James Cohn writes graceful, fluent, attractive music in a conservatively tonal style revealing the mastery of an experienced composer comfortable with his own voice. He also has that rarest of qualities: a musical sense of humor. The Mount Gretna Suite, for example, a delightful four-movement piece scored for the same 13-player ensemble as Copland’s original version of Appalachian Spring, makes jocular reference to popular songs such as “Old MacDonald Had a Farm” and “No Place Like Home”. It may sound silly, but the references are so well integrated and aptly chosen that the result comes across as genuinely witty.
Not all of Cohn’s humor is that obvious. The second-movement Nocturne of his Quintet No. 2 has a stealthy, “tip-toe” quality that’s bound to raise a smile, while the lovely Serenade for Flute, Violin, and Cello radiates good spirits and contains some very distinctive melodic invention. The largest work here, the Concerto da Camera for Violin, Piano, and Five winds, offers the violin some very grateful material to play, and while the idiom may sound easy on the ear, Cohn never writes down to his listeners. The lengthy first movement is very cogently put together and thematically memorable, but then so are the remaining two.
Much of Cohn’s music has an engagingly “conversational” quality, nowhere more so than in the Piano Trio of 1988. Particularly in this work there’s a give-and-take to the instrumental exchanges that recalls Haydn’s quartets and focuses the ear on the music’s linear progress rather than on its vertical harmonic density. It’s an aspect of the music especially well realized by these performances, all of which carry the composer’s imprimatur (or so we assume–it’s his label after all). They are, one and all, superb, and the recording, produced by the legendary team of Joanna Nickrenz and Marc Aubort, shares a similarly distinctive pedigree. If you like sane, cultured, entertaining chamber music that’s approachable but never condescending, this disc will surely please.
