Fanfare Reviews
from January/February 2001
Reviews: Rendezvous
RENDEZVOUS • Eugene Migliaro Corporon, cond; North Texas Wind S; Cleveland Duo1 • KLAVIER KCD-11109 (68:55)
BOZZA Children's Overture. DAUGHERTY (an. Spede) Red Cape Tango. TUROK Canzone Concertante No. 5, for violin, piano, and wind ensemble1. HEARSHEN Divertimento. WOOLFENDEN French Impressions. GRANTHAM J'ai été au bal
CONVERGENCE • Newcastle Brass Quintet1; Eugene Migliaro Corporon, cond; North Texas Wind S • KLAVIER KCD-11110 (68:33)
DZUBAY Myaku. TULL Concerto Grosso for Brass Quintet and Wind Ensemble1. PRESS (arr. Johnston) Wedding Dance. GRYC Masquerade Variations. HINDEMITH Konzertmusik, op. 41. GRAINGER (trans. Pappajohn) The Warriors
Here are the latest Klavier CDs of brilliantly performed wind repertoire. They are, however, not equal. The first collection is mostly routine wind fare; the music is nothing special except for the Daugherty novelty. But the other CD has smashing repertoire, and I will be urging you to welcome the "official" new millennium in true celebratory fashion by letting
The Warriors sweep you away. If you've never heard the piece before, I envy you. I'll get to that CD in the second half of this review.
As infectiously colorful and rhythmic as the music is in Rendezvous, it does not contain strong works. In fact, its program is one of the slightest and most conservative in Klavier's series. There's nothing inherently bad about that; wind repertoire is not "masterpiece" driven. But, still, this CD will not be one of the most played in my considerable collection of North Texas Wind Symphony discs.
Eugene Bozza's Children's Overture (1964) establishes its connection to youth by quoting the opening section of Respighi's Pines of Rome, where children play in a pine grove and mimic marching soldiers. Eventually, Bozza weaves several children's songs, including Frère Jacques, into his musical fabric. Michael Daugherty's Red Cape Tango (1987-92) is sort of a hoot. Imagine the famous Dies Irae performed as a tango, and you have the essence of the piece, an adaptation for winds of the final movement from his Supermanish Metropolis Symphony. Tempos, instrumentation--both are in constant flux in this plainsong-on-Broadway production.
Paul Turok's Canzone Concertante No. 5 for Violin, Piano, and Wind Ensemble (1989) is a sonic byplay of timbres presented in a lively, eclectic mix of neo-Classicism, modern-dance steps, marching-band routines, and pastoral reflections. The soloists work primarily as a duo, and offer a novel sonic contrast. Ira Hearshern (b. 1948) is a new name to me. He is principally an orchestrator and arranger for film and television, but here he is heard in an original composition. His Divertimento is composed of five movements, each taking a distinct popular character: ragtime, blues, mambo, ballad, and march--musical styles from Europe and the western hemisphere.
Guy Woolfenden (b. 1937), also a new composer to me, has scored more than 150 Royal Shakespeare Company productions. His French Impressions (1998), one of his five original works for symphonic winds, is inspired by four paintings of French painter Georges Seurat, and his music is based on the paintings' themes, not their pointillistic technique. Worlds of gas lighting, sunny Seine banks with bathers, the circus, and the can-can make for varied tone coloring. Donald Grantham's J'ai été au bal (1999) is an explosion of dance rhythms, surveying the popular- and folk-music landscape of Louisiana. Traditional Cajun tunes are carried along on a little waltz time, some quick syncopations, and, near the end, brass-band flourishes.
In all, Rendezvous is a generous, nearly 70-minute program of wind music, but, for me, it was pretty much exhausted on a single hearing, and subsequent hearings have not made it more than just an OK CD.
And now for something special. The Convergence CD provides much more substance, including classics by Hindemith and Percy Grainger, though the latter's work is a transcription. Let me hold off on their pieces for a moment, though, for some fairly interesting compositions precede them.
David Dzubay's 1999 Myaku (Japanese for "pulse") is a fanfare built on the idea of a recurring rhythmic pulse and the number 7 (explained in the booklet). There is an unexpected darkness to it that I enjoyed. Fisher Tull's 1985 Concerto Grosso is the standard Baroque setup: an instrumental ensemble (in this case, a brass quintet) in dialog with, and sometimes in opposition to, a larger instrumental body, with percussion serving as a sort of secondary concertino group. The music is fast-slow-fast, and offers engaging melodies and textures.
Jacques Press's brief 1967 Wedding Dance is a transcription of the final movement of his orchestral suite Hasseneh, and is a wild romp. It has been called one of the wind-band literature's "most spectacular" pieces for its overflow of color and rhythms. When you hear its melody, you will say, "Oh, yeah, I know that tune. I love it!" Stephen Gryc's 1997 Masquerade Variations is based on a melody used by Prokofiev in the second piece in his piano cycle Visions fugitives. After the statement of the theme, each subsequent variation is of a type--fanfare, tarantella, nocturne, passacaglia, and dance--and solo winds are featured. This is a satisfying piece with a clear sense of direction and audience appeal.
And now the two best works on either CD.
Probably the least well known of Hindemith's several works titled Konzertmusik, the op. 41 for wind ensemble has his unmistakable neo-Classical, contrapuntal interplay and a touch of Gebrauchsmusik. In three movements--Concertante Overture, Variations, and March--the op. 41 (originally scored for a small German band with saxhorns) is not the unqualified masterwork that the op. 50 is, but it does deserve to be better known and recorded more often. The middle movement is a set of variations on the Austrian popular tune Prince Eugene the Noble, and the concluding march is intentionally overpompous, poking fun. This is meaty wind music.
It is finally time for The Warriors, one of the most thoroughly pleasurable pieces in all symphonic literature. Composed in 1913-16, the work lay virtually unknown after its premiere in 1917 at the Norfolk (US) Festival of Music and a few other performances here and England in the early 1920s. It even had to wait nearly 70 years for its first commercial recording. All of this is understood when one learns that this vivacious composition is scored for huge orchestra supplemented by a large percussion section of mostly tuned instruments, including three grand pianos. It is recorded here in a transcription for winds (that thankfully retains all that percussion and those three prominent pianos, sometimes played directly on their strings with marimba sticks). I am ecstatic to report that, fairly uncommon when it comes to such things, the music doesn't suffer one bit for being transcribed; since the work is so percussion-laden, keeping these instruments allows the music to retain virtually every ounce of its riot of color, and this is one of the few times that I can actually applaud a transcription. Grainger intended The Warriors, subtitled "Music for an Imaginary Ballet," as "an orgy of war-like dances, processions, and merry-making." (It has been suggested that The Warriors came from Grainger's hearing of an Indonesian gamelan orchestra at the 1900 Paris exhibition, and, indeed, he arranged The Warriors in 1928 for "gamelan-like" tuned percussion and keyboards.) Though in one 20-minute movement, the work is in eight distinct sections individually characterized by either mood or tempo. Carried along on contrapuntal structures and rhythmic complexity, no fewer than 15 original-Grainger themes "and Motiva" are heard. The Corporon-led performance is quite thrilling, only just slightly slower than the fabulous disc-premiere performance by John Hopkins leading the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra on an Australian EMI LP.
Report-card time. Rendezvous gets a passing grade of C, while Convergence earns an A+ and moves to the head of the class.
Stephen Ellis
Copyright © 2001 by Fanfare, Inc. Reprinted by permission from Volume 24, No. 3 (January/February 2001), pages 328-329.
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