Fanfare Magazine‘s Peter Burwasser has a new review for Nadia Shpachenko’s Quotations and Homages recording in their July/August 2018 issue:
“This highly attractive and frequently delightful CD is a clever concept program.… Shpachenko bookends the collection with the music of Tom Flaherty, in works of very different emotional impact, one serious and the other whimsical, reflecting a similar variety in the balance of the program. His Rainbow Tangle is a rich and colorful reflection of the music of Messiaen, honoring the prismatic tonalities of the French master. Igor to Please also shows off Flaherty’s fine sense for timbre blending, featuring some of the most successful use of toy piano I have heard (sorry, John Cage), in music that transforms a sinister motif from The Rite of Spring into a work of almost naïve joy. Shpachenko here is joined by five other pianists (Genevieve Feiwen Lee, Vicki Ray, Aron Kallay, Sarah Gibson, and Thomas Kotcheff) in a work scored for six pianists on two toy pianos, two pianos, and electronics. One other work also includes these additional musicians: James Matheson’s Bagatelle, a reconsideration of music from Beethoven’s “Eroica,” for six pianists and three pianos. Elsewhere we get Missy Mazzoli’s blistering homage to Brahms in full molto dramatico voice, as she captures the moods of high Romanticism with harmonic constructions for a modern ear. Daniel Felsenfeld goes outside the world of classical music for his inspiration, with a bold reimagining of the music of rock’s Velvet Underground. Peter Yates also steps outside of traditional boundaries, with a superficially simplistic set of four brief pieces with thoughtful prose narrated over a quietly jangly solo piano part. Back to the classics we go with Adam Borecki’s Accidental Mozart, a theme from Sonata Facile with eight variations, each associated with a cocktail (the composer recommends consuming them all, but only if performed after 5 pm). Nick Norton’s homage to the late Elliott Carter is, appropriately, stunningly virtuosic, and fast as blazes, flying by at 15 seconds in this reading. Russian-born composer Vera Ivanova presents six compact and highly effective portraits of composers she admires, namely, Ustvolskaya, Prokofiev, Feldman, Gubaidulina, Kurtág, Debussy, and Satie. The dramatic concision and careful construction of her music is very impressive. Shpachenko is a brilliant and thoughtful artist. There is a huge range of dramatic and technical effects within this collection, and she captures them all with remarkable precision and expressivity. The recording is exceptionally lifelike, as to be expected from this “audiophile” label.. In all, this is a most invigorating and distinctive release.”