Luciane Cardassi: Going North
Redshift Records

No one is better equipped to take on a programme of contemporary works by Canadian and Brazilian composers than Luciane Cardassi, herself a Brazilian-Canadian pianist currently based in Banff, Alberta. Recorded in May 2019 at the Rolston Recital Hall in the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity, the recording presents eight electronics-enhanced pieces written between 2008 and 2019 that extend the piano repertoire into dramatically adventurous territory. Whether the material is ethereal, spectral, or introspective, it's always wholly engaged in and committed to boundary-pushing, and Cardassi shows herself to be the ideal conduit for the composers' visions. That's especially so when a number of them were written for and/or commissioned by her.

Each piece's backstory helps crystallize the listener's understanding of the material and better appreciate the composer's intentions. In writing Dois Aforismos com Interlúdio (2010), for example, Jorge Villavicencio Grossmann attempted to emulate the syntax of Vicente Huidobro's poetry by having the aforismos parts appear as rapid gestures in contrast to the meditative treatment of the interlúdio. Emilie LeBel similarly looked to poems by Canadian writer Sue Sinclair as inspiration for a cycle of solo piano pieces, with the third in the series, Wonder (2012), augmenting piano with text from the poem recited by the pianist.

Representative of the recording's adventurous spirit is Terri Hron's AhojAhoj (2011), which developed out of correspondence between the composer's parents and family members behind the Iron Curtain in Czechoslovakia. Excerpts of speaking voices on cassettes are woven into the composition, with “Hello” and “Goodbye” (both “Ahoj” in Czech) surfacing. In keeping with the fact that most of the speakers are no longer with us, the material exudes a ghostly quality, with voice fragments emerging alongside a wide-ranging field of echo, cassette noises, and piano commentary. It's telling that the latter is but one part of a sprawling collage design rather than the dominant element.

Unfolding like a mirage, Chantale Laplante's Estudo de um piano (2008) embodies the project's exploratory tone in incorporating sonorities derived from the scrubbing, scratching, and plucking of the piano's strings. Live and pre-recorded sounds come together to form a cryptic dialogue of muted gestures, each one arising in response to the ones before. Scored for piano and pre-recorded electronics, for will robbins (2010) was written a year after Darren Miller met Cardassi during a residency at the Banff Centre where the two collaborated on a performance of Luigi Nono's …sofferte onde serene… The detail possesses more than anecdotal interest when Miller's own creation shares many of the qualities of Nono's creation, including its emphasis on pianistic texture, space, and percussive effects. Whereas many pieces accentuate stillness, Alexandre Espinheira's Berimbau (2019), in which piano, handclaps, and vocalizations appear alongside string plucks and textures characteristic of the Afro-Brazilian berimbau, oozes exuberance and rhythmic energy without diminishing the recording's experimental tone.

November 2020