Mugam Sayagi: Music of Franghiz Ali-Zadeh

1	Oasis, for string quartet
2	Apsheron Quintet, for pia
3	Apsheron Quintet, for pia
4	Music for Piano
5	Mugam Sayagi, for string
Mugam Sayagi: Music of Franghiz Ali-Zadeh
1.	Oasis, for string quartet 13:26
	Composed by Franghiz Ali-Zadeh
	Performed by Kronos Quartet
2.	Apsheron Quintet, for piano quintet 19:06
	Composed by Franghiz Ali-Zadeh
	Performed by Kronos Quartet and Franghiz Ali-Zadeh
3.	Music for Piano 7:38
	Composed by Franghiz Ali-Zadeh
	Performed by Franghiz Ali-Zadeh
4.	Mugam Sayagi, for string quartet 21:20
	Composed by Franghiz Ali-Zadeh
	Performed by Kronos Quartet, Scott Fraser, Scott Fraser and Bonnie Barnett

Barnes & Noble

After more than 30 years in the new-music trenches, the Kronos Quartet have earned our trust: If they champion an unknown composer's work, it's because the music urgently deserves to be heard. That's certainly the case with Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, a native of the former Soviet republic of Azerbaijan whose eloquent music is poised between the Middle East and the modernist West. Kronos's collaboration with Ali-Zadeh dates back more than a decade, and three of her highly original works for the quartet are featured here. From the Western instruments she elicits sounds redolent of Azeri tradition, whether by means of ancient scales or colorful extended techniques. Oasis (1998) begins with the quiet tones of dripping water, suggesting a hallucinated respite from the harsh desert. Indeed, the play between expressive sorrow and luminous illusion is central to this work -- which bears no resemblance to the 19th-century exotica that claimed to portray this region of the world, such as Borodin's In the Steppes of Central Asia. In Ali-Zadeh's Apsheron Quintet (2001) -- for which the composer joins the ensemble on piano -- the interaction between instruments is scintillating and strikingly free. Metaphors of nature and landscape are irresistible, especially in the mysteriously immobile second movement, "Reverse Time." Ali-Zadeh performs solo on her equally evocative Music for Piano (1989), in which a portion of the instrument's register is prepared to rattle like the traditional tar. Finally, the alternately melancholy and aggressive arch of Mugam Sayagi (1993) lays claim explicitly to the complex Azeri style of mugam, which provides material for much of Ali-Zadeh's work. Kronos's long association with the composer allows them an obvious mastery of her idiom, and their fine performances make this one of the most ear-opening discs of new music in recent memory. Scott Paulin

All Music Guide

Some people would quickly run away from the music of someone who claims to admire the music of Berg, Crumb, and Cage. Franguiz Ali-Zadeh admires all of those composers and uses similar techniques in her composition, but she also finds inspiration in the music of her native Azerbaijan. With all of this, she creates especially evocative, picturesque works that invite listening more than once. "Oasis," the opening work on this disc of her music featuring the Kronos Quartet, begins extremely quietly with water droplets, and then the quartet enters with desolate harmonics, depicting the desolation of the desert. Later in the piece, voices of those taking refuge in the oasis are heard. Ali-Zadeh's music is full of sounds beyond that of the traditionally played instruments of the string quartet and the piano, sounds that enhance and become part of the music. Sometimes it is techniques such as pizzicato, harmonics, col legno, or preparing or playing the strings of the piano; other times it is added instruments, as in "Mugam Sayagi," or recorded sound, as in "Oasis." The music itself is tightly constructed, but the scalar nature and the microtones of the Azerbaijani inflections give it a sense of freedom and improvisation, as in the title work and in the first movement of the "Apsheron Quintet." "Music for Piano" is an example of how Ali-Zadeh likes to contrast moods, giving the listener just enough time to absorb and get a feel for how the music is describing a particular mood, before heading into the next one, more often than not, with abruptness. For that work, she prepared the piano by placing a bead necklace on the strings, creating a further contrast between the sound of a piano and that of an Azerbaijani tar (a lute-like instrument), between the modern and the ancient. Ali-Zadeh's music is captivating because of the mixture of sounds and textures, moods and pictures. The Kronos Quartet, as always, takes naturally to this new music, instinctively grasping what it is that makes it work, bringing it to life and convincing those who don't trust new music that there are things in it worth appreciating. Patsy Morita

Gramophone

Austere at some times and freely emotive at others, Ali-Zadeh's music reveals a distinctly non-Western voice that has thoroughly digested what the West has to offer. Except, that is, a modernist sense of personal detachment. Ken Smith

The New Yorker

[A] gorgeous object and one of the best things the quartet has done. Alex Ross