Ergo

Piano wunderkind Zhen Chen has an ambitious mission: to forge a new style of music that chimes with a generation of musicians and fans versed in both Western and Eastern classical traditions. His ten pieces on this album admirably eschew pianistic virtuosity in favour of plain and accessible melodies, which showcase two of Chinese classical music's most popular instruments: the pipa (lute) and the erhu (fiddle).

Jiaju Shen's de^ pipa plucking on opener ‘Jade’ instantly evokes a stereotypical Chinese rural tableau – one imagines bamboo stalks quivering in time with her tremolo strumming. Feifei Yang joins to form a lively trio on ‘Springfield’, an arresting fugue-like piece. Having paid tribute to the traditional, the album might have launched into bolder and more experimental fusions, but Ergo plays it frustratingly safe. A sequence of pleasant but unremarkable minor laments slip by and even the intriguingly titled ‘Dance Floor Banter’ turns out to be a polite ersatz waltz. Zhen explains in the liner notes that the album's title derives from Descartes' immortal proposition ‘cogito ergo sum' (I think therefore I am), but this album might have benefited from less thinking and more feeling.