which are thoroughly atonal and combinatorially unsurprising. The other works on the disc are shorter and somewhat more focused. The Wings That Bear the Night Away is for solo violin (Mari Kimura) and fixed media – yes, Chasalow employs electroacoustic methods from time to time, and here also shows his fondness for microtonality – and is based on the fatal flight of Icarus. Third Piano Trio: Rock Hill Variations (played by Clara Lyon on violin, Collins on cello, and Steven Beck on piano) is dedicated to Aaron Copland – not the Copland well-known for folkloristic and accessible works but the Copland whose more-caustic music is less frequently performed – and contrasts quickly darting material with somewhat longer (but not lyrical) lines. The Snow Man and Disillusionment of Ten O’Clock, based on Wallace Stevens poems, require cellist David Russell to recite and sing as well as play, all while engaging with electronics that envelop everything in a cloud of sound whose bearing upon the words is less than apparent. The CD concludes with To the Edge and Back, a flute-and-piano work here arranged by violinist Julia Glenn and played by her and pianist Beck. Somewhat less abstruse and more lighthearted than the other music on the CD, this piece plays the instruments nicely against each other and manages to make several comparison-and-contrast points without overstaying its welcome: running less than five minutes, it is the shortest work on the disc. Audiences predisposed to enjoy self-assertive avant-garde expressiveness showcasing strings and their interactions with other instruments and electronics will enjoy the Chasalow works here, although the pieces are not really very differentiated in any stylistic sense from those by other composers who employ analogous techniques for many of the same expressive purposes.
— Mark Estren, 5.14.2026
This album of music for strings by Eric Chasalow opens with a kind of composition that has always appealed to me: live performance with fixed media, i.e. pre-recorded sound. It’s a method that interested me enough, even early on, that I used it for my own final project in my electronic-media composition class in college, back in the 1980s.
I think the reason may be conceptual more than specifically artistic: the friction of a duet between what are in some ways antithetical forms of music. Live performance has freshness and unpredictability. Fixed media has the rigor of immutability.
That doesn’t make “The Wings That Bear the Night Away” for violin and fixed media necessarily my favorite piece on …arching, reaching, breathless but it gives the album a compelling start. The piece has a further twist in that the recorded sound comes from another piece by Chasalow, a song performed by the Lydian String Quartet. The composer “granulated” that recording, manipulating it in various ways to create a jittery track of music obviously generated by string instruments but re-shaped into unnatural forms that a human string player couldn’t physically produce.
Just knowing the choppy track derives from the composer’s own music gives the combination an intimacy it might not otherwise have. At the same time, the man-machine duality of a soloist performing alongside a recording has what in the pre-robotic, pre-AI age we might have called a futuristic quality. Today one could say that it touches on the “uncanny valley” effect.
The live solo violin part is made up of many looping arpeggios and partial scales, with melodic gestures and motifs often of just two notes. Those motifs sometimes repeat in a way that suggests minimalism, but then veer off into other dimensions. The recorded music has a nervous quality and seems to drive along the soloist (a fired-up Mari Kimura, who is also a scholar and technological innovator).
“Third Piano Trio: Rock Hill Variations” offers a calming contrast. There are again jittery passages, but Chasalow intersperses them with flowing, pastoral interludes that indulge in relaxed and even traditional Western harmonies. A crackling performance by violinist Clara Lyon, cellist Hannah Collins, and versatile pianist Steven Beck makes the music sing.
Increasing the instrument count by one, Chasalow’s “Second Quartet” was composed for and is performed by the aforementioned Lydian Quartet. The music here derives from a sound-installation version, in which the musicians first play their parts unsynchronized in different locations around the performance space, then coalesce to play them together and create the 15-minute piece we hear on the album.
Perhaps because of this genesis, the music, though rooted in consistent material, has to me a wandering, unfinished feel – long on contemplation, short on momentum. It grips the ear after the midpoint, when the material grows denser and more active. Decisive thematic statements and even a faux-fugue section lead to an ultimately well-earned harmonious coda.
Upping the number of players to six, Chasalow gives us his String Sextet, an earlier piece (from 2009) whose first movement derives from the fourth movement of Brahms’ Sextet Op. 36. The interpolation and reworking of Brahms’ themes are quite clever and I really enjoyed listening to one and then the other.
Melancholy pervades the slow second movement’s dissonances and discomfiting tensions, which hover unresolved for a full five minutes until a peaceful hum finally settles things. Eastern European or Arabic influences mark the melodic fragments and modal suggestions. The hyperactive third movement feels like standard-issue contemporary avant-garde, a little of everything thrown into the pot, arch and tricky but with a somewhat hollow core.
Elsewhere on the album, cellist David Russell plays and recites settings of two Wallace Stevens poems. His un-studied vocalizing creates warmth and intimacy. In one, he placidly intones the lyrics, mostly speaking, here and there singing, accompanied by sighing music from the cello and manipulated vocal recordings. In the second, he sings most of the text, with a few subtle electronic effects supporting the non-resolving melody and a cello part consisting entirely of slow and very sparse pizzicato arpeggios that parallel the bleak lyrics. (“misery in the sound of the wind, / In the sound of a few leaves, / Which is the sound of the land / Full of the same wind / That is blowing in the same bare place…”
The album closes by looking back to the 1990s, when Chasalow wrote “To the Edge and Back” for flute (his own onetime instrument of study) and piano. Here transposed, without edits, for violin and piano, this compact exercise in virtuosity shines in the able hands of violinist Julia Glenn and pianist Beck, while serving as a reminder of the length and breadth of this composer’s distinguished career.
— Jon Sobel, 5.21.2026
New Focus Recordings is an artist-led collective label featuring releases in contemporary creative music of many stripes, as well as new approaches to older repertoire. The label was founded by guitarist Dan Lippel, composer Peter Gilbert in 2004, and composer/engineer Ryan Streber in 2004, formed …Read More …
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