Recording: Time Tracks
Stereo Review, July, 1998 (****)
“one of the nicest surprises of the season.”
[In] Jeanne Golan’s Time Tracks, her program and performances add up to one of the nicest surprises of the season. In Beethoven’s E Major Sonata, Op. 109, she allows the music to unfold in the most uncluttered, splendidly balanced way, making its points in human terms, including a hint of humor in the concluding variation movement, without rhetorical underscoring.
The refreshing Beethoven is followed by two fairly recent works: Cornelius Cardew’s charming Piano Album (three descriptive miniatures) and Alvin Curran’s extended memorial piece For Cornelius, the middle section of which, as Golan points out in her (program) note, contains certain parallels with the final movement of the Beethoven Sonata. There’s still more: two Granados Goyescas and Conlon Nancarrow’s intellectually playful Two Canons for Ursula. It adds up to an imaginatively balanced recital in which Golan identifies persuasively with all the material. The recording itself is outstanding in its well-focused realism.
by Richard Freed