Fanfare Reviews
from January/February 1996

HOVHANESS: Khrimian Hairig for Trumpet and String Orchestra, op. 49¹. The Holy City, op. 218¹. Psalm et Fugue, op. 40A. Kohar, op. 66, no. 1. Symphony for Metal Orchestra, op. 203 (Symphony no. 17). Richard Auldon Clark conducting the Manhattan Chamber Orchestra with Chris Gecker, trumpet¹. KOCH INTERNATIONAL 3-7289-2H1 [DDD]; 52:41. Produced by Michael Fine.

The current renaissance of interest in Hovhaness's music reminds me of a sign on a no longer extant plumbing supply store in my hometown of Red Bank, NJ: "If you don't like the weather, stick around for a while." During my youth, it was fashionable to denigrate Hovhaness's music for its harmonic stasis, exoticism, and sheer euphony. Now, many moons later and after comparatively more arcane musical languages have fallen out of vogue, and after the advent of Górecki's Third Symphony and the successful marketing of Gregorian chant, Hovhaness is, finally, "in" to a growing audience that finds solace in his unostentatious spirituality, his ecumenical synthesis of musical cultures and styles, and his disarmingly simplistic and direct musical devices.

For a clearly stated encapsulation of Hovhaness's career, the reader is directed to Walter Simmons's review of Hovhaness's Quartets Nos. 1, 2, 3, and 4; his Four Bagatelles (Delos DE-3162); and his First Symphony along with Meditation on Orpheus, Fantasy on Japanese Woodprints, and The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam (Delos DE-3168) in Fanfare 19:1.

This release, along with Telarc's CD-80392 containing splendid performances of the previously unrecorded Symphony No. 6 ("Celestial Gate"), op. 173, and the Concerto No. 7 for Orchestra, op. 116, along with Prelude and Quadruple Fugue for Orchestra, op. 128, Tzaikerk, "Evening Song" for Flute, Violin, Timpani, and String Orchestra, Prayer of Saint Gregory, for Trumpet and String Orchestra, and Alleluia and Fugue for String Orchestra, op. 40b, which are already served on Crystal C 800 and C 110, represents a general departure on the part of the recording industry that, up till recently, contented itself in the issuing of duplicate versions of already recorded and known Hovhaness pieces. The release under review contains only one piece that is duplicated elsewhere--The Holy City, op. 218 on CRI C-259. It also uses smaller and less overtly sumptuous forces than those of I Fiamminghi conducted by Rudolf Werthen on Telarc. The Manhattan Chamber Orchestra under Richard Auldon Clark numbers thirty-seven (in which are included six flutes and six percussionists), and produces well-sculpted, fluent, and beautifully intoned and balanced recordings of everything.

Khrimian Hairig, op. 49, is from Hovhaness's Armenian period between 1942 and the early 1950s, and is complementary to his contemporaneous Prayer of Saint Gregory which likewise uses a solo trumpet. Similarly complementary are the Psalm et Fugue, op. 40a, which shares the same opus number with the Alleluia and Fugue and, like its sibling, projects a hypnotic kind of hymnody.

Kohar, op. 66, no. 1, variously is, in Armenian, a woman's name or a jewel. The piece is decidedly Middle Eastern in its melodic shapes and harmonic turns. It starts with incantational passages from the English horn and flute and ends in a wild and rather forbidding dance between the timpani and strings.

The Holy City, op. 218 (1967), the only piece on this release duplicated elsewhere, opens with an eerily dreamlike sequence posited by the harp and sustained treble strings, interspersed with moments of pure hymnody played by the strings and solo trumpet. This is exquisite Hovhaness--a case where content and the amount of time taken to express it are in close, synergistic harmony.

The 1963 Symphony for Metal Orchestra, op. 203 looks farther east than his Armenian pieces, to the Gagaku music of China, Korea, and later, Japan. The unusual ensemble consists of six flutes, three trombones, and percussion. The flutes perform lines that imitate the Japanese sho, or mouth organ, over a bed of Asian-sounding percussion and sustained trombone chords. Glissandi are liberally employed, heightening the tonal ambivalence of the work, and elevating it to the status of one of Hovhaness's most exotic, evocative, and otherworldly scores.

The back of the jewelbox is mislabeled. The two sections of Kohar are on tracks five and six, not on five alone as indicated. There are actually ten tracks on this CD.

This has been my first exposure to Richard Auldon Clark and his Manhattan Chamber Orchestra. He is an imaginative conductor with the ability to find wholly workable and communicative tempo relationships in this sometimes intractable repertoire. Instrumental balances are strikingly effective. The recording is both detailed and spacious, adding up to a fine addition to Hovhaness's growing discography.

William Zagorski

HEARTS MUSIC. Eugene Corporon conducting the Cincinnati Wind Symphony. KLAVIER KCD-11064 [DDD]; 72:37.

