Hallelujah Junction album review – two-piano journey through 20th-century Americana
This debut recording by husband-and-wife piano duo of Lukas Geniušas and Anna Geniushene (runner-up to Yunchan Lim at the 2022 Van Cliburn competition) beats a revealing path through 20th-century Americana.
Four works date from the 1930s, including Gershwin's Cuban Overture and Copland's El Salón México. Stravinsky's Dumbarton Oaks was the composer's first US commission; played in the composer's two-piano version rather than by chamber orchestra, it seems less an 18th-century homage and more a direct link between the baroque and 20th-century minimalism. A complete contrast comes with Balinese Ceremonial Music by Colin McPhee, who was mining the potential of gamelan music decades before other western composers followed.
The playing is finely balanced and unobtrusively imaginative throughout, but it's the two more recent pieces that are arguably the most interesting. Frederic Rzewski's Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues is initially unsettlingly inhuman, weaving the protest song into the noise of factory machines: you can picture the pianists as automatons thumping at the keyboards. Finally, there's the title work, the name of which John Adams borrowed from a truck stop near the California-Nevada border. Written in 1996, it's an example of how Adams can make minimalism feel huge and eclectic; the pianists trace its jangling and surging lines brilliantly.
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