Indra Rise, born in 1961, is a Latvian-born composer who lives and works in Denmark. The five works included in this collection reveal a composer with a sensitive ear for textures and use of space, but who is still grappling with stylistic issues. The earliest work, Three Coloured Stories for piano solo, evokes the harmonic sophistication of Chick Corea’s best solo piano improvisations. At the keyboard, the composer is more than up to the music’s not immodest technical requirements. On the other hand, Rise’s 1991 String Quartet is carved from minimalist blocks, and takes a while to find its center. The three most recent compositions vary in appeal. Out of the Darkness, a 1993 work for solo alto saxophone, is bland, meandering, and way too long for what little it has to say. One might expect a more energetic, emotionally cumulative whole to emerge from The Return (written in 1997), although the darting mezzo-soprano lines fit hand-in-glove with the ingenuous flute, cello, and accordion textural shifts. Skip the 1996 Pictures of Childhood–15 minutes of sung and spoken texts, woven into a crudely insipid, cutesy-poo canvas of electronic music cliches.
