Mischa Salkind-Pearl: Lines and Traces of Desire (Music for Cimbalom)

There’s a pleasing sense of disorientation in these compositions stemming from the rich, mysterious tones of the cimbalom, a large hammered dulcimer from Hungary. Played with a flair beyond mere virtuosity by Nicholas Tolle, the instrument sounds right at home whether solo or alongside a soprano (Mary Bonhag), a violin (Lilit Hartunian), or amidst the Ludovico Ensemble. You may reconsider everything you thought you knew about the Cimbalom after supping from this luxurious feast.

— Jeremy Shatan, 9.26.2025

You’re forgiven if you don’t know what a cimbalom is. Picture a hammered dulcimer, increased in size and weight until it needs legs to support it Developed in its modern form in the 1870s in Hungary, it’s better known in Eastern Europe than in the West. But many composers have discovered and written for it, including György Kurtág. It’s Kurtág who inspired Nicholas Tolle to take up the instrument. And Tolle is the featured performer on Lines and Traces of Desire, the new album on New Focus Recordings from composer Mischa Salkind-Pearl.

Introducing: The Cimbalom

The collection’s most compelling music comes at the start, with “The Plum Gatherer,” a setting of a poem by Edna St. Vincent Millay for cimbalom and soprano. Here, as in a lied by Schubert or Brahms, the singer and instrumentalist are equal partners. The contemplative piece stretches over more than 10 minutes and begins with a sparse, tense introduction from Tolle’s cimbalom, acclimating us to the sound.

The attack resembles that of a harp, but the sonority is much more vigorous. The highest notes sound rather like those of a piano (both are hammer-on-strings instruments, after all). In the lower and midrange the cimbalom has a sandy twang all its own. And the timbre varies depending on how hard one strikes with the mallets.

Soprano Mary Bonhag, also heard on another recent New Focus release, River Spirits from composer Susan Botti, is a superb interpreter of modern repertoire. The music, elevated by her expressive coolness and dense with narrow melody, effectively plumbs the cloaked imagery of “grey ambiguous nettles” that evoke for the poet a youth she cannot recover. The second part of the piece, even more stark, begins with the line “The plum-trees are barren now and the black knot is upon them.” The imagery is grim. But the music, while solemn, has a quiet vigor, and casts light on the interplay between the stark sound of the cimbalom and the thickened purity of the human voice.

The three-part Palm’s Soft Terrain arises from an interesting idea that succeeds conceptually but doesn’t quite pay off musically. Here Salkind-Pearl interprets three American weaving patterns through music for solo cimbalom. “Undulating Herringbone” evokes that pattern through arhythmic stabs of sound and repeating motifs. The tuning of the cimbalom is a bit off from what we’re used to, and the repeated patterns with sudden deviations bring that to the fore.

We also hear more of the range of techniques Tolle can employ to create both tonal and percussive effects. The latter dominate the second number, “Basket Weave,” where harsh strikes (plucks?) evoke the hard material of an actual basket more than fabric. Concluding with a long series of bell-like tolls, it makes its point – but gratingly.

The third is by far the longest movement. I had to look up the “Mary Ann Ostrander Pattern.” It’s quite an intricate one. The music is more harmonic than in the first two movements, and even, here and there, smoothly consonant. Still the vocabulary feels a little constricted for a 14-minute piece, despite gnarly passions that intrude towards the end.

For all three movements, it’s worth taking a look at the referenced patterns while listening. With the visuals in mind, the music has more meaning. But it remains rather dry.

Scanning the Room, Tracing the Lines

Salkind-Pearl is composer-in-residence for the Ludovico Ensemble, the group that joins Tolle for “Map of My Room.” Though it’s an older piece, in it you can hear the composer’s musical sensibility already maturing. On a casual listen it may feel like 11 minutes of group improvisation. But that’s only because the score skilfully melds the textures of the instruments such that at many moments it hardly sounds like an ensemble. The cimbalom’s throaty sound complements the airier flute (Zach Sheets) and bass clarinet (Rane Moore) and Lilit Hartunian’s warm violin. It’s easy to accept the intended depiction: a survey, episodic and without development, of the various and unspecified items in the composer’s room (and refuge).

The title suite features Hartunian (whose admirable work you can also hear on New Focus’s recent release by Ryan Vigil) in a duet with Tolle. The short first movement continues the driftiness of “Map.” But with the second movement, titled “Unison,” come interesting sonorities, as the cimbalom’s long decay alternately parallels and lingers beyond the violin’s bowing. Tolle and Hartunian sync in sinewy style, like two horn players doubling a jazz riff, effects varying with technique, attack, and presence or absence of harmony.

Extended techniques abound in the short but spacious third movement, simulating snaps and whistles and sighs and such. The even shorter fourth alternates dissonant strikes and mellow cushioning.

