BAUER: Orchestral and Chamber Works

REVIEW:

Kenneth Fuchs' An American Place is a bright, big-hearted, neo-romantic work in the style of John Adams' Harmonielehre. Adams' finale is an unmistakable influence as both works open with motor rhythms chugging along in the strings while woodwinds and high percussion chirp and tingle above as the music builds to a spirit-lifting sunrise. Fuchs pretty much goes his own way from there as the piece travels through a series of engaging episodes--some featuring wonderful brass writing--and closes in a similar atmosphere to its opening. Eventide is a concerto for English horn, harp, percussion, and strings inspired by Negro spirituals such as "Swing Low, Sweet Chariot" and "Mary Had a Baby", though Fuchs does not quote them directly, at least not in a manner that's easily recognizable. The work is reminiscent of the pastoral mood-music of Vaughan Williams, though the English horn writing occasionally brings to mind jazz saxophonist Kenny G--a tribute perhaps to the free spirited, highly virtuosic playing of soloist Thomas Stacy.

The pleasantries end with Out of the Dark, which is a set of three pieces based on works by expressionist painter Helen Frankenthaler. Heart of November begins in thorny string paroxysms, while Out of the Dark moves somewhat away from the gnarly harmonies of the previous piece. Summer Banner gradually reintroduces consonance, and the work ends in a blissful, subdued atmosphere (with fine solo work by hornist Timothy Jones). Jo Ann Falletta leads first-rate performances with the London Symphony Orchestra, captured in excellent sound--another fine addition to Naxos' American Classics series.

--ClassicsToday.com (Victor Carr Jr.)

Joan Tower's chamber music has much the same emotional intensity and gestural ferocity as her orchestral works. Her primarily angular harmonic language, with its predominantly dissonant cast, evokes a sense of agitation bordering on rage--something most apparent in Wild Purple for solo viola (played with conviction and arresting virtuosity by Paul Neubauer). Like many Tower works, In Memory (in a stunning rendition by the Tokyo String Quartet) begins quietly--the violin's first notes are almost imperceptible--then builds to a gripping climax. The music's emotions are particularly raw and acute, as the composer was inspired by the death of a close friend, and then the 9/11 attacks that occurred shortly after.


Big Sky for piano trio (persuasively performed by Tower, along with Chee-Yun and Andre Emelianoff) has somewhat softer contours. It begins and ends in a subdued, melancholy atmosphere, while the climactic central section jars with its abrupt syncopations fleshed out in robust, quasi-romantic piano writing.


Island Prelude is the most surprising piece in this collection, as it features passages of genuine consonance and even lyricism, as well as some characterful writing for solo oboe (featuring the expert Richard Woodhams with the Tokyo String Quartet). Of course, all of this is woven into Tower's free-flowing, volatile musical style, which quite often catches you off-guard--the very thing that makes her music compelling.


No Longer Very Clear is a set of four piano pieces, the titles of which are lines taken from the John Ashbery poem of the same name. This very intimate encounter with Tower's art reveals a composer of imagination and ingenuity, and one who possesses a profound emotional sensitivity. The piano writing is brilliant and ranges from Scriabinesque passion to the mystery and exotic beauty found in Messiaen. Ursula Oppens (in the first two pieces) and Melvin Chen (in the remainder) both offer powerfully evocative performances. The recordings are uniformly excellent in both the chamber and solo settings. This release marks an important document of the composer, and a fine addition to Naxos' American Classics series. [9/16/2005]
--Victor Carr Jr, ClassicsToday.com

Crawford Seeger's life reflects both the positive and the negative charges of a woman's life in music. There were burdens of raising a large family; the hovering presence of her husband, the composer Charles Seeger; the Depression; social activism (one of the song settings concerns the Sacco-Vanzetti case); and with it all, a tough-minded modernism and a muscular personality. All the pieces on this CD derive from the years 1924 to 1932, before marriage and its concerns more or less silenced Ms. Seeger's work until the 1950's. (She died in 1953.)
The early piano preludes (here Nos. 1 and 9) bear the fluidity and sensuousness of Scriabin, as Cheryl Seltzer's booklet note suggests. Pieces like the Suite for Five Wind Instruments have an assertive tang and an increasing distance from tonality that put them closer to the industrial-strength harmonic revolutions of the times. To this way of thinking also belongs the Violin Sonata, an original and confident work.
Exercises in spartan combinations include two Diaphonic Suites," for solo flute and for bassoon and cello. The three Carl Sandburg songs ride on a complex and dense instrumental accompaniment."
- Bernard Holland, NEW YORK TIMES

