William Susman: Scattered Threads
Belarca Records

While composer William Susman often assumes the piano chair on his recordings, Scattered Threads sees him largely ceding the role to Nicole Brancato, a pianist he met after a San Francisco concert five years ago and who expressed interest in presenting his music. The elegant performances she delivers on this latest collection show her to be a most sympathetic and invaluable interpreter, and one expects their musical relationship will continue. Susman's connection to violinist Dylan Hamme came about in a slightly different way when his great-aunt, pianist Katrina Krimsky, enthusiastically recommended the twenty-three-year-old wunderkind to her composer friend. In fact, a week after their first meeting, plans were already in place for Hamme to record Susman's material. The composer also plays on the release, but once only, with the violinist on a treatment of Woody Shaw's Katrina Ballerina in memory of Krimsky, who passed away in 2025 (the trumpeter wrote the piece for her in 1974). Scattered Threads is also, for the record, Hamme's recording debut.

Shaw's is the only non-Susman work on the release, which otherwise features five of his transporting settings scored for violin and piano. Written between 1996 and 2013, the pieces offer a fascinating multi-decade portrait. Some of the works appeared in different guises before but sparkle anew in these fresh renditions. Even a cursory listen to Susman's music recognizes its connection to classical minimalism, and there are a few passages that could conceivably have come from the pen of Steve Reich (the closing parts of Seven Scenes for Four Violins, for instance). But as his music repeatedly shows, Susman's no clone or copyist but rather a composer who's forged his own style from a large pool of musical sources. It's not unusual for traces of jazz or South American music, to cite two examples, to surface in a given composition. While an occasional repetitive pattern does emerge, Susman's material resists being slotted into any one genre.

Bookended by its most recent and earliest compositions, the album begins with 2013's Aria, adapted from Susman's work-in-progress opera Fordlandia and originally performed by Susman and violinist Karen Bentley Pollick. As the opera's title intimates, the work takes as its subject the Ford Motor Company and specifically the struggle for power between Henry and his son Edsel. Aria, however, is sung in the opera by Evangeline, Henry's secretary and mistress, and appears in this adaptation as a five-part, fourteen-minute meditation for violin and piano. The format naturally evokes the impression of a dialogue between two people and a sometimes impassioned one when romantic feelings complicate matters. Expressions of plaintive longing engage at the outset, Brancato and Hamme each demonstrating maturity in their restrained handling of the lyrical material. Cracks in the relationship appear as the music advances and tension increases. Sweetly singing violin phrases alternate with plucks and double stops to enliven the music, and as the recitalists confidently progress through the work's many changes and emote rhapsodically during its closing section, the conclusion's reached that Susman is fortunate to have recruited such capable partners for the project.

Jumping back a decade and originally scored for clarinet and piano, Duo Montuño (2004) finds the recitalists roaring through syncopated passages and feverishly engaging in a passionate, mambo-tinged dance. Premiered in 1997 in an arrangement for flute and piano, Motions of Return presents Brancato and Hamme moving dynamically from one modulation to the next with authority, the changes especially impressively executed when the contrasts in tone, rhythm, and tempo are so pronounced. Initially presented in an arrangement for voice and piano, Scatter My Ashes (2009) is no less haunting in this latest iteration when Brancato's patterns chime incandescently alongside Hamme's melancholy phrase-making.

July 2026