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.

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.

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

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 is the third major-label monograph of diverse music of Michael Daugherty (b. 1954), the University of Michigan faculty member known for his engagement with pop-culture subject matter. The first, of his Superman-inspired Metropolis Symphony and other works, made a splash. Another brought us a series of sound-gags, including the bassoon concerto Dead Elvis. There’s also a release of his opera Jackie O and scattered works on numerous compilations, as well as a symphonic band version of UFO and other works on the Klavier label. This is his first Naxos release, part of the terrific “American Classics” series.

Philadelphia Stories, considered by the composer his Third Symphony, was commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra, which premiered it under David Zinman in 2001. The work is in three movements, as much a triptych of tone poems as an abstract symphony—an urban La mer. The titles of the movements indicate the gist: “Sundown on South Street,” “Tell-Tale Harp,” “Bells for Stokowski.” The piece is just under half-an-hour long, each of the first two movements being about seven-and-a-half minutes and the third about 14.

If you know anything of Daugherty’s music, much of what’s here won’t surprise you for the most part. Daugherty frequently draws on pop and kitsch music archetypes in building up evocative larger forms. I can’t pin down any specific paraphrases in the first movement, but the several different kinds of orchestral pop, jazz, and Latin jazz conjure the atmosphere of Philly’s South Street, a byway of the musical night life where Daugherty himself had performed jazz and experimental music. The movement is a fantasia for two solo harps and orchestra, the title referring to The Tell-Tale Heart, which Edgar Allan Poe wrote in Philadelphia. Daugherty likens the somewhat gas-lit mood of the movement to Poe’s lyric poetry. The big shadow to go along with Stokowski’s in the last movement is Bach’s, alluding of course to the conductor’s famous orchestral transcriptions of Bach’s music. Daugherty begins the movement with a solo violin theme (arguably in the style of Bach), which serves as a basis for wide-ranging variations, Daugherty writes, “in my own musical language.”

The second work, UFO (1999), is a five-movement concerto for percussion and orchestra, written for soloist Evelyn Glennie and the National Symphony and conducted at its premiere by Leonard Slatkin. The five movement titles are as evocative as those in Philadelphia Stories: “Traveling Music,” “Unidentified,” “Flying,” “???,” and “Objects”; each concentrates on different percussion instruments. There are a few neat moments, but from the subject matter one expects a more imaginative (Lachenmann-like? Messiaen-ish?) orchestral experience than one gets. Deft, but largely predictable—as in Philadelphia Stories. The latter, though, is a far more satisfying work; it suffers less from a desperation solely to entertain. (The symphonic-band instrumentation of this piece was created in 2000; it was commissioned by a consortium of university bands and recorded by Glennie and the University of North Texas Wind Symphony, Eugene Migliaro Corporon conducting.)

Daugherty is a good composer from the standpoint of his ability to get what he wants out of his materials, but it’s hard to put one’s finger on what his true voice (that “my own musical language” of the above quote) might be beneath the busy surface of style-dropping. It could be argued that style isn’t something that can be heard from moment to moment, necessarily—that the whole of the work, the choices the composer makes in his gleanings from others, his extramusical impetus, are the style. Daugherty definitely has a taste for particular kinds of borrowings.

The performances are excellent. Marin Alsop obviously knows the Colorado Orchestra well and leads them with confidence through this often tricky music; they seem like they’re having fun. Glennie is outstanding as usual as a performer, but once again, she’s playing a commissioned piece that remains a little flat. Still, this disc is all in all a good and inexpensive introduction to Daugherty’s work. This Naxos series is invaluable.

Robert Kirzinger, FANFARE

Jon Deak is a composer who ‘has more fun with music than anyone I know’ (New York Newsday), and all of the pieces on this album of symphonic stories for young and old alike involve the performers as narrators. These tales include the wolves of Canada and Alaska in B.B. Wolf (An Apologia), a loving tribute to the immigrants of America in Bye-Bye!, and a dramatic and virtuoso version of Hans Christian Andersen’s The Snow Queen Finale. The Legend of Spuyten Duyvil is a tale of old New Amsterdam that invokes the heroic spirit of trumpeter Anthony Van Corlaer. John Deak, composer and education specialist, was associate principal bassist with the New York Philharmonic for many years. A Pulitzer and Grammy Award-nominated composer, he has written over 300 groundbreaking works, many of which are accessible to children.

