Editorial Reviews

Here San Francisco's Del Sol Quartet (a curious name for an ensemble from that fog-bound city) sets itself an ambitious goal: the definition of musical commonalities in contemporary works from around the Pacific "Ring of Fire," the seismically active countries of the Pacific Rim. The program that results holds lessons for other chamber groups, and the performances are all accurate and sympathetic, even in the notoriously difficult "Epicycle" of New Zealand composer Jack Body. The group's biggest step is to go beyond the usual influences from Indonesian and Chinese sources to suggest a wider set of parameters. These include not only cyclical structures, evident in broadly minimalist works from both sides of the Pacific (and John Adams, despite his New England roots, has certainly engaged himself enough with Pacific themes to qualify), but also folk song roots, evident not only in several Asian works but in Gabriela Lena Frank's "Leyendas: An Andean Walkabout," presented, as are several other works here, in excerpted form. Several works, notably Cambodian composer Chinary Ung's "Spiral X: In Memoriam," are political in nature, something that is still rare enough in the conceptual and systematic works of the Atlantic sphere. The disc concludes with an improvisation by the quartet itself. It's an interesting idea, but you want it to somehow summarize the themes of the program, and there's no way it can do that. The program is nevertheless fully capable of standing on its own, and the engineering and booklet notes by Berkeley, CA, composer Charles Amirkhanian are added attractions. James Manheim, All Music Guide

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