Classical Music

Includes work(s) by Mark-Anthony Turnage. Ensemble: B. B. C. Symphony Orchestra. Conductor: Leonard Slatkin. Soloists: Evelyn Glennie, Peter Erskine, Christian Lindberg, Timothy [horn] Brown, Michael Murray, Christopher Larkin, Andrew Antcliff.

This disc was nominated for the 1998 Grammy Award for "Best Instrumental Soloist Performance (with Orchestra)."
Joseph Schwantner's early years were devoted to jazz guitar and arranging for small jazz ensembles. But on receiving his doctorate in composition in 1968, Schwantner shifted musical gears and has proven to be a precocious and adventurous composer. This disc, representing Leonard Slatkin's debut with the National Symphony Orchestra, consists of three works by Schwantner, all of which feature the percussionist Evelyn Glennie. The brief opening piece, appropriately titled "Velocities," consists of a dazzling, nonstop "Moto perpetuo" for marimba. The Concerto for Percussion and Orchestra is an extravagant and colorful work which not only recalls Schwantner's Pulitzer Prize-winning 'Aftertones of Infinity' from 1969 but also has faint echoes of Bartók's classic work, 'Music for Strings, Percussion and Celesta' because of its wide range of colors and effects, especially the moody second movement. 'New Morning for the World was not-so-coincidentally premiered on January 15, 1983, the day and year in which Martin Luther King Day was declared a national holiday. It is a searing and explosive work and one that is made all the more stirring by the recitation of King's words by Vernon E. Jordan, Jr.

Rhythm Song

Margaret Brouwer (born in 1940) is head of the composition department at the Cleveland Institute of Music. Based on this excellent new Naxos recording, she has an individual voice with a fine ear for orchestral colors. Her 2002 Concerto for Evelyn Glennie? Aurolucent Circles ?is immediately arresting, with its powerfully phrased opening voiced in the lower strings. The evocative entrance of Glennie in its potent mystery reminded me of some of Holst?s outer and more arcane planets. This is appropriate, as the concerto?s first movement is titled ?Floating in Dark Space.? Besides virtuoso passages for the soloist accompanied by full orchestra, the work has strongly contrasting sections employing two concertino groups which show off the very fine first-desk players in the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic. Glennie?s solos cover a kaleidoscopic range of percussion instruments and colors. The second movement, ?Stardust,? takes those colors and plays them about the stage, drifting and more often sweeping through various sections of the orchestra. The final movement, ?Cycles and Dances,? continues the notion of motion about and through the orchestra in a frenetic dance interrupted by lower brass?a favorite gesture of Brouwer?s. Glennie is the star around which all this revolves. The recording of the concerto (and the remainder of the disc as well) is both exciting and detailed, with a convincing sense of space around the instruments.


Mandala was inspired by a Tibetan sand painting and a Dutch psalm melody (Psalm XCI in the Dutch Reformed hymnal.) The trombone intoning the Psalm tune could equally be playing a version of the Buddhist om. Adding to this interesting musical-cultural mix are musicians whispering barely audible bits of random text, always with the ever-present Psalm never far from the surface. Whether this adds up to a work that will stand up to repeated hearing remains to be seen: I have a strong feeling it well may.


Pulse is an accessible and attractive score with an unexpectedly melismatic theme heard mainly from the winds and then the solo violin. As someone who usually appreciates the elegiac mood, I was looking forward to hearing Remembrance, dating from 1996 and the earliest score on the recording. It is affirmative rather than mournful, but perhaps somewhat long for its material.


Brouwer?s musical commentary on the rapid pace of 21st century life is expressed in the disc?s final work SIZZLE . Three trombones and a horn play a similar role here as in Mandela : they stand apart in time and space, representing different currents in a fast moving stream.


Gerard Schwarz?s performance of all these works is authoritative and convincing. He is ably abetted by his orchestra and the fine production and engineering.


