The cover of a new recording by Ashfield cellist Rebecca Hartka comes as close as you can get to the variety of styles and cultures performed on the CD.
Apart from listening to it, of course.
The pinks, reds, greens, gold, browns of the artwork by Gayle Kabaker — another extraordinarily talented Ashfield woman — on the cover of “Colors Couleurs Colores Cores” suggest that the music, like the languages of the tile, express the gamut of expression from the French and Latin cultures.
Hartka, who plans a CD release concert for Nov. 3 at 7 p.m. at Greenfield’s Hawks & Reed Performing Art Center, has been collaborating for years with Boston- area pianist Barbara Lysakowski and guitarist Josè Lezcano, who are guests on this recording, to works by French composers Maurice Ravel and Claude Debussy, as well as Brazilian composers Astor Piazzola, Jaco do Bandolim and Rdolim and Radanes Gnattali and contemporary Cuban-born composer Josè Manuel Lezcano.
“Barbara and I have been exploring the colors and subtle delicacies of French music for nearly a decade together, deepening and expanding our color palette, and redefining our interpretation as Duo Deja Vu,” Hartka writes in her liner notes. “With Josè, I have had adventures on and off stage, exploring new worlds and styles, and traveling to Cuba as guest artists at the Cello Festival of Havana.”
Those explorations led her to notice stylistic links between Latin styles and French music, she adds: Chopin and Liszt’s 19th Century “very personal style invited dissonant harmonies that sound quite ‘jazzy,’” and those European harmonies were combined with African rhythms and blue scales to form ragtime in the United States, tango in Argentina, habanera in Cuba, and choros and samba in Brazil.
Hartka’s recording explores those intersections, as well as those between Ravel’s early 20th Century compositions using the habanera dance rhythm and the jazz that was born across the ocean in New Orleans.
Kabaker created the cover collage based on the sketches she made in Havana with Hartka and Lezcano in March as well as her Duo Deja Vu sketch performing at Hawks and Reed.
Reservations for the concert are available from www.hawksandreed.com