Nicholas DiEugenio & Mimi Solomon - Unraveling Beethoven (2018)

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Nicholas DiEugenio & Mimi Solomon - Unraveling Beethoven (2018)

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Violinist Nicholas DiEugenio and pianist Mimi Solomon release their second recording on New Focus, this one a chronicle of their commissioning project, Unraveling Beethoven. The duo approached several composers, Tonia Ko, David Kirkland Garner, Jesse Jones, Robert Honstein, and Allen Anderson, and asked them to write works that are inspired by Beethoven's Violin Sonatas. The attractive results display a range, from a mixture of direct references to Beethoven's work to more oblique reactions to the violin sonatas.

David Kirkland Garner’s The Sky Was Good For Flying takes as its thread the second theme of the opening movement of Beethoven’s Kreutzer Sonata, spinning it out in balletic ascending figurations. Allen Anderson found himself captivated by the language of DiEugenio’s request, and the association with fabrics and threads. He settled on the concept of “linen” and the process of its generation as the inspiration for the piece. Beginning with independent lines, Anderson slowly “weaves” them together into mutually reinforcing musical material. Robert Honstein’s initial source of material for Olmsted was Beethoven’s Violin Sonata #1, but shortly thereafter abandoned the direct connection and allowed the dialogue with the older maestro to be more tangential. The title references Frederick Law Olmsted, the storied American landscape architect and designer of such iconic public spaces as Central Park in Manhattan and Prospect Park in Brooklyn. The opening movement, “Jamaica Pond," percolates with arpeggios in the high register of both instruments, with the violin articulating glistening harmonics. “The Ramble” references the wooded area in the middle of Central Park, perfect for contemplative nature walks just minutes away from the din of the urban streets. In “Long Meadow” he portrays the playful movements of children and families enjoying a day outside in the broad, grassy area of Prospect Park in Brooklyn. “World’s End” is an unfinished park south of Boston that remains as it was 100 years ago. Honstein’s music paints a beautiful picture not just of what the place is now, but the haunting sense of what could have been.

Tonia Ko’s Tribute (Axis II) contains the most experimental music on the recording, and in that sense explores something essentially Beethovenian. Ko passes scraping textures between the violinist and the pianist playing inside the instrument, as she explores “the border between distortion and pitch.” Jesse Jones’ process in writing Scherzo (after Beethoven) led him to explore the extent to which Beethoven’s harmonic, melodic, and structural vocabularies are linked. Limiting himself to the same tools in the compositional toolbox, Jones’ work is an affectionate tribute to the soundworld and spirit of Beethoven’s famous sonatas. It is a fitting close to this set of new compositions whose jumping off point looks backward towards a figure who cast his eyes always towards the musical future.

– D. Lippel