Ekanayaka, Tanya: Reinventions. Rhapsodies For Piano

   in Piano International (Nov, 2015)
Fusions of Western classical music with the indigenous folk music of non-European countries are not unprecedented. Last year the Ethiopian pianist Girma Yifrashewe won praise for the compositions on his Love and Peace CD, where he adapted ideas derived from 19th-century Romantic repertoire to the pentatonic scales of Ethiopian folk music. Tanya Ekanayaka’s Reinventions is similar in principle, and even more steeped in Romanticism; however, she draws on the folk music of her native Sri Lanka and has devised a highly idiosyncratic method for blending it with her European sources. Ekanayaka composes around Western classical music motifs, incorporating a variety of traditional Sri Lankan tunes. Melodic fragments of great beauty …