DIAMOND: Hearts Music. HARTLEY: Concerto for Twenty-three Winds. MURRAY: Ronald Searle Suite. COLGRASS: Winds of Nagual. NELSON: Aspen Jubilee.

TRIBUTES. Eugene Corporon conducting the North Texas Wind Symphony. KLAVIER KCD-11070 [DDD]; 75:22. (Distributed by Albany.)

STAMP: Aubrey Fanfare. TULL: Sketches on a Tudor Psalm. GRANTHAM: Bum's Rush. GOULD: Ballad. CICHY: Divertimento. HOLST: Hammersmith. McTEE: California Counterpoint: The Twittering Machine. WELCHER: Zion.

A few issues back I wondered whether Eugene Corporon's band music series on the Klavier label would continue, since he was moving from the Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music to the North Texas College of Music. The arrival of Tributes, recorded with the North Texas Wind Symphony in spring 1995, provides the happy answer. His other new release, Hearts Music, appears to be a leftover from his Cincinnati tenure, as it was recorded more than five years ago. Some have criticized Corporon's recordings--there appear to be at least a dozen now--as being note-perfect but lacking in expression. I beg to differ. Inevitably, his recordings are compared with Frederick Fennell's work with the Eastman Wind Ensemble several decades back. In side-by-side comparisons of duplicated works, Fennell usually comes out on top, but that's a lofty benchmark, and Corporon nearly always holds his own. And, just as Fennell did on Mercury Living Presence, Corporon offers well-played, original programs in stunning sound that mix the familiar with the new--as these releases demonstrate.

The title track of Hearts Music is a simple fanfare and chorale written by David Diamond as a musical thank you to Corporon and the Cincinnati players for their premiere performance and recording of the composer's Tantivy. Ironically, in light of what I've written above, I received that performance rather poorly when I reviewed it. Hearts Music fares much better. My favorite work on the disc is Ronald Searle Suite by Hollywood and Broadway composer Lyn Murray. It was written in 1957 to accompany an animated documentary by Searle called Energetically Yours, a commission from Standard Oil. I've never seen the film, but one can easily imagine the on-screen action with music to such delightful movements as "The Age of Steam" and "The Age of Gasoline." One finds more program-type music in Michael Colgrass's Winds of Nagual, at more than twenty-four minutes the longest work on this brimming disc. Colgrass draws inspiration from Carlos Castaneda's tales about a Yaqui Indian sorcerer named Don Juan Matisse. "Sometimes when I'm composing, I see music almost like it's a film," Colgrass writes in the liner notes. And Winds does sound like film music, right down to the titles of each movement--"The Desert; Don Juan Emerges from the Mountains" and "Carlos Stares at the River and Becomes a Bubble," for example. While Colgrass also writes, "The listener need not have read Castaneda's books to enjoy the work," I found it helpful to follow along with the movement titles, at least upon initial listenings. Corporon also offers worthy renditions of Walter Hartley's Concerto for 23 Winds, which Fennell popularized so many years ago, and Ron Nelson's Aspen Jubilee, a work that recalls the style of his Savannah River Holiday and Rocky Point Holiday and has become a concert band staple in its decade of existence.

Tributes finds Corporon's Texas players in just as fine a form as those in Cincinnati. They turn in convincing performances of works that, with the exception of Gustav Holst's Hammersmith and Morton Gould's Ballad, are largely new to me. Jack Stamp, conductor of bands at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and producer of these recordings, wrote his airy Aubrey Fanfare to commemorate Corporon's first season with the North Texas Wind Symphony. Stamp dedicated the work to his late mentor, Fisher Tull, whose Sketches on a Tudor Psalm of 1971 receives a heartfelt performance here. North Texas colleague Cindy McTee's California Counterpoint of 1993 is a transcription of her earlier orchestral work inspired by painter Paul Klee's The Twittering Machine. Two other Texans, University of Texas professors Donald Grantham and Dan Welcher, contribute their recent works, Bum's Rush and Zion, respectively. Bum's Rush is a dark, jazz-tinged work that "for the composer . . . is evocative of the novels of Raymond Chandler and film noir." Zion is the third and final part of Three Places in the West, inspired by national parks. Utah's Zion National Park provides the fodder for the final installment, which expresses the composer's feelings from being in the park rather than serving as mere program music. Roger Cichy's Divertimento combines jazz and symphonic elements and uses the three-note motif C-G-B as tribute to his main musical influences--Aaron Copland, George Gershwin, and Leonard Bernstein. Gould's Ballad and Holst's Hammersmith receive sympathetic performances, too, but let's face it: they're not the main attraction here with all of this other new music.

These are essential releases that no band enthusiast should be without. I tend to favor Hearts Music, but I have so much yet to learn from Tributes. I wouldn't want to be without either. Klavier, is it asking too much to start recording other excellent college bands, too?

Randy A. Salas

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Fanfare Reviews from January/February 1996

Fanfare Reviews
from January/February 1996