This article originally appeared in Issue 50:1 (Sept/Oct 2026) of Fanfare Magazine.

Ensemble for These Times seeks to champion marginalized or forgotten composers. Here, the players turn their attention to Latin America in a stimulating selection of works spread across two discs.

I enjoyed Claudia Montero’s Buenos Aires, despierta y sueña on pianist Isabel Dobarro’s Grad Piano disc, Kaleidoscope (Fanfare 48:5), and her three-movement Buenos Aires en tres (2016, for piano trio) is just as satisfying, the energy of the outer movements contrasting with the pulsatings of the central “Intenso y pesante” and its later, leaden peace. Margaret Halbig, piano, Lylia Guion, violin, and Megan Chartier, cello work superbly well together as a team. The recording would benefit from a touch more depth, but it does carry detail well.

Chartier is the superb cellist for the solo work Milontan by José Bragato, joined, after an extended soliloquy, by Halbig. Bragato makes his Fanfare debut here, and his music is fetchingly lyrical and tonal with some jazz elements, including a walking bass in piano. That was published in 2001; published two years earlier, his Dos canciones argentinas (with Nanette McGuiness) offers a similar sense of easy flow. McGuiness’s vibrato is a touch intrusive, but the music is certainly worth hearing.

I really wanted Gabriela Ortiz’s piece to work. My previous major experiences with Ortiz’s music have both been negative, but both were larger pieces: the Trumpet Concerto, “Altar de Bornce” (Paco Flores/Philharmonia Orchestra/Payare) and the Violin Concerto, “Altar de cuerda” (LAPO/Dudamel, both concerts heard in London), finding them both over-gestural and lacking in depth. Writing for solo piano and within a short duration of some four minutes, one would hope concision would be her pal, but not so. The music appears diffuse and insubstantial, despite Halbig’s ferocious advocacy.

Tania León’s Elegia a Paul Robeson was written in 1987, a warm, immersive bath of a piece for piano trio. Inspired by her grandmother’s love of Robeson, León’s piece is tender, heartfelt, and lovely. A slightly warmer recording would have sealed the deal, though. Her piano piece Tumbao, superbly played by Halbig, is energetic, spiky, like an etude with ambition for greater things.

I have only come across one piece before by Angélica Negrón, her Cooper and Emma on Jennifer Koh’s disc Alone Together (Fanfare 45:3) where, again, her music nestled next to some of León’s. The title here means “Recurring Dreams, I see Fast Cars.” Only the second piece the composer ever wrote, it is gnomic in a Satie-like way, and Halbig treats it as such. Negrón’s melancholy is more South American than Satie’s, though.

I get the impression the next composer is capital letter–averse: not only is the title the motion between three worlds all lower case, but so is the composer’s name, inti figgis-vizueta. From the description of the score, the performer, cellist Megan Chartier, has a fair amount of freedom. Composed in 2020, this is a piece that focuses on liminality: the player is asked to “always be moving between.” It is a fairly diverting soliloquy, and my admiration goes to Chartier’s clear devotion and virtuosity. In total contrast comes the lightheartedness of Gabriela Lena Frank’s Manhattan Serenades for cello and piano. There are three: “Uptown,” “Midtown,” and “Downtown.” It is the perfect close to the first disc, jazz-infused and gritty in the first instance, quieter in the second, an exploration of descent in the piano against which the cello spins a cantabile line (although sudden crescendos and changes of articulation imply there is an underlying anger, perhaps), and lastly a quirky tipping of the hat in the final “Downtown.” Manhattan Serenades is perfectly placed to close the first disc.

Two vocal items kick off the short second disc, both from Carla Lucero’s 2019 chamber opera Juana (inspired by the poet Sor Juana née de la Cruz), heard in arrangements for soprano and piano, and piano trio. These are obviously arrangements, in that the music seeks constantly to expand, either timbrally or dynamically. And yet the hints we get of these pieces are tantalizing indeed, and soprano Chelsea Hollow has the sharp edge that suits this music well. The (vocalist-free) second aria for trio actually works better, as if the challenge of creating an instrumental version created a finer musical experience. The music seeks to burst out again, but now into dance.

I believe the music of Brennan Stokes to be new to me, but hope I will hear more. His The Unseen is a song cycle about loss, illness, and identity, setting the great poet, Sara Teasdale. The music is infused with regret, and Hollow’s voice suddenly occupies vaster spaces. While the texts chart Teasdale’s feelings of isolation, loneliness, and angst, the emotions map perfectly onto the COVID-19 times (the cycle was written in 2021). The titular track “The Unseen,” with its ticking of time in the piano, its disjunctions and spoken lines, is a clear highlight. There is much imagination here, not least in the piano writing of “Gray Fog,” but overall it feels as if it is Teasdale’s words that have the greatest power, the greater memorability. Hollow’s talents are certainly tested, especially in the extreme upper register, and she shows herself a fine interpreter.