NANCARROW: Pieces for Small Orchestra / Tango? / String Quar

"These two symphonies - the fourth premiered in 1942 in Cleveland, the ninth in 1969 in Philadelphia - are full of arresting moments, both emotionally and in terms of orchestral effects. . . These pieces are layered with dark mysteries that make you want to hear them again and again. Also, the recording quality drawn from Seattle's Benaroya Hall is outstanding." - David Patrick Stearns, Philadelphia Inquirer, Sunday, May 29th, 2005

"...Though separated by decades, the two war symphonies are exceptional -- exemplary showcases of "The American Sound" in symphonic music (i.e. athletic, modal, spacious, dramatic, starkly songful). They are soundscapes full of mass sonority, vigor and seriousness. The performances and recordings are brand new and superb." - John Simon, Buffalo News, Sunday, May 22nd, 2005


Click Here for the complete Naxos American Classic Series

Naxos celebrates the immigrant experience with the release of Peter Boyer’s Ellis Island: The Dream of America, an ambitious work combining spoken word performances of actual Ellis Island immigrant stories with powerful orchestral music. Performed by London’s renowned Philharmonia Orchestra conducted by Boyer, this recording features a cast of Oscar-, Emmy-, and Tony-winning actors: Barry Bostwick, Blair Brown, Olympia Dukakis, Anne Jackson, Bebe Neuwirth, Eli Wallach, and Louis Zorich, directed by Tony- and Grammy-winning Martin Charnin.

Boyer fashioned the seven monologues of Ellis Island: Dream of America from interviews in the Ellis Island Oral History Project with actual immigrants who came to the United States between 1910-1940, weaving a dramatic orchestral tapestry around their true stories. The work concludes with a reading of the Emma Lazarus poem The New Colossus (“Give me your tired, your poor…”), an emotionally powerful ending to this celebration of our nation of immigrants.

Ellis Island: The Dream of America was premiered by the Hartford Symphony Orchestra in April 2002 to great acclaim, and its many subsequent performances have also received enthusiastic responses. Gerald Moshell of the Hartford Courant described the first performance as “a searing emotional experience” while Harold McNeil of the Buffalo News described the piece as “at turns, horrifying, whimsical and heart-rending. But it’s always palpably engaging ...”

Peter Boyer is emerging as one of the most successful young American orchestral composers, with nearly 100 orchestral performances of his work to date. In addition to his work for the concert hall, Boyer is active in the film and television industry and is on the faculty of Claremont Graduate University.

The suite is made up of the following sections:

1. Prologue 06:09
2. Words of Helen Cohen, emigrated from Poland in 1920, read by Blair Brown 02:37
3. Interlude 1 01:24
4. Words of James Apanomith, emigrated from Greece in 1911, read by Louis Zorich 02:43
5. Interlude 2 02:07
6. Words of Lillian Galleta, emigrated from Italy in 1928, read by Olympia Dukakis 03:32
7. Interlude 3 01:33
8. Words of Lazarus Salamon, emigrated from Hungary in 1920, read by Eli Wallach 04:16
9. Interlude 4 01:56
10. Words of Helen Rosenthal, emigrated from Belgium in 1940, read by Bebe Neuwirth 04:27
11. Interlude 5 01:01
12. Words of Manny Steen, emigrated from Ireland in 1925, read by Barry Bostwick 04:42
13. Interlude 6 02:24
14. Words of Katherine Beychook, emigrated from Russia in 1910, read by Anne Jackson 02:53
15. Epilogue: "The New Colossus" (Emma Lazarus, 1883), read by all actors 01:50

-----

REVIEW:

