Dirty Little Secret

We Say...

Review by John Schaefer

Andrew Russo has done some imaginative programming — check out his album of pop/rock covers Mixtape, for example. That's a necessity if a classical pianist is going to stand out in a crowded field, and perhaps even reach beyond classical music's usual audience; and this album manages to strike a nice balance between recent classics and even more recent works that might stretch the definition of classical. The gauntlet is thrown down right away, with "The Body of Your Dreams" by Dutch provocateur Jacob ter Veldhuis. Known almost exclusively these days as Jacob TV, he is a huge fan/critic/observer of American mass media and pop culture, and most of his works, this one included, are built around sampled and edited sounds from American TV, film, and the like. Here, the vapid sales pitches of a TV infomercial give rise to a work that's at once rhythmically challenging, strangely melodic, and witty as hell.

Dirty Little Secret is largely concerned with late 20th/early 21st century music. Its "classics" include works by 2 Pulitzer Prize-winners: John Adams' early Minimalist exercise "China Gates," and Aaron Jay Kernis's "Superstar Etude #1," a death-defying piece that requires the pianist to swing a foot up on the keys, a la Jerry Lee Lewis. (This, naturally, is the album's finale. After all, how do you follow something like that?) Several works by the gifted Derek Bermel dot the audio landscape here, and Marc Mellits offers a typically rockin' piece called "Medieval Induction." Scott Joplin's "Maple Leaf Rag" probably won't be new to anyone, but sandwiched in between Daniel Felsenfeld's "A Dirty Little Secret," a kinetic piece full of nervous energy that sounds like it wants to be a rag when it grows up, and the cheery "Boogie Woogie Etude" by the late Morton Gould, Joplin's familiar piece sounds brand new. And that is pretty inspired programming.