Evelyn Chang - Poets from the East (2009)

Young, Taiwan-born pianist Evelyn Chang's debut solo disc from Avie, Poets from the East, takes the idea of "East" properly but in a more expanded sense than many might consider it. The program consists of two Russian composers, one Bulgarian and one Taiwanese; while Russian twentieth-century master Alexander Scriabin is certainly a known quantity and filmgoers may have some sense of connection with film composer Leonid Desyatnikov, the names of Bulgarian composer Dobrinka Tabakova and Taiwan's Ma Shui-Long may be wholly new to listeners. There is absolutely nothing to be gained by virtue of being scared off by the sheer aspect of novelty, as all of the music on Poets from the East is directly stated, communicative, and instinctual, and Chang's playing falls right in line with such requirements, though she adds her own, special sense of touch and expression that marries the whole program together. It is a common strategy in classical recordings to place a well-known composer in the company of relative unknowns in the hopes that the known quantity will help "sell" the rest, but that is not the force in play here; all of the music in some way relates to and reflects the example set by Scriabin, but not in his later, synaesthetic mode but as a key miniaturist and reinventor of the pianistic language of Chopin into something new, not to mention his role as a representative of the Russian Piano School that also produced Rachmaninoff.
The Scriabin work here is an early one, his Preludes, Op. 11 (1896), often recorded singly or in select form, but seldom recorded as a set outside of "complete" type Scriabin collections. Chang's performance is stunningly beautiful and maintains its beauty even though she does not linger, as would be tempting in such Chopin-informed music; Scriabin himself recorded some of these preludes among his piano rolls and he did not linger either. Such a performance preference was not the result of trying to maximize the amount of music on a piano roll, but an aesthetic preference that goes toward the overall shape of the music, and Chang's concern with the schema of these preludes goes toward the entire set of 24 as a unit, rather than a more microcosmic view of these tiny works as individual items. It is such a unified reading that the listener divests the sense of one prelude leading to another, and it's an utterly refreshing way to approach this set. The Ma Sketch of the Rainy Harbor is painterly in effect and attractively modal; Tabakova's pieces are invested to some extent in toccata-like patterns that vaguely recall Indonesian music and are reminiscent, perhaps coincidentally, with some music of Japanese composer Takashi Yoshimatsu. Some of the Desyatnikov music here is derived from film cues, but they don't feel exceptionally cinematic so much as lyrical, though the tiny Rondeau-chase can be a fractured Liadov miniature reimagined as a high-stepping ragtime influenced French music hall dance as arranged by Nikolai Kapustin.
The prevailing view of Russian music held by establishmentarian thinkers in the realm of the West posits it as a kind of miracle whereby the East ultimately caught up to, equaled, and engaged in a kind of a dialogue with the French manner but, apart from Tchaikovsky, never produced anything comparable with the great German tradition. Chang's Poets from the East makes mincemeat of this argument. Not only did Russian composers help set standards for classical musicianship in greater Asia, they did so without overriding established classical traditions in these parts of the world; rather unlike what we have seen in India and the former Persia where Western music has clobbered the court and sacred music practiced for hundreds of years. Beyond its considerable educational value, however, Chang's Avie debut Poets from the East is an eminently listenable and enjoyable disc, one that instantly makes its hearers thirsty for more.