Jessica Krash: True Stories
Albany Records

American composer Jessica Krash (b. 1959) has spent a lifetime dedicating herself to music, whether that's involved creating award-winning works of exceptional variety and imagination, teaching for twenty-eight years at George Washington University, lecturing throughout the United States, or taking on the role of director for multiple music organizations. The remarkable portrait album True Stories also proves that her creative energy has in no way dimmed as all of its material was produced over the last eight years. Krash has enriched the music landscape for decades and continues to do so with this comprehensive collection.

Her music resists easy slotting into any one style or school. Instead, a work develops in response to a life experience or idea with the composer drawing on her extensive background to fashion a musical expression in accordance with it. One piece might exude a lyrical Romantic character, another enigmatic, bi-tonal mystery. Emotion and technique inextricably wed in these pieces, such that melodic and formal considerations are accounted for equally. There is wit and humour but also drama and seriousness of purpose in works that are personalized yet also cognizant of broader issues.

A pianist too, Krash performs on four of the album's eight works, which personalizes the recording even more (as do illuminating liner notes by her that provide context for each piece). Five Pieces about Women in the Sky features her alone, while What I Wish for You, True Stories, and Between Friends are duos that pair her with cellist Tanya Anisimova on the first two and pianist Betty Ann Miller on the third. The other pieces broaden the instrumental scope in featuring separate performances by violinist Jinan Laurentia Woo, pianist Catherine Kautsky, the ensemble District5, and the Lithuanian Symphonic Wind Orchestra. All are esteemed performers who usher Krash's music vividly into being.

Recorded between July 2019 and December 2025, the works make good on Krash's desire to juxtapose materials in jarring, unexpected ways and treat musical expression as an act of choreography where elements move closer to and away from one another. Testifying to her music's personal dimension is the opening What I Wish for You, a heartfelt and at times jazz-inflected duo setting written in 2019 for her son's wedding processional. Duet partners Anisimova and Krash later reunite for the title piece, a ruminative odyssey that wends its way unpredictably through multiple chapters. Their deeply entwined dialogue sustains interest for the full measure of its explorative sixteen minutes, the cellist's virtuosity a constant source of dazzle.

Imbuing the recording with an ample array of colours, the six-part And Then is distinguished by the artistry of the woodwind quintet District5. Again highlighting the personal dimension, two of its movements directly reference Krash's 2017 trip to Ghana, “Thinking of Ghanaian Music, at First - Playfully Wistful, Wistfully Playful,” an intricately interwoven tapestry aptly titled in its restless animation, and the calming “Searchingly Peaceful, Peacefully Searching,” composed in response to the creature sounds she heard emanating from the Ghanaian savannah at night. Meanwhile, “Restless Almost All the Time” was written during a Cape Cod visit and represents her attempt to musically render the feeling (not the literal sound) of wind rustling through pine trees. As rich in timbres is What I Learned From You, the setting the Lithuanian Symphonic Wind Orchestra commissioned to celebrate the 300th birthday of the Vilna Gaon, Elijah ben Solomon Zalman. Krash's expansive musical evocation of the eighteenth-century Jewish scholar pulls into its design fragments of traditional synagogue tunes to emphasize how the past remains very much alive in the present as hopeful futures are forged.

Certainly one of the album's more arresting pieces is Debussy Chez Moi for augmenting solo piano with spoken word. Krash wrote the piece for pianist Kautsky, who asked the composer to create a piece she could perform during the promotional tour for her book, Debussy's Paris: Piano Portraits of the Belle Époque. The words voiced so grippingly by her derive from Debussy's letters, poems he set to music, and titles of his piano pieces.

Elsewhere, Krash draws for inspiration from personal, historical, and public figures. Written with her great-great-grandmother in mind and scored for unaccompanied violin, Krash's The Imagined Wisdom of Bella Pavis is realized spectacularly by the prodigious Woo. In two evocative movements from the piano suite Five Pieces About Women in the Sky, the composer honours the achievements of Tammie Jo Shults, a pilot who guided passengers to a safe landing when one of its plane engines exploded (she reassured them, “We're not going down, we're going to Philly”), and astronauts Christina Koch and Jessica Meir, whose 2019 repair of a faulty battery on the International Space Station signified the first all-woman spacewalk. Fittingly, Krash concludes the set with Between Friends, a three-part setting commissioned by Miller and performed by the pianist with the composer. Alternately boisterous and introspective, the music hints at the distances traversed by Krash and her partners on the release.

October 2026