This trio of Korean-born sisters sits astride two marketing trends in classical music, turning heads both with their haute-couture duds (and good looks) and with their genre-bending unorthodoxy -- their concerts intersperse repertory standards with rock numbers, crossover material like
Astor Piazzolla, and contemporary works, some composed for the group. Ahn-Plugged, their new CD, strengthens both these aspects of their emerging identity. On the cover, the sisters, known for rollerblading around lower Manhattan, gallivant across a city street carrying a white, graffiti-covered cello case. Inside is an assortment of contemporary pieces, only one of them (
Leonard Bernstein's youthful Trio of 1937) in more than one movement. "Here," we learn from the notes, "different styles of music co-exist to be shared and experienced by all without any rigid rules." That means a bevy of Neo-Romantic pieces;
Michael Nyman's The Heart Asks Pleasure First is already well known from its use in the art-film hit The Piano. There are two works by
Piazzolla, the Argentine tango-classical fusionist whose work is enjoying an extraordinary revival, an arrangement of a 1985 David Bowie recording made with the Pat Metheny Group, and works by Henji Bunch and
Eric Ewazen that add percussion to the trio.