Fanfare Reviews
from March/April 2000

Reviews: Soundscapes - DePaul University Wind Ensemble

SOUNDSCAPES • Eugene Migliaro Corporon, cond; North Texas Wind Symphony; Eugene Migliaro Corporon, cond • KLAVIER KCD-11098 (73:45)

MAKRIS Aegean Festival Overture. RUDIN Bacchanale, op. 20. BENSHOOF Out and Back Again. PERSICHETTI Parable IX, op. 121. GERSHWIN Preludes for Piano, No. 2. GRANTHAM Fantasy Variations on Gershwin's Second Prelude for Piano

SOJOURNS • Eugene Migliaro Corporon, cond; North Texas Wind Symphony; Eugene Migliaro Corporon, cond • KLAVIER KCD-11099 (70:15)

YOUNG Tempered Steel. GRANTHAM Southern Harmony. GILLINGHAM Concertino for Four Percussion. SOUSA Easter Monday on the White House Lawn. WELCHER Symphony No. 3 ("Shaker Life"). HAGEN Wedding Dance. DAUGHERTY Niagara Falls

My sense of concert-band music is informed by the Eastman Wind Ensemble of yore, the United States Marine Band, and more recently by such groups as the DePaul Wind Ensemble under Donald De Roche, and the Detroit Concert Band led by Leonard B. Smith. All of those institutions share two virtues: whiplash precision in performance and, even more important, a mission to expand the concert-band repertoire both by unearthing unplayed treasures from the past and by commissioning and otherwise championing works by distinguished contemporary composers.

The North Texas Wind Symphony is in that august league. Given the evidence presented on these two Klavier releases, it is indeed pushing the envelope both in its choice of repertoire and in its performances of the same. Like the Eastman band and the DePaul Wind Ensemble, the North Texas Wind Symphony is a training institution. Made up of the most promising musicians attending the University of North Texas College of Music and led by Eugene Migliaro Corporon, the college's director of Wind Studies and an obviously inspired and inspiring conductor, they consistently turn in highly polished and vervy performances of some quite challenging repertoire. These two discs are the most recent installments in Klavier's ongoing wind recording project. Started in 1989, it has already yielded 21 recordings featuring compositions by close to 100 composers.

The most thematically complex and compositionally deft piece on Soundscapes is Persichetti's Parable IX, a highly dramatic and relentlessly fine essay into the outer possibilities of tonal music. As to be expected with Persichetti, every detail of his complex sonic mosaic is perfectly placed, and his uncommon ear for instrumental timbres, both massive and delicate, is unfailingly telling.

Andreas Makris's Aegean Festival Overture (1967) is in a more retrograde style than that of Parable IX. Makris served for many years as a first violinist in the National Symphony Orchestra under Mstislav Rostropovich, and originally composed the piece for that ensemble. Here it is arranged for symphonic band by Albert Bader, and, given its 7/4 pulse, it proves to be both an evocative and a sonically exhilarating romp.

Rolf Rudin's often Coplandesque Bacchanale (1990) unabashedly taps into that already well mined vein of midcentury symphonic Americana. Rudin's subtle exploration of the purely lyrical possibilities of the band's lower percussion, and his Persichetti-like complexity in the handling of discrete instrumental parts, makes it wide-eyed, fresh, and beguilingly innocent again.

Ken Benshoff's Out and Back Again (1993) is the most intriguing offering on this disc. Scored with prominent solo violin and viola parts, it conjures up the hymnodic and hypnotic world of Virgil Thomson. A euphonically sensitive piece, it is at once melodically simple and harmonically complex.

Gershwin's Second Prelude (splendidly arranged by John Krance) serves to demonstrate the wide affective range of this ensemble, and Donald Grantham's at once jazzy and tongue-in-cheek Fantasy Variations (1997) on that same Gershwin prelude provides a fine and quite satisfying coda to an already highly distinguished release.

Sojourns, like its companion volume, opens with a sonic bang. Charles Rochester Young (b. 1965) is a composer known to me only by his 1987 Sonata for Soprano Saxophone and Piano performed by Steven Mauk and Mary Ann Covert on Open Loop 008. That is a haunting, harmonically subtle piece that left me largely unprepared for his bracingly noisy and monothematically simplistic (in the best possible ways) Tempered Steel of 1997. It is an ostinato-driven fanfare (you should excuse the expression) marked by offset accents and leavened with poignant moments of repose (cleverly crafted, à la Haydn, from that same fanfare motive). At its most festive moments, Tempered Steel is enlivened by barrages of wonderfully lease-breaking lower percussion.

