Customer Reviews

Augusta Read Thomas: Triple Concerto; Wind Dance/ Tania León: Batá/Carabali

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The Louisville Orchestra was famous, from the 1950s onwards, with record collectors, amateurs of contemporary music and public librarians, for carving for itself a very special niche by devoting much of its activies to commissioning and performing music from contemporary composers, and recording it on their own "Louisville First Edition Records" LPs. It was the visionary idea of Mayor Charles Farnsley and a decision made in 1948 when the orchestra was on the brink of bankruptcy (like any orther symphony orchestra in America or elsewhere, box office was simply unable of covering the costs, and the Louisville community wasn't too supportive either), an idea that was indefatiguably championed until 1967 by its music director, Robert Whitney (who'd been at the helm since 1937 at the age of 33), then succeeded by Jorge Mester.

While Louisville First Edition Records totalled circa 180 releases between 1954 and the late 1980s, the CD era wasn't very favorable to them. They first entered an arrangement with Albany Records in the late 1980s, which resulted in the release of ten CDs, in a Louisville Orchestra "First Edition Encores" series: but these were all reissues of (mostly recent) material previously issued on LP (see comments section for the list and links). Then, in the early 1990s, Louisville went it alone, with ten more (now new recordings, released more or less simultaneously with the LPs, though the CDs always collated the content of one and a half corresponding LPs), in a very similar presentation but now the series was called "First Edition Recordings". There was also one additional CD, not part of that series, LCD 500, Luvisi Plays Rachmaninoff: Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, Op.43 & Beethoven: Piano Concerto 5, Emperor. Then the orchestra, I think, went bankrupt, and the CD releases were interrupted, other than a few odd and occasional releases on other labels, the most significant being Zwilich: Concerto Grosso; Symphony No. 3; Oboe Concerto on Koch and Joan Tower: Concertos on D'Note. In the early 2000s an organization called The Santa Fe Music Group acquired the rights to the Louisville catalog and started reissuing it, in attractive reissues (in a collection now called First Edition Music) that, contrary to the Louisville tradition of motley assortments of composers and styles, were coherently composer-centered - the downside being that many of those CDs were disappointingly short. Sadly Santa Fe Music Group closed down not even halfway-through completion of the project, and it has remained that way since (apparently they are back in business, now based in Austin, Texas - at least their website is accessible, and they publicize their Louisville releases. I've sent a mail asking if there were plans for more, and got no response. Bad omen).

The CD at hand, LCD 010, released in 1995, is the last from Louisville's own original and final batch of 10 (+ 1). So it is really Louisville's Swan Song and farewell to a recording project that had lasted 40 years and resulted in a unique recorded documentation of music of many styles written during those four decades. And what a Swan Song: an apotheosis, two make one regret for ever the label's demise. Not only because it is one of the rare Louisville records devoted to female composers: although Australian Peggy Grandville-Hicks' opera "The Transposed Heads" was part of Louisville's initial batch of twelve in 1954 (LOU-545-06), it is not until 1977 that the label published another woman, Priscilla McLean's Variations and Mozaics on a Theme of Stravinsky (Louisville LS-762, paired with Villa Lobos' Bachianas Brasileiras No. 4, and not reissued), followed a year later by Ivana Themmen's vocal cycle "Shelter This Candle From the Wind" (LS-767, coupled with Menotti's The Telephone, none reissued) and Joyce Mekeel's Vigil (LS-768, paired with Thorne's Elegy and Schickele's Pentangle, only the latter reissued on CD, Music by Norman Dello Joio, Peter Schickele & Vincent Persichetti). Jump again twelve years: this very series of Louisville First Edition Recordings CDs became more daring. LCD 002, in 1990, had Ellen Taffee Zwilich's 2nd Symphony (with Hindemith's Piano Concerto and Donaldson Lawhead's Aleost, Paul Hindemith - Concerto for Piano / Donaldson V Lawhead - Aleost / Ellen Taaffe Zwilich - Symphony No 2 (First Edition)), LCD 006 (1991) collated Gubaidulina's Pro and Contra and Joan Tower's Island Rhythms (with Otto Luening's ridiculous Kentucky Fantasy, Joan Tower Island Rhythms, Otto Luening Kentucky Concerto, Sofia Gubaidulina Pro Et Contra - Louisville Orchestra), and LCD 009 (1995) featured Zwilich again, in her Violin Concerto (with workds of Hailstork, Schuller and Dzubay, Hailstork: An American Port of Call/ Schuller: Four Soundscapes/ Zwillich: Violin, & Cello Concerto/ Dzubay: Snake Alley). Not enough to reverse the overwhelming trend, though. There is much to be lauded in the Louisville enterprise - but not its promotion of gender "diversity". With the four works collated on the present disc, and even adding the four more of Zwilich and four of Tower published on the two other labels indicated above and on the Zwilich reissue of Santa Fe Music Group's First Edition Music (Ellen Taaffe Zwilich: Chamber Symphony / Concerto for Violin, Cello and Orchestra / Symphony No. 2), it totals 20 compositions, on over 400 published in various forms by Louisville.

But it's not just a matter of affirmative action, mind you. The four compositions collated here are all fine works. Augusta Read Thomas writes in a contemporary style that is both dramatic and evocative, colorful, advanced but never intractable. She has taken in the lessons of Lutoslawski and Dutilleux - and, more distantly, of Britten and Tippett. Her 19-minute Triple Concerto is written for the rarely encountered line-up made famous by Debussy's first Sonata: flute, viola and harp, and she alternates the gossamer interplay of instruments and the powerful orchestral outburst.

Havana-born Tania León's two compositions are more unruly but with a similar sense of atmosphere and orchestral color, and with a strong rhythmic impulse, much in evidence in Carabalí, inspired by Carabalís (also known in Latin America as "cimarron", and the word will be familiar to fans of Henze), the slaves brought to the Americas from Belgian Congo, who preferred to escape to the jungle and perish rather than relinquish their freedom.

TT 58 minutes. At least, when Louisville stopped, they did it in a bang, not in a whimper.