Sometimes when I get a disc for review, I play it through, ignoring the details, while attending to the dishes or other matters of domestic moment. With regard to the disc here reviewed, an early, kitchen-sink impression has clung through subsequent plays: Rachel Rudich is a remarkably fluent instrumentalist with a talent for involvement in first-rate music elsewhere neglected.

I won't drone on and on about seven composers' works; enough to say each holds the attention. To touch briefly on those pieces that seem to me significant additions to the recorded literature: Wuorinen's Second Trio: Piece for Stefan Wolpe of 1962 reminds us that a currently fruitful composer, no less one of the best on the "uptown" scene, has been at it for some while. This 30-odd-year-old trio fairly burst with Wuorinenisms—high-powered rhythmic entities from which leap, or saunter, those delightfully characteristic melodic shards, as if to say, "I could so easily go this route, had I chosen to." The more one hears of Wuorinen's music, the more one perceives a Romantic sensibility peeping through some rather large rents in those dread atonal "difficulties" (which are nothing of the kind).

Mario Davidovsky, another composer I very much admire, is somewhat more protean in character, at least here. A real gem, this 1993, single-movement Quartetto plays as a seductively languid piece, its in no way untoward exercised moments rather more erotic than formál in deportment; this despite the snap, crackle, and pop taking its cues from an earlier period's avant- garde in which, now that we mention it, Davidovsky played a part. The first of his remarkable Synchronisms dates from 63.

The present program's Powell is Mel. As you have already observed from the headnote, the composer Karl Kohn is, in his Ternaries for Flute and Piano, Rudich's accompanist. (Ternary: consisting of three parts; the quodlibet of Donald Martino's title offers more of challenge. It's a "light-hearted comp, comprising several popular tunes," etc., most notably in the finale of Bach's Goldberg Variations [The Oxford Dictionary of Music].)

Recorded sound good enough. A must-have for the new-music buff and a good bet for the merely curious.

-- Mike Silverton, FANFARE [7/1998]