Donald Grantham's 1998 suite, Southern Harmony, is based on tunes collected by William "Singin' Billy" Walker and published in an 1835 anthology by the same title. From a lode already mined by Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Virgil Thomson, and William Schuman, Southern Harmony is vivid Americana--forthrightly folkish, occasionally hymnodic, and now evocative of a more than mythical age. In keeping with the nature of his materials, Grantham manages the trick of making the often kaleidoscopic complexity of his scoring seem always simple and homespun. Much of the same can be said for Dan Welcher's 1997 Symphony No. 3 ("Shaker Life"), which focuses on spiritual practices outside the mainstream of American religion. Its first movement, "Laboring Songs," starts innocently enough, but quickly finds itself in harmonic thickets. Suspensions, bitonal tensions, and almost sinister percussion sounds soon dominate, only to be dispelled by moments of seraphic eloquence and fervent joy. The same scheme holds for the second movement, "Circular Marches." Both become music that, unlike Grantham's, makes one look from the inside out.

David Gillingham's 1997 Concertino for Four Percussion is a William Schumanesque tour de force. Sousa's Easter Monday on the White House Lawn is a valuable period piece in that it shows us at once from whence concert band music came and what, in this surrounding context, it has become.

Wedding Dance, culled from Daron Hagen's 1998 opera Bandanna, reveals the influence of his various mentors including Joseph Schwantner, Ned Rorem, Witold Lutoslawski, and David Diamond. Its casual jazziness and neatness of construction bring Rorem and Diamond especially to mind.

The last item on this second disc, Michael Daugherty's 1997 Niagara Falls, brings it to a close in a fitting manner. Way back in 1993, Daugherty (b. 1954) composed his Metropolis Symphony, a large-scale piece inspired by the comic book character Superman and subsequently recorded by David Zinman and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra on Argo 452 103-2. As a former child who grew up in the 50s, when it was universally stated that comic books would surely rot the minds of their youthful readers (it was also believed that all psychological disorders could be traced to bad toilet training), I, an inveterate reader of the same and a subsequent collector of related memorabilia, found Daugherty's concept particularly appealing. The virtues that inform the Metropolis Symphony are alive in his phantasmagorical Niagara Falls--at once a most irreverent and profoundly reverent homage to the multifaceted culture that made all the pieces on these two discs possible.

Klavier's "Live to Two Track" sound is, like the performances it preserves, appropriately spectacular.

William Zagorski

DEPAUL UNIVERSITY WIND ENSEMBLE • Donald DeRoche (cond); DePaul University W Ens; Larry Combs (cl, sax) • ALBANY 334 (62:02)

BOZZA Children's Overture. LOPATNIKOFF Concerto for Wind Orchestra. GUARNIERI Homenagen a Villa-Lobos. MILHAUD Symphony No. 5, "Dixtour." MARTINŮ Comedy on the Bridge: Suite. BEAL Concerto for Clarinet/Soprano Saxophone

The DePaul University Wind Ensemble is squarely in the tradition of the Eastman Wind Ensemble under Frederick Fennell, and it lovingly preserves all of that august institution's virtues. Here, they are enthusiastically applied to some quite magical music.

Eugene Bozza's (b. 1905) Children's Overture, using the first section of Respighi's Pines of Rome ("Children playing in the Borghese Gardens") as its point of departure, is a pure delight. Its title is no misnomer on a number of levels. I remember my pre-Bemsteinian exposure as a kid to orchestral music--children's concerts given in Red Bank, New Jersey, by the Cleveland, Pittsburgh, and Detroit Orchestras. I liked the loud colorful pieces best. Wagner's "Ride of the Valkyries," played by the Cleveland under Louis Lane, brought us culturally starved moppets to our feet well before the piece was over. It had what we craved; it was rhythmic (I learned what 9/8 time was), exciting, and loud. I thought that Lane, in that Elvis-inspired age, was truly cool---calm, elegantly unflappable, and wielding his baton with great precision. It was a stick that oracularly summoned the forces of unholy pandemonium. Bozza doesn't provide pandemonium, but he does offer a strikingly brilliant piece with a lot of rhythm, instrumental color, and wondrous percussion.

Enough of memory lane. Nikollai Lopatnikoff (1903-76), an Estonian but Russian-trained composer with whom I've over the years lost all discographic contact, comes across vividly in this performance of his racy Concerto for Wind Orchestra. His piece is essential, and deserves this recording. But, to me, one of the most compelling draws of this recording is found in Mozart Camargo Guarnieri's Homenagen a Villa-Lobos. Guarnieri (b. 1907 in São Paulo) has been touted as Brazil's next Villa-Lobos. I don't know that I agree with that assessment, but my spotty knowledge of a few of his piano pieces tells me that he is a contender. This performance of that piece verifies that assessment.

The Milhaud piece ought to need no introduction. But it does. It has been recorded only once before to my knowledge. My library contains an old Candide LP of this Symphony for 10 wind instruments conducted by its composer and captured in excellent predigital sound. This performance offers a fine second opinion.

Martinů's Suite from Comedy on the Bridge is drawn from a 1935 opera score. As with any Martinů, it is worth preserving and savoring. The last piece, Jeff Beal's (no birth date given) Concerto for Clarinet/Soprano Saxophone, is a mildly jazzoid piece that brings this collection to a satisfying close.

Recommended for all the above.

William Zagorski

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Fanfare Reviews from March/April 2000

Fanfare Reviews
from March/April 2000