Although he is a prolific composer of operas, symphonies and concertos, songs lie at the core of Daron Hagen’s output. With over 350 published art songs, he has embraced and extended the great lineage of American song exemplified by Samuel Barber, Leonard Bernstein and Ned Rorem, and is now considered one of the foremost twenty-first century composers for the voice. The meticulously crafted and wholly idiomatic examples included here have been recorded under the composer’s supervision with his chosen performers, members of Lyric Fest, Philadelphia’s renowned song series.

This collection of songs with voice and clarinet has at its heart Lori Laitman’s profoundly moving cycle I Never Saw Another Butterfly, which sets the words of hope and desolation written by children imprisoned in the Terezín concentration camp. Inspired by this poignant music, Kristine Hurst-Wajszczuk and Denise Gainey commissioned a follow-up, The Secret Exit, on poems by Nobel Laureate Nelly Sachs that reflect on life and death. Newly arranged for voice and clarinet, Living In The Body is a cycle about love, memory and resilience. The program is completed with Diana Rosenblum’s delightful setting of Winter Rain and Kalmen Opperman’s haunting Unseul.

This recording of choral works showcase a group of composers who are or were once faculty members of the Aaron Copland School of Music at Queens College, CUNY. The widely differing languages and poetic aesthetics set by these composers represent the concept of “Songs of Peace and Praise,” from symbolic, descriptive pieces such as Bright Sheng’s “Two Folk Songs from Qinghai” to tender and moving interpretations of traditional texts such as Allen Brings’ “In paradisum.” The voices of The New York Virtuoso Singers and Queens College combine to express the universal nature of shared experience.

BAKER The Glass Bead Game. 1 Awaking the Winds. 2 Shadows: Four Dirge-Nocturnes. 3 The Mystic Trumpeter 4 • Leonard Slatkin, cond; 4 Hans Vonk, cond; Saint Louis SO • NAXOS 8.559642 (66:36) Live: St. Louis 1 1/21–24/1991; 2 5/14–16/1993; 3 5/18–20/1990; 4 4/16–18/1999


From 1991 to 1999 Claude Baker was the composer-in-residence to the Saint Louis Symphony, the fourth and last in a program in which he was preceded by Joseph Schwantner (1982–85), Joan Tower (1985–88), and Donald Erb (1988–91). Recorded souvenirs of the residencies of the first three were issued by Nonesuch and New World; neither Schwantner release made it to CD, but the Tower and Erb did and can still be purchased. Though arguably the most compelling artist of this distinguished quartet—please don’t send nasty notes—and certainly the one longest in residence, Baker was not so honored. A 1993 live recording of Shadows: Four Dirge-Nocturnes was included in the limited edition commemorative set, The Slatkin Years , but that is long out of print. (The Naxos disc opts for the 1990 premiere.) So this Naxos release of live recordings originally made for broadcast between 1990 and 1999, funded by Indiana University in Bloomington where Baker holds an endowed professorship, is a most welcome redress of an unfortunate oversight.


The Glass Bead Game (1982/83)—inspired, as is almost all of his music, by a literary work and quoting from the compositions of others as annotation—is quintessential Claude Baker and therefore a perfect work to open the program. Baker, inspired by Hermann Hesse’s novel of the same name, takes his thesis from the intellectual narcissism of Hesse’s Castalian scholars. Their obsession with analyzing the past, their fascination with games, trivial detail, cleverness, and systemic complexity, and their eventual stagnation and decline through failure to create anything new are all reflected in the musical program. Baker uses Hesse and the music to shine a light on 20th-century musical obsessions, using a brilliantly executed numerologically complex serial canon; a dream-like, period-correct performance of a Johann Schein courtly dance commented upon by modern atonality; and an amazing collage of six works by Dallapiccola, Schoenberg, Vaughan Williams, Shostakovich, Penderecki, and Liszt, given unity by their incorporation of the famous B-A-C-H motive. These six pieces are assimilated Castalian-syle into a final movement, which is both amazing in its virtuosity and sobering in its ultimate emptiness.


