Asian Feeling in Eb minor
Good day, gentleman,
this is the second piece you want us to review. Since this is an older piece, we assume that you are a lot better now. Now let us take a listen now...
Composition:
You present us a cliché anime harmonic and melody which you approached successfully in our opinion. You also did not forget details like a lot of gestures and the dynamics go fluently. You had a pretty good use of the picardy third, too, which surprised us delightfully.
The generally simple cadenza (which gets repeated often with only a few variations) makes this piece boring pretty fast after listening to it several times, because there is not much to discover, thus you made it easy to listen to but more experienced listeners of classical music will miss more interesting content. At 1:14 you use the very same structure as in your "Last Ship" piece. We understand that this is a trademark of yours but still you can add small gestures (trills played by woodwind, glissandi, arpeggios, etc.) and other things to discover to keep it interesting. In general you could also use more movements in the middle voices and end everything up with modulations.
Instrumentation:
It seems you have a favour for this kind of instrumentation with the strings playing the chords. I can only re-emphasize that woodwinds would blend so good in here. Just right after the short pause in the middle they would fit perfect playing following chords. In addition they can also fill some higher frequencies to get more mixture of high and low. I guess some more instruments (like crotales, celesta or something else) won't hurt, because they would thicken the sound. I actually liked the brass with the tremolo playing timpani - this was a quite nice variation.
An instrument which could add a nice color would be a piano, playing along with the melody or else - a countermelody. At the end the strings play a slow and soft melody - I think this melody would even shine more, if you double it an octave higher (maybe also with some woodwinds) and let it play very expressively.
Mixing:
The mixing is quite well - it seems you have a standard pattern for your mixes.
But I think you could place the melody-playing instruments much more diverse in the room, because they are all in the centre so far. Another little thing is that the Duduk should have a little break for taking breath (at 14 seconds). I would also decrease its attack a little bit to make it less choppy. Also some more strength in the higher frequencies would be nice (like in your other piece).
All in all, you have shown us a solid asian feeling. The instrumentation is in the most need of improvement, be creative in combining different instruments to get nice colours. I hope we could help you.
Best regards,
Sir Edward Eisenworth
