MP3 Katrina Krimsky - Time Over Time

The music of pianist/composer Katrina Krimsky unifies a wealth of musical styles and opens the door to the world of beauty and well-being. Selections are for solo piano, piano/electronics, piano with flute and percussion.

10 MP3 Songs
CLASSICAL: Contemporary, NEW AGE: Neo-Classical



Details:
Katrina Krimsky; Time Over Time
Reviewed by Sonoloco Record Reviews

I first came across Katrina Krimsky browsing through Terry Rileyâs official homepage (www.terryriley.com), and being a longtime dweller in the enchanted realms of Rileyâs soaring timbres I instantly wanted to find out more about her.
This CD is a good starter. Itâs a collection of tunes from three different Krimsky albums; Katrina Krimsky (1975 on Transonic Records), Ambrosia (1986 on Spoon Records) and Four Moons of Jupiter (1992 on Fink & Star Production Ltd.) Being a heavy reader of popular literature about modern physics I canât but smile when I see the name of the label!
Katrina Krimsky is a Swiss-American composer-musician of Russian descent, who maintains residencies in San Francisco and Zürich.
The immediate impression as I swing the CD through the laser light is that of fluency, elegance, rhythmic patterns tap-dancing through an illusory bardo-world of almost faded dreams⦠and I glance at the picture of Dalai Lama on the wall, determining the atmosphere in my room with that withheld Mona-Lisa smile, on the verge of breaking out into a hollering laughter across the world of samsaraâ¦

Terry Riley has his intense moments of deep penetration of the timbres of existence and the pulsations of the highest levels of the intervals of conscience, but ever so often he descends into a more familiar â but not less mysterious â realm of generous smiles and shining spheres of gold, blue and silver, in a communion with one and all on an elegant note of dance floor and spring time benevolence. I believe itâs here that Katrina Krimskyâs music fits in. I find these characteristics also in her pieces.
Evidently she throws her experiences of this life and the tendencies and affinities of former lives into these sounding extensions of herself, which all the light that simmers through her prismic qualities and fans out in flashing colors through our cerebral cortexes reveals.
Her music does simmer, shimmer, in a richness of overtones, as her beads of pianism roll out in meandering serpentines. Instant, short hints at different traditions open up sudden wormholes into other sections of musical history! Itâs a fast journey though a hall of mirrors, but with sudden windows opening on passing-by, the wind lifting the curtains, bringing the scent of meadow flowers and the messages of salty seas. Magnificent!
A direct reference to her friend Terry Riley is made by Katrina Krimsky on track 5 of the CD, in her rendition of A Rainbow in Curved Air; one of Rileyâs most known works, published in 1969. In C may be the most influential work as such, in view of music history, compositional thinking and so forth, consequently producing an enormous flow of recordings by all kinds of ensembles, but A Rainbow in Curved Air won Riley the rock nâ roll crowds and an immense, wide popularity, well outside of the tighter crowd of the composers of contemporary art music. Riley played electric organ, electric harpsichord, rocksichord (?), dumbec and tambourine, but Krimsky has scaled it down into the purity of her piano, albeit with some electronic treatment and overlays. Itâs described like this is the CD booklet: Katrina utilizes piano improvisation of modal patterns over a 14-beat drone with electronic overlays to create a multi-level sound experience evocative of eastern musical influences. [â¦] Katrina permutates, inverts, uses delay of Riley keyboard ornamentation and patterns to wave a polyphonic and polyrhythmic fabric.
Indeed you do recognize Riley in this fabric, but just as I think was intended, as a certain breeze through the music, as a certain scent of incense, as an atmosphere through which the chords rise and fall and roll, like the calm swell from a storm that has settled somewhere below the horizon. This homage to the Maestro is diligent and gentle as a soft touch of your loverâs fingertips across your forehead; so beautiful!

