Tanya Ekanayaka
18 Piano Sutras; 25 South Asian Pianisms
Tanya Ekanayaka (piano) Naxos World NXW76163-2 133:16 mins (2 discs)
Ekanayaka describes this double-album as ‘a slow journey, beginning in my childhood, of seeking, discernment, discovery, renewal, vision, thought, compassion, gratitude, and hope’. What more could she add? Actually a lot. The compositions here, all by her, have been ‘inspired by 40 spectacular languages and 42 secular songs… with each song containing lyrics in one of the languages’. Bilingual Dr Ekanayaka is at pains to tell us – in the tone of a kindly New Age therapist – of her desire to create piano music which reflects ‘the mind of a South Asian female’, and also the ‘multilingual multi-cultures and tapestries of my life, peoples and spaces’ in this ‘indigenisation’ of the piano.
Enough? By no means. Each of her 43 little pieces gets a learned liner-note commentary on the endangered language of the place which inspired it, plus a verbal evocation of the mood she wants to establish. Some ‘ponder aspects of longing and nostalgia’, others ‘celebrate the expansiveness of the skies’; the trouble is that many of her evocations are interchangeable. And that is because most of the pieces express the same mood.
We never hear the languages or the folk songs she purports to celebrate – we never get a whiff of local colour – because everything is put through the same musical mangle. This music is unscored, and might as well have been improvised: it depends on a handful of subdebussy, sub-ravel effects – tweaks, twiddles and arpeggiations – whose relentless repetition creates a numbing blandness. Michael Church PERFORMANCE ★★★
RECORDING ★★★