The last movement begins and ends with interpretations of a keyboard sonata by 18th-century composer Manuel Blasco de Nebra. The purpose of this nod to the Baroque isn’t made clear. One can relate the sound of an 18th-century keyboard (whether fortepiano or harpsichord) with that of the cimbalom, and contrast it with the bowed violin sound that adds a dimension to the piece as originally written for the keyboard alone. It works quite well, offering a new angle on the old.

— Jon Sobel, 11.20.2025

The mere fact that this is an album of New Music for the cimbalom makes it unique, but there is also an air of cognitive dissonance. Most listeners will identify the instrument with Hungarian folk music, although it was actually invented in Budapest in 1874 based on the traditional hammered dulcimer. Bartók and to a lesser extent Kodály employed it for coloristic effects, so the cimbalom has a modernist lineage. These four pieces from Boston-area composer Mischa Salkind-Pearl are seminally influenced by György Kurtág, who also inspired percussionist Nicholas Tolle to take up the instrument.

The cimbalom underwent a sea change in Kurtág’s hands. In a solo work like Játekók (Games), combined with strings in Signs, Games and Messages, or as a shadow in an orchestral work like Stele, the cimbalom becomes evanescent, mysterious, and delicate. The resonance of its metal strings after being struck with cotton-tipped sticks is often as important in Kurtág as the struck note itself. This new personality, which superseded the percussive, often driving, folk image of the cimbalom, is where Salkind-Pearl takes off from.

The program consists of a solo piece, Palm’s Soft Terrain, a duo with soprano, The Plum Gatherer, a duo for violin and cimbalom, Lines and Traces of Desire, and a small-ensemble piece, Map of My Room, each taking advantage of the cimbalom’s merging of atmospheric and percussive effects while remaining for the most part within the “soft terrain” of its sound world.

If you start with the solo piece, it is immediately apparent that the cimbalom is so uniquely itself that there’s a blurry line between the composer using it and it using the composer. Sound dominates over form. In his composer’s note Salkind-Pearl tells us that Palm’s Soft Terrain takes its rhythmic patterning from American weaving traditions. For example, the third movement, “Mary Ann Ostrander Pattern,” is a double weave using as one layer a “cutting” from Brahms’s Ballade op. 10/4. The Brahmsian source isn’t easily recognizable, but Tolle clearly weaves two textures in the right and left hand, one low and sonorous, the other high and pingy. All three movements use repetitive patterns in Minimalist fashion.

Very different is The Plum Gatherer, a vocal setting of Edna St. Vincent Millay’s melancholy poem about a child reaching to pick sweet plums from a tree surrounded by stinging nettles, leading to a contemplation of the tree, now dead, its fruit only a longing memory. The vocal and instrumental line are atonal, the rhythmic structure free-form. Mary Bonhag’s lyric soprano here has a childlike tone that suits the verse while also capturing its haunted atmosphere. The cimbalom’s tone is close to a dulcimer’s, pursuing its own line as a twin voice rather than an accompaniment. The gentleness of the setting makes this a lovely listening experience even in the absence of conventional melody.

Lines and Traces of Desire is directly modeled on Kurtág’s 8 Duos for Violin and Cimbalom, as well as reacting to it. Salkind-Pearl comments that the emotional tone of the material “documents restlessness, resignation, ache, and longing.” There are five movements, the longest being around five minutes. One movement is in unison; another is a transcription of the Adagio from the Sonata in E by the obscure Spanish Baroque composer Blasco de Nebra. The variety and ingenuity applied to making each movement individually memorable make this suite a high point. Tolle and violinist Lilit Hartunian constitute Lamnth, a duo founded in 2023. They combine with a lovely sympathy that elevates the music and gives it emotional nuance.

The largest chamber piece, Map of My Room, calls upon the Boston-based Ludovico Ensemble, founded by Tolle in 2002. Its flexible membership is taken form freelance musicians, in this case a quartet of violin, flute, bass clarinet, and cimbalom. (Salkind-Pearl is the group’s composer-in-residence.) The title, Map of My Room, is meant to be taken literally, the room being where the composer lives. The score’s design has no development. Instead, “The piece progresses as if following a map—the path is linear, but not straight.”

Nor is the path straightforward. The harsh opening, where the cimbalom is hammered to deliver loud clangs, signals a challenging listen. There are softer passages and evocatively suggested moods, but the piece is a sequence of episodes in an abstract New Music idiom that requires dedicated attention during its 11-minute duration. There is evident skill from both Salkind-Pearl and the musicians, but for me the result is a mashup of generic contemporary gestures. The main interest lay in hearing how the cimbalom functions as a modern-ensemble instrument.

That one reservation aside, this is a release like no other I’ve ever encountered, and with Kurtág as inspiration, we hear a very impressive, imaginative immersion in the cimbalom’s personality. Tolle has mastered a range of timbres and techniques that are so varied, nothing risks monotony. This is the perfect outing for those with adventurous ears, not requiring a taste for paprika.

— Huntley Dent, 1.27.2026