Customer Reviews

Hailstork: An American Port of Call/ Schuller: Four Soundscapes/ Zwillich: Violin, & Cello Concerto/ Dzubay: Snake Alley

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This, LCD 009, is one of the last releases from the series of ten issued by the Louisville First Edition Recordings between 1989 and 1995, in continuation of their famed series of LPs, initiated in 1953 with Louisville Lou 545-01 (collecting Villa Lobos' Dawn in the Tropical Forest, Hasley Stevens' Triskelion and Creson's Invocation and Dance) and totalling 158 releases. But sadly the label was near its end, it published only one more release and disappeared. I've reviewed most of the issues from the final series:

- 001 Hodkinson: Sinfonia Concertante ; Josephs: Variations on a Theme of Beethoven ; Korte: Symphony No.3

- 002 Paul Hindemith - Concerto for Piano / Donaldson V Lawhead - Aleost / Ellen Taaffe Zwilich - Symphony No 2 (First Edition)

- 003 Cumulus Nimbus / Fantasy Variations / Farbenspiel: Concerto No. 3 for Orchestra

- 004 Music of Ezra Laderman

- 005 Witold Lutoslawski: Fanfare for Louisville; Karel Husa: Apotheosis of this Earth; Monodrama

- 006 Joan Tower Island Rhythms, Otto Luening Kentucky Concerto, Sofia Gubaidulina Pro Et Contra - Louisville Orchestra

- 007 William Bolcom: Symphonies 1 & 3, Seattle Slew Orchestral Suite, First Edition

Most (but not all) of LCD 008, a Corigliano program (Corigliano: Gazebo Dances/ Voyage/ Summer Fanfare/ Prom Overture/ Piano Concerto), was picked up by First Edition Music and part of their first batch of releases (FECD-0002, John Corigliano: Tournaments Overture; Elegy; Piano Concerto; Gazebo Dances), which I've also reviewed. First Edition was a label from the Santa Fe Music Group which had acquired the Louisville's catalog and in the early 2000s embarked upon a program which was meant to reissue the complete Louisville back catalog. But they seem to have disappeared too.

It was the old and not always positive habit of the Louisville label to publish variegated collections of composers with often no program coherence. First Edition Music had a stronger and welcome editorial line in this respect. The four composers gathered here do share some stylistic traits though: they all broadly belong to what I would call "midly modern" contemporary composers: their musical language is not passé, no neo-romantic, it makes use of many of the advances in 20th Century music language, without in any way being radicals. All this makes their music enjoyable, highly dramatic and exciting, but always accessible (at leat for ears attuned to 20th Century music). Of all, only the Zwillich Concerto has been reissued by First Edition Music in a coherent, all-Zwillich program (see my review of Ellen Taaffe Zwilich: Chamber Symphony / Concerto for Violin, Cello and Orchestra / Symphony No. 2).

Two of these composers I've never even heard OF, other than from this disc: Adolphus Hailstork and David Dzubay. Born in 1941, Hailstork is an academic composer, a pupil of Giannini, Diamond and Nadia Boulanger, but his language his more advanced than their kind of neo-romanticism, although one hears whiffs of that in the overture's second, lyrical theme. "An American Port of Call" is a colorful and dynamic concert-overture, with echoes of Jazz (the sinuous clarinet at 1:10), composed in 1985. Colorful, dynamic, rambunctious and evocative are comments that apply to David Dzubay's "Snake Alley" from 1989, but it is also (supposedly) programmatic and descriptive music, depicting the journey of an Amercican tourist into Snake Alley in Taipeh, which is apparently the street where snakes are sold and brothels are found. All this is told in great detail by Dzubay in the notes reproduced in the informative booklet, but the music can be heard with enjoyment without these explanations (although anyone would wonder at 6:30 when breaks in a sinuous, chorale-like Taiwanese folk song entoned by full strings). Rhe short quotation of Stravinsky's Rite of Spring at 4:20 is unexplained (and isn't there an even shorter quotation of Varèse's Amériques at 0:48 and again at 7:57?). Dzubay, born in 1964, is another academic composer, whose teachers include Donald Erb, Lukas Foss and Oliver Knussen. He graduated from The Indiana University in Bloomington where he presently teaches composition.

Gunther Schuller and Ellen Taffee Zwilich are much better known. Schuller is famous as much for his contributions to Jazz as for those to"classical-contemporary" music, and one of the inventors of "third stream" music, combining Jazz and classical techniques. But Schuller's characteristic is probably his chameleon-like ability be equally at home in a variety of style. His Symphony 1965 was a fine work written in a strictly serial style (see my review of ASIN:B000001K3Z American Orchestral Music - sorry, I ran out of authorized links). His Four Soundscapes are subtitled "Hudson Valley Reminiscences", but that you'll know only by going on the publisher's website, Schirmer, and same with the fact that it was commissioned and premiered in 1975 by the Hudson Valley Philharmonic Orchestra, and that the conductor Schuller refers to in the CD's liner notes was Claude Monteux. Inspired by the Hudson Valley region present and past, they are very evocative and atmospheric, Ives-derivative in their ability to let shards of ragtimes burst fleetingly into an all-embracing tapestry of slow-moving, transcendental sonic atmospheres, but also evocative of Berg at times (especially in the first piece, although it pays direct tribute to Ives).

The Double Concerto for Violin and Cello from 1991, a Louisville commission and premiere recording, is full of subtle and delicate dialoguing filigree between both instruments, but also of passionately lyrical statements. Sonorities typical of Tippett (Ttriple Concerto) and Britten (String Quartets) may come to mind. The language is freely modern, not cutting edge or aggressive, always appealing, very lyrical, and as such very typical of a generation of composers that has rejected the dictates of systems in favor of a greater compositional freedom and a readiness to pluck from many compositional baskets. Yet Zwilich is commendable for her refusal to relinquishing all exigencies and her ability to invent a lyricism that doesn't lapse into trite, taste-pandering heart-on-sleeve C-major sentimentality.

I'm not sure there's anything essential here but everything is highly enjoyable, and I don't mind having duplicated the Zwilich, which gave me a new opportunity to hear this excellent composition. The recordings were made in 1991 (Zwillich) and 1993 and come in excellent sound. Informative liner notes (although they are not always clear about who commissioned and premiered the works). TT 50, NOT the 57:52 indicated on the disc's back cover.