Vocal Recital: Elzy, Ruby - GERSHWIN, G. / JOHNSON, H. / BLA

TROUBLED ISLAND - WORLD PREMIE

This is the third volume in this phenomenal series devoted to Mexicoís greatest 20th century composer (volumes 1 and 2, CB8850 and CB8851 respectively won the 2003 and 2004 GRAMMYS in their categories). In this international collaboration between Southwest Chamber Music and Mexicoís Tambuco Percussion Ensemble, we hear a celebration of the composerís native culture, with such powerful works as Xochipilli (a pre-Columbian god of music) and the vocal works Cuatro Melodias and Lamentaciones. The other vocal works, with their melodic gifts, come close to revealing the operatic composer Chavez could have been. Of particular interest are the percussion works: the famous Toccata is here, along with Tambuco and one of his final works, the Partita for Solo Tympani. In between is the dramatic incidental music to a 1932 production, Antigona, apuntes para la Sinfonia. The previous volumes have been consistent best-sellers, and volume 3 should be immensely popular. Even more good news: the series, to be completed in 2006 to mark Southwest Musicís 20th anniversary, will eventually include the complete String Quartets and the complete works for piano and string ensemble. Definitely one of the most important chamber music releases this year!

Kraft, W.: Music for String Quartet and Percussion/ Krenek,

Wuorinen, C.: Winter's Tale (A) / Horn Trio / A Song To the

The Hollywood Flute

GOEHR, A.: 5 Objects Darkly / CARTER, E.: Of Challenge and o

ARNI EGILSSON CHAMBER MUSIC

Cambria Master Recordings is pleased to announce Cabaret Songs of Madeleine Dring featuring performances by Dring specialist Wanda Brister, Mezzo-soprano; Courtney Kenny, piano and vocals; and Nuala Willis, contralto. The English composer Madeleine Dring (1923-1977) is best known for her rhythmic and tuneful piano works, art songs, and works for oboe. However, she also enjoyed writing and performing songs for West End Revues. Nearly all the songs on this album are premiere recordings and have not been heard since the close of the original productions. Cabaret Songs of Madeleine Dring includes some of Dring's compositions from West End Revues of the 1950s including Airs on a Shoestring, Child's Play, Fresh Airs, various cabaret songs with texts by Dring, and three arrangements of Cole Porter songs. It features Courtney Kenny, pianist and cabaret artist who was a friend of Dring and Musical Director for Child's Play in 1958 giving us a direct line to that era. Brister discovered Dring in 2000 and helped to have all the unpublished vocal works printed in 2018 by Classical Vocal Reprints. The release was recorded at Kenny's home in Sussex.

PREMIERES • Conrad Chow (vn); Bruce Broughton (pn); Ronald Royer, cond; Sinfonia Toronto • CAMBRIA CD1204 (71:03)


BROUGHTON Tryptich. Gold Rush Songs. ROYER Rhapsody. In Memoriam J. S. Bach. LAU Joy. CHOPIN Nocturne in c?


Conrad Chow is a magnificently talented young violinist who specializes in playing new music. Bruce Broughton’s Triptych: Three Incongruities is an interesting suite that opens with a rhythmic dance. The middle movement is a slow, legato melody that has decidedly contemporary harmonies, and the last movement is again fast and rhythmic with a Celtic feel to it. It is easily accessible music and it could be the entry into 21st-century music for a music lover who has previously shunned it. His Gold Rush Songs , written for violin and piano, are wordless, but those of us who are familiar with the songs know the story of Joe Bowers and Betsy from Pike. Many will also recognize the final song describing those fabulous “Golden Slippers” that we might wear walking along the streets of Heaven. Broughton is obviously familiar with the old West. His most celebrated film score, for the Lawrence Kasdan 1985 western Silverado , brought him an Oscar nomination. Since then he has composed music for the concert stage, television, and even video games. He knows how to entertain an audience, and proves it on this disc.