Peter Boyer's Ellis Island: The Dream of America will not surprise or disappoint anyone looking for a straightforward presentation piece in the American populist vein, à la Copland's A Lincoln Portrait. Indeed, the music is so openly tonal, melodic, and richly orchestrated; the attitude so noble and patriotic; and the subject matter so emotionally compelling, it would be surprising and disappointing if Boyer had not followed Copland's example, and had set these authentic immigrant narratives from the Ellis Island Oral History Project in anything less than an accessible, American vernacular style. Yet it is the texts, not the music, which matter most in this work, and listeners will find the effective but expectedly epic score less absorbing than the absorbing performances by actors Blair Brown, Louis Zorich, Olympia Dukakis, Eli Wallach, Bebe Neuwirth, Barry Bostwick, and Anne Jackson, who deliver the historic accounts with believable characterizations and genuine emotions. Of course, any invocation of Ellis Island and the Statue of Liberty must include a recitation of Emma Lazarus' "The New Colossus," which is passionately read at the work's conclusion by the cast against the stirring, anthemic accompaniment of the Philharmonia Orchestra. Naxos provides excellent sound, though it is fairly loud in places.

– All Music Guide

New music in the United States since World War II has been a spirited arena of diverse ideologies. Serialism, minimalism, indeterminacy, “New Romanticism”, and other musical pathways have attracted their passionate constituencies of composers and audience. Of composers who have chosen to go their own way, working apart from the ever-changing mainstream, a major figure is Leon Kirchner. Single-mindedly following his own vision, he has developed a powerful inimitable language...

The works on this recording span four decades. Although the composer’s music has gone through a subtle evolution, the basic features of Kirchner’s musical language are apparent from the start. His music tends to the rhapsodic, with impulsive movement from lyric to dramatic, and asymmetrical rhythm and phrasing. Works are conceived as organic wholes. (All the multimovement works on this recording are “played without pause”.) In the earlier music particularly, sectional contrasts are sharp, marked by clear tempo changes; in his later music, the textural continuity becomes more homogeneous, the changes gradual and seamless. The tonal language is chromatic but not serially organized. The composer’s markings in the scores are detailed and sometimes unusual: “Haltingly”, “Wild”, “Coming from nowhere, almost out of control.”

Cheryl Seltzer
© 2005 Continuum
from the album liner notes

Includes work(s) by William Grant Still. Ensemble: Fort Smith Symphony. Conductor: John Jeter.

Hallowe’en (about 1914) ‘is but a take-off of a Halloween party and bonfire - the elfishness of the little boys throwing wood on the fire, etc. etc...’ To illustrate the growing bonfire, the strings enter progressively, in different keys, with oddly-placed accents. The ending is a take-off of ‘a regular coda from a proper opera, heard down the street from the bandstand’. From the technical point of view, Ives considered Hallowe’en one of his best compositions.

The vocal selections convey something of the wealth of his 175-odd songs, for which Ives wrote many of the texts. Joel Sachs and Cheryl Seltzer direct performances in this thrilling chamber program, also including Five Take-Offs, Three Quarter-tone Pieces, and Sunrise.

REVIEW:

The opening song-group, very well sung, begins lyrically with The Housatonic at Stockbridge, but at its climax the piano accompaniment goes wild; the following Soliloquy explodes similarly, and the dissonant, untamed accompaniment continues its conflict to underline On the Antipodes. Sunrise (Ives’s final song) initially brings relative peace and an Elysian violin solo but still has an agitated climax. In the brief Remembrance (of the composer’s father), the cello enters too, to create a simple eulogy in which the violin persists. In Aeschylus and Sophocles the wildness erupts into frenzy at the words ‘Accursed be the race’, but the anger subsides for the final ‘Farewell’, and the last word is with the cello.

The first of the instrumental pieces, The Gong on the Hook and Ladder, pictures the annual parade of the neighbourhood Fire Company. Hallowe’en is a busy, dissonant Scherzo (the strings playing in different keys), suggesting the growing flames of the bonfire, with children running round it. In Re Con Moto et al. brings the most ferocious dissonance of all ‘to stretch ear muscles’, as Ives suggested. The piano pieces, Five Take-offs (implying improvisatory freedom, but in fact highly organized), were published as recently as 1991, and would make a stimulating centrepiece for any modern piano recital. The untamed, feral Jumping Frog has an underlying boldly controlled cantus firmus. Then, astonishingly, Song without (Good) Words is quite beautiful—very romantic, but with wrong notes—and Scene Episode begins in much the same mood of emotional serenity, which is not quite sustained. Bad Resolutions and Good WAN! Opens with a hymn but once more, characteristically, the peace is boldly interrupted.

