After Life, Tom Cipullo’s modern opera, investigates the role of art in a distressed world, and asks heavy questions about an artist’s obligation in confronting humanity in all of its good and bad parts. David Mason wrote the libretto for the work, which imagines a meeting between Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein as ghosts, who show their brilliance and flaws. In Sleep the World Is Yours, a song cycle by Lori Laitman, sets three lovely poems by Selma Meerbaum-Eisinger, who sadly would perish in a Nazi camp at the young age of 18.

Reviews:

Cipullo weaves David Mason’s ingenious, rhapsodic libretto into an absorbing, often lively, occasionally desultory narrative told in words and music that is translucently scored and makes full use of the five-member ensemble’s colours, astonishingly vocal at times in their effect.

– Gramophone

The coupling of the two works makes perfect sense thematically and stylistically. Both are well worth hearing and well performed, very good examples of some of the significant tonal modern work being made right now in the US.

_Gapplegate Classical/Modern Music Review

Inspired by diaries, letters, and personal accounts from the 1860s, Rappahannock County is a music-theatre work which movingly and dramatically commemorates the 150th anniversary of the American Civil War. The location of the Rappahannock River as a border between north and south is a metaphor for the region's many conflicts. Performed by a cast of five singers who play over 30 rôles, the piece brings this dramatic historical period to life in songs which express the devastating impact of the Civil War on all of the people who endured it.

Playing on Fritz Kreisler’s own ‘Bergonzi’ violin (c. 1740), Henning Kraggerud presents a program of Kreisler’s compositions for violin. + Filmed in the intimate surroundings of Oslo’s historic ‘Old Lodge’, this is a world premiere recording of many of these arrangements for violin and orchestra. + Mr. Kraggerud introduces the works himself, and leads the Oslo Camerata in a sparkling, thrilling concert. + Fritz Kreisler (1875-1962), one of the greatest violinists of his, or any other, generation, also performed many lovely, little works in the style of past, obscure composers to whom he gave attribution that he slyly kept the public from learning that the pieces had, in fact, been composed by him. + Violinist, violist, composer, and director Henning Kraggerud is a naturally gifted artist who combines an unusually sweet and colorful tone with intelligent expression and impressive virtuosity. + He is Professor at the Barratt Due Institute of Music in Oslo.

One of America' finest and most widely recognized composers, John Corigliano has won several Grammy Awards, the Pulitzer Prize and dozens of other honors. His hauntingly beautiful Chaconne and virtuosic the Red Violin Caprices, both based on his AC.

Stephen Hartke's the Greater Good was commissioned by Glimmerglass Opera, and is a strikingly original contribution to the operatic repertory. Based on an iconic short story by Maupassant set during the immediate aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War.

In 1998, I reviewed the composer-led excerpts from John Adams’s collaboration with poet and activist June Jordon (1936–2002), I was looking at the ceiling and then I saw the sky. The title is a quote from a survivor of the 1994 Northridge earthquake in southern California. Here we have the whole work. In the earlier review, I assumed what was missing was connecting dialogue, a mistake corrected by one of Fanfare’s many frighteningly alert readers. In fact, the entire work is sung, and here the designation is “song play,” which seems to describe the form quite accurately. The work has much in common with pieces like Brecht-Weill’s Das kleine Mahagony or, more recently, the Rice-Lloyd Webber collaborations, Jesus Christ Superstar and Evita, in that the songs operate more or less as commentary to the onstage action. Like the Brecht-based Weill works, there is a great deal of implied and explicit social criticism, something that five years into the Bush administration seems much less quaint now. The problems with the work remain. The cardboard characters and their largely clichéd interactions keep everything at arm’s length, something compounded by the tendency of the songs to comment on the action rather than embody it. In addition, for all of its cleverness, Adams’ pastiche score rarely rises to the kind of immediate melodic impact one finds in Weill, Sondheim, or LaChiusa.

