Various Artists - Walk with Me, My Joy (2025) Hi-Res

Daniel Pesca writes music that is simultaneously sophisticated and transparent. The materials are rich with harmonic detail and interest, motivic continuity and development, and rhythmic vitality. The expressive intent is always clear even when it is intentionally multi-layered, making his works eminently listenable and engaging. Walk with me, my joy features Pesca's sensitive performances on piano alongside longtime collaborators flutist Sarah Frisof, cellist Christine Lamprea, percussionist Ian Rosenbaum, and guitarist Dieter Hennings, and reflects Pesca's leadership as a musician's composer, with convincing interpretations and a refreshing absence of superfluous bombast.

Gestures of Grace is inspired by the physicality and elegance of dance. The character of the five conjoined sections can be found in their rhythmic material and varied articulations. The opening "Twirling" features lightly separated motivic gestures that connect longer, legato lines. "Flowing" is sensuous and evocative, with undulating, wavelike arpeggios in the piano supporting accumulating phrases in the flute. "Hinting" is more coy, with a dialogue of off-kilter, jaunty figures between the two instruments which elides directly into the hypnotic "Glinting." The work's final movement, aptly titled "Dancing," is also it's longest and most developmental. Insistent accents and light, playful rhythms alternate, both within a forward driving pulse. The energy turns inward, leading into a reflective flute soliloquy that intensifies into a reprise of the pointed material from the opening before a fleet coda.

In Solitude was written in the uncertain early months of the Covid-19 lockdown, and reflects the unsettling tenor of the moment. The work is divided into three sections: the first is searching, grasping to latch on to familiar elements in an suddenly new landscape. The second section builds on the phrasing from the opening, weaving together breathless figures, before a somber coda that revels in a suspension of time.

Pesca's solo Chaconne for piano uses the iconic formal harmonic device as a springboard for a series of textural variations. Opening with several dramatic pianistic gestures, a clear statement of the theme follows. Swooping arpeggios, punctuated repeated figures, jaunty chordal stabs, and variable groupings bring us into the body of the constantly evolving composition. The middle section finds a moment of temporary repose before building momentum through brilliant passagework, shimmering high register chords, and tolling voicings in the bass. Chaconne closes with a rolling section in triple meter, dotted by virtuosic flourishes and a bravura final ascent.

Three Intermezzos, composed for and performed here by guitarist Dieter Hennings, are reminiscent of Hans Werner Henze's Drei Tentos for the same instrument in their marriage of economy and expressivity. The first opens with a declamatory three note gesture that is echoed in gradually quieter repetitions and motivic reorientations, evolving into a fantasy of arpeggiated harmonies and brief statements of an angular dance-like theme. The second Intermezzo features quirky grace note figures, brash Bartók pizzicati, and strident minor second dyads, capturing a dry humor. The final movement is elegiac, as repeated tones serve as an anchor around which the guitar builds a musical rhetoric filled with pathos.

The album's title piece for flute, percussion, cello, and piano, Walk with me, my joy, is a set of variations and reflections on an Irish folksong, "Shule Agra." Pesca's mother sung this lullaby to him as a child, and it has stayed with him as a musical landmark of his childhood experience. The Prelude features a lilting ostinato figure built around an ascending major second in the piano and vibraphone, over which the flute and clarinet play lyrical melodic phrases. It reaches an impassioned climax before dispersing into a thoughtful, nostalgic final phrase. The disarmingly simple theme is presented in the flute over a haunting texture of bowed vibraphone and cello glissandi. A series of nine variations follow in varying textural frames, from the pointillistic lightness of Variation 2, the watery fluidity of the solo piano Variation 3, the mysterious halo of Variation 5, the ardent cello-led Variation 6, the quirky interplay between marimba and flute and cello in Variation 7, the quasi-canonic groove in Variation 8, to the glimmering pastels of Variation 9. The Finale and Variation 10 are combined, a gracious and energetic culmination of the previous movements, skillfully orchestrated to take advantage of the colors inherent in this instrumentation. The Epilogue allows the energy from the close of the previous movement to diffuse into the ether, closing on a clarion unison sustained pitch between flute and vibraphone.

– Dan Lippel