Sinfonia Cymru’s chamber programme – given as part of this year’s Vale of Glamorgan festival – featured four composers, all women and all American. Caroline Shaw and Augusta Read Thomas are familiar names but, with those of Lera Auerbach and Gabriela Lena Frank pretty much unknown on this side of the Atlantic, this was a welcome introduction on the part of ensemble’s American cellist, Abby Lorimier, who curated the sequence.
Thousandth Orange, Shaw’s piano quartet which opened the evening, relates to the way artists painting still lives can convey the myriad inflections of light falling on a bowl of fruit. The piano’s four opening chords, calmly stated, are the basis for an exploration of the relationship between strings and keyboard, with different juxtapositions throwing up a variety of colours and, finally, the decaying of sounds.
Read Thomas’s duo for violin and viola, Silent Moon, representing the stillness of the winter solstice which yet heralds the coming energy of spring, was played most expressively by Maria Ismini Anastasiadou and Isobel Neary-Adams. It too orbited from quiet opening to still end but, at its heart, embraces an exchange that carried a strongly dramatic intensity.
Auerbach, a sculptor and author as well as a prolific composer, defected to the US in her late teens just before the 1991 fall of the Soviet Union, and it is hardly surprising that the early Trio No 1 for piano, violin and cello – played by XinRu Chen and Georgina MacDonell Finlayson with Lorimier – should betray her musical roots. Echoes of Shostakovich were unmistakable, but in the central Andante the anguish and aching nostalgia was clearly Auerbach’s own and rather moving.
Lena Frank – a member of Yo Yo Ma’s Silkroad Ensemble – has Peruvian and Chinese heritage and her piano quintet Tres Homenajes: Compadrazgo pays tribute to the Latin American notion of camaraderie, sustaining both individuals and communities. The final Homenaje (homage) invoked combat and the ritual sacrifice stemming from pre-Columbian beliefs aimed at appeasing the gods. It was notable for the fistfuls of notes played by Chen, her bravura execution nonchalantly achieved.