The plot, taken from the John Adams Web site, is as follows: in mid-1990s Los Angeles, David, a preacher, sings about his many love affairs and his current girlfriend, Leila. Dewain is arrested by Mike, a homophobic cop, for stealing two bottles of beer while trying to reach his lover, Consuelo, who is afraid that her son has been arrested by the INS. Tiffany videotapes the arrest; she wonders why Mike is not more receptive to her advances. Dewain resists arrest and Mike has him charged with a felony, meaning he could go to jail for 45 years under the “Three Strikes” law. At his trial, David, his lawyer, tries to explain his client’s point of view. After questioning Tiffany, Rick begins to be attracted to her. David visits Dewain in jail, where Dewain tells him he’s decided to go to law school. Leila wonders if David will ever settle down. As act II opens, Leila and David are making out on the couch in David’s office in his church when an earthquake hits. Leila is knocked unconscious. Mike visits Tiffany’s house; she asks him why he hasn’t been more forward, and he has a crisis of sexual identity; Rick suddenly appears, and she asks him out instead. Dewain, in his cell, recounts how the walls split open and he could see the outside, but, realizing that he was better off working inside the system, he did not escape. Consuelo tells him she is going back to El Salvador to fight for political freedom; Dewain decides to stay in Los Angeles. Lying in David’s arms, Leila begins to recover.

At the time of the premiere, Peter Sellars, the original director, offered up the hope that the work would become the play of choice for high schools everywhere. That seems as unlikely now as it did then (should anyone care, the high school musical of choice, once the rights become available, will be William Finn’s The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee), in part because of the sexual and sometimes heavy-handed political content as well as the sheer difficulty of the music. For all its flaws, the work gains enormously in stature when heard complete and, to set the show in context, it is a whole lot more interesting musically than Rent or any of the Andrew Lloyd Webber “rock operas.”

The performance is very fine. Darius de Haas, returning from the original cast, as David the preacher and Kimako Xavier Trotman as Dewain, the gang member, are the only Americans in the cast. It would be idle to pretend that anyone could replace Audra McDonald as Consuelo but Martina Mühlpointner is very good. If you listen closely, some of the singers have slight accents, occasionally making their words a fraction less distinct but, frankly, you have to listen for it and it makes no impact at all on the overall success of the enterprise. As before, the work is recorded like the musical that it is rather than in the defined space more commonly associated with classical music. Therefore, a discussion of recording quality is really beside the point. Extensive notes and a detailed synopsis cued to the individual numbers are included, but no text.

FANFARE: John Story

Enjoyable and entertaining ... the strong personality of Locklair's music is projected successfully ...

This is, as the liner-notes suggest, a CD of attractive and colourful music. Though most of the works are very recent, Locklair writes in an idiom that is perfectly accessible to anyone who has even a quite limited knowledge of 20th century music. His influences are fairly easy to discern – not only Copland, but other more international voices such as Martin? and Shostakovich occasionally shine through. However these soon fade from the attention, as Locklair has his own strong stylistic personality.

The Symphony of Seasons is, naturally, in four movements, proceeding from a ceremonial opening ‘Autumn’ to a warm and expansive ‘Summer’, via the longest movement, ‘Winter’, and a sprightly ‘Spring’. Locklair uses some well-known melodies along the way, notably the Lutheran chorale Nun danket alle Gott, which is heard in ‘Autumn’, and the round Sumer is icumen in, which duly appears in the finale.

The most striking section for me is ‘Winter’, an extended slow movement cast in the form of a Chaconne, that is to say variants over a repeated harmonic sequence. Though I could probably have done without the wind machine - especially after the summer we’ve had in the UK - I nevertheless found this a powerfully atmospheric movement. Also striking is the restraint with which ‘Summer’ is treated; it begins in a magically hushed vein, with a fine, broad melody, and, though Sumer is icumen in brings life and dance rhythms into the music, it dies away in an atmosphere of mystery.

The earliest work on the disc is Lairs of Soundings, a three movement piece for soprano and strings dating from 1982. Movements 1 and 3 are settings of parts of poems by Ursula Le Guin, and are both fraught, nervous pieces. They are offset by a strikingly lovely slow central section, in which the voice is wordless, the ‘text’ being pure vowel sounds. Attractive music, though the work as a whole seems a little short – perhaps it needs one more movement. Janeanne Houston is the soloist, well able to deal with the very high tessitura, but slightly unsteady in tone and intonation here and there.

Phoenix and Again is a short, straightforward occasional piece, while In Memory – H.H.L. is an elegiac movement for string orchestra paying tribute to the composer’s mother. Like all the music on the disc, it is well crafted and carefully planned. To claim, however, as the disc’s conductor Kirk Trevor apparently has done, that this is a ‘worthy successor to the Barber Adagio’ is the sort of wild assertion that really does the piece no favours at all, and does call the conductor’s musical judgement somewhat into question.

