Julia Hamos - Ellis Island
(Naïve Records, 2025)
The French record label, Naïve, continually shows its dedication to new artists with broad repertoires. Hungarian-American pianist Julia Hamos reveals no commercial fear in programming a clever and inventive recital for her debut recording with the label. Ellis Island is a recording of emigre material. She covers solo piano music of Hungarian composers, Béla Bartók, György Kurtág, and György Ligeti expertly mixed with the different emigres represented in Meredith Monk, Charles Mingus, Franz Schubert.
Ellis Island is an exposition of Hamos’ journey from her native Transylvania to New York City, one that has been particularly artistically fruitful for the pianist. It has also been reflective, allowing Hamos to hear the Hungarian in the music of Meredith Monk, Mingus, and Schubert (from afar). Her experiences have also permitted the pianist to understand the underlying emotion, that of anguish, present in the three Hungarians’ music. It is not a far extrapolation to bring Mingus into this fold, an irascible man ready to engage all prejudiced slights, real and imagined. Hamos’ reading of Mingus’ “Myself When I Am Real1” combines suspicion, endurance, and even happiness in her playing with passages sounding frankly Eastern European. Her performance has an American majesty that scarcely exists anymore except as an empty simulacrum2. She touches, through Mingus, what was and can be again.
Hamos realizes a pastoral complex in Meredith Monk’s “Flowing” from Monk’s film, Ellis Island (1981). Minimalist elements compel this piece beyond the root definition of emigre to all types of displacement in one’s own land. Pathos fills it simple, elegant melody, revealing a confidence and persistence in the music. Schubert’s “Ungarische Melodie” rings Hamos’ reality most truly and is obviously a piece as close to the pianist as skin. Her performance is almost that of an informed Brahms Hungarian Dance if composed by Chopin.
The trio of Hungarians rule the recording, with Hamos divining the ragged souls from each selection. Hamos opens with György Kurtág’s solo piano piece “Volume I: No. 74, Perpetuum mobile (objet trouvé)” from that composer’s Játékok (Games) (1973). This is a two-plus minute study of glissando dynamics set as perpetual motion. The piece is arresting and anxiety-filled with unpredictable flights of sound. After the Monk, Hamos addresses Kurtág’s craggy and abrupt early composition 8 Klavierstücke, Op. 3 (1960), using additional pieces to season the recital as it progresses. Hamos draws out Kurtág’s pathos, carefully presenting it dynamically. Hamos was able to work with the composer before these recordings. This is thought music, requiring the listener’s attention to the detail that Kurtág, through Hamos, requires. The music tests the pianist’s articulation over free-form composition.
Hamos shoehorns György Ligeti’s Etude No. 4 “Fanfares” in before introducing her Bartok. It is a fast-paced drive through an urban area, all bright lights and splashes of color and hue. The pianist’s Bartok selections include the composer’s Mikrokosmos (Volume IV - Six Dances in Bulgarian Rhythm) which sound like George Gershwin fractured and reassembled in Eastern Europe. These pieces brim with mirth, determination, and a sense of humor. These elements extend into Hamos’ consideration of 15 Hungarian Peasant Songs, lofty and pastoral. The pieces are dreamy miniatures evoking moods from bliss to dark contemplation. A determined whimsy drives these performances all the way to the coda, where the Schubert manifests as if it belonged there all along.
From Charles Mingus - Mingus Plays Piano (Impulse! Records, 1963).
Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Éditions Galilée, 1981)