Derek Bermel - "Intonations" album review
Derek Bermel - Intonations album review
His music expands classical music's intonation system in an audience friendly manner.
Intonations is Derek Bermel's second album released on Naxos' "American Classics" series. The album explores Bermel's roles as both composer and clarinetist, accompanied by the JACK Quartet and electric guitarist Wiek Hijmans. The titular track, Intonations, takes advantage of JACK's extreme technical command as an ensemble to explore subtle, yet intense divulsions into microtonality. In the first movement, "I. Harmonica", Bermel alternates between justly tuned and slightly detuned chords, literally mimicking the sound of a blues harmonicist overblowing and bending pitches. Bermel's implementation of pleasing microtonality continues through the next two movements, in the forms of a hymn and hustle dance. Intonations cyclically concludes by reviving the original harmonica motive from the opening of the entire piece. The music is created and performed in such an exceptional manner that Bermel has almost done the unthinkable. His music expands classical music's intonation system in an audience friendly manner.
The album combines chamber music and solo pieces, and Bermel's Thracian Sketches for solo clarinet and five Violin Etudes are successful, independent examples of the latter. Thracian Sketches, composed in 2003, intelligently adapts Bulgarian folk music into contemporary classical music. Bermel projects folk rhythms onto the unresolved sound of the whole-tone scale. Beautifully organized, the work is one large seven-minute expansion, starting slowly and simply in the chaulumeau register of the clarinet, and climaxing with a screeching-high jaunty tune. The Violin Etudes are expertly interpreted on the album by Christopher Otto of the JACK Quartet. Comprised of five unrelated miniatures composed between 2009 and 2016, each movement is a source of concentrated solo material. Otto convincingly transforms these simplistic sounding etudes into complex webs of sound.
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Two other works utilizing the JACK Quartet finish off the album. In Ritornello, for electric guitar and string quartet, the concerto grosso evolves into something never before heard by contemporary audiences. Bermel combines theatricality with intellect to create this coalescence of Baroque and art rock. Hijmans, known for bringing the electric guitar into the world of classical music, has total control over his instrument and sound, varying from gorgeous clear tones to bordering on violent improvisation. A Short History of the Universe (as related by Nima Arkani-Hamed) concludes the album with three movements for clarinet quintet, with the composer and JACK performing. In A Short History, Bermel notches up his intellectual approach to composition, musically ruminating on physicist Arkani-Hamed's lectures. Bermel draws upon his jazz and Klezmer approach to his instrument, with all three movements focusing on smearing the sense of time with glissandi of all lengths.
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