The Three Quarter-Tone Pieces are aurally the most fascinating of all, more remarkably so as they are very listenable. Originally written in 1924 for a double keyboard microtonal piano, they are now usually played as a simultaneous piano duo, using two pianos, tuned a microtone apart. They really do ‘tweak the ear muscles’, the first bell-like, the second in wild ragtime, and the third boldly fantasizing on America ’tis of thee or God save the Queen (according to your nationality).

All in all, this makes a fine, characteristic anthology, splendidly realized...In many of the pieces Ives’s habit of including a phrase or two of deliberate banality amid the wildness adds piquancy, well caught in these performances from the New York-based group, Continuum. The instrumental piece Hallowe’en has a bass drum entry that takes you terrifyingly by surprise, helped by the vivid recording. The Take-offs (an expression Ives used as meaning improvisation) are simpler but just as original.

-- Penguin Guide

Includes work(s) by Samuel Barber. Ensemble: Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Conductor: Marin Alsop.

We start with a pretty conventional three-movement, neo-Romantic Violin Concerto, written in 1940. The conductor’s program notes equate it with Bruch, but it’s not that old fashioned; there are hints of Bloch as well. Still, I find the opening Allegro too predictable and, at 14 minutes, too long. The Bruch connection could be some actual quotations in the violin part, but there are also some original ideas presented. McKay’s music is strongest, and most original, in his slow movements; he had a gift for the long melody and knew exactly what to do with one. Right from the opening note, the Andante quasi adagio rings true. Even the solo part changes instantly: the ultra-conventional figurations and filigree of the first movement give way to a soaring, wide-ranging line, which shares and exchanges ideas with solo woodwinds. Did the soloist feel the same way? His earlier cadenzas sound uncommitted; now he is all heart and beauty. A happy, lively finale also makes more use of winds than did the opening movement, and the solo line becomes more brilliant. One can’t help liking it.

The Suite on 16th-Century Hymn Tunes (an homage to one Louis Bourgeois) relapses into convention, recalling Vaughan Williams without matching him. It was written for organ in 1945, scored for strings shortly thereafter, and rescored for two string orchestras in 1962, the version heard here. A celesta joins in the fourth (Choeur céleste) of five movements; the work’s slow movement, it again stands out. A cogent listener (she doesn’t like being identified as my wife) thought the piece might be William Boyce, and English for sure. The Sinfonietta (1942) is a surprise: romantic excess has abdicated in favor of sharp, clean harmonies and rhythms. McKay has jumped a musical generation in the two years since the Violin Concerto; he seems as much at home in what was a very modern idiom for its day as he was in the earlier style. An Allegro . . . con brio (he writes verbose movement indications) has bite and wit; the Moderato pastorale makes varying use of a ripe oboe tune, enriching a nearly 10-minute movement at every turn. The colorfully scored finale, Allegro . . . molto, is brilliant fun.

Song over the Great Plains (1953) is a serious 14-minute tone poem, looking backward to Howard Hanson from McKay’s days at the Eastman School. Rich, mildly dissonant harmonies and heavy-duty scoring dominate, as trombones prevail. There is an occasional piano obbligato, played by Ludmilla Kovaleva, which serves primarily as respite from the tense atmosphere. The whole is not quite convincing, running just a touch too close to Hollywood. On another day, I might fall for it. All the performances are expert and seem sympathetic; the recordings are satisfactory.

James H. North, FANFARE

Selection includes a Message from President Reagan.
Selection includes John F. Kennedy Inaugural Excerpt.
Selection includes Dwight Eisenhower Inaugual Excerpt.
Selection includes Harry Truman Inaugural Excerpt.
Selection includes Franklin Roosevelt Inaugural Excerpt.

