Illumination

“This album of chants and chantlike piano works by Victoria Bond, who is a composer and conductor, displays her deeply felt mystical sensibility. The intense performances are by Paul Barnes, who does double duty as pianist and chanter and has collaborated with Bond since 1999. A professional chanter in the Greek orthodox Church and a skillful pianist, he sings with haunting musicality in three tracks of traditional Byzantine Chant and a piano concerto, Ancient Keys and plays with fervid virtuosity in Illuminations on Byzantine Chant and Black Light (also a short piano concerto). The latter, which incorporates Black American motifs in the opening movement, is punchy and aggressive, but most of the music is calm and meditative, perfect for these troubled times.”

“Rare is the release that credits its soloist as “pianist and chanter,” but Illumination is no ordinary recording. Though Paul Barnes is renowned as a foremost interpreter of Philip Glass's works, he's also collaborated with others, Victoria Bond (b. 1945) among them. Dedicated entirely to material by the American composer, Illumination presents four pieces, one featuring the pianist alone, two concertos with orchestra, and the fourth presenting Barnes, who's also a professional chanter in the Greek Orthodox Church, singing four traditional Byzantine Chants sans accompaniment.…Armed with virtuosic technical ability and refined musicality, Barnes is an ideal match for Bond's music. Little effort is required, however, for him to connect with the pieces, given how much they originated out of his own experiences with chanting. I have but one quibble: I would have preferred to hear the four vocal chants, which he sings with authority and deep feeling, at the start of the album rather than the end. In doing so, it would be easier to hear how those originating pieces act as the foundation for Bond's works, rather than hearing them as postludes. The vocal pieces total a mere four minutes, but they're critical to the character of the project and deserve better than to appear as an afterthought.”

“The very well-made music of Victoria Bond (born 1945) is combined not with a single stringed instrument but with an orchestra in two works on a new Albany Records CD – and, more intriguingly, with the human voice, courtesy of pianist Paul Barnes, who is also a professional chanter in the Greek Orthodox Church. The four works on this disc – one for piano alone, two for piano and orchestra, and one consisting of Barnes offering four traditional Byzantine Chants – fascinatingly combine religious elements (including some drawn from Bond’s own Judaism) with secular ones. The four hymns chanted by Barnes take up a total of less than five minutes, but their influence pervades most of this more-than-hour-long release… Bond asks a lot of the performer in these Illuminations, requiring sensitivity to the underlying material and also an impressive amount of virtuoso display that, far from trivializing the underlying hymns, gives them even more expressive power. Barnes’ knowledge of the foundational material surely helps him produce this very sensitive interpretation of the music, as his pianistic skill lets him bring forth the power of Bond’s keyboard writing.”