Gramophone Review

"Aires de Sefarad" Albany Records, TROY829

Dramatic and energetic glosses on Spanish and Hebrew traditions

Guitarist Matt Gould and violinist Beth Ilana Schneider, who perform together under the name Duo46, created something of a stir in their previous recording, aptly named ‘Untaming the Fury’.  If that showcase of 10 young composers fell short in anything, however, it was in failing to match the duo’s brilliant technique and fiery temperament with a compositional vision as equally developed.

No such problem here.  The Argentine-born, Berkeley-based composer Jorge Liderman offers a piece that is, quite literally, made to order: a cycle of 46 songs without words adapted with great care from Sephardic sources for the violin and guitar.  The range of musical material in the sources alone, drawing on a rich intersection of Spanish and Hebrew traditions, already provides a wealth of metric, harmonic and structural possibilities.  In his liner-note, Liderman claims to have remained true to the prosody of the original songs but his masterful merging of the melody with the particular idiom of the violin make those claims academic at best.  Above all, the collection superbly captures a series of emotional moods, each in two minutes or less, while moving from individual piece to piece with a palpable dramatic arc.

The musicians, for their part, deftly match the concision of each compositional idea with spontaneity of spirit.  Here is all the ‘fury’ of their earlier outing, with a considerably broader range of emotional sensitivity.  Nothing ever seems forced, nor for that matter does it often sound preconceived.  Listening to the surface energy alone, one could imagine these songs springing to life purely from the fingers rather than the head, which in this case is rather a compliment to both performer and composer.

-Ken Smith, July/August 2006