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Navona Records3.5
Ho: Dark Tales
Duo Concertante
Navona Records, 2025
Alice Ho’s Dark Tales is a set of five pieces for violin and piano, each based on a Newfoundland ghost story from poet Tom Dawe’s story collection An Old Man’s Winter Night. They are played on the recording by Duo Concertante—Nancy Dahn (violin) and Timothy Steeves (piano).
Programmatic instrumental music is a bit of a strange beast because it can’t really tell a story. It can evoke mood though, and Dark Tales does that very effectively. Without a liner note, would I be able to tell that the second piece—“Landwash Spirits”—was about the ghosts of drowned sailors? I don’t think so, but I do get a sense of catastrophe and loss and a stormy-sea feeling with a clear idea of a howling gale.
It’s the same with the other four pieces. Each has its own soundscape tailored to the story, created by using pretty much the full sonic range of both instruments. The piano can be ethereal or loudly percussive or just plain busy. Besides conventional bowed and plucked notes, the violin creates scraping and squeaking sounds.
Ho uses this palette in quite an eclectic way, ranging from melodic to atonal to not really “musical” at all. It’s actually impressive that just two instruments can create such a varied sound world. The five pieces vary in length from just under 10 minutes to 14, for around an hour of music total.
The recording was made in December 2024 at D.F. Cook Hall in St. John’s. It’s very crisp and detailed, at least in the 96KHz/24bit digital version I listened to. It’s a digital-only release. It will be available in lossless digital at 44.1kHz/16bit and 96kHz/24bit resolutions and as MP3. As usual with this label, there is no booklet but the album has its own page at www.navonarecords.com with notes and bios.
This page is also available in / Cette page est également disponible en:
Français (French)
