Unsuk Chin describes her music as a conscious attempt to render in sound the visions she encounters in her dreams. This ear-catching profile album from Ensemble Intercontemporain presents three of the Korean-born, Berlin-based artist’s works: a triptych of visionary panels that flicker and swarm with kaleidoscopic colours.
It opens with Gougalon, a playful suite inspired by the travelling amateur theatres of her native country. Prepared piano and a percussion section that hums with gongs, bells, bottles and vibraslap lend a riotous jocularity to six contrasting episodes, including the lugubrious Lament of the Bald Singer, the clangorous Grinning Fortune Teller With the False Teeth and the madcap Hunt for the Quack’s Plait. First-class engineering allows the listener to savour every sonic jot and tittle.
Dimitri Vassilakis and Samuel Favre are the sure-footed soloists in the Double Concerto for Piano, Percussion and Ensemble, a 20-minute soundscape with reference points drawn from both western and non-western music. Under the confident guidance of conductor Pierre Bleuse, the 19-instrument ensemble illuminates Chin’s complex, freely flowing score with rock-solid technique and a deal of panache.
Finally, there’s Graffiti, a three-movement work for chamber orchestra, which oscillates between a tensile textural intricacy and graceful transparency. It opens with Palimpsest, a skittering, polystylistic hurly-burly, and concludes with the abrasive stabs and jabs of the rhythmic Passacaille. In between comes a haunting nocturnal street scene, dubbed Notturno Urbano, where tolling bells combine with eerie harmonic dissonances to conjure an atmosphere that is rich, strange and uniquely Chin.
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