The concluding item on this enjoyable and entertaining disc is the three movement Harp Concerto, delivered with great aplomb by Jacquelyn Bartlett. This is a charming work, with a beautiful central slow movement, Variants, in which the soloist often provides a soft yet sumptuous accompaniment to woodwind and string melodies. This underlined for me the impression that Locklair is most himself in his slow music, where he often achieves a rarefied atmosphere that is very affecting.

To be fair to Kirk Trevor - having taken him to task above! - he does a fine job of steering the Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra through this inevitably unfamiliar music. They mostly play very well, with some excellent woodwind playing. The brass occasionally show the strain, particularly in more demanding parts of the Symphony, and the strings sound as if they could perhaps do with a couple more desks in each section. But these shortcomings are not serious, and the strong personality of Locklair’s music is projected successfully throughout.

-- Gwyn Parry-Jones, MusicWeb International

Ernst Toch's 1928 Violin Sonata opens this new Naxos collection of the composer's chamber music. The rather dissonant piece spends a good bit of its time on the fringes of atonality (especially the angular first movement) but then softens its harmonic contours a bit for the finale, which is a brisk gallop in the style of Shostakovich. The earlier (1923) Burlesken for Piano, a suite of comical dances, makes for less challenging listening, while Three Impromptus for Cello, composed just a year before Toch's death in 1964, captivates through masterful cello writing, as well as emotional expressiveness.

Toch composed the Quintet upon his arrival in the United States in 1938, and what comes through forcefully is the sense of his nostalgia for the world he left behind as he brilliantly marries Brahmsian compositional style to 20th-century tonal language. The movement titles go straight to the heart of the matter: The Lyrical Part, The Whimsical Part, The Contemplative Part, and The Dramatic Part, with the Contemplative slow movement being the most firmly rooted in the 20th century, reaching a Berg-style expressiveness. Spectrum Concerts Berlin provides committed and powerfully rendered performances, all captured in first-rate sound. Toch fans need not hesitate in acquiring this excellent disc.

--Victor Carr Jr, ClassicsToday.com

Recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2004, the prolific American composer Paul Moravec writes in a musical idiom that offers an underlying romanticism tempered by distinctively modern discipline, qualities evident in the three works collect.

This recording has a lot going for it. Ives' music permits such a wide latitude of interpretive options that it's difficult to criticize any performance on grounds other then technical incompetence, and Steven Mayer not only plays extremely well, he has interesting ideas about how this music should sound. The Concord Sonata receives a magisterial performance, some 10 minutes slower than Marc-André Hamelin's benchmark recording for New World, but the music itself is so dense that it never sounds slow. Quite the contrary. If Mayer sacrifices some typical Ivesian wildness, he compensates by allowing us to hear more of what's going on in even the densest passages. He's particularly adept at pointing up, say, Beethoven's Fifth on its various appearances in "Emerson", and despite his comparative leisure, he highlights the abrupt contrasts of tempo and dynamics in "Hawthorne" as well as anyone.


Mayer's relaxed reading of the "The Alcotts" has special charm and a warmth that's just right for this portrait of two girls practicing the piano at home. "Thoreau" is let down a bit by the recording, which fails to back off far enough to realize a true pianissimo, even though Mayer scales down his dynamic range as Ives requests. Indeed, about the only other quibble I have aside from this one is that Mayer doesn't give us a true "very fast" in the 7/4 section of "Emerson", though of course it's an open question whether or not Ives himself would have cared. In the final analysis, this performance makes an excellent introduction to the work, combining a healthy dose of Romantic expressiveness with great clarity, concentration, and boldness. Even the readings between movements (of bits of Ives' own essays and fragments taken from the eponymous writers, an aspect of the performance I truly dreaded) are sonorously but simply intoned by Kerry Shale, coming off well as a sort of palate-cleansing sorbet between the larger courses.


