Phil Salathé: Imaginary Birds: Music for Oboe & English Horn
Ravello Records

If I say that the most appealing thing about Imaginary Birds is its oboe-and-English horn performances, it's not meant as any slight against Phil Salathé's prowess as a composer. It's simply that recordings featuring those instruments in lead roles are rare, and as a result the American composer's release is all the more satisfying for granting oboist Ling-Fei Kang and English hornist Charles Huang a generous forum. Imaginary Birds follows its opening work with four others featuring different configurations, but with either one or both of Kang and Huang participating in the five performances, a feeling of cohesiveness is maintained throughout.

Salathé, who studied composition at Bennington College, the Hartt School, and Stony Brook University (where he received his doctorate in 2014), is a man of multiple talents and moods. The now-faculty member of SUNY Potsdam's Crane School of Music writes everything from chamber and orchestral pieces to hand-programmed ‘chiptunes' for video game formats and can even boast of having appeared on Jeopardy! (he won an episode, incidentally). As Imaginary Birds illustrates, he's as comfortable writing a dramatic work as one more lighthearted—don't be surprised, for example, if a smile crosses your face at certain moments during the opening piece, Mandarin Ducks.

Given that the latter creatures are known for their lifelong fidelity, it's fitting that the recently betrothed Kang and Huang should be the players involved. The work comprises seven enchanting movements; while frivolity's definitely in play, Salathé weaves into the writing techniques such as multiphonics, circular breathing, and indeterminacy to keep things interesting. A programmatic quality pervades it (something not exclusive to this piece alone), the composer evoking musically actions of various associative kinds. The duo's playing instantly endears when one voice shadows the other's in “Playing in the Water,” the impression created of creatures reveling in each other's company. Angry interactions disrupt the carefree tone of the opener, however, when a slug appears to induce squabbling, whereas “Brooding Over a Sick Mate” and “Nesting by the Lake” add Stravinsky-like and folk-tinged dimensions, respectively, to the work.

Its title derived from a passage in Robert Schumann letter to his future wife, Clara Wieck, The Heart That Loves But Once finds Salathé segueing from the light-heartedness of Mandarin Ducks to material more dramatic. The sound design changes, too, with Huang now accompanied by viola, harp, and piano/celesta for the single-movement setting. Alternately ponderous, agitated, and rhapsodic, the material fluctuates between moods, as if reflecting the emotional turbulence of an unsettled relationship, the keening viola contrasting sharply with the ethereal sonorities of the celesta and the stabilizing presence of the piano. The Wood Between the Worlds, on the other hand, takes its name from the mysterious forest in The Magician's Nephew, the first book in C. S. Lewis's Chronicles of Narnia, and is thus suitably mystical and wide-eyed. Structured in ten concise parts, it augments oboe and English horn with cello and piano and ranges widely between settings ponderous (“A dead world under a dying sun”), anarchic (“A world ruled by machines”), and magical (“A world shrouded in forest”), a tendency consistent with pools in Lewis's forest that provide gateways to different locales.

Three miniatures written in 2018 for Huang, Imaginary Birds of the Frozen North sees him evoking an ostrich intent on staving off intruders from its home (“Lesser Snow Ostrich”), an anxious dodo perhaps aware at some inchoate level of impending extinction (“Great Northern Wandering Dodo”), and a lonely screech owl calling out longingly, perhaps for a mate (“Sub-Arctic Screech Owl”). The album's prettiest piece, Expecting the Spring Breeze, arrives last and thus functions as something of a three-minute encore. It isn't, however, a composition by Salathé but instead a touching ballad by Teng Yu-hsien in a Salathé arrangement performed by Kang with guitarist John Birt. Any album whose reference points include a Taiwanese musician, Lewis's Narnia saga, exotic ducks and birds, and Robert Schumann is eclectic, to say the least, yet Imaginary Birds is held together by Salathé's sensibility. Certainly the recording's broad scope complements a composer who himself acknowledges that eclecticism and juxtaposition have infused his musical life.

February 2019