These world premiere recordings of works by award-winning composer David Gompper reflect his recent interest in the concerto, as well as his evolution of approach through increasing complexity in time and space, textural landscape and narrative detail. The ‘Double Concerto Dialogue’ covers moods from lyrical to argumentative and inconsequential chatter to deeper reflection, while the ‘Clarinet Concerto’ relates to the energy and skill of the Parkour runner. The explosive colors of ‘Sunburst’ are associated with the star-shaped proportions of the Farey numeric series. Gompper’s exquisite ‘Violin Concerto’ can be heard on a previous Naxos release. David Gompper has lived and worked professionally as a pianist, a conductor, and a composer in New York, San Diego, London, Nigeria, Michigan, Texas and Iowa. He studied at the Royal College of Music in London with Jeremy Dale Roberts and Humphrey Searle. After teaching in Nigeria, he received his doctorate at the University of Michigan and taught at the University of Texas, Arlington. Since 1991 he has been professor of composition and director of the Center for New Music at the University of Iowa.

Dominick Argento is widely considered to be one of America’s leading composers of lyric opera and choral music. The two major song cycles on this recording demonstrate Argento’s flair for setting unusual texts to music. From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, which won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for Music, is based on eight of the writer’s confessional journal entries, while The Andree Expedition sets diaries and letters from an ultimately tragic balloon expedition to the North Pole in 1897. “For me, all music begins where speech stops.” (Dominick Argento)

John D. Gottsch spent his youth in the lake country of Florida, which instilled in him a love of nature that has informed his music ever since. His symphonic poem Sunset is almost cinematic in its opulence and in its depiction of both the beauty and fragility of Key West, and the area’s vulnerability to climate change. By contrast, Princess Yurievskaya charts the passionate love of Catherine Dolgorukova and Tsar Alexander II from their first meeting and eventual marriage, to his assassination. This vivid narrative is full of exciting dances and torrid romance, irradiated with evocative orchestral solos.

Charles Ives' four violin sonatas count among the composer's most focused and imaginative works in any genre. They contain enough craggy dissonances, mangled hymn tunes, and rhythmic horseplay to satisfy hard-core Ivesians, yet their burly textures and volatile mood swings communicate a sense of immediacy not dissimilar to late-Romantic violin sonatas by Brahms and Franck. Individually and collectively violinist Curt Thompson and pianist Rodney Waters are fully on top of and into these works. Thompson's acerbic, nasal tone is particularly effective in sustained lyrical passages, and at times he alters it to take on a cello-like timbre (listen to the Third Sonata's drawn out first-movement coda, for instance). He also digs into Ives' uptempo humor with idiomatic gusto in the Fourth Sonata's outer movements and in the Second Sonata's central "In The Barn" movement--an "unsquare" dance if ever there were one! For his part, Waters brings maximum security and character to the composer's difficult piano parts.


True, Thompson doesn't match the tonal and expressive variety violinist Gregory Fulkerson commands in the above-mentioned reference versions, which are better engineered as well. But you can't beat having all four Ives Sonatas on a single, bargain-priced disc, and the brilliant booklet notes by Ives scholar H. Wiley Hitchcock are models of their kind. Recommended.

--Jed Distler, ClassicsToday.com