TALLA ROUGE | MUSICAL AMERICA - REVIEW

NEW CHAMBER MUSIC

by: Clive Paget | November 2024

Shapes in Collective Space is an all-world-premieres album by Talla Rouge, aka inventive viola duo Aria Cheregosha and Lauren Spaulding. Leilehua Lanzilotti’s “silhouette, mirror” shares material from her “with eyes the color of time,” the Kanaka Maoli composer’s work for string orchestra that was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Music. It’s presented here with an ethereal refinement and tranquility.

Although this recording was partly motivated by losing a family member to dementia, there’s fun too, as in Karl Mitze’s “Seesaw,’’ a toe-tapping exploration of how baby brains bounce around when free of grownup concerns. Threaded through the program is “Navazi,” a series of ‘’composed improvisations’’ by Kian Ravaei that draw on Iranian classical modes. It’s a distinctive sound world entered into with impressive sensitivity.

Gemma Peacocke’s iridescent “Fluorescein” is named for a fluorescent compound used to track magnitude, direction, and circulation patterns within another fluid. The two violas coil and flicker as they dance around each other with water-tight synchronicity. There’s a boppy, almost baroque energy to Gala Flagello’s “Burn as Brightly”; an abandoned freedom to composer Inti Figgis-Vizueta’s “shapes in collective space”; and a thoughtful stillness and intensity to Akshaya Avril Tucker’s “Breathing Sunlight,” a ten-minute rumination inspired by the music and dance traditions of South Asia. A smart and really rather cool project, it is ideally presented in natural binaural sound and really shines on headphones.