The listener interested in the somewhat vexing question of the relationship between music and visual art has various choices on the market. The releases on France's Alpha label, pairing compositions from the Renaissance to the early Romantic period with nicely reproduced and analyzed paintings that touch on similar aesthetic issues, are especially recommended. But this little American album also has a distinctive contribution to make. The Montage Music Society chamber group has assembled four contemporary works, all multi-movement pieces in which each movement is based on a painting. The paintings are all quite well known, and reproductions of some of them appear in the booklet. This approach is diametrically opposed to that in the Alpha set, substituting direct programmatic evocation for deeper currents. The strength of the musical-visual connection varies over the length of the program. Perhaps the most satisfying piece is Libby Larsen's Black Birds, Red Hills, subtitled "A Portrait of Six Paintings of Georgia O'Keeffe." Nowhere is it explained why there are only five movements, but they do evoke both the massive forms of O'Keeffe's Western landscapes and the smaller details (such as a blackbird) that are set against them. Matthew Harris's Starry Night is a piano trio in seven movements, each based on a famous Post-Impressionist or early modern painting; the first is the ubiquitous Starry Night of Van Gogh. Harris forges a Post-Impressionist language of his own that's not too obvious in its musical descriptions but nevertheless capable of conveying unique atmospheres. Sample the gnarly, slightly loopy textures of the sixth "painting," Dali's "The Persistence of Memory" (track 6), for an example. The other two works are perhaps less likely to be connected by listeners to their visual sources; Andrew List, working from a set of metaphysically titled Gauguin canvases in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, ignores the works' Tahitian setting. Nevertheless, the performers bring obvious enthusiasm for the project to their playing, and this is a release that any museum education office ought to have in its collection.
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