Track 1 â Ambrosia - starts like a North Indian raga, with a sweep down the keyboard which mimicries the sitar playerâs introductory strumming across the strings of his instrument before the raga picks up (or perhaps itâs a reference to the cimbalom, since the melodic beginning actually stems from Bela Bartokâs First Rhapsody and a traditional folk-dance utilized there). The fast elegance of the tune that unfolds emits rays of playful acceptance of the circumstances of our stroll through this life, it seems to me. The tune is a walk, head high, through the characteristics of samsara, eyes glancing without grasping at the turmoil that rages around the path, and I sense the joy of a little girl hopping down the line, but also the content reflections inside the mind of an old lady resting on her childhood swing in a garden where the winds of high summer whisper through the leafy crowns above, her body getting ever lighter, ever more transparent, until there is only spiritâ¦

Four Moons of Jupiter introduces an ensemble of piano, flute, marimba, vibraphone, percussion and tabla. The title refers to the four moons that Galileo Galilei discovered around Jupiter in 1610: Io, Europa, Ganymede and Calisto â long before the Voyager space probe sent those amazing pictures of all the other moonsâ¦
The booklet: The clockwork of the orbiting Four Moons of Jupiter keeps the pace of time while revolving around Jupiter, exemplified by an 11-beat pattern, [evoking] the gamelan spirit. The thematic variations of the periodic musical moons pulsate over the 11-beat pattern in various permutations of melody and rhythm, which repeatedly return and join together.
This is the longest work on the CD, with its 9 minutes 16 seconds.
It immediately reminds me of the collaboration between Terry Riley and Krishna Bhatt on a CD called No Manâs Land, but it also evokes memories of Steve Reich and his more driving patterns and the adventures of Piano Circus. However, those are just involuntary associations, for this is Katrina Krimsky and her ensemble, hammering a beat that is intricate as well as repetitive and rock nâ rollish! This is a tune youâd most likely like to turn up and dance around to in the holy daze of the cow dust hour, because I canât sit still, whoopee!
All these instruments combine in a sparkling display of timbres, harnessed and domesticated into a joint pull of forces towards some unavoidable trait of the timesâ¦

Golden Gate Park comes with a booklet scenario of relaxed, quietly content socializing outdoors. The tune has an almost Satie feel to it, but it also resembles some of Rileyâs more modest, laid-back piano improvisations, bordering on the crudely popular, but not ever crossing the fine line. However, some ways into this piece a boogie-woogie injection kicks things off, at times recalling Nancarrow moments, and a humorous musical citation is inserted, before things quiet down into some smooth afternoon under the treesâ¦

Waves â track 4 â sprinkle you from the outset with the salty fluid of the ocean, as wave upon wave roll in. The construction of musical waves makes me think of Debussy and other composers of the impressionistic era, but maybe this is just a self-evident remark about a piece which is described thus in the booklet: Melodies, sounds and patterns appear over the constant cascades of augmented bass arpeggios revealing the hypnotic experience of the ocean.
I once came across a Canadian-Ukrainian composer and pianist called Lubomyr Melnyk, and even interviewed him for a magazine in the early 1990s, when he lived not far from my town in Sweden. He characterized his music as continuous, and he sat for hours at the piano, just letting go, sounding somewhat like Katrina Krimsky in Waves. He released a number of LPs, but I havenât seen any CDs of his as yet. Krimskyâs piece is just five minutes long, which is a pity, for I think this kind of music grows on you more and more as the duration extends.
The musical waves of Waves roll on in sunny reflections and glittering spurs of watery rays, in a motion typical of life itself, with its underlying, rhythmic breathing.

Holidaze is a short episode, joyfully and a little melancholically untangled out of the keyboard, in effect fetching some of the pianistic excitement of legends like Moritz Rosenthal, Ignaz Friedman and Emil von Sauer to the fore, though mostly in an atmospheric state, i.e. not in any kind of mimicry. This is a brilliant little tune, also in duration resembling the limited space of a 78-rpm with its 3:48!

Time Over Time has a key to its construction in its title, like the booklet explains:[â¦] opens with improvised patterns in a major key interwoven over a slow 6+5 beat drone. This abruptly shifts to a fast pulsating bass pattern in 7-beat time with upward movement of brightly spirited patterns and rich bell-like sounds. Expressed on the grand piano, the subtle and intricate juxtapositions of meters, clashing rhythms and timbres create sensuous resonance.
Sure enough! This is very powerful music, sort o unrelenting, merciless, like an Israeli tank through the lanes of Gaza, or, with a nicer parable; like a great whale forcefully sailing through the ocean. Again itâs reminiscent of Lubomyr Melnyk, which is interesting to me, since Iâve never heard anyone sound quite like him before. Even in this case Iâd prefer to hear this for a much, much longer time. Perhaps we could persuade Katrina Krimsky to release a full-length CD with an extension of Time Over Time, huh?

