Vijay Iyer – Trouble
Jennifer Koh; Boston Modern Orchestra Project; Gil Rose
BMOP Sound 1099 (bmop.org/audio-recordings/vijay-iyer-trouble)
I like it when a composer admits they have trouble finding their way to what they eventually write. While the product in no way betrays difficulty, if the search is somewhat successful, it’s there anyway, because no doubt what provoked them to write the piece is indeed troubling. Such is the case with Vijay Iyer’s new release (in italics this time), Trouble. He approaches the role of orchestral composer as something of an outsider, but one who brings vital new material inside.
Asunder (2017) opens the disc with worrisome momentum (the first movement is called Agitated), a pulsing major third that passes from voice to voice. I grew more and more anxious as his ideas provoked me to see the worst outcomes, to fear the things to come. But I also just enjoy hearing his textures play out, an urgent though mindless race, all the voices like commuters on the same narrow path. Written for and premiered by the Orpheus Ensemble, it travels quite a way from its opening unease through subsequent movements Patient & Mysterious, Calm & Precise and Lush. Iyer found inspiration in the collaborative non-hierarchic ensemble’s working method; Asunder evolves.
Once more for everyone in the back, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project led by Gil Rose is fantastic. As is the violinist soloist Jennifer Koh in the title work, an alien voice within a landed chorus. Guiding Iyer towards rethinking the genre (he admits to having had doubts about writing a typical concerto form), Koh shared her experience of being an “artist of color in the U.S… nearly a year in the making, Trouble (2017) remains, for me, one of my most layered... intense works,” the composer writes in his liner notes.
Crisis Modes (2018), a work for strings and percussion, closes the disc. It’s simply gorgeous, while still infused with the unease that colours the whole disc. Iyer wrote all three works in the years of Trump’s first administration, as an American of Colour aware of the suddenness with which things can turn. It’s no surprise that the themes are of dysphoria and doubt.
