CD REVIEW
Reservoir
Diatribe Recordings, DIACDSOL001
Isabelle O’Connell, piano
BIG (Wilson); Forgotten Worlds (O’Leary); becher (Walshe); Reservoir (Dennehy); The Narrow Road to the Deep North (Bodley); Three Preludes (Buckley); Seagull (Agnew); The Klippel Collection, Nos. 10, 11, 13 (Irvine); Along the Flaggy Shore (Martin)
While others eschew the trials of tackling today’s contemporary classical music, New York-based, Irish-born pianist Isabelle O’Connell has been quietly making a name for herself throughout the world by focusing on music of the past 100 years. In addition to her work as a soloist with orchestras such as the National Symphony Orchestra of Ireland, she has performed at new music festivals including Mannes Contemporary Music Festival (USA), Pablo Casals Festival (France), and Waterford New Music Week (Ireland). Among her many awards are a Fulbright Scholarship, a John F. Kennedy Scholarship, and the Tibor Paul Medal. Her fame even landed her a rare spot on the Irish television show The Late Late Show.
Reservoir , O’Connell’s newest album, features works by nine living Irish composers. Throughout, she plays with a firm grasp of rhythm, articulated phrasing, and with a sense of transparency in the fashioning of musical lines rarely displayed in contemporary music circles, where technique for technique’s sake in often emphasized. On Ian Wilson’s BIG (1991), for example, the block chords of the middle section sing out from O’Connell’s piano. The pounding roughly sketched opening lines, with all of their jagged edges, resolve themselves into a series of harmonic chordal statements that, in lesser hands, would have been a moment of repose. In O’Connell’s conception, however, they are shimmering pinnacles of grateful and joyous arrival. The entire performance is so strong in scope and full-bodied, rich tone, one wonders why more of today’s young artists cannot create the same excitement.
O'Connell's portrayal of Jennifer Walshe’s becher (2008) is, likewise, another brilliant performance. The work is so full of disparate musical quotes from sources as widely varied as The Beatles and Edward Grieg, that finding a point of relation from which to tie it together is difficult for any pianist. To break the stalemate of indecision such a work proposes, O’Connell approaches the piece more as colorist than conceptualist. Allowing the composer to do the work, she stays true to the score, giving all of its micro-quotations equal billing. By not putting her own face on the work, O’Connell allows Walshe’s voice to ring true, which, in the end, is the real purpose behind any classical performance.
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