Los Angeles-born Ronald Royer first studied cello and played in several orchestras, and like Broughton worked in television and the motion picture industry during the 1980s. A few years later, he began to study composition at the University of Toronto, from which he received his master’s degree in 1997. He is now the music director of Ontario’s Scarborough Philharmonic Orchestra. The first movement of his Rhapsody for Violin and Chamber Orchestra is aptly marked adagio, misterioso . The entire work has an exotic flair. Listening to it, I imagined sailing across the Red Sea in a dhow, perhaps heading for Zanzibar with a cargo of dates. The sea is calm at first, but just as we see the shore in the distance, the wind whips up the waves. In the second movement, both the sea and the seafarers become agitated as the dhow narrowly escapes destruction on the reef before sailing into the harbor. Royer gives us a great vehicle and Chow plays his music with great finesse. It definitely shows off the gorgeous tone colors of his 1933 Gaetano Pollastri violin. I find his In Memoriam J. S. Bach somewhat less impressive, but it is still a fine piece of music. I definitely want to hear more from this composer.


The inclusion of the Milstein transcription of Chopin’s Nocturne No. 20 serves to show that Conrad Chow is equally at home in both traditional and contemporary classical music. Unlike some artists who specialize in modern music, his trills, runs, and scales are perfect in every way. It’s a beautiful piece and it is wonderfully rendered here. With regard to the mechanics of the compact disc itself, the sound is clear, but the violin is definitely out in front of the orchestra. When accompanied by the piano, the violin is more of an equal partner, however.


FANFARE: Maria Nockin

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In his own premiere CD, violinist Conrad Chow presents first recordings of recent works that all have at least one foot firmly planted in traditional tonality. Film composer Bruce Broughton notes in the booklet that he reworked the Triptych (Three Incongruities) from an earlier version after his marriage to violinist-wife, Belinda, who helped familiarize him with the instrumental resources he’d been seeking to understand. The first movement updates Bach’s approach to the violin, rendering it spikier and more sharply rhythmic, perhaps, but nevertheless preserving the character of the older composer’s melody and rhythm. The second movement provides a similar facelift for Prokofiev, of whose quirky harmonic twists and turns (specifically, it seems, modeled after similar passages in the composer’s First Violin Concerto) he provides a pastiche. The finale, based on the sound of traditional fiddle tunes, if not the fiddle tunes themselves (Broughton identifies them as Scottish in character), exudes intoxicating verve. Chow produces an edgy, occasionally astringent tone from the 1933 Gaetano Pollastri violin upon which he plays (or might that asperity be an artifact of the lean recorded sound?). He adapts with ease to the three different styles the work encompasses: virtuosic in the Bach-like first movement, moody in the Prokofiev-like second, and hypnotic in the fiddle-like finale.

Composer Ronald Royer has rolled all the various styles upon which he draws (he cites Maurice Ravel, Béla Bartók, and Pablo Sarasate in the booklet) into the much briefer Rhapsody, which, aside from its eclecticism, recalls Miklós Rózsa’s Violin Concerto in its adaptation of Hungarian elements. The violin’s commanding introduction after the brooding opening recalls Ravel’s idiomatic writing at the beginning of Tzigane and stamps the work as a vehicle for showcasing more than a violinist’s technical abilities. Chow plays with great assurance in such passages, rising above the sweeping orchestral accompaniment, lyrically in the first movement and sparklingly in the often motoric second. Royer’s In Memorian J. S. Bach consists of two movements, Sarabande and Capriccio, both adaptations of Bach’s style in a chamber-like setting for violin accompanied by flute, clarinet, bassoon, harpsichord, and string quartet, all players drawn from the Sinfonia Toronto. It’s a verisimilar tribute, etched in melodic patterns close enough to the originals to be taken from them, although the violin explores higher registers as well as the middle ones that predominate in Bach’s works. The following Capriccio struts along in shifting meters but still manages to suggest its model, the movement suggesting at times (except for the brief skyrocketing cadenza) the chameleon-like rhythmic kaleidoscope flashing in Stravinsky’s Violin Concerto.

Kevin Lau’s Joy had its origins, according to the composer, in a work for string quartet intended for performance at a wedding. In its reincarnation, he’s broadened its range of expression (as well as its instrumentation). Its soaring cantabile suits the violin—and violinist Chow—like a hand in glove, recalling glowing passages from landmark 19th- and early 20th-century concerted works for violin and orchestra.

