CD Review by Melinda Bargreen

"Tone Poems": Music for Nine Photographic Opuses, pianist Judith Cohen, photographs by Bruce Barnbaum (Photographic Arts Editions, 360-691-4105)

"Tone Poems," with a foreword by the Seattle Symphony conductor Gerard Schwarz, actually is the first of a projected four volumes of Bruce Barnbaum photographs and Judith Cohen piano recordings. The photographs (many subjects and styles, including abstractions and landscapes) aren't paired crudely with the music in a programmatic manner, but there are intriguing interrelationships (for example, the quirky and quicksilver "Visions Fugitives" of Prokofiev paired with sharply etched abstractions).

Cohen's playing is beautifully evocative, especially in Brahms' wistfully eloquent A Major Intermezzo. She has some outstanding chamber collaborators in clarinetist Eugene Zoro, violinist Mikhail Shmidt and cellist David Tonkonogui.

Melinda Bargreen
Seattle Times music critic