Review of “Kaleidoscope” by Isabel Dobarro. Textura April 2025
Review of “Kaleidoscope” by Isabel Dobarro. Textura April 2025
Isabel Dobarro: Kaleidoscope
Grand Piano
Kaleidoscope—an apt title for a panoramic solo piano collection featuring pieces by female composers from the United States, Latin America, Africa, Europe, Asia, and Australia. This richly rewarding and diverse set by Galician pianist Isabel Dobarro fittingly appears on Naxos’s Grand Piano imprint. On the release, she does her part to right historical and contemporary wrongs, specifically the underrepresentation of women composers in yesterday’s and today’s programmes. Among the twelve artists featured are Gabriela Ortiz, Tania León, Caroline Shaw, and Yoko Kanno, each figure the recipient of esteemed awards and honours. Inspirations for their pieces came from equally diverse sources, with Kanno’s Hana Wa Saku, for example, written to honour the victims of Japan’s March 2011 earthquake, and Carolyn Morris’s Blue Ocean drawing on memories of her early years growing up along Australia’s Great Ocean Road.
Such a project is consistent with others undertaken by Dobarro, an award-winning graduate of New York University and currently a professor at the Katarina Gurska Higher Center, President of the European Music Center in Spain. Dividing her time between Madrid and New York City, she’s advocated for the works of Louise Héritte Viardot, Pauline Viardot, and Marianna Martínez and was recently named a ‘Woman to Watch in Culture’ by The Association Mujeres a Seguir. As Patricia Kleinman eloquently states in her foreword, Kaleidoscope represents “a significant stride toward the normalization of the programming of music composed by women and the integration of contemporary non-European music into the 21st-century musical lexicon.”
The journey begins with Nocturne by Bulgaria-born and London-based Dobrinka Tabakova, an incandescent reverie that pulls the listener into the fifty-five-minute release immediately. As she does throughout, Dobarro sensitively tailors her touch to the material to pinpoint its essence. Fiery and declamatory by comparison is Ortiz’s torrential “Estudio 3, homenaje a Jesusa Palancares” (from Estudios entre preludios), the performance this time testifying to the pianist’s virtuosic command. The dramatic contrasts in mood, tempo, and dynamics demonstrated between the opening pieces carry over to others, if not perhaps as extremely. Many of the settings are concise statements lasting from two to three minutes, which lends the recording a travelogue-like character.
From Nkeiru Okoye’s African Sketches comes the haunting “Dusk,” an intimate and melancholy African-folk excursion. A dual Canadian-Jordanian citizen of Bosnian, Palestinian and Syrian heritage, Suad Bushnaq brings her background working in the film composing industry to the expressively romantic Improvisation. Like Bushnaq, Kanno has created a considerable body of music for various live-motion visual media, and the piano version of her Hana Wa Saku pulls at the heartstrings with lyrical tenderness. Whereas the intense energy and rhythmic thrust of León’s “Tumbao” recalls Ortiz’s setting, the expansive Blue Ocean by Melbourne-based Morris revisits the sparkle of Tabakova’s opener. As uplifting is “Very lightly, like a harp” from Water Dance by Karen Tanaka, whose composition studies have taken her to Tokyo, Paris, and Florence. Dobarro honours the memory of Argentinean composer Claudia Montero (1962-2021) with a poignant treatment of Buenos Aires, Despierta y Sueña that evokes with deep longing the South American city. Speaking of evocations, Dobarro closes the release with the world premiere recording of Carme Rodríguez’s Alalá das paisaxes verticais, which the composer created as a musical portrait of the pianist’s home region of Galicia in northwestern Spain.
The recipient of the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Music and several Grammy Awards, Caroline Shaw has established herself as of one of contemporary music’s major figures, and her mesmerizing, Chopin-influenced Gustave Le Gray (titled after a key figure in French photography of the mid-nineteenth century) shows why. Words in the booklet’s brief Shaw bio, that she tries “to imagine a world of sound that has never been heard before but has always existed,” astutely capture the feeling one has while listening to Gustave Le Gray, that this fourteen-minute piece seems hauntingly familiar despite its having been created in 2012. Dobarro’s exquisite rendering is nuanced, as she carefully calibrates her phrasing, pacing, and touch to maximize the music’s impact. After softly chiming chords cascade during the opening minutes, the interlacing of patterns grows in complexity until, four minutes in, time slows and the work’s most intoxicating motives emerge. Transitions are effected smoothly between contemplative and dance episodes, the whole held seamlessly together by Dobarro’s unerring performance. As consistently strong as the album is in general, it’s the pianist’s rendition of Shaw’s piece that is its undeniable high-water mark.