Adagio para Amantaní (2007)

Taking its title from a “beautiful and barren” island in Lake Titicaca, the Adagio para Amantani takes the form of an extended, hushed and intimate cadenza for rippling piano and ruminative cello alone. In sharp contrast, the finale, ‘T’inku’ (a curiously counterintuitive manifestation of compadrazgo that takes the form of a ritualistic fight) justifies the bristling combative spirit by bringing the mock-feud to a cohesive conclusion.

Gabriela Lena Frank is the real deal: a modern composer with a personal style, one that manages to integrate a wide range of sounds and performing techniques into a cohesive language that unapologetically includes melody and tonal harmony without ever sounding anachronistic. She clearly manages to remain true to herself, but she doesn't have to write down to her listeners in order to share her thoughts and feelings. This is just good music.

Adagio para Amantaní (for cello and piano) is a soulful meditation inspired by an island landscape in the middle of Lake Titicaca.

The performances, with the composer's participation where the piano joins in, and presumably her supervision where it does not, are uniformly excellent, and so are the sonics. A wonderful disc of inventive, fresh, characterful music, plain and simple.

Frank's one-movement Adagio para Amantani for cello and piano (2007) is basically a sonic postcard. Frank wrote it after visiting the island of Amantani, located in the middle of Lake Titicaca between Peru and Bolivia. The island is beautiful yet barren, and it inspired Frank to write the CD's most intense music. Indeed, she drenches the Adagio's repeated piano notes with lots of sustaining pedal, suggesting a kind of cold, languid landscape. The cello's long-breathed melodies capture the island's aching loneliness. Frank and Walker perform the piece with heartrending emotion.