Red Rain
Red Rain, a collection of solo instrumental works by Huang Ruo, offers an in-depth portrait of a composer who has made significant marks across all genres of art music. These pieces display a creative and inventive variety of colors, timbres, and musical poetry for single instruments that echo his chamber, orchestral and operatic works. Huang Ruo draws on diverse sources of inspiration to create a unique, fascinating, and timeless artistic voice.
These pieces explore vast, echoing musical spaces: spiky, driving rhythmic drama; singing and nostalgic melodies; and everything in between. The solo cello work “Four Fragments” moves through memory, time and space, and Soo Bae makes full use of the cello’s expressive range. The title piece “Red Rain” is inspired by the painting on the cover by Jaune Quick-to-see Smith, and Emanuele Arciuli captures the transforming, dreaming, metamorphosing mood with sensitivity and beauty.
“Tree Without Wind,” based on a Buddhist fable, exists in a vast, open space that gradually fills with tremendous gestures and culminates with the chiming of colossal bells. The “Three Pieces for Piano” couldn’t be more different from each other — “Diffluent” violently crashes through fractured rhythmic shifts, “Left” is a soulfully fragmented song for the left hand alone, and “Points and Lines” presents a traditional form with fierce originality. “Shifting Shades” transforms another piece, “Drama Theater No. 2,” for solo piano with additional instruments like a police whistle, beer bottles, and sheets of paper, expanding the sonic range of the piano. Stephen Buck finds the whole range of expression in these works. Finally, in “Wind Blows,” Huang Ruo and Arash Amini capture the mood of a vast, open plain, across which the listener hears a floating, wistful, nostalgic melody.
Recently awarded First Prize by the prestigious Luxembourg International Composition Prize, Huang Ruo has been cited by the New Yorker as “one of the most intriguing of the new crop of Asian-American composers.” His vibrant and inventive musical voice draws equal inspiration from Chinese folk, Western avant-garde, rock, and jazz to create a seamless, organic integration using a compositional technique he calls “dimensionalism.” Huang Ruo’s writing spans from orchestra, chamber music, opera, theater, and modern dance, to sound installation, multi-media, experimental improvisation, folk rock, and film.
