Lysander Piano Trio & Sarah Shafer – Mirrors: 21st Century American Piano Trios (2020) [Official Digital Download 24bit/96kHz]

Celebrating their 10th anniversary in 2020, Lysander Piano Trio present their FHR début album ‘mirrors’ album featuring première recordings of new American piano trios commissioned or premièred by the ensemble.

The works included on this album, with their richness of styles and origins, provide an exciting and optimistic glimpse into music being written for piano trio today. Of particular note is ‘Love Sweet’ written by Grammy Award winning composer Jennifer Higdon and featuring the brilliant soprano Sarah Shafer.

“An enterprising and finely realized collection of recent works for piano trio (all of them first recordings) Lysander Piano Trio, an ensemble now well established on the American recital circuit, which here gets to display its versatility and conviction in abundant measure.” (Arcana)

The Lysander Piano Trio rightly stresses the diversity of this survey of the 21st century American piano trio, with styles and influences coming from rock (in Gilad Cohen’s Around the Cauldron), extended technique (in Jennifer Higdon’s voice-and-trio song cycle Love Sweet), and minimalism (in Jakub Ciupinski’s The Black Mirror). The group effectively shifts gears among a variety of sounds, which is often the key to a successful program of contemporary music. However, for all the diversity, there’s an interesting unity among these works, one that is underappreciated as a pervasive factor since the fall of modernism: the pieces all refer to extramusical scenes and images. Cohen’s Around the Cauldron, as one might expect, depicts the Witches of Shakespeare’s Macbeth in a series of delightful short scenes, including one from the perspective of the unfortunate newts (and there is another little Shakespeare scene, “Titania and Her Suite,” from Sofia Belimova). Reinaldo Moya’s four Ghostwritten Variations each address a different novel, from Thomas Mann to science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson, and William David Cooper’s An den Wasser zu Babel is something of a German Expressionist set of variations on a theme representing the psalm “By the Rivers of Babylon.” An X factor in the album’s favor is that all of the music was either commissioned by the Lysander Piano Trio or premiered by one or more of its members. The music was recorded in two different places that do not play very well together, but in general, this is an enjoyable and stimulating release that finds new life in a traditional chamber music genre.

Tracklist:
01. Lysander Piano Trio & Sarah Shafer – Cohen: Around the Cauldron: I. In Dusk (01:24)
02. Lysander Piano Trio & Sarah Shafer – Cohen: Around the Cauldron: II. Pounce (03:13)
03. Lysander Piano Trio & Sarah Shafer – Cohen: Around the Cauldron: III. Transmutation (01:27)
04. Lysander Piano Trio & Sarah Shafer – Cohen: Around the Cauldron: IV. Boiling (01:05)
05. Lysander Piano Trio & Sarah Shafer – Cohen: Around the Cauldron: V. Witches Waltz (01:51)
06. Lysander Piano Trio & Sarah Shafer – Cohen: Around the Cauldron: VI. Newts’ Lament (00:46)
07. Lysander Piano Trio & Sarah Shafer – Cohen: Around the Cauldron: VII. Sacrifical (03:44)
08. Lysander Piano Trio & Sarah Shafer – Moya: Ghostwritten Variations: Var. 1, Doctor Fautus (03:19)
09. Lysander Piano Trio & Sarah Shafer – Moya: Ghostwritten Variations: Var. 2, Cloud Atlas (01:54)
10. Lysander Piano Trio & Sarah Shafer – Moya: Ghostwritten Variations: Var. 3, Orfeo (02:23)
11. Lysander Piano Trio & Sarah Shafer – Moya: Ghostwritten Variations: Var. 4, The Memory of Whiteness (03:41)
12. Lysander Piano Trio & Sarah Shafer – Higdon: Love Sweet: I. Apology (02:34)
13. Lysander Piano Trio & Sarah Shafer – Higdon: Love Sweet: II. The Giver of Stars (03:48)
14. Lysander Piano Trio & Sarah Shafer – Higdon: Love Sweet: III. Absence (01:55)
15. Lysander Piano Trio & Sarah Shafer – Higdon: Love Sweet: IV. A Gift (03:17)
16. Lysander Piano Trio & Sarah Shafer – Higdon: Love Sweet: V. A Fixed Idea (03:50)
17. Lysander Piano Trio & Sarah Shafer – Belimova: Titania and Her Suite (02:10)
18. Lysander Piano Trio & Sarah Shafer – Cooper: An den Wassern zu Babel (15:15)
19. Lysander Piano Trio & Sarah Shafer – Ciupiński: The Black Mirror (13:39)