The (E)motion of Water: Işıl Bengi’s Hydropath

When you think of an album organised around the idea of water, the usual suspects come to mind: Debussy and the sea, Ravel and the play of water, but when you start to look beyond that, water has some other connotations.

Turkish-Belgian pianist Işıl Bengi adds to her ever-interesting list of recordings with her new Hydropath.

Işıl Bengi

A hydropath is someone who practices hydropathy, the treatment of diseases with the application of water. Bengi’s application takes her around the world, sampling water from Japan and Turkey, America and France, Russia and Germany. She’s a marvel at discovering the little-known works that add so much to her repertoire.

Although her work started with Brahms’ Drei Intermezzi, she opened the album with a work by Charles-Valentin Alkan. The eighth of his Préludes, Op. 31, is the Song of the Madwoman by the Sea, which places the listener in a world between the air and the depths – of the border between madness and genius.

One of the last works he wrote for piano, the Intermezzi, Op. 117, by Johannes Brahms, was the inspiration for Bengi’s water tour. The works were written in the summer of 1892 at the spa Bad Ischl. They have a stately simplicity that brings the calm and relaxation one seeks at a spa (we won’t comment on the coincidence between the name of Bad Ischl and the first name of our pianist because it’s too perfect).

The avant-garde pianist Toshi Ichiyanagi’s 1990 work Inexhaustible Fountain finds its source in the widely separated registers of the pianos, using extended chords and contrasting sounds to bring out a mysterious atmosphere, closing with, as Bengi puts it, ‘a cascade of tsunami waves’.

Massenet’s first Impromptu, Sleeping Waves, takes us back to the late 19th century and the dream-like quality of music with water references.

Work by the American composer Augusta Read Thomas brings us Rain at Funeral, the final of her Six Piano Etudes. With a minimum of notes and a maximum of atmosphere, we’re part of an unending depression, sombre, and dark.

A real discovery is Turkish composer Ulvi Cemal Erkin’s Beş Damla (Five Drops). Each movement carries its own atmosphere, from the active and whirling first movement (I. Animato) to the final movement’s thoughtful introspection (V. Moderato).

Julian Scriabin, son of Alexander Scriabin, drowned at age 11 in the River Dniepr. He had been a composer from childhood and was clearly influenced by his father’s thoughts and style. His Prelude in C major, Op. 2, written in 1919, the year of his death, is a revelation of a composer taken too soon.

Another kind of water appears in Modest Mussorgsky’s Une Larme (A Tear). A work from 1880, one of Mussorgky’s last years, it’s a recall of memory, of the past, of past happiness.

Not necessarily on water, but rather a cry to the heavens, Amy Beach’s Out of the Depths takes its inspiration from Psalm 130, ‘Out of the depths I cry to you’. Beach brings us down into the depths, from which the cry emerges.

Written as a prelude to a production of The Building of Banba, Henry Cowell’s tone-cluster piece, The Tides of Manaunaun, starts with the left forearm pressing down 13 notes at once. One of his best-known tone-cluster pieces, the work influenced even Béla Bartók to look at the technique.

This recording joins Işıl Bengi’s earlier recordings, Terre de Jeu (2021), and Agni Kunda (2022), the first based on the idea of the earth and the second on fire. Water now joins these elemental gatherings of music, bringing us Bengi’s always innovative music collections. Thematic collections can get to be tiresome, but she is able to assemble astonishing juxtapositions of style around a theme that makes you reconsider the idea in its entirety.

Videos of her work give an idea of how complex the performance of some of these pieces can be.