With this release of chamber pieces by Cambodian-American composer Chinary Ung, Bridge Records continues its exemplary quest to capture the music of contemporary composers whose work has been underrepresented on disc. As in the case of Ung, a professor at the University of California, Davis, these are frequently composers who have made a career in teaching during a period in which "academic composition" has been widely disparaged. That's particularly unfortunate because Ung's work is vital and engaging on both emotional and ...
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With this release of chamber pieces by Cambodian-American composer Chinary Ung, Bridge Records continues its exemplary quest to capture the music of contemporary composers whose work has been underrepresented on disc. As in the case of Ung, a professor at the University of California, Davis, these are frequently composers who have made a career in teaching during a period in which "academic composition" has been widely disparaged. That's particularly unfortunate because Ung's work is vital and engaging on both emotional and intellectual levels and has a warmly appealing sound that shouldn't scare off even more conservative audiences. In this inventive, colorful music, that is in fact luminous, Ung unselfconsciously incorporates Cambodian elements, giving his work a distinctively Eastern character. Each of the five chamber works presented here is strong enough to merit wide familiarity. Child Song, a deceptively naïve-sounding but musically sophisticated treatment of a Cambodian folk tune, is...
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