Eunbi Kim: A House of Many Rooms: New Concert Music by Fred Hersch
Albany Records

A veritable history of piano styles is presented by Eunbi Kim on her debut recording A House of Many Rooms, its forty-four minutes dedicated to compositions by Fred Hersch. A celebrated pianist in his own right, he's also a survivor of two devastating life events: diagnosed with AIDS at a time when it was a pretty much a death sentence (see Randy Shilts's And the Band Played On and Tony Kushner's Angels in America, among others), he's lived with the disease for over three decades; and in 2008 he suffered a debilitating, months-long coma that required him to re-build his health and technique from scratch. While Hersch doesn't play on the recording, he did co-produce and mentor it, and though he's generally described as a jazz musician, A House of Many Rooms emphasizes his classical side in featuring “concert music” (his term) for piano, even if a few of them started out as jazz tunes before morphing into formally notated compositions.

This tribute is but the latest feather in Kim's cap. Both a virtuosic pianist and interdisciplinary artist, she received her Masters in piano performance from the Manhattan School of Music and has performed in major venues throughout the United States; she's also known as the creative force behind Murakami Music, a music-theatre performance piece that explores mental illness among the pianists in Murakami's novels. The Hersch project originated when she heard “Little Midnight Nocturne” for the first time and was so touched she felt compelled to contact him. She subsequently learned he had other concert works of similar merit that, while they might have been performed publicly, had not yet been recorded; obviously the idea of recording a full-length featuring such material was a natural next step (“Prelude No. 1” was even written expressly for Kim). The album title, incidentally, came about when Hersch suggested Kim should imagine and play each part in Variations on a Theme by Tchaikovsky as if she were entering completely different kinds of rooms.

To create the Tchaikovsky-based piece, Hersch selected a melody from the second movement of the composer's fourth symphony, the melody's twenty-bar length identifying it as a potential theme from which variations could spring. In keeping with the form (e.g., Bach's Goldberg Variations), the work opens with a direct statement of the elegant melody, after which its many variations appear one by one. At twenty minutes, it comprises a major bulk of the recording, but it never grows stale when the variations range so widely; further to that, the dynamic explorations performed by Kim prevent repetition from setting in. Some are uptempo and high-spirited, others melancholy and even brooding in tone; stylistically, nods to classical, jazz, salon music, blues, ragtime, and even tango surface along the way.

In Three Character Studies, a particular technical issue is addressed in each case. Whereas the one explored in “Nocturne for Left Hand Alone” is self-explanatory, “Little Spinning Song” and “Chorinho” are respective exercises in the rotation of the hands and in the application of double thirds, sixths, and octaves. On listening grounds, however, each impresses as something substantially more than a technical exercise, the lovely elegance of the first matched by the dazzle of the fleeting second and the rather tango-like thrust of the third. An exercise of a slightly different sort is symbolized by “Little Midnight Nocturne,” for which Hersch drew inspiration from “‘Round Midnight”; Monk's original is less explicitly referenced than subtly alluded to in Hersch's late-night conception. For the album's only non-solo performance, “Tango Bittersweet,” in which Hersch fondly memorializes acquaintances who passed away from AIDS during the early years of the epidemic, Kim's joined by violinist Yoon Kwon, whose heartfelt expressions amplify the bittersweetness of the material.

March 2018