FANFARE MAGAZINE September 2004

ASIA Woodwind Quintet.1 String Quartet No. 2.2 Brass Quintet3 Dorian Wind Qnt;1 Cypress Str Qrt;2 American Brass Qnt3 Summit DCD 385 (59:00)

Daniel Asia (b. 1953) is a leading member of that talented post-World War II generation of American composers that includes Danielpour, Kernis, Schwantner, and Tower—among many others—who helped turn the tide of stylistic syntax away from the predominant serialist academicism of the 60s and 70s.

 Although this program of three chamber works is headlined "Trilogy," each one represents different facets of his evolution over the past two decades. The Second String Quartet of 1985 shows us Asia writing the kind of freely modified 12-note music one would expect from a pupil of Druckman and Schuller. But already one can sense in this serious and ambitious almost half-hour work an underlying urge to break free of the confines of ideological allegiances, as the movement headings "Cantabile; free and flowing—crisp and energetic" and "Majestic—dancing–majestic" would indicate. This score exhibits the same distinctive traits that would characterize his later and more tonally oriented works: a natural and unfettered thematic fertility coupled with a noticeable economy of content and coherence of form. The two other much more recent pieces here are perhaps a bit more modest in scope than the quartet, but they are certainly more immediately approachable. They embody the type of sea change that overtook Asia's idiom during the 1990s—as does an earlier Summit release pairing his First and Fourth Symphonies—when he turned decisively towards a simpler and more neo-Classic frame of mind without diluting the harmonic agility and resourcefulness of his earlier period. The Brass Quintet of 2001 displays an almost Renaissance-like manner, especially in its austere but eloquent "Tranquil and elegiac" middle movement, which sounds like a blend of Gabrieli and the Stravinsky of "Symphonies of Wind Instruments." 

But in the utterly disarming Woodwind Quintet of 1998, Asia has written a six-movement collection of "bagatelles" (the composer's own term) that reflect an indigenous and very idiomatic adaptation of Franco-American wind-writing originating in part in the melancholic perkiness of Pétroushka. This is an outstanding contribution to the woodwind quintet repertoire that invites and deserves repeated hearings. 

All three ensembles provide beautifully judged and dynamically shaped readings with a top-drawer acoustic from Summit. All in all, this turns out to be one of the premier releases of American chamber music of 2004. Paul A. Snook