In An Exotic Travelogue, Wafting Down Silk Road With Oslo Wind Players

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The superb wind ensemble Oslo Kammerakademi performs works evoking lands from the eastern Mediterranean to China on its new CD, ‘The Silk Road.’ (Photo by Marius Dale)

The Silk Road. Oslo Kammerakademi. Lawo Classics LWC1271. Total time: 64:59 minutes.

DIGITAL REVIEW — On its latest CD, the superb wind ensemble Oslo Kammerakademi performs two colorful works it commissioned, plus two by renowned Frenchmen, all evoking lands from the eastern Mediterranean to China, including Persia (today: Iran), Afghanistan, and Mongolia.

The colorful cover image is a detail from a 1909 painting by Vassily Kandinsky: ‘Orientalisches,’ i.e., images of the Orient.

The phrase “The Silk Road” refers to the routes by which goods were transported from one region in Asia to another, and eventually even to Europe. The concept inspired Yo-Yo Ma’s much-recorded Silk Road Ensemble, which often engages in collective improvisation. The present album, performed by the superb Norwegian wind ensemble called the Oslo Kammerakademi, evokes the same vast region and its interwoven history, but it does so through fully worked-out pieces.

The best-known of the four composers, Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921), wrote his fascinating Orient et Occident in 1869, before he began his habit of spending winter vacations in Algeria and Egypt, but the work already shows the composer’s clear fascination with non-Western musical traditions.

The generally excellent booklet-essay posits that the work’s middle section, which lays a one-line melody over a syncopated drone, was inspired by Turkish Janissary bands. (Listeners today know that style from “Turkish” pieces by Mozart and Beethoven.) The effective version is by bassoonist Trond Olaf Larsen, who plays in one piece on the CD and is the ensemble’s permanent arranger.

André Caplet (1878-1925), a close friend of Debussy, contributes Suite Persane (1900) for double wind quintet, which is perhaps closer to an earlier generation’s way of evoking “the Orient” than to Debussy’s. I was reminded of certain pieces by Borodin and Mussorgsky and to scene-setting moments in Massenet’s opera Hérodiade, yet the piece never feels like a pale copy.

Norwegian composer Gisle Kverndokk (Deutsche Musical Akademie)

Gisle Kverndokk (b. 1967) is an award-winning Norwegian composer of operas and musicals. Little by him seems to have been reviewed in American music journals, though his musical Letters from Ruth was given a semi-staged production by the New York Opera Society in Washington, DC, in 2017. Several colorful works of Kverndokk can be streamed, including a lively orchestral suite from his musical Jorden rundt rår 80 dager (Around the World in Eighty Days) that incorporates materials from well-known operas for each land that is visited and makes me long to see the whole show. (The suite can be heard on the usual streaming channels; excerpts from each track are here. The entire opera can be streamed here.)

Given its world-premiere recording here, Kverndokk’s The Silk Road (2017), for wind octet and double bass, is full of charm and variety, with 10 movements that “travel” from Venice to China by way of Armenia, Azerbaijan, and other lands we mostly know about from newspaper articles about war, civil strife, or airplane crashes.

The musics of these various lands are frequently based on a melody over a drone (plus percussion). Adding chords, as Kverndokk often does, tends to “domesticate” the sound, making the land feel less foreign and perhaps more understandable. Does this increase cross-cultural understanding or result in a kind of cultural colonization? At the very least, I find it to be a work that would have wide appeal and, I hope, will get many performances, perhaps even on orchestral concerts. An orchestra’s strings could, before or after this Kverndokk piece featuring winds, have their chance to shine with, say, Elgar’s gorgeous Introduction and Allegro, or Samuel Adler’s skillful string-orchestra arrangement of Ives’s Variations on “America.”

Turkish composer Mert Karabey

Occasionally, the effect of laying chords under these non-Western melodies is startling, as when a wailing clarinet in the Uzbekistan movement becomes, thanks to its interaction with Kverndokk’s modal harmonies, a dead ringer for the soloist in a klezmer band.

I wish that the program notes had given more details about the musical sources for each movement and what the fuller meaning or implication might be of such titles as “Turkey: Don’t Leave Any Hazelnuts on the Tree,” “Iran: Khayam and the Pots,” or “China: I Love You, Snow in the North.” Perhaps Kverndokk would be so kind as to put some fuller info up on his own generally informative website: www.gislekverndokk.com.

The album concludes with a 2011 piece, six-minutes long (or short), by Turkish composer Mert Karabey (b. 1976): The Last Days of Sultan Selim III. Commissioned, like the Kverndokk, by the enterprising Oslo Kammerakademi, it makes prominent use of a tune composed by that sultan (1761-1808), known even today as an unusually enlightened monarch who wrote poetry and composed over a dozen maqams.

Karabey’s work evokes Selim’s eventual murder by forces loyal to the new sultan Mustafa IV, as a heavy-treading military march overwhelms and obliterates a heartfelt funeral cortège. Karabey’s doctoral dissertation explores the method of Arnold Schoenberg, but this concise symphonic poem for winds, double basses, and percussion speaks directly to the listener, even one who may know little about historical conflicts within the ruling classes of the Ottoman Empire. Music critic Don O’Connor has recently published online a 439-page history of the symphonic poem from its beginnings (before Liszt) to 1986. If he ever wants to extend it to the present, Karabey’s evocative wind-ensemble piece would deserve a place of honor.

This is one concept album that works as a whole and in its constituent parts. The playing and the recorded sound (from sessions in an Oslo church) are meticulous and atmospheric. I look forward to hearing more works by Kverndokk and Karabey.