Jenny Lin
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Fresh thoughts on new music: Jenny Lin's inspired 'Insomnimania'
September 6, 2008, 12:00 am
Pianist Jenny Lin's new CD, "Insomnimania," explores music associated with sleep, dreams and twilight. It includes works composed by John Cage, Robert Helps, Frederic Rzewski, William Bolcom, John Musto, Raymond Scott, Michael Byron, Eric Richards, Cornelius Dufallo and Daniel Felsenfeld. (Koch International)
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• Jenny Lin's "Insomnimania"
MARK STRYKER in Detroit Free Press
Fresh thoughts on new music: Jenny Lin's inspired 'Insomnimania'
Despite the implosion of the major labels and overall struggles of the classical music <http://www.freep.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20080907/ENT04/809070353#> recording industry, quality independent labels continue to release impressive recordings at a swift pace, typically filled with the kind of inventive repertoire the majors often ignore.
Of the many worthwhile examples that have come my way recently, American pianist Jenny Lin's "Insomnimania" (**** out of four stars, Koch International Classics) is particularly inspired.
Lin has a knack for programming and executing winning thematic projects. One recent recording on the Hanssler label surveyed preludes by Russian composers working between 1905 and the creation of the Soviet Union in 1922. Another CD, "Chinoiserie" (Bis), surveyed music by Western composers who found inspiration in the Orient.
"Insomnimania" explores 20th- and 21st-Century American solo piano music associated with dreams, twilight, somnambulism, insomnia and the never-never land between sleep and consciousness. The composers -- John Cage, Robert Helps, Frederic Rzewski, William Bolcom, John Musto, Raymond Scott, Michael Byron, Eric Richards, Cornelius Dufallo and Daniel Felsenfeld -- are a diverse lot of experimentalists and mavericks, some famous and others unknown to even aficionados. The entire album, beautifully paced and performed with striking technical command, emotional intensity and nuance, casts an alluring spell.
The opener, Cage's "Dream" (1948), sets a meditative mood that carries through the entire album, a sustained feeling of suspended animation. Cage's simple single-note lines turn back on themselves, land in spare chords and then spin away again in a state of low-key reverie descended from the piano music of Erik Satie. Other works turn feverish, the imagery morphing into night-music visions. Rzewski's "Mayn Yingele" (1989) takes off from a prayerful melody by a Yiddish poet, a lament that blooms into grandly conceived variations that wail in the night.
Vernacular echoes -- specifically ragtime -- come into play in both Musto's abstract and ghostly "Midnight's Harmonies" and Bolcom's "Dream Shadows," which marries a bittersweet melody and lazy rhythmic sway into a 3 a.m. feeling of the blues. Pour yourself a nightcap and wait for the sunrise.
Detroit Free Press
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