Eliseâs Dream sports the same ensemble as in Four Moons of Jupiter, but itâs much shorter. It contains, says the booklet text, references to Beethovenâs Für Elise and Heitor Villa-Lobosâs Clay Doll. Itâs a fast, short, fairytale-like tune, with itâs jerky, tin soldier rhythm across the table⦠Fun!

Katrina Ballerina â one of the longer works on the CD â is written by the jazz trumpeter Woody Shaw for Katrina Krimsky. Like the submitted text confirms, Krimskyâs rendition is a romantic interpretation. Iâd add that itâs full of lust and luster, hopeful glances and springtime thoughts falling over each other in an exuberant, lyrical jazz fantasy as the Earth turns towards the light. Sparkling!

The last piece is less than two minutes long and appropriately entitled Epilogue, ending this CD on a contemplative note, introspection always providing the clearest view through the many-layered illusions of lifeâ¦
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Biography:
Katrina Krimsky, pianist and composer of Russian descent, has developed an individual style blending the various sources of musical knowledge and experience she has absorbed through a lifetime devoted to music. Born and raised in the American South her musical studies began at a very early age with her mother, an accomplished pianist, and continued at the Eastman School of Music where she was a student of Cecile Staub Genhart. She received her Bachelor of Music degree in 1959. In the early â60s she joined the Piano Faculty at American University in Washington, D.C. and performed extensively as soloist and as keyboardist with the Ars Nova Trio. Seeking new horizons she traveled in the mid-â60s to the center of contemporary musical activity â Cologne, Germany where she was associated with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Henri Pousseur, Luc Ferrari and other prominent European composers and she performed recitals of 20th Century piano music. Returning to the States in 1967 she became a performer with the Center of the Creative and Performing Arts Ensemble in Buffalo, NY. As âThe Pulseâ she performed and recorded Terry Rileyâs innovative work IN C for Columbia Records. She was also associated with many other composers including David Rosenboom, Jon Hassell, David Behrman, and later in New York City with La Monte Young as a member of his Eternal Dream House performing ensemble.
In 1972 she moved to San Francisco establishing herself prominently as pianist, improvising composer, and joined Terry Riley, Pandit Pran Nath, and Robert Ashley on the Music Faculty of Mills College. Katrina also sought connections to the jazz world and performed solo piano regularly at the jazz club Keystone Korner, listening to many of the master jazz musicians and performing with such greats as Woody Shaw and Bobby Hutcherson. Her first recording Katrina Krimsky in 1975 included works by Samuel Barber, Terry Riley, and Woody Shaw and subsequently she has released seven additional recordings. In Europe she performed with bassist Peter Kowald, and together with saxophonist Trevor Watts she recorded Stella Malu on ECM label. Her next release was her performance of The Babyâs Family Volumes 1 and 2 by Heitor Villa-Lobos. Composer/performer Irmin Schmidt of CAN recorded her music in the South of France and then produced her solo piano recording Ambrosia She was commissioned by the âTage Für Neue Musicâ in Zurich for an ensemble version of Terry Rileyâs A Rainbow in Curved Air. She concertized extensively with her performing ensemble including flautist Lisa Hansen and sitarist Krishna Bhatt and recorded her original compositions on Four Moons Together with her prominent former student Barbara Higbie, she was awarded a Djerassi Foundation residency. In 1998 appearing for the second time on the Merkin Hall Interpretations Series in New York she premiered Rhapsody for Two Pianos with Barbara Higbie, Bell Solaris composed for her by David Rosenboom, Superior Seven by Robert Ashley, and her own work Fluid Silk. Her devotion to and interest in World Music, in African-American Music, and in Contemporary Music enhances her own highly-developed discipline rooted in the European classical tradition and culminates in her individual style of musical expression as exemplified in her performances and recordings. Katrina has performed widely in the USA and in Europe and she maintains presence in both Zurich, Switzerland and San Francisco, California.