Album

Only the funding notices reveal that the "loft" mentioned in the title of this disc is located in Chicago—the booklet text speaks mysteriously of a "major city." The location is relevant, for the program of this fine sampler transcends New York's entrenched uptown/downtown split and its other cliques. All the music here might be described as accessible to a youthful audience, but none is minimalist, none is particularly neo-Romantic, and the one work that uses pop influences does so in quite a subtle way. That work is Carter Pann's Differences for cello and piano, which is a kind of suite that uses dances of various periods as referents. Two of its movements are based on contemporary pop idioms, displacing them just enough that their motor rhythms disappear but keeping characteristic turns of melody and the like—sample track 6, "Song," which Pann says "draws its language from the 1970s and early '80s." It abstracts the language of Styx and the like rather than imitating it. Ricardo Lorenz's Bachangó is a vigorous Afro-Cuban essay. There isn't a dull, or a pedantically played, piece in the bunch, but perhaps the most exciting is Stacy Garrop's String Quartet No. 2, "Demons and Angels" from the year 2000. The work has a detailed program, embodying a sequence of events of the sort that you might find in a contemporary movie—like the film Crash, for example, it goes by its starting point once again in the middle of the piece, when its background has been partially filled in. That starting point is a quintuple murder, depicted by five dissonant chords, and the rest of the work is an exploration of the psyche of the murderer. Garrop plays off the unlikeliness of this as subject matter for a string quartet, and her realization of the concept is economical and even gripping. A superior sampler from Cedille, helpfully packaged with a card offering a free CD with more music, this disc can be faulted only in that it doesn't tell you where to go to hear the Composers in the Loft series if you happen to be in Chicago.

© James Manheim, All Music Guide

CD 1
Ricardo Lorenz Composer Bachangó, for piano Work Recorded 2007 Marta Aznavoorian Piano
1	Bachangó, for piano	5:05			$0.99
Carter Pann Composer Differences, for cello & piano Work Recorded 2006 13:30 Elinor Freer Piano, David Ying Cello
2	1.Strand	2:02			$0.99
3	2.Air	3:41			$0.99
4	3.Country Dance	3:04			$0.99
5	4.Blues	2:59			$0.99
6	5.Song	1:44			$0.99
Pierre Jalbert Composer Trio for violin, cello & piano Work Recorded 2007 16:29 Lincoln Trio Ensemble
7	1.Life Cycle	8:32			$1.49
8	2.Agnus Dei	7:57			$1.49
Stacy Garrop Composer String Quartet No.2 ("Demons and Angels") Work Recorded 2006 30:14 Biava Quartet String Quartet
9	1.Demonic Spirits	7:55			$1.49
10	2.Song of the Angels	3:54			$0.99
11	3.Inner Demons	7:35			$1.49
12	4.Broken Spirit	10:50			$1.99
Vivian Fung Composer Miniatures, for clarinet & string quartet Work Recorded 2006 11:58 Maia Quartet Ensemble, John Bruce Yeh Clarinet
13	1.Floating	1:58			$0.99
14	2.Light and Playful	2:27			$0.99
15	3.Improvisation-like	2:55			$0.99
16	4.A Piacere	4:38			$0.99