Amy Beach's songs are pleasant enough, and certainly well-crafted, with smartly chosen texts--Burns, Longfellow, Browning, Shelley, and some lesser-known poets, including Beach herself. But most of their appeal lies with the composer's deftness in borrowing from and incorporating the styles of major artists such as Schubert, Brahms, Wolf, Richard Strauss, and Debussy into her writing. She even takes directly from Beethoven in her quite lovely song "The Rainy Day". In other words, there's nothing really original here, but melodically and in terms of overall accessibility and singability, Beach understood the genre and knew how to create music that nearly everyone--singers as well as listeners--could enjoy. There are lullabies, German lied, and French chansons, as well as a nod or two to English and American parlor-song. And we're fortunate to have as our interpreter a singer who is one of the world's experts in this repertoire: mezzo-soprano Katherine Kelton did her doctoral dissertation on Beach's songs. She exhibits a voice of rich color and easy, inviting expressiveness, and her technique effortlessly conveys the varied moods and cleverly imitative styles so that we can just sit back and appreciate each one of these charming if not particularly profound works. Beach's piano accompaniments are carefully thought-out and add essential, characterful aspects of tone, color, and texture that are often very technically challenging. Catherine Bringerud is completely at home with this music and at one with Kelton's vocal interpretations. The sound is complementary to vocal and instrumental timbres and presents the performances in realistic perspective. Fans of American song--and especially of Amy Beach (who did much of her writing just down the road from where I'm writing this review, at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, NH)--shouldn't miss this interpretively considerate, solidly performed recital.

--David Vernier, ClassicsToday.com

Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and John Adams—it is my prediction that, 50 years from now, it will be the last composer’s music that is played most frequently. I am not sure that Adams is the “best” composer of the three (frankly, Reich’s work is more interesting to me), but he is the one who has motivated the most performers to program and record his work. For example, apart from Alsop, three other conductors have recorded Short Ride (de Waart on Nonesuch, Rattle on EMI, and Mosko on Chandos), and there are alternative recordings on Nonesuch of the other three works as well. The Nonesuch discs are important documents, but not necessarily the last word. Despite their explicit or implicit approval by the composer, they can and will be bettered, as time goes on. Consider The Wound-Dresser. I remember being impressed by this work when Nonesuch released the CD with baritone Sanford Sylvan, and the composer conducting the Orchestra of St. Luke’s—I still was in graduate school, and various commentators were quick to draw parallels between Walt Whitman’s injured and dying boys and the current victims of the AIDS epidemic. There’s nothing wrong with Sylvan and Adams, but I find Gunn and Alsop more moving—almost too much so, as the text’s homoaffective subtext is moved closer to the foreground. (It strikes me now that the vocal line at “Many a soldier’s loving arms about this neck have cross’d and rested” could have been written by Stephen Sondheim.)

Alsop makes a good case for Short Ride and for the Berceuse élégiaque. The latter work is an arrangement for chamber orchestra of a work by Ferrucio Busoni—a fact that is not mentioned anywhere in Naxos’s documentation, shamefully enough. Adams, in his Nonesuch recording, is a little more weird and abrasive than Alsop in Shaker Loops—to good effect. All in all, the availability of the Nonesuch recordings does not make this Naxos release superfluous. Alsop is a fine conductor, the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra plays well for her, and then there’s that Naxos price! If you’ve been curious about Adams’s music, but have not been willing to pay Nonesuch prices to hear it, here are four of Adams’s best works in competitive performances at a fraction of the cost.

Raymond Tuttle, FANFARE

Includes work(s) by John Philip Sousa. Ensemble: Royal Artillery Band. Conductor: Keith Brion.

United States Marine Band: Liberty for All - An Interactive

REVIEW:

Gerard Schwarz's David Diamond symphony recordings originally appeared on the Delos label in the early 1990s. They remain impressive (though unfortunately still rare) documents of this composer's uniquely engaging music. In contrast to Symphony No. 1's ebullient opening, Diamond's Second begins with a wistful Adagio funebre, one of the work's longer and more profound movements, another being the beautiful Andante expressivo (with its evocative string and woodwind writing). The harmonic and melodic style occasionally recalls Copland, who comes most immediately to mind in the brass and bass drum play of the scherzo. However, the finale brings that unique blend of folksy Americana and classical rigor that marks much of Diamond's work.

