TOWER: Chamber and Solo Music - Tokyo Quartet, Chee-Yun; Chen, Melvin; Emelianoff, André; Neubauer, Paul; Oppens, Ursula; Tower, Joan; Woodhams, Richard

Joan Tower’s bold and energetic music, with its striking imagery and novel structural forms, has won her large, enthusiastic audiences. She is a performing musician and writes for other instrumentalists with great sensitivity and understanding, as demonstrated by the works on this disc. The string quartet In Memory is a piece about death and grief, inspired by the loss of a close friend, and the victims of the 11th September terrorist attacks. Big Sky is a rapt and intimate portrait of an American landscape, while Wild Purple is a virtuosic piece for viola that highlights the often neglected “wild side” of the instrument. The four piano pieces, each with a title taken from John Ashbery’s poem No Longer Very Clear, are variously calm and hugely kinetic, but always surprising. The disc ends with Island Prelude, a sensuous piece with a tropical island setting.

Tower, Joan

 In Memory

 Big Sky

 Wild Purple

 No Longer Very Clear

 Island Prelude