Broughton’s set of Gold Rush Songs for violin and piano push further into the realm of instrumental virtuosity and harmonic inventiveness while at the same time incorporating actual songs from the era (“Joe Bowers,” “Betsy from Pike,” “My Darling Clementine,” and “Oh, Dem Golden Slippers,” as well as, briefly, “O Susanna!”), all appearing in a more complex harmonic idiom than their originals did. Chow brings the program to an affecting ending with an expressive account of Nathan Milstein’s arrangement of Chopin’s popular Nocturne in C?-Minor, a blockbuster performance of a blockbuster encore.

When it’s as difficult as this release makes it to decide whether the performances or the repertoire deserves the higher praise, the recommendation is especially assured. “Strong,” “warm,” or even “urgent” would hardly be out of place.

FANFARE: Robert Maxham

Schonthal, R.: Piano Music

Includes work(s) by various composers. Conductor: Sir Eugene Goossens.

MUSIC OF ZENOBIA POWELL PERRY

Royer, R.: Romance / Whitehead, O.: Pissarro Landscapes / Ba

This music is intriguing – rich and strange indeed.

The American composer Deon Nielsen Price studied with Leslie Bassett and Samuel Adler. She has been active in various academic bodies in West Coast universities. She has written extensively and with distinction in relation to her instrument, the piano. Her catalogue of compositions is substantial.

The pieces featured here are recorded at a higher level than usual and every detail emerges close-up and vivid.

Yellow Jade Banquet sports super-clear textures and lines. Impressions flood in: an excited squeal, an enchanting undulation, an Oriental swerve, a hint of chant and seductively inspirational pulses suggestive of minimalism - which this writing is not. Hovhaness, McPhee, Cowell and Lou Harrison are perhaps influences on this composer.

The macabre Epitaphs for Fallen Heroes induces awe. There is something of the ceremony in this piece with its stonily resonant and hieratically assertive piano part. The Dies Irae and angular dissonance are confidently mixed. Take this as a sort of Bergian-surreal successor to Liszt’s Totentanz.

America Themes is a phantasmagoria of American traditional tunes with Johnny comes marching home melting into Taps and thence to Copland and so on. The composer affectionately continues a tradition made resilient by Ives and keeps the ear constantly beguiled by each transition.

Gateways is a gritty, rhetorical and tough work for wind band. It is inspired by life’s paths that step off the way or onward through gateways. It is as much about the paths as the gateways themselves, we are told.

States of Mind is a work in four movements: Meditation, Troubled Thoughts, Mysterious Dream, Transformation. The first is a tender essay redolent of Barber at his most gentle. Troubled Thoughts thrusts thorny angles into the pottage and its stinging poignancy sears and scars in a way suggestive of Schnittke. Mysterious Dream moves from dank meditation to free-wheeling surreal visions. Transformation has a serrated Shostakovich-like determination and some stunning headlong pizzicato passages. The fugal flavour of some of the writing was irritating - a very personal prejudice.

Dancing on the Brink of the World is much in the same exotic vein - a sort of time-travelling fantasy from the Yelamu autochthons of Crissy Field to Hispanic incursion and onwards from the internment of Japanese Americans to a tribute in retrospect to the ancient cultures. It’s a rich brew of whooping energy, bristling and chirruping, ratchet and rattle, groaning brass redolent of Hovhaness and dancing vitality. A smoochy soft shoe dance is made the more intriguing by a high and anxiously buzzing repeated figure from the violins. Fragments and musical units are in constant motion like an inspirational kaleidoscope of the emotions and of inventive imagery. The effect in this work’s dazzle of consciousness is something like a pellucid version of Grainger’s Warriors. The work ends with the foghorn in the Bay.

This disc is a successor to Cambria’s first Deon Nielsen Price CD (CD-1170) which included To the Children of War, song-cycle for voice and piano; Diversions; Crossroads for trio; L'Alma Jubilo (The Jubilant Soul), for solo guitar; Big Sur Triptych, for soprano saxophone and piano: (Sea Otters; Redwoods; Crags); Hexachord: View from Malibu; and Three Faces of Kim, the Napalm Girl, for alto and soprano saxophones and piano.

The notes are quite full but fail to tell me things like the composer’s year of birth and exactly where Crissy Field is.

This music is intriguing - rich and strange indeed. Very Californian in the freewheeling accommodation it strikes with the Pacific Rim and with history.

-- Rob Barnett, MusicWeb International