Symphony No. 4's finale uses a similar rhythmic structure and even shares the same key as the Second, but otherwise the two works are quite different. Diamond compacts a lot of material into three brief movements. The musical language is less overtly tuneful than in No. 2, but the composer's expanded harmonic and textural palette ensures ever-captivating sounds, just as his sense of dramatic contrast and well-timed climaxes provide substantial emotional impact throughout. Schwarz conducts both scores with keen sensitivity, while the Seattle Symphony (particularly the brass in No. 4) relishes the challenge of this then-unfamiliar music. The low-level recordings require a volume boost to register fully, and they retain some shallowness, but not enough to detract from full enjoyment of the performances.

--Victor Carr Jr, ClassicsToday.com

"None of the performances on this new release is less than superb; moreover, no one who has been using the Naxos series to build his library of Barber works risks being disappointed by this or any of the other releases...this new Naxos release is especially notable for its extremely rich yet transparent sound quality and for painstakingly shaped phrasing by the Scottish National Orchestra."

-- Walter Simmons, Fanfare

The Violin Concerto is at one and the same time George Rochberg' most widely performed and least known work, since it was heavily cut in the "Stern version" played and recorded in the 1970s.

Charles Tomlinson Griffes only lived 35 years; his death in 1920 cut short one of the most promising careers in American music. During his short life span he created a collection of short, rhapsodic works that are full of color and romantic adventure.

The Pleasure-Dome of Kubla-Khan is best known in its orchestrated version, expanded and altered somewhat from the original piano composition. It is a lush, lyrical, and dramatic work whose exotic melodies exude Middle-Eastern and Oriental influences. Of the other compositions, the Piece in D minor, from 1915, stands out. Elegant, impassioned impressionism reigns in this engaging work, and it certainly deserves wider recognition.

Though the rest of the pieces on the CD are all worth hearing, the early transcription for two pianos of the Hansel and Gretel overture is most impressive.

As performed here, it is one of the most charming duo-piano pieces in the repertoire. Michael Lewin plays the rest of the program with passion and precision, though his interpretations lack that last measure of urgency given by James Tocco on Gasparo.  The recorded sound is exemplary, using 24-bit technology for the highest resolution.

--Rad Bennett, ClassicsToday.com

Elliott Carter makes his Naxos début with an ear-catching programme

It’s very good news that Naxos has added Elliott Carter to its American Classics series, beginning with a strong programme of rarely heard pieces, and juxtaposing Carter in early populist vein with Carter the 1960s’ avant-gardist in full cry.

The wartime muscularity of the Symphony No 1 (completed in 1942 but heard here in its 1954 revision) is clearest in passages which echo, or anticipate, Copland’s more extrovert orchestral scores of the same period. But that triumphalist spirit is most productively on show in Carter’s splendidly brash Holiday Overture (1944). The Symphony as a whole is less straightforward, more varied in style and character, and the slow movement in particular moves from hymnic meditation into more ambiguous regions of expression in a manner that might not be completely convincing. It is certainly distinctive, however, and fits well with the balance between restraint and exuberance that typifies the work as a whole.

By the mid-1960s, when the Piano Concerto was composed, Carter’s language had shed its tonal roots, and his forms were far more distant from those traditions that are still traceable in the Symphony. Textures are immensely elaborate, yet the music is uninhibitedly dramatic, depicting all kinds of conflicts and attempted reconciliations while subjecting the basic concept of the concerto to penetrating critical scrutiny.

The power of the drama emerging from the constantly fluctuating confrontations between soloist, main orchestra, and a mediating concertino-group of seven players is rather muted in this recording, which (I suspect) is not the result of a preparatory series of public performances. Ursula Oppens, with Michael Gielen, managed to convey rather more of the music’s inherent fire and tumult. But Mark Wait shows a finely gauged technical command, and although Kenneth Schermerhorn and his Nashville players are occasionally underpowered and inclined to play safe, the jubilant conclusion of the Holiday Overture sweeps any interpretative reservations aside. With the symphony not otherwise available, this disc is a thoroughly recommendable addition to the Naxos American canon.

-- Arnold Whittall, Gramophone [3/2004]

Band Music (American) - SOUSA, J.P. / BERLIN, I. / WARREN, G

Includes work(s) by various composers. Ensembles: United States Army Band, United States Army Chorus.

This album was nominated for the 2004 Grammy Awards for Best Classical
Album and Best Orchestral Performance.