Inbal Segev: 20 for 2020 (Volume 2) review – venturesome collection

The past 18 months have in so many ways been a particularly torrid time for performers, most of all for musicians who spend most of their time playing the music of dead composers to live audiences. Linking up with living creators suffering through the same challenging pandemic creates a much wider range of possibilities.

In her 20 for 2020 project, venturesome Israeli-American cellist Inbal Segev embraced composers of diverse backgrounds “to show some of the ways this surreal year has affected us all, regardless of age, gender or heritage” in the hope that the new works would “form a celebration of the glorious variety of cello writing in the 21st century”.

In volume two, Viet Cuong’s Room to Move (good pandemic title) is an overdubbed cello octet, a songful line spun out to a spatially dispersed pizzicato background. Avner Dorman’s Elegy for the Victims of Indifference, for cello and accordion, begins bleakly then turns heated. Vijay Iyer’s The Window, for cello and piano, wanders freely through desolation and sweetness.

Christopher Cerrone’s The Pleasure at Being the Cause, also for cello and piano, delights in locked patterns. Angélica Negrón’s foot-tapping Ruta Panorámica, for cello, bandoneón and electronics, goes for outdoors freshness.