专辑简介

Portraits (New Dynamic Records, 2014) presents four works from SOLI’s 2012 live program, “Hot Off the Press.” The CD opens with the Divertimento (2008) by Columbian composer, Diego Vega, combining lyrical expression, complex textures, and elegant phrases passed seamlessly from one instrument to the next. Peter Farmer’s Rag Out for Four (2012) is a two-movement work that combines styles and techniques such as jazz and approaches in serial composition. Erich Stem’s Moving On (2012) gets immediately to the point, beginning with an almost restless urgency that gets spun-out and examined, at turns strident, questioning, and melancholy, with themes materializing and dematerializing in an agitated dialogue that is ultimately resolved in the expressive emotional choreography of the final movement. The final piece on the CD is Elliott Miles McKinley’s Three Portraits (2012), a work that explores the mutability mood, tone, and association through shifts and juxtapositions of rhythm, tempo, and melody, such as the anthem-like clarity of the opening piano line in the second movement evolving into a jazzy-reggae rhythm, or the electronic “groove variations” of the third movement that underlie short, insistent phrases in the live instruments.