A slightly mixed twofer, then, but rewarding overall. Documentation is detailed and useful. Colin Clarke

This article originally appeared in Issue 50:1 (Sept/Oct 2026) of Fanfare Magazine.

Inspired by Real Life: America by the Attacca Quartet, and other great studio albums, Friction Quartet commissioned a sequence of works in the wake of COVID-19, of which several are presented here. Friction Quartet comprises Otis Harriel and Kevin Rogers, violins; Mitso Floor, viola; and Doug Machiz, cello. As things opened up again, it became clear that the way most people listened to music had changed; now we are even more tech-bound. So the emphasis here is very much on the studio recording and resultant experience: the ability to be “close” to all four instruments at the same time, a shift from a natural blending acoustic like, say, London’s Wigmore Hall. It also meant the studio and production becomes part of the art itself. Two studios were used, Skywalker Sound (a large space: Wiancko and Dowling), and Tiny Telephone (the clue is in the name).

Speaking of names, “proper” nostalgia is distinguished from more generalized “nostalgia” here, referring to a sort of private reflection: Rodriguez’s work does this (specifically for childhood), but there is certainly a sense of longing in parts of Wiancko’s piece (particularly the last “Part”). Not to be confused with Paul Wiancko (whose Waterworks turned up on a violin/piano disc on Orchid, reviewed in Fanfare 48:4), composer/violinist/creator (to quote her website) Michi Wiancko offers the four-part DIRTWORK. It is no surprise to learn that Wiancko is good at film music (the dark comedy short I’m In Here by Willy Berliner, freely available via a link from that website, is well worth a watch, a disturbing study in over-quiescence and its consequences). The music in DIRTWORK is hugely atmospheric: the title refers to the “work done by strong and stubborn hands” (to quote the liner notes), and the strains and low energies associated with that seem foregrounded in the first part/movement, against the frenetic activity of the second (brilliantly executed by Friction Quartet, and simultaneously a vindication of the stated aesthetic of the release with its deliberate close miking). The third part is the “slow movement,” solo instruments holding an appealing melodic line against pizzicato from the remaining players. The finale buzzes with energy through notated repeated notes ceding to dyads, a nod to Minimalism, surely, but Wiancko is much more than that. The close recording is certainly involving and, I assume, deliberately dry, while the performance is incessantly involving.

Next up, Texan composer Andrew M. Rodriguez makes his Fanfare debut with the titular track, Proper Nostalgia. The first movement (of six) opens up a whole load of space in its opening interval drones against which soloists can (seemingly) improvise. Only at a crescendo is there an unexpected plethora of arpeggio. Rodriguez delves deeper into the commission’s very ethos: he uses home recordings of the quartet (“DIY” recordings of the instrumentalists in their homes). He also explores electronic manipulation of sound, including white noise. Overdubbing is part of his repertoire of tricks. The overall effect is wide-ranging, for sure, intended to bring in questions of memory: how we remember an event, and the relationship of that memory to the original “reality.” The manipulation of acoustic space is here, too: the distinct added reverb to the third movement, for example.

An all-Schankler disc, also on Aerocade, was multiply covered by myself and two of my colleagues in Fanfare 43:2. I also reviewed Schankler’s piece Pheromone, which was also the title of Meerenai Shim’s Aerocade disc (which seems to have launched the label: the catalog number is “001”). And is there a better title for a piece than Alien Warp Etude (Fanfare 37:5)? Here, we have unveiling, consisting of four movements: ideation; agitation; congregation; and capitulation. “Agitation” is certainly a musical encapsulation of just that in a technically stunning performance, and the smaller acoustic of Tiny Telephone underlines the constraints of lockdown (the piece is described as a “scream in the face of police brutality and state violence”). “Congregation” is something of a funeral march, a pizzicato cello providing the slow tread against a much quieter, somewhat emaciated sustained chord. It is highly effective; “capitulation” in its strummings.

Alex Dowling is a Fanfare debutant with Inner Orbits; he has previously produced a fascinating work for string quartets, Breathers, which is intended to facilitate breathwork and meditation. Here, Inner Orbits uses material from a previous electroacoustic work, but reimagined for acoustic instruments (and taking in their constraints as positives). The claim of the liner notes is that Dowling’s piece captures “the ineffable music that exists between the notes.” I am not quite on board with that, but there is a certain blanched, slow-moving quality that puts me in mind of Alaskan composer John Luther Adams. The performance is beautifully calibrated and balanced, and textures are perfectly realized.

A multifaceted disc that introduces four thought-provoking pieces in highly accomplished performances. Colin Clarke