Kinetic. Michael Jinsoo Lim, violin. Planet M Records (PMB-006). Total time: 68:53.
DIGITAL REVIEW — Each of the inventive pieces featured on Kinetic, a new CD of largely 21st-century pieces performed by Pacific Northwest Ballet concertmaster and solo violinist Michael Jinsoo Lim, is connected to dance in delightful ways. The album contains newly commissioned world-premiere works by Leilehua Lanzilotti, Paola Prestini, and Lim’s wife, University of Washington violist and composer Melia Watras, as well as pieces by John Corigliano and Astor Piazzolla.
“I have found myself at the intersection of music and dance for over 15 years,” says Seattle-based contemporary music champion Lim, who also appears frequently as a chamber musician. “Collectively, the music represents much of my musical life.”
Not only is Lim the leader of the Pacific Northwest Ballet Orchestra, but he is also often featured as violin soloist. To expand the annual holiday presentation of Tchaikovsky’s The Nutcracker, Lim integrates a concerto-like solo piece that George Balanchine extracted from The Sleeping Beauty ballet. It is always a pleasure to hear Lim’s artistry soar above the orchestra on such occasions.
Among the composers showcased on the album, the name Corigliano immediately stands out as familiar. Lim is co-founder of the award-winning Corigliano Quartet, named in honor of his passion for the composer’s music and for contemporary American music overall.
STOMP (2010) is distinctive in that is written for scordatura, or mistuned, violin, in which the strings are tuned to non-standard pitches, causing dissonances that are strident to the ear and challenging to the player. Camille Saint-Saëns’ well-known Danse macabre comes to mind as an example of this practice.
According to Corigliano, “STOMP demands a theatrical mind, an unerring ear, and a delight in making music with the entire body.” It is a wild ride from bar one, a tempestuous square dance with seductive overtones, with Lim masterfully re-tuning the strings simultaneously as he plays and stomps his foot.
The Red Violin Caprices (1999), which Corigliano composed in combination with other music for the score of François Girard’s film The Red Violin, evoke such Baroque forms as the chaconne as well as Romantic idioms. The symbolism of blood resulting from the story’s tragic components infuses these astonishing pieces with dark but fascinating elements. The calm of the initial theme is followed by variations that reflect the influence of Paganini, perhaps a nod to his 24 Caprices, with its double stopping and variation written in octaves. Lim performs these with impressive technical virtuosity.
Lim admits to being a long-time admirer of Piazzolla’s reinvention of the tango, using classical and jazz fundamentals to transform the traditional form into nuevo tango, or new tango. Piazzolla’s Tango-Études, originally composed in 1987 for flute, were published for flute, violin, and saxophone. It’s not a danceable tango as much as a melodic improvisation, reminiscent of the solo violin sonatas of renowned virtuoso Eugène Ysaÿe, and powerfully rendered by Lim.
The three pieces by prolific composer Watras, created expressly for Lim and this CD, include the world-premiere recording of A dance of honey and inexorable delight (2022). Poet Herbert Woodward Martin narrates his own text, interwoven with the solo violin, which depicts the “quiet activity, petal to flower, stem to stalk…” Lim’s well-executed violin arpeggios and octaves provide a chaotic background to the poet’s haunting evocations.
A fascination with doppelgänger stories inspired Watras’ Doppelgänger Dances (2017), which symbolize the eternal conflict between good and evil. The composer incorporates the Baroque dance form of the double, or doubly fast variation, used by Bach, Handel, and others. Lim plays with stylistic elegance throughout the seven dances, each of which clocks in between one and three minutes.
In “Double I,” Lim employs sound effects unique to string instruments such as sul ponticello (on the bridge) and glissando, alternating with soaring melodies. Fantasia utilizes chaconne-like tunes alternating with aggressive dissonances. The variations on each dance range from spirited to introspective, all of them mesmerizing.
As concertmaster of the ballet orchestra, Lim is without doubt an expert on the famous violin solo in Tchaikovsky’s celebrated classic Swan Lake, which forms the basis for the third of Watras’ pieces influenced by dance, the world-premiere recording Homage to Swan Lake (2018). In the late 19th-century tradition of improvisation, represented by such composers as Liszt, Paganini, and Sarasate, the piece takes Tchaikovsky’s ballet score and propels it in several different directions.
Watras demands ever-changing technical styles exploiting the diverse capabilities of the instrument. Lim is more than up to the task, skillfully negotiating the multiple stopping and daredevil octaves and soaring to the top of the register with virtuoso flair and lush tone, while adding subtly wrought pizzicati and rapid slapping sounds on the fingerboard.
The memory of former Hawaiian landmarks inspires Leilehua Lanzilotti’s where we used to be (2022). Lanzilotti describes the work — whose world premiere Lim gave in 2023 — as “the dance between what is and what used to be.” Though these landmarks no longer exist, the locals still use them as reference points for giving directions. The composer conceptualizes them as a kind of indigenous cartography.
Another world premiere, Paola Prestini’s A Jarful of Bees,adds percussive electronic sounds recorded by Ian Rosenbaum to represent elements of nature such as wind and storms, to the music of the eight-dance pattern of the honeybee. By performing this dance, successful bee foragers can communicate and share information with other colony members; for instance, the direction and distance to patches of flowers yielding nectar and pollen, to water sources, or to new nest-site locations. The violin and electronic effects amount to an ecological cautionary tale, symbolizing human threats to our own natural world: a sign of our times.
