From the liner Notes to the CD
By Prof. Ruth HaCohen
“Casino Umbro" means "Umbrian Noise" or mess; the work was created during the composer’s residency at Civitella Ranieri in Umbria. Noise it is, if one considers the juxtaposition and fusion of two diametrically opposed musical style and sonic concepts – a baroque and contemporary one – a blasphemous concoction. (The work was invited by two Israeli ensembles: the contemporary music ensemble "Meitar" and the period instruments ensemble "Israeli Bach Soloists".) But the spirit of lush Umbria penetrates the texture. The work is indeed a good one to enter into Amos Elkana’s sonic world: transparent despite complications, communicative though sophisticated, soft and exuberant, emotional and thoughtful. It embarks with a French baroque gesture, embellished, warm; modal D. A perpetuum mobile jazz-like piano figuration emerges from this solemnity, gradually sweeping the other participants into its “mechanical” gesticulations, until all are dancing a “fractal” dance on a kaleidoscopally ever changing, adding and subtracting pitch and rhythm patterns. These two sections determine a structure of the kind found in Beethoven’s late works (and then in Mahler, Bartok and others): an alternating structure, in which each contrasting section affects the next, which structurally refers back to the one before (in the spirit of an ABABA… form). The dreamy like section that follows the “fractal dance”, is thus a sonic and tonal admixture of both universes: impressionistic, fraught with novel sonorities, but allowing sporadically for “conventional” chords to flicker, soft and slightly embellished melodies to emerge. Fourth section is likewise reactive, becoming a more reflective, moderate dance, divulging how modern-jazz piano can find itself dialoguing with a baroque harpsichord, without each losing its idiomatic identity, encouraging the other actors to similarly behave. One can hear in another section a Schoenbergian Klangfarben Melodie as a natural development of forgoing events, followed by a Stravinsky-like recollection. And so it goes, until all is silenced back into a baroquian gesture – a whole tone higher, a universe apart.