Shadows: Four Dirge-Nocturnes (1990) and The Mystic Trumpeter (1999) are grounded as well in literary sources. In Shadows , Baker explores four haiku, using characteristics of the form—syllable counts, binary construction, and motivic concision—as compositional elements. The verses and the music are dark, evoking death, the graveyard, and mourning in each of the seasons from spring through winter. Woven into the nocturnal work are gestures, fragments, and quotes from works by Mahler, Britten, and Stravinsky, ending touchingly with a quote from “In diesem Wetter” from Kindertotenlieder. The Mystic Trumpeter concerns itself with Walt Whitman, finding both literal and symbolic connection between the verse—the title poem and “The Dalliance of the Eagles”—and Ives’s The Unanswered Question , and works by Messiaen, George Rochberg, and medieval troubadour Guiraut de Bornelh. Awaking the Winds (1993) is the anomaly. It has no literary precursor, contains no borrowed music, and is “freely chromatic” rather than Baker’s usual combination of tonality and atonality. Unlike the other works that are heavily driven by the percussion section, this one eschews even timpani. It essentially is a pastorale, though the composer disavows any programmatic intent, with suggestions of wind and sounds of nature, a storm, and a quiet dénouement.


During the decade of these performances, Leonard Slatkin and the SLSO had a well-deserved reputation as promoters of new music, especially by native composers, and the orchestra was in superb shape, able to play anything that their composer might write for them. Vonk, who took over the podium in 1996, may not have taken to the idiom as naturally, but the orchestra still knew the way home and the Dutch maestro paces them most effectively. The execution of this bold, dramatic, and exceedingly challenging music is flawless, the moments of quiet and delicacy are sublimely poised, and even more to the advantage of the music, all is presented with absolute conviction. Recordings exist online of Indiana University ensembles playing this music—although The Mystic Trumpeter seems to have disappeared for now—but good as they are—and the fine Shadows is even conducted by Slatkin—none of the IU performances can match these in function or insight. The recordings themselves, the majority engineered by the late/lamented William Hoekstra, are demonstration class, and reveal little of the very quiet audiences. I was present for at least three of these concert series, so for me there could not be a better tribute to Claude Baker or to his years with the SLSO than the release of these recordings. They should serve admirably to introduce the work of the composer to those not so fortunate, as well.


FANFARE: Ronald E. Grames

Known for his large-scale compositions, Leonard Bernstein also wrote for his own instrument, the piano. The sequence of four Anniversaries, published between 1944 and 1989, are brief, deftly evocative vignettes written to celebrate his many friends, colleagues and family members. The early Piano Sonata is imbued with youthful self-confidence, and explores certain compositional techniques to which he was to return in more mature works. The rhythmically incisive Music for the Dance No. II is another important early work.

Eleanor Cory's music is performed throughout the US and internationally and has been recognized by many awards and commissions including the Aaron Copland and Fromm Foundations and the National Endowment for the Arts. The shifting musical languages that give her compositions their unique vibrancy include the "modal, tonal, atonal mix" of her First Violin Sonata, as well as jazz elements. All of this and more can be found in Things Are, her memorial for composer Milton Babbitt, and in the Celebration of pianistic virtuosity. Cory's Third String Quartet expresses both "sweet melancholy" and playful dialogue. Epithalamium explores the flute's flexibility in elegantly shaped gestures, while the instrumentation of the Fantasy is light in it's mood and airy textures.

"The performance on this disc by John Salmon is of the highest caliber. He plays beautifully, both with precision and expertise, and pulls the most out of each note. His facility at the keyboard is wonderful. If a better performance of these works can be done, I would be amazed... this disc is truly excellent. The music is a joy. The performance is exquisite. Very highly recommended."
-- Patrick Gary, www.musicweb.uk.net

"This fine disc of [Brubeck's] more formal piano pieces was born from long years of dedication by American pianist John Salmon...Throughout the disc, Salmon plays with rhythmic strength and remarkable digital clarity."
-- Bradley Bambarger, Gramophone

Over the last decade the music of the Puerto Rican composer Roberto Sierra has become internationally admired, and this has led to prestigious commissions and performances around the world. Fandangos was heard at the BBC Proms in London and employs a harpsichord work attributed to Antonio Soler as a departure for a richly inventive orchestral fantasy. The dramatic Sinfonia No. 4 was described by ArtsNowNashville as 'a textbook example of how this composer breathes new life into old forms. The piece is basically a classic Germanic symphony imbued with Spanish sensibilities and reinvigorated with new harmonies and rhythms.' Robert Schumann is subtly evoked in Carnaval, five character pieces that explore mythical creatures, both menacing and serene.