Shop Now

American Record Guide

Bela Bartók’s six-volume Mikrokosmos was the inspiration for Afrikosmos, a six-volume, 75-piece collection by South Africa-born composer Michael Blake. Just as Bartók worked with many pieces of Bulgarian folk music, so does Blake with traditional Sub-Saharan music. Blake classifies his works as “studies, pieces on rhythm and texture, character pieces, dances, pieces exploring a mode or scale, folk song arrangements and variations, transcriptions, and homages”.

Quite a few pieces grabbed me. In disc 1 there is a lively, odd-metered ‘Walking Song’ (an homage to Percy Grainger), an enigmatic Chorale’ that pays homage to South African composer Michael Mosoeu Moerane, and Ntsikana’s Bell’ with its sympathetically vibrating piano strings. John Knox Bokwe’s ‘Plea for Africa’ has an old-timey church-hymn sound. ‘Night Music’, by far the longest (9:43) of the collection, includes some real dissonance, and ‘Unevensong’ is unpredictable in many ways.

In disc 2, I enjoy the complex and lively ‘Dance in Seakhi Rhythm’; the cheerful, 3-chord pop-tune sound of ‘Chaconne in Mbaqanga Style’; the pianist’s whistling in Diary of a Dung Beetle’; and the “ragged edges and silent core” in ‘Broken Line’. And then there’s the happy-go-lucky, celebratory ‘Dar komm die Alibama’, a song about a Confederate raiding ship that arrived at South Africa in 1863.

Disc 3 offers the meditative ‘Sonnerie pour G D’, a tribute to Gabriele Delius that uses only the chords G and D. ‘Supermoon’ is an homage to Henry Cowell where spooky inside-the-piano strumming is heard.

And then there are the final selections. All sevenths fall in the beautiful, serene ‘ Seventh Must Fall’, which challenges the rule that says ‘a major seventh must rise to the tonic and the minor seventh fall to the sixth”. In a haunting ‘Haiku’, the melody of the South African national anthem is played slowly, each note octaves apart. And then there is the rugged ‘ Freedom Day Variation’, based on a struggle song from the darkest days of apartheid.

All works are played with skill and feeling by pianist Antony Gray.