FANFARE: Michael Fine

Vincent Ho’s music is wild and fanciful, and takes us to the limits of sonic energy, but it is also intimate and tender, for he is not afraid to reveal his truly lyrical soul. THE SHAMAN is a work that sets an atmosphere of magical stillness, with the soloist evoking unearthly sounds - wolf calls, shimmering colours, and the lightest of orchestral textures. It is powerful work that merges the spiritual indigenous world with the modern classical world to create a compelling musical journey. ARCTIC SYMPHONY was inspired by the composer’s first-hand experience of the Arctic Ocean with a scientific research team aboard a Canadian Coast Guard ship. Evelyn Glennie is the first person in history to successfully create and sustain a full-time career as a solo percussionist, performing worldwide with the greatest conductors, orchestras, and artists. She fondly recalls having played the first percussion concerto in the history of The Proms at the Albert Hall in 1992, which paved the way for orchestras round the world to feature percussion concerti. Vincent Ho is a multi-award winning composer of orchestral, chamber, vocal, and theatre music. His many awards have included Harvard University’s Fromm Music Commission, The Canada Council for the Arts Robert Fleming Prize, ASCAP’s Morton Gould Young Composer Award, four SOCAN Young Composers Awards, and CBC Radio’s Audience Choice Award (2009 Young Composers Competition).

Classical Music

MacMillan: Veni, veni Emmanuel

As a performer and conductor, Christian Lindberg has a rare ability to electrify an audience, and as reviewers attest, the same applies to his compositions. Released on disc in 2018, his viola concerto Steppenwolf was described as ‘one of those rare contemporary works that captures the attention from the first notes’ (Fanfare) while the five-star review in BBC Music Magazine spoke of ‘thrilling orchestral storytelling’ and ‘glorious musical cavalcades’. The present album offers further opportunity to acquaint oneself with the unstoppable energy of Lindberg in all of his three incarnations. The album is named after the closing work, 2017, described by Lindberg as his testimony about a year when the world changed, as a result of the US presidential election. Starting work on it on 1st January he followed the news in the media and let it feed his creative process throughout the course of the year. The opening work is an earlier one, commissioned for the nine trombones of The New Trombone Collective, and inspired by the spectacle of great waves rolling in at the beach in Wollongong, Australia. Framed by these two is Liverpool Lullabies, a concertante work for percussion and trombone which Lindberg composed with Evelyn Glennie and himself in mind. They are also the soloists on this recording, supported by the Antwerp Symphony Orchestra which also shines in the other two works on the album.

Joan Tower is widely regarded as one of today’s most important American composers. The works heard here in their world premiere recordings are part of a growing legacy that one pundit has described as “The Power of Tower.” Strike Zones is tailor-made for percussionist Evelyn Glennie’s dazzling technique and impeccable musicianship. The work’s orchestration is crafted to enhance a stage filled with percussion instruments – while in Small they are contained on a single table, the soloist working like a brilliant chef. The piano concerto Still/Rapids was inspired by the glistening beauty and powerful force of water, and Ivory and Ebony, written as a test piece for an international piano competition, is infused with Tower’s “high-energy” signature.

REVIEW:

Another American Classics release features the music of contemporary composer Joan Tower. These fabulous premiere recordings give a good representation of the range of music Tower has been producing over recent years. It is particularly good to hear performances from Evelyn Glennie as one of a cast of top rate musicians here. The earliest work, Strike Zones, dates from 2001 and the latest, Small from 2016. Both these feature percussion. Still/Rapids combines piano and orchestra with the final piece, Ivory & Ebony being a test piece for an international piano competition.

-- Lark Reviews

Grammy Award-winning composer Michael Daugherty explores the relationships between machines, humanity and nature in three unique concertos. ‘Dreamachine’ for solo percussion and orchestra is a colorful tribute to the imagination of inventors who dreamed of new machines, both real and surreal. The flute concerto ‘Trail of Tears’ dramatizes the tragic governmental forced relocation of Native Americans in 1838 and meditates on how the human spirit discovers ways to deal with adversity. ‘Reflections on the Mississippi’ for tuba and orchestra is a musical voyage down the legendary Mississippi River from Iowa to Louisiana. The Albany Symphony, conducted by David Alan Miller, delivers mesmerizing performances by three outstanding women soloists: Grammy Award-winning percussionist Dame Evelyn Glennie, flutist extraordinaire Amy Porter, and Carol Jantsch, the remarkable principal tubist of The Philadelphia Orchestra.

REVIEW:

Not typically known as a composer of virtuoso music hitherto, Michael Daugherty here writes splendid parts for all three soloists in these concertos, but percussionist Evelyn Glennie’s in Dreamachine is simply breathtaking. And yet, there’s more to this album than Glennie. Daugherty has been expanding his characteristic “Stravinsky plus pop culture” musical language, and although all the music here is typically programmatic, you might not guess that he was the composer. The opening flute concerto, Trail of Tears, applies cinematic techniques to that tragic event with unexpected and convincing results, all the while merging those with virtuoso flute writing. And the evocative tuba concerto, "Reflections on the Mississippi" is a much-needed expansion of the concerto literature for that instrument. With fine engineering from a pair of spaces in the Troy, New York area backing capable performances from the Albany Symphony under David Alan Miller, this is an unusually strong Daugherty release.

