Tulevaisuus
Mackenzie Melemed
Bright Shiny Things BSTC-0227 (brightshiny.ninja/tulevaisuus)
Finnish for “future,” Tulevaisuus is the title of an engaging and moving recital of music from the 18th to the 21st centuries by American pianist Mackenzie Melemed. A disparate combination of music at first glance, Melemed pairs works from the classical canon by Bach, Liszt, and Brahms with contemporary works that respond to these older works.
Melemed employs a wide range of tone colour for Bach’s Prelude and Fugue in B-flat Minor (from book one of the Well-Tempered Clavier). His beautiful control of textures and contrasts in the following Prelude and Fugue by Stephen Hough is proof that this music is effective even in hands other than Hough’s own. Not linked by title alone, Hough’s fugue features a sudden re-appearance of the opening motif from Bach’s prelude at its climax. Liszt’s Funérailles is suitably dramatic and brooding, if lighter in texture than normally heard. Laura Kaminsky’s Threnody… October 2024 follows with dramatic use of sonority and a bell-like resonance which recalls Liszt’s own dramatically tolling work.
In Brahms’ early Variations on a Theme by Schumann, Melemed gives a performance of sombre lyricism, a mood that continues in Avner Dorman’s Lament and Variations, which quotes directly from the Brahms in the course of an emotional arc that ranges from sorrow to resilience, and concludes in peaceful stillness.
Drawing these works together is an overall mood of elegiac reflection. Liszt’s Funérailles was inspired by the failed Hungarian Revolution of 1848, Brahms’ variations were composed in the aftermath of Schumann’s attempted suicide by drowning, Dorman’s work is dedicated to the victims of the October 2023 attack in Israel, and Kaminsky’s Threnody was written in response to the incessant conflict of our present time.