The three shorter works, all more or less related to the sonata (everything in Ives tends to be related to everything else anyway), make for a very interesting and entirely appropriate bonus. I particularly enjoyed the wacky and truculent Varied Air and Variations, a riotously obnoxious piece that doesn't get as much attention as it should. As noted, the sonics, though generally good, tend to put the microphones a touch too close to the piano, and in consequence somewhat limit the dynamic range while capturing a bit of performance noise besides--but this isn't really troublesome. If you're looking for a satisfying, low-priced way to get to know some truly remarkable piano music through intelligent and sympathetic performances, you can't go wrong here.
--David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

REVIEWS:

Leshnoff might compose his music for anyone who wants to listen, but it seems to me that the inattentive listener will be cheated out of most of its pleasures. Indeed, it wasn’t until I sat down and really listened to this CD on my home stereo that I realized how fine this music is. It asks the listener to devote time and attention to it; there’s no pandering here, but I think it still is accessible to anyone who is sufficiently open-minded enough to enjoy Hindemith, Bartók, or late Stravinsky, for example. (Surely that’s not too much to ask!)

The Violin Concerto could well be a significant addition to the instrument’s repertoire. Five movements are indicated, but because there is no pause between the first and second movements, and none between the fourth and fifth, and also because there is a tempo change in the fourth, the work’s structure is more complicated than the CD’s track listing indicates. The concerto opens with a figure not unlike Westminster chimes, and because it reappears several times throughout the concerto, it serves as a kind of guidepost. The opening Allegro drives forward with purpose, and is serious but not grim. There is much to interest the ears, not least in the orchestration, which is consistently imaginative. The solo writing is idiomatic, as if Leshnoff composed it for himself. At 7:57, the second movement (Slow) is the concerto’s longest, and it is here that we are introduced to Leshnoff’s more lyrical side. Again, orchestral colors are deployed with an artist’s sensitivity, and the musical argument is well considered and involving, with an emotional intensity suggesting that the composer, in spite of his age, is something of an old soul. If Samuel Barber had lived longer, he might have written music not unlike this. The central Scherzo lightens the mood—for a time—without disturbing the concerto’s emotional trajectory. Prokofiev comes to mind. Leshnoff uses the orchestra masterfully, avoiding both cliché and novelty for novelty’s sake. The fourth movement (Slow–Fast) returns to the mood of the second, but it is more unsettled, and soon becomes agitated. A crisis is reached, and then resolved—but only partly—in the closing Elegy, which again is reminiscent of Barber. The music stops before one expects it to, giving the concerto an open-ended feeling. Although he didn’t write a programmatic work, one of Leshnoff’s inspirations was a story told by a Holocaust survivor. During forced labor, SS guards would make prisoners sing Nazi propaganda songs, but the prisoners would insert their prayers into these songs. In light of this story, one can better understand why the concerto ends as it does.

Distant Reflections is scored for solo violin, piano, and strings, with an offstage string quartet. This might be thought of as Leshnoff’s response to Vaughan Williams’s Tallis Fantasia , except here Leshnoff uses fragments from a Mass by Ockeghem. As in the concerto (but without sounding like it), a very refined ear is at work (in terms of both color and form), and Distant Reflections is at once sensual and serious. Without talking down to listeners or gimmickry, Leshnoff indeed has succeeded in writing new music that could appeal to many.

Pearl German is the wife of Jeremiah German, “a college professor with an abiding love of music,” according to Naxos’s booklet notes. The String Quartet No. 1 was a commission in honor of German’s wife, on the occasion of her 80th birthday. The four movements, beginning with “Winter,” are named after the four seasons. Again, this is not a programmatic work—there are no Vivaldian stamping feet or barking dogs. Instead, Leshnoff seems to be aiming at a more metaphysical reflection on the cycles of life. Ending the work with “Autumn” allows Leshnoff yet another downbeat ending, which he seems to like and does well. In terms of both timbre and emotions, this quartet is refined, eschewing that which is obvious or easy. As in the other two works, his writing is concise; Leshnoff is not a composer who goes on talking after he has nothing more to say.

These performances, all supervised by the composer, make an excellent case for the music. Wetherbee is a first-class violinist, whether he is a soloist or within the very able Carpe Diem String Quartet, whose other members are Wendy Morton, Korine Fujiwara, and Robert Firdman. The Baltimore Chamber Orchestra, founded in the 1980s, plays with polish under the direction of Markand Thakar, and with evident appreciation for Leshnoff’s ideas. There are some weird and annoying sonic artifacts, only noticeable during pauses and very quiet sections in the recording of the String Quartet; it sounds as if another ensemble were playing in a studio two doors down. Otherwise, Naxos’s recording is excellent.

Labels like to push their hot new composers, and after a while, one gets skeptical over this or that so-called discovery. Leshnoff, however, is excitingly “the real thing,” and I expect we’ll be hearing a lot more from and about him in years to come.

-- Fanfare