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Apollo Chamber Players smartly curate three works from 20x2020 project for 'Moonstrike' / textura

textura writes……Apollo Chamber Players' sixth album is a smartly curated affair featuring three works from its 20×2020 project, which the quartet—violinists Matthew J. Detrick and Anabel Ramirez Detrick, violist Whitney Bullock, and cellist Matthew Dudzik—originated in 2014 with the goal of commissioning twenty new pieces before the end of the decade. Though the album title might suggest the group's sights are set on the stars, all three pieces feel firmly grounded on the earth beneath our feet.

While Jerod Impichchaachaaha' Tate's Moonstrike does focus on American Indian moon legends, the fabulistic tales narrated by Chickasaw astronaut John Herrington are as captivating as any a group of children might be told by a native elder. Even more earth-focused are Jennifer Higdon's tone painting In the Shadow of the Mountain and Pierre Jalbert's L'esprit du Nord. Though each work was created by different composers, they form a cohesive group when their programmatic elements are so complementary. Shared by all three is the idea of connecting people through the time-honoured practice of storytelling and drawing attention to our relationships to the earth, history, and cultural traditions.

The framing works have much to recommend them. Higdon's sixteen-minute setting evokes the stirring majesty of the Great Smoky Mountains, which she grew up in the shadow of. That personal history led her to select Charles Frazier's Cold Mountain as the source material for her first opera, the music of which in turn provided the starting point for In the Shadow of the Mountain. The mists seemingly part as the music begins and gradually reveals a landscape rich in colour and mystery. Fiddle-like passages and folk-tinged melodies amplify the work's earthy quality, and while there are lyrical, peaceful, and plaintive episodes there are agitated ones too. Higdon deftly weaves a multitude of parts into a fluidly flowing expression that plays to the Apollo Chamber Players' strengths and seems to distill the full range of emotional experience into a single, compact statement.

Jalbert's L'esprit du Nord uses three French-Canadian folk songs as a foundation and elaborates on the presentation in two of the three parts with vintage field recordings. “Chanson de Lisette” initiates the piece with a theme-and-variations-styled treatment that sees the originating folk song theme recast in contemporary musical garb. The incorporation of a 1940s field recording intensifies the poignancy of the elegiac inner movement, “Cantique,” which contains two religious folk tunes, a ‘Passion' song and a tune titled “Les Pélerins.” The concluding “Fiddle Dance” turns even more joyful when a brief field-recorded excerpt of a wheezing harmonica finds its way into the energized performance.

It's Tate's MoonStrike that is the project's literal and figurative centrepiece, however. Structured in seven parts, the twenty-eight-minute work bookends three colourful tales with a dance, prologue, epilogue, and dance reprise. As the first enrolled member of a Native American tribe to have flown in space, Herrington's well qualified to assume the role of narrator. His clear enunciation and enthusiastic delivery make stories that are already gripping all the more memorable. After the rousing “Corn Dance” inaugurates the piece, an unaccompanied Herrington introduces himself in the “Prologue” before delivering the first story, “Origin of the Moon.” As he recounts attempts by coyotes and antelopes to steal the moon, the presentation is enriched by the string quartet's vibrant commentaries upon the action. Folk melodies animate “The Man Who Married the Moon,” an engrossing tale of romantic intrigue, after which “Raven Steals the Moon” revisits the moon-stealing theme, with this time a vengeful bird the culprit and its insistent demand for food (in the form of a a high-pitched “Caw! Caw! Caw!”) repeatedly punctuating the music. Herrington bids the listener goodbye in the “Epilogue” before the “Corn Dance Reprise” ends the piece as spiritedly as it begins.

Classical artists are always struggling to find ways to expand their audience and expose their music to new generations of listeners. Certainly one way to do that is to create works that have the capacity to engage young ears, works like those on Moonstrike, which would lend themselves as well to a school auditorium as concert stage. It's easy to visualize the Apollo Chamber Players and Herrington taking the album on the road, performing its entertaining material at North American high schools, enthralling teens with its tales of tricksters, and opening their ears to a world of music they might have given little attention to otherwise.

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