Azerbaijani rhapsody
East meets West in Franghiz Ali-Zadeh´s colurful compositions (Time Out [New York], 27. 1.-3.2.2000)
The stunning result of the 52-year-old composer’s cross-pollination of Eastern and Western forms is richly melodic, brightly hued music. »Think: Ravi Shankar meets Arvo Pärt on the Caspian Sea«<, says George Steel, executive director of the Miller Theater.
(Susan Jackson)
A Mix of Azerbaijan and the West (The New York Times, 8.2.2000)
Continuum […] checks in regularly on dominant styles and prominent compos- ers, but it has always been at its most exciting when it looks beyond the main- stream. Its Thursday evening concert at the Miller Theater was devoted to the music of Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, a composer from Azerbaijan whose works draw on both the conventions of contemporary Western music and the ornate modal flourishes and timbres of Islamic music. […] she has melted those influences into a fresh, otherworldly style that allows for improvisation but also includes stretches of sublime melody and elegant, ear-catching counterpoint.
In an early example of this amalgam, In Habil’s Style (1979), a cello sings with elaborate inflections of Middle East vocal music. The piano accompa- niment is exotic in a different way: passages are played with a small mallet directly on the strings; elsewhere the pianist drums with open hands on the closed keyboard lid. […]
In Music for piano (1989), Ali-Zadeh suggested the flavor of mugham by placing objects on the piano’s strings so that certain notes had a percussive, metallic quality. A buzzing texture underpins assertive, Lisztian stretches of piano writing, and there are passages in which the prepared piano yielded the sound of a Middle Eastern string band. At times, the combination of prepared and unadorned timbres creates the impression of a multicultural duet. […] Crossing II (1993) uses a similar sense of organic growth, combined with a seductive shimmer and fleetingly chaotic writing for strings, winds and brass, to create a magical atmosphere. From the static string writing of its opening pages, it became so variegated and so constantly surprising that a listener did not want it to end, an unusual and welcome feeling at the end of a night of new music.
(Allan Kozinn)
Disciples of the difficult are back
Kronos Quartet, Mugam Sayagi: Music of Franghiz Ali–Zadeh (Nonesuch) (Illinois Times, 19.5.2005)
Few things in life are certain, but it’s safe to say that the Kronos Quartet will never put out a bad album. […] Harrington and his colleagues – violinist John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt, and cellist Jennifer Culp – make extraordinary music that’s unfairly tagged as »difficult«. Call it »challenging« or »naccessible« or highbrow or whatever bogus euphemism you use for music that can’t be hummed in the shower […] The members of Kronos might be the world’s most famous disciples of the difficult […].
Mugam Sayagi, Kronos’s first album since 2002’s Nuevo, consists of four pieces by the Azerbaijani pianist/composer Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, three of which were commissioned by the quartet. Ali-Zadeh, who was born in Baku in 1947, synthesizes myriad, often disparate influences in her work, an approach that’s perfectly compatible with Kronos’s genre-bluring sensibilities. Her music combines the traditional folk melodies of her native country with the 12-tone technique of Arnold Schoenberg and the cerebral lyricism of Alban Berg and Gustav Mahler. At once Western and Eastern, modern and ancient, ethnic and universal, Ali-Zadeh’s compositions defy the conventional wisdom that experi- mental music is for theory freaks and eggheads.
A musical form native to Azerbaijan, »mugam« consists of various scales meant to convey specific emotions; the album’s title means »in the style of mugam. Rather like an Indian »raga«, the »mugam« is monophonic, a hypnotic drone that gradually ascends to a euphoric climax. Adapted for strings and, on two pieces, piano, these mugams are more harmonically complex than their traditional counterparts, layering polyphonic overtones and melodies that veer from harmonious to dissonant. The title track, for example, deconstructs a melancholy folk song, enlisting a synthesizer and a tambura to provide the requisite drone. A clanging gong and sawing strings create an ominously martial mood, which comes as no surprise: Ali-Zadeh wrote the quartet in 1993, when Azerbaijan was at war with Armenia.
Oasis, the CD’s opening cut. Begins almost inaudibly, with the sound of drip- ping water and the faintest pizzicati. An astringent violin pierces the miragelike shimmer, bobbing and weaving as whispering male voices give way to slash- ing chords and deep, foreboding cello. Apsheron Quintet interpolates long, shuddering waves of dissonance with lush, almost Romantic-sounding piano and violin figures. In its dreamlike second movement, the musicians conjure a nocturnal landscape in which the violins whine like monstrous mosquitoes and the piano flutters like a trapped moth. Kronos lets Ali-Zadeh handle Music for piano all by her lonesome, but you might not realize at first that it’s a solo ef-fort. By draping a necklace over the strings of the middle register, she jerry-rigs the instrument into a surprisingly effective approximation of the traditional >>tar<<; the lyrical passages twitter delicately above the roiling lower keys and the buzzy, clattery center, creating a triolike effect that’s both mysterious and familiar, like hearing Debussy in the desert.
(René Spencer Saller)