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American Classics For Veterans / Various
Rouse: Seeing; Kabir Padavali
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Review:
Trevigne is nothing less than sensational. She is assured in her presentation, and possesses a warm and, yes, voluptuous soprano that is perfectly matched to this material. Her performance shows a level of commitment to the composer’s intentions that only the best singers of contemporary music can command.
– Fanfare
Glass: String Quartet No. 5; Suite from Dracula; String Sextet / Carducci Quartet
Philip Glass’ Fifth String Quartet is the most substantial of his five quartets and the most traditional, using formal structures and expressive contrasts that go far beyond minimalism. While maintaining Glass’ unmistakable personal style, this is a quartet that delivers both driving energy and an unforgettable, threnody-like tenderness. Glass chose a string quartet for his score to the film Dracula to ‘evoke the feeling of the world of the 19th c.’, the music underpinning the film’s visual drama while avoiding obvious ‘horror’ effects. The String Sextet is an arrangement of Glass’s Third Symphony, combining symphonic scale with the intimacy synonymous with the chamber music genre.
REVIEWS:
The Carducci’s performance is imbued with a grainy, almost greyscale patina. In ‘Excellent Mr Renfield’ and ‘Women in White’, moments of eerie anticipation are punctuated by dramatic outbursts. The quartet is joined by Cian O’Dúill (viola) and Gemma Rosefield (cello) for the string sextet arrangement of Glass’s Symphony No 3. Written originally for a 19-piece string orchestra, the Third lends itself well to a chamber setting. There are a few moments when the lines split to one-to-part, but what is lost in weight and depth is more than made up in clarity, focus and forward momentum.
-- Gramophone
…here, at last, is what I’ve awaited. [Carduccis’] performance of the sextet is, hands down, much better than the one with the Glass Chamber Players on Orange Mountain; in fact, I can’t imagine one that could be better. As I think this is one of Glass’s best later compositions, this release warrants immediate purchase. To this there are also just as luminous performances of the Fifth Quartet and a suite from the Dracula score—the latter, again, infinitely more vibrant and passionate than [previous recordings].
-- American Record Guide
Gottschalk: A Night in the Tropics – Solo Piano Music / Mayer
Louis Moreau Gottschalk was the first important American composer to fuse European classical piano music with American cultural influences, including folk music, the music of slaves, and Latin American dances. Although still revered for his anticipation of elements of Ragtime and Harlem Stride Piano, he owed his greatest musical debt to Chopin. On this recording we hear memorable and catchy tunes as well as considerable harmonic ingenuity. It includes some of his finest pieces, such as the deliciously Gallic Pasquinade, the wonderfully expressive Le Banjo and Steven Mayer’s solo piano arrangement of La Nuit des Tropiques.
REVIEWS:
Mr. Mayer brings dazzling virtuosity and playfulness to jaunty pieces like “Le Banjo: Fantaisie grotesque” and “Pasquinade: Caprice.” He also gives elegant accounts of several dreamy, refined and harmonically rich, less-heard works like "The Last Hope," a religious meditation, and the gorgeous “Reflets du passé,” a reverie.
-- New York Times
…Mayer’s transcription [is] a breathtakingly beautiful work, and in his hands a sweeping panorama of pianistic pulchritude reminiscent of the golden age of Romantic piano works by Alkan, Liszt, and Thalberg…
…[His] expert playing lends the music such charm and genuine appeal that my appetite is now whetted to hear more of it, much more, and preferably by Mayer, whose belief in Gottschalk feels absolutely sincere and is both convincing and persuasive. Very strongly recommended.
-- Fanfare
String Quartets, Vol. 2 – Nos. 5-8
Tower: Violin Concerto… / Lin, Guerrero, Nashville Symphony
Review:
In the Violin Concerto the ear is caught by the constantly changing colours of the soloists interaction with different orchestral players. Violinist Cho-Liang Lin is lyrical and muscular as required, and his slender tone is well balanced with the excellent Nashville Symphony. The orchestra impresses also in two more recent pieces by Tower, and bears further witness to Tower's imaginative handling of instrumental coloring.
– BBC Music Magazine
Semper Fi
Paine: Symphony No 2 "In the Spring" / Falletta
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The second CD of a two-volume set of the orchestral music of the late-Romantic American composer John Knowles Paine, this 2015 Naxos release presents the Prelude to the play Oedipus Tyrannus, a premiere recording of the tone poem Poseidon and Amphitrite - An Ocean Fantasy, and the Symphony No. 2 in A major, "In the Spring." Paine was a respected music professor at Harvard University and the most prominent member of the group of composers called the Boston Six, so his influence on the development of American symphonic music was significant. However, the flavor of Paine's music is actually less American than German, as befitted his European training and the music that dominated concert halls at mid-century. In Paine, one can hear traces of Mendelssohn, Schumann, and Brahms, so a measure of the musical taste can be taken in his music, particularly in the Second Symphony, which was a popular success and Paine's favorite among his works. JoAnn Falletta conducts the Ulster Orchestra in these performances, and the playing is robust and solid, if not especially vibrant. Because Paine's music is quite conservative and lacking in dramatic effects, the orchestral palette is not especially colorful, so the musicians have less distinctive sonorities in Paine's rather homogenous scoring. This is a respectable presentation, if not a revelation, and anyone interested in the beginnings of the American symphonic tradition should hear this album.
