Gilad Cohen: Around the Cauldron
Reinaldo Moya: Ghostwritten Variations
Jennifer Higdon: Love Sweet
Sofia Belimova: Titania and Her Suite
William David Cooper: An den Wassern zu Babel
Jakub Ciupinski: The Black Mirror

I'm not sure about you, but each time I've read Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus and became intrigued by fictional composer Adrian Leverkühn's dilemma, I would try to imagine in my mind's ear what his music would sound like. Philosophically minded, early 20th century German zeitgeist opened up some possibilities, but I could never really get a clear outcome set in my mind. Now I can stop trying. I believe Venezuela born composer Reinaldo Moya has captured the essence of the character and his times extremely well. His Ghostwritten Variations (2016) is a set of four variations each based on a different fictional composer from famous novels. I can't speak for the other three, since I haven't read the novels, but I must say that his take on Adrian Leverkühn is very much what I expected.

It seems that most of the compositions on this CD, which by the way are all world premiere recordings written within the last ten years, are in some form or another based on literary works. For example the inspiration for Gilad Cohen's Around the Cauldron came from the three witches from Shakespeare's Macbeth. Its creative use of what sounds like southern voodoo rhythms in some of its movements well projects sorcery at play. Another Shakespearian based piece, this time on A Midsummer's Night Dream, is Titania and Her Suite by Sofia Belimova (b. 2000). It well captures the mercurial nature of the queen of the fairies.

The subtitle of this recording is 21st Century American Piano Trios but fear not. None of the works collected here are so far out in left field as to be incomprehensible. Each one has a style of its own, and yet all of them seem firmly rooted in tradition. The members of the Lysander Piano Trio, Itamar Zorman (violin), Michael Katz (cello), and Liza Stepanova (piano), in this their second recording, display a refined level of versatility and musicianship, and well define each work's nature and point of departure.

The short audio clip below is taken from the aforementioned Ghostwritten Variations.