07 Petrified Forest ProjectThe Petrified Forest Project
Rhonda Rider
Ravello Records RR8103 (ravellorecords.com/catalog/rr8103)

Cellist Rhonda Rider is no stranger to playing in interesting locations, having been Artist-in-Residence previously at the Grand Canyon in 2011, and later at the Petrified Forest National Park in 2015. As cello professor at Boston Conservatory at Berklee, she brings her vast experiences with classical and contemporary performance, enabling her to explore these newly commissioned compositions with skill and ease. The connection to the beautiful surroundings is clearly evident throughout the album, as Rider pairs the compositions with each setting that inspired them, in this 200-million-year-old ecosystem.

The album opens with Raven Chacon’s Invisible Arc, inspired by a traditional Navajo hunting song, and Laurie San Martin’s Vast steppe, based on Gregorian Chant, which includes changing the cello’s tuning and some improvisations juxtaposing old and new, as does the park itself. Kurt Rohde’s credo petrified for amplified cello is a beautiful lamenting conversation that considers “the unadorned ritual of forgotten deaths… dying its own gradual death at a glacial pace becoming sonic dust.” Pari is a four-movement suite by Mischa Salkind-Pearl that takes its movement titles from flora native to the park; a delicate composition sketching the thriving nature of these seeds in such a dry area. 

The theme of old and new continues with Verklärtes Holz (Transfigured Wood). Beginning with the title, a reference to Arnold Schoenberg’s Verklärte Nacht, it illustrates the parallels between natural and artificial processes of transformation: the petrified wood beginning as living redwoods, swept away by floods, buried and mineralized; vs wood over time becoming a cello, a picturesque description in three movements and a fitting addition to an album both based on wood and performed on wood. The album ends with Ian Gottleib’s Meditation on Impatience, and Rider passionately portrays the colourful, cinematic exploration of layers of sediment in the forest’s Badlands of this truly ancient ecological wonder.

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