– Blair Sanderson, All Music Guide
Hovhaness: Symphony No 48... / Schwarz
The truth is, Hovhaness always has had his detractors. Bernstein rather maliciously called his First Symphony “ghetto music” (which would be a compliment today), and his 67 symphonies and other works can sound rather the same–but then, so does a lot of Bach. For me anyway, there’s something disarming about his childlike joy in consonant harmony, in the fluidity of his fugal writing, and his utter unconsciousness of the fact that his melodies often tread dangerously close to kitsch. Say what you will, his music is unfailingly honest. It is what it is.
There are also moments where it achieves an astonishing, passionate intensity. The Prelude and Quadruple Fugue is, in its way, a masterpiece in considering the means by which it accumulates energy as each distinctively-wrought fugue subject enters and gets combined with its predecessors. It’s so clear, so easy to follow, and so much fun that you entirely forget the sophisticated contrapuntal mind at work behind the scenes. And that is as it should be.
The Concerto for Soprano Saxophone and Strings also sounds vividly tuneful and unfailingly attractive. When Hovhaness calls the finale, perhaps naively, Let The Living and The Celestial Sing, it’s easy to scoff, but the music is just so bloody pretty. Greg Banaszak plays the solo part with the suave timbre that the work requires, especially in the Adagio espressivo at the start of the second movement, while Hovhaness specialist Gerard Schwarz does his usual fine job with all three works, galvanizing the players of the Eastern Music Festival Orchestra to a welcome degree of corporate integrity. It helps, of course, that Hovhaness’ music is as straightforward to play as it is to hear. Beautiful.
-- David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com
Gallagher: Symphony No 2 "Ascendant"… / Falletta
Jack Gallagher continues his association with the London Symphony Orchestra conducted by JoAnn Falletta with Symphony No. 2 ‘Ascendant,’ a robust, colorful work of dramatic contrasts and expansive architecture that seeks to express the aspirations and strivings of the human spirit. Quiet Reflections is a calm, serenely lyrical meditation which evokes a sense of longing for past tranquility. Gallagher’s previous Naxos release Orchestral Music (8.559652) with the LSO conducted by JoAnn Falletta was awarded five stars by BBC Music Magazine and hailed as “fresh and exuberant” and for “its explosions of sound and colour” by Gramophone.
Anchors Aweigh: The Best of the United States Navy Band
4 Pieces / Hard Cuts / The Housewife's Lament
Fuchs: Falling Man… / Williams, Falletta, LSO
Composer Kenneth Fuchs and conductor JoAnn Falletta completed their fourth recording with the London Symphony Orchestra at Abbey Road Studios, August 30–September 1, 2013. The recording features baritone and Naxos artist Roderick Williams and is produced by Grammy Award-winner Tim Handley. The repertoire includes Falling Man (for baritone voice and orchestra); Movie House (seven poems by John Updike for baritone voice and chamber ensemble); and Songs of Innocence and of Experience (four poems by William Blake for baritone voice and chamber ensemble). Fuchs’ music continues to find its visual counterpart in the work of Abstract Expressionist artist Helen Frankenthaler, whose art adorns the cover of this disc.
Piano's 12 Sides (The) / The Bills / The Cheese Grater
Heggie: Connection - Three Song Cycles
Famed for his operatic music, Jake Heggie has always been a devoted and prolific songwriter. Three early song cycles for soprano and piano feature in this release, each cycle exploring the many varied facets of the three women depicted, who include Ophelia and Eve. Each was written for a specific singer and they all reflect Heggie’s very personal and exciting lexicon of musical influences, which range from folk and jazz to art song and music theatre.
Dvorak and America - Hiawatha Melodrama
Piano Music (+MENNIN)
Violin Sonata No. 1 / Cello Sonata / Divertimento / String Trio / Adagio elegiaco
COMMODORES JAZZ ENSEMBLE: Commodores Live!
Piano Music – Fantasia / Second Hand, or Alone at Last / De Profundis
Danielpour: Toward a Season of Peace / St. Clair
-- All Music Guide
Boyer: Symphony No 1 / Boyer, London Philharmonic Orchestra
Peter Boyer is one of the most frequently performed American orchestral composers of his generation, widely admired not least for his GRAMMY®-nominated Ellis Island: The Dream of America (Naxos 8.559246). The composer writes, “The five works included on this recording represent a cross-section of my orchestral music. Three Olympians reflects my interest in mythology and history. Often I have received invitations to compose music for celebratory concerts, and three of the works included here – Silver Fanfare, Festivities and Celebration Overture – were created for such occasions.” Symphony No. 1 is a lyrical and rhythmically charged work, dedicated to the memory of Leonard Bernstein.