-- AllMusic.com (James Manheim)

The latest batch of colorfully orchestrated, imaginatively conceived orchestral works by this GRAMMY Award winning composer are concertante pieces from 2010: Trail of Tears, which is a meditation on the brutal 1838 relocation of Native Americans and the flute a fittingly haunting commentator; 2013's Reflections which goes down the famous river in four movements (“Mist”, “Fury”, “Prayer” and “Steamboat”) and the big, 34-minute Dreamachine of 2014, the most stylistically heterogenous work here from the eerie and impressionistic “Electric Eel” movement which sounds like the aquarium movement from Carnival of the Animals on acid or peyote to the rock-band drum solo in the “Vulcan’s Forge” finale.

-- Records International

CORIGLIANO Conjurer 1. Vocalise 2 • David Alan Miller, cond; 1 Evelyn Glennie (perc); 2 Hila Plitmann (sop); 2 Mark Baechle (electronics); Albany SO • NAXOS 8.559757 (57:43)


When he was first asked to write a percussion concerto, John Corigliano was reluctant. Percussion concertos he had heard too often sounded “like orchestral pieces with an extra-large percussion section,” with little or none of the interaction between soloists and ensemble which is the hallmark of the form. The problem was the very nature of many percussion instruments, which produce no discernable pitch on which to build melodic material. One answer has been to limit the solo line to pitched percussion, and some composers have quite successfully created concertos for marimba or xylophone. In Conjurer (2007), Corigliano has done that one better, creating a Concerto that uses a large range of percussion instruments, pitched and unpitched, in which the melodic material is introduced— conjured as the title suggests—by the percussionist and then developed by the orchestra and soloist, much as would happen in any solo concerto.


The trick is the clever use of sequences in which pitches are implied for the unpitched instruments. It would be merely clever, though, if Corigliano had not succeeded in his real goal. This he has done brilliantly, not only creating exciting soundscapes of a dizzying variety of percussion instruments, but also using those sounds to create real music with emotional and dramatic depth. In this, he is fortunate to have the services of that most musical of percussion virtuosos, Evelyn Glennie, who plays all of the many instruments with great subtlety, or dazzling élan, as the situation requires.


The work is divided into three movements, each preceded by an extended cadenza in which the thematic material is revealed and presented to the string orchestra. Each movement showcases a particular percussion family: wood, metal, and skin. The character of the melodic material created by each family is part of the genius of the work. I will not spoil the fun of the discovery, but I will state that the movement in which tenderness and mystery predominate does not come from the family one might instinctively expect. Further delight arises when the composer uses his strings to create percussive effects to accompany the melodic lines of the percussion instruments. I cannot but imagine that we will be hearing this work a lot, as every percussionist with the chops will want a shot at this work. It’s a tour de force for the soloist, and a musical work of real merit.


The accompanying work, which dates from eight years earlier, finds Corigliano experimenting with a different sort of sonority—that of the human voice—and with the use of electronics to enhance and augment it. Commissioned by Kurt Masur and the New York Philharmonic, the wordless Vocalise begins with a soprano voice—the pure and very lovely voice of Hila Plitmann—with a few instrumentalists in the acoustic realm. Corigliano then gradually begins to amplify it, as electronic effects add to the accompaniment, eventually enlarging the voice into a Wizard of Oz-like presence dominating an augmented orchestra climax of Straussian dimensions. The work ends as quietly as it begins, but with the voice subsumed into the echoes of the electronic processing, which, as Corigliano describes it, “gently surround the audience.”


Mark Baechle is credited with producing and performing the electronics, and the sound design—an essential part of this work—is credited to Teese Gohl and Angie Teo. (Such things are very much the creative work of humans, not “soulless machines.”) David Alan Miller and the Albany Symphony Orchestra, usually heard on the Albany label, provide impressive accompaniment to the superb soloists. The recording of Conjurer was made in the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall, with the exemplary results we have come to expect from that venue. Vocalise was recorded at the Experimental Media Performing Arts Center—who knew there was such a thing outside of Paris?—of the Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, also in Troy and with an equally fine outcome. Anyone with any interest at all in contemporary composition or exemplary percussion playing will want to hear this release.


FANFARE: Ronald E. Grames

REBOUNDS FOR PERCUSSION