Vishnu

SONOLOCO

This CD from innovative composer run label Innova in St. Paul, Minnesota, fits well into my collection of eastern classical music, that I’ve so far mostly gotten from labels like Ocora, Auvidis and Maison des Cultures du Monde. The gamelan, Javanese brand, which gets the first track going, is vibrant and beautiful as any other gamelan CD I’ve heard. The voice that comes in after a while, belonging to Hyunah Yu, lyric-coloratura soprano from South Korea, is a give-away though, to the fact that this is a highly western production. Her singing, though following somewhat eastern lines of melody, is in itself expressing the tune in a western way, with a certain vibrato that is not audible in eastern singing from the gamelan part of the world. This is no drawback, though, since this is a western production, and this combination of a western kind of voice and eastern instruments gives a special excitement to the recordings.