Customer Reviews

Albert: Symphony RiverRun/To Wake the Dead

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I was fortunate to have witnessed a reprise performance of this work by Mstislav Rostropovich and the National Symphony a couple years after its premiere. The conductor sincerely believed in contemporary music and that it should be performed more than once in repertoire. I was blown away by the power of this score in live performance, delighted that Delos had announced beforehand that they were recording it live. It created that additional frisson during the performances. A woman behind me was enthusiastically commenting between movements on motifs in the score and how they were rethought and repeated throughout performance. I had the good fortune to meet the composer as we were exiting the Kennedy Concert Hall and found that the woman was his mother! A proud doting mother appreciating his son's great music! One of those profound concert performances one never forgets and that relives every time I listen to this wonderful recording. Highly recommended to anyone who appreciates music of the 20th century. What a terrible loss that this composer died in middle age.

Stephen Albert was an American composer who was killed in 1992 in a three car accident on Cape Cod. He left behind two outstanding works, his first symphony "RiverRun" which won the Pulitzer Prize and a cello concerto which Yo Yo Ma has recorded. There are to date only two recordings of RiverRun, one on Delos and another on Naxos. The Delos recording is pared with an earlier song cycle on poems of James Joyce; the Naxos CD instead includes Albert's Second Symphony which someone else orchestrated after Albert's demise.
The Joyce song cycle on Delos is one of several Albert made out of the poetry of Joyce. It is very good, but the music is less tonal than the second symphony which is nowhere as good as the first, RiverRun.
Which do you choose? I would go with the Delos. It has the better recording of RiverRun. The song cycle also better complements RiverRun. The name of this first symphony comes from Joyce's last book, "Finnegan's Wake," and along the same line the text for the song cycle on the Delos album also come from that great Irish poet.