PEP (Piano and Erhu Project): Volume Three
Redshift Records

The soundworlds associated with certain instruments have expanded through the efforts of innovators such as harpist Zeena Parkins, steel guitarist Susan Alcorn, banjoist Bela Fleck, and others. Doing her part to redefine how the erhu is perceived is Nicole Ge Li who, with pianist Corey Hamm, records and performs in PEP (Piano and Erhu Project), the Vancouver-based new music outfit the two formed in 2011 to bridge Eastern and Western musical forms and cultures. While the title of their third PEP collection might be prosaic, the music performed on the release is anything but. Works by a broad swathe of composers appears, from the Chinese composer Gao Ping and the two Prokofievs—Sergei and his grandson Gabriel—to American, Canadian, and British composers such as Marc Mellits, Stephen Chatman, and Michael Finnissy. Almost eighty minutes in length, the release makes a compelling argument on behalf of the erhu's legitimacy as a classical instrument, though it does more than that.

The musicians bring impressive credentials to the project. Li, who began learning the erhu at the age of six, graduated from the Shanghai Conservatory of Music in 2008 and has since established herself as a vital musical presence in Richmond, British Columbia, where she teaches, performs, and records. Hamm has commissioned, premiered, and recorded more than three hundred works by composers from all over the world and has drawn attention for his recording of Frederic Rzewski's The People United Will Never Be Defeated! Enthusiastic collaborators, Li and Hamm plan to follow this latest volume, recorded at at Roy Barnett Hall at the UBC School of Music, with a fourth and fifth.

It's telling that the recording starts with Ping's six-part Hu Yan (2017), as its placement mirrors the journey of the erhu itself and how PEP wishes for it to be seen. In terms of its history, the instrument might be most strongly associated with China, but the pieces that follow reflect its gradual broadening out into other parts of the world. The virtuosity of both musicians is evident throughout Hu Yan, though it provides an especially magnificent showcase for Li when it demands from her a broad range of expression. Whereas some parts are playful and rambunctious, others are ruminative; the second, for example, exploits the melismatic potential the erhu offers in the way it lends itself to an uninterrupted flow of sound, while the fifth finds a solitary Li carrying on a dialogue with herself using plucking and bowing. Even more than the second movement in Ping's piece, Somei Satoh's Birds in Warped Time II (1986) takes the erhu's capacity for melisma to a greater extreme when its sinuous phrasings slide in and out of rippling piano textures for eleven hypnotic minutes.

As pretty as its title suggests is Mellits' Mara's Lullaby, which he wrote in 2005 when his daughter was only a few months old and contains a melody he sung to help put her to sleep. However huge the separation between violin and erhu is, there are moments on the release, such as here, where Li's playing comes very close to collapsing the distance. Written in he same year, his Mechanically Separated Chicken Parts is motorik by comparison, a rhythmically insistent exercise in perpetual motion.

Another noteworthy setting is Firewall (2015) by Canadian composer Lucas Oickle, its title alluding to the challenges he and his then-girlfriend (now wife) experienced when she was in Shanghai and the two were messaging back-and-forth. In keeping with a piece intended as both love story and censorship comment, the material traverses multiple moods and styles, from tender to agitated and everything in between. Chatman's Remember Me, Forever (2015) introduces a different sound quality in using inserted golf tees to turn Hamm's instrument into a prepared grand piano; its somewhat gamelan-like sound makes for an arresting contrast to the vocal-like erhu. Another surprise arises, however, when midway through the keyboard in its untreated form returns to join the erhu for a sweetly nostalgic duet.

Gabriel Prokofiev's Three Pieces for Erhu and Piano ranges from the playful minuet-styled “Five Steps” and noirish drama of “Off Piste” to the introspective “Lament,” which captures the erhu's potential for sensitivity and expressivity. His grandfather's lively “Scherzo” (1943) ends the album on a high-energy note, the piece an arrangement of the second movement of his Flute Sonata (1943).

December 2020