Ethan Wickman - Portals and Passages / by Doyle Armbrust

It’s been a sensational month for science geeks. First, the super moon, and now “Inside the Hubble Toolbox,” the centerpiece of the outstanding new Portals and Passages. A collaboration between composer Ethan Wickman and pianist Nicholas Phillips, the solo piano collection presents a remarkable dialogue between Wickman’s textural prowess and the likes of Bach and Beethoven.

Take the first movement of “Hubble,” “Intergalactic Mambo,” a muscular hip-swinger showcasing the formidable badassery of Phillips’s left hand. The scramble of the following movement, “Busy! Busy! BUSY! …all work and NO play will fix the Multi-Object Spectrometer,” gives way to a dusky, exploratory third movement, before rocketing into the most clever of the album’s tracks, “A Final Polish: Then We Rest.”

Constructed around a handful of transposed measures from Beethoven’s ubiquitous “Moonlight” sonata, “Polish” sees Wickman following the quotation with swirls of ascending 16th-note runs, circumnavigating monolithic chords, until emerging from the air lock in full view of the Large Magellanic Cloud.

Elsewhere, in “Invention for St. Vincent in the Mezquita,” Wickman examines the titular mosque-cum-cathedral with cadenza-like responses to a prelude from Bach’s “Well-Tempered Clavier.” Throughout, Phillips navigates Wickman’s fleet rhythmic and timbral shifts as one who has internalized these scores with a great deal of empathy. This is an album of both stunning breadth and poise, and not without some old-fashioned nerd humor.

- Doyle Armbrust

published in Time Out Chicago on March 30th, 2011