This evening’s set of tracks from Soundcloud strolls up and down the road between folk and classical music – which is of course a thoroughfare very well-traveled in both directions.
To begin with, a recently-formed band in Ireland, The Gloaming, has just released an eponymous debut album, in the United States with the record label Brassland and elsewhere with Real World, and on its Soundcloud page the former has loaded one song from it, “The Sailor’s Bonnet.”
This five-piece, with Iarla Ó Lionaird as the vocalist, Caoimhín Ó Raghallaigh on the hardanger, a type of fiddle from Norway, Martin Hayes playing the violin and the fiddle, and Dennis Cahill wielding the guitar, while the New York musician Thomas Bartlett handles the piano, has embraced the forms of Irish folk music as a medium for modern moods, or as a stage fit for new-old musical practices such as improvisation either solo or concerted.
Much more formal, to be sure, yet punctuated by significant dissonances and strophified as it were by distinct traces of choreography, is a new work for piano by the New York composer Rosalie Burrell. Comprising eight movements, her piece is entitled “Entwined Disquiet,” and in the recording loaded on her Soundcloud page it is sensitively played by Javor Bračić.
Some of the passages in this work sound as though they are meant for a solo dancer, others for a ring-dance comprising an ensemble of several, and it is not difficult to imagine the whole accompanying a dance in which neither the formality of the music nor the feeling within it is accorded the last word.
From the Danish accordionist Andreas Borregaard’s Soundcloud page comes tonight’s last track, a recording from some years ago of a performance of “Le Grand Tango,” one of Astor Piazzolla’s most well-known works, by him together with the violist Asbjørn Nørgaard, the other half of the duo Inviolata.
As evident as is the role of Piazzolla’s work as a conduit between the common music of Buenos Aires and the higher reaches of the classical scene, it is always pleasant to come across a tribute to it in the shape of a spirited rendition, and Inviolata’s mediates between them with both passion and clarity.