McTee: Symphony No 1, Circuits... / Slatkin, Detroit
My first contact with Cindy McTee’s music was a recording of the wind ensemble transcription of Circuits by the Cincinnati College-Conservatory Wind Symphony. In fact, all previous experience with McTee’s music has been in the wind ensemble medium, including three movements of the Symphony No. 1 under the title Ballet for Band . There is a wind ensemble recording of Double Play , as well, which I had not heard until now. It says a lot about the difficulties of getting new music recorded by orchestras that McTee’s larger ensemble music, almost always written for the orchestra first, has been much more available to collectors in wind band arrangements. Of course, it didn’t hurt that she was, from 1984 to 2011, on the music faculty of the University of North Texas at Denton, the current academic home of band music-recording phenomenon Eugene Migliaro Corporon. He must have found her technically challenging, elegantly crafted, imaginative, often playful, and always vibrant music irresistible. (She claims, incidentally, to have acquired the compositional playfulness from Krzysztof Penderecki during the year she studied with him at the Cracow Academy of Music. That is as surprising a piece of information as I can remember picking up from an artist biography.)
In any case, it seems fitting, given the large amount of play her orchestral music has gotten, that the first CD of these works is being conducted by Leonard Slatkin. This is not because he has been her husband since 2011, but because Slatkin, a noted proponent of quality American music with audience appeal, has been an advocate of McTee’s music for so much longer. In fact, he was instrumental in arranging the commission of her Symphony No. 1 for the National Symphony Orchestra in 2002. That work is the central composition in this Detroit Symphony program, and is in several ways emblematic of the McTee style. It is, to begin with, music motivated by dance and movement, driven by an emphasis on rhythms, often motoric, with unexpected disruptions and syncopations to keep it impetuous. Not surprisingly, it keeps the percussion section very busy. It is music of high contrasts: in those rhythms, and in sonorities, and in its use of tonality. And lastly, each of the four named movements—“On with the Dance,” “Till a Silence Fell,” “Light Fantastic,” and “Where Time Plays the Fiddle”—is inspired by characteristics of one or more well-known works by other composers: the opening motif of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5, a melody from Penderecki’s Polish Requiem , Barber’s Adagio for Strings, Ravel’s La valse , and Stravinsky’s Le sacre du printemps . Those who know the Ballet for Band will note the elegiac second movement not included in the band version: an Adagio derived from an earlier Agnus Dei for organ, with which she eulogizes the victims of 9/11. All this, with some occasional jazz references to boot, McTee transforms into a unified, highly original, exceptionally moving 30-minute work.
Double Play (2009–10), the most recent work on this release, is another Slatkin commission, this for the Detroit Symphony. Indeed, this recording is from the premiere performances. “Unquestioned Answer,” the first movement, is a witty rethinking of Ives’s Unanswered Question , using the same device of an initially serene backdrop interrupted by a contrasting repeated theme. Instead of trumpet, the theme is played by various groups of instruments, and unlike Ives’s unvaried theme, McTee’s—derived from Ives’s—is transformed at each repetition. The last variation, for wood blocks and cowbells, leads into the second movement, “Tempus Fugit,” which truly seems to flee at light speed, after the moments of indecision while the ticking clocks get synchronized. Reminding one commentator of big band jazz of the Hermann/Kenton variety and inspired by a theme by Slatkin, it is hugely entertaining.
So is her most popular work, Circuits , written in 1990: a high-energy romp in which the title describes a stimulus not so much electronic as fractal. It is McTee’s closest brush with minimalism on this CD, but there is nothing hypnotic or reflective here. That comes in Einstein’s Dream (2004), which incorporates electronics and brooding introspection in a remarkable collage of wildly contrasting styles. If this can be taken as a conjecture of what it might have been like to be inside the great physicist’s head, then one finds order in the Baroque ensemble, deep intellectual questing in the Romantic violin—based again on Ives’s trumpet theme in The Unanswered Question —and the most marvelous, and sometimes fantastic, images floating among them. The intent is quite serious, of course, as each of the seven continuous sections reflects on some aspect of Einstein’s thoughts and works, art, and science. It is the work to which I returned most often, reveling in its depth and uncommon beauties.
So, this CD is a thoroughly enjoyable experience. The work of orchestra and conductor in these performances is exemplary, something that I have not always felt when hearing recent recordings from this source. The engineering is superb. I can think of no better way to come to know the work of this fascinating composer. Highly recommended.
FANFARE: Ronald E. Grames
Cage: Works For 2 Keyboards, Vol. 1
Danielpour: Darkness in the Ancient Valley / Guerrero, Nashville Symphony
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REVIEW:
The program closes with A Woman’s Life (2007), based on a cycle of poems on that topic by Maya Angelou, who read the cycle, apparently unforgettably, to Danielpour and his wife in 2006. These songs are pitch perfect and memorably touching. I was enthralled from the start—a childhood poem of devastating innocence cloaked with an aura usually reserved for the likes of Barber—and if you love his music and American song repertoire in general you must hear this cycle. The finale is unspeakably beautiful. Ms Brown sings with loving understanding. The Nashville players sound great, as is usual these days.
–American Record Guide
