Gogol

"Gogol" carries the weight of its namesake — the great Ukrainian-Russian satirist whose fiction collapsed under the pressure of his own obsessions — and Chilly Gonzales seems to understand that weight intuitively. The piece is more angular than his gentler work, the left hand asserting itself with a slight heaviness, the harmonic language touching on minor tonalities that feel inherited from Eastern European folk tradition rather than Western classical convention. There is a quality of circling, of returning to the same thought from different angles without resolution, which mirrors Gogol's own literary method of spiraling descent. The mood is rueful rather than despairing — a kind of dark comedy embedded in the music's slight lurching quality. Gonzales is a showman by nature, and even here, in this spare and literary piece, there is a theatricality in the phrasing, a sense that the music is being performed for an audience of one, somewhere in a dim room. Reach for it on grey mornings, on days when irony feels like the only honest response to the world, when you want company that understands absurdity without flinching from it.