Angela & Jennifer Chun - Philip Glass - In The Summer House, Mad Rush; Nico Muhly - Four Studies, Honest Music (2016) [24-88.2]

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Angela & Jennifer Chun - Philip Glass - In The Summer House, Mad Rush; Nico Muhly - Four Studies, Honest Music (2016) [24-88.2]

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The music on this recital was specifically written or arranged for duo violinists Angela and Jennifer Chun. It highlights the personal and professional connections between Philip Glass and Nico Muhly, a longtime colleague and admirer of Glass's work. Glass's miniaturist works, Mad Rush and In the Summer House, create a maximum effect when paired with Muhly's minimalist Four Studies and Honest Music.

The sister duo of Jennifer and Angela Chun is to be commended for imaginative commissions, and the music on this Harmonia Mundi release is no exception. The growing fame of American composer Nico Muhly has rested in substantial part on choral music and its large British contemporary repertoire in particular, but he worked as Philip Glass' copyist, and the influence exerted by American minimalism on Muhly's music snaps into focus with this release. In the Four Studies, the only totally original work of the four on the album, the influence comes perhaps more from Steve Reich than from Glass, with the precisely executed, phase-shifting counterpoint of the Chun sisters above Muhly's own keyboard foundation. The other Muhly piece, Honest Music, is an intriguing transcription: a remaking of an original for violin and electronics into a work for two violins. Muhly perhaps outdoes his mentor here: the two works by Philip Glass are a bit less successful than his own, both transcriptions. Mad Rush is a two-violin version of an early piano piece (1979, based on a still earlier organ work). It's pure minimalist Glass and effective enough in a violin version, but In the Summer House, a 1993 suite of incidental music for voice, violin, cello, and synthesizer, does not really succeed as abstract music and is not enhanced by the transcription. Enhancement does come from Harmonia Mundi's sound, recorded at an auditorium at Drew University in New Jersey; even more so than the well-engineered recordings on Glass' own Orange Mountain Music label, it gives the music clean, abstract lines.