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Reviews New recordings from St Louis, Chicago and Baton Rouge » The Scene Live highlights – page VII
C Baker The Glass Bead Game a . Awaking the Winds a . Shadows: Four Dirge-Nocturnes a . The Mystic Trumpeter b
St Louis Symphony Orchestra / a Leonard Slatkin, b Hans Vonk Naxos American Classics S 8 559642 (67’ • DDD) Recorded 1991 99
St Louis Symphony pro ile former resident composer Whether he is making subtle references to music of distant eras or applying his own contemporary stamp, Claude Baker has a way of drawing the listener into sonic worlds both intriguing and eloquent. The works on this disc reveal the American composer’s command of dramatic tension, metaphoric imagery and orchestral colour.
Baker drew inspiration for The Glass Bead Game from the Hermann Hesse novel that warns society about embracing the past at the risk of future knowledge and creativity. The three movements unfold through an array of techniques, including quotations from other works. The tour de force is the third movement, named for Hesse’s novel, a fantasia in the form of a collage of music by six major composers.
Awaking the Winds eschews programmatic allusions, instead allowing Baker to exult in an abstract narrative he brings to vivid life with expressive extremes and a rainbow of instrumental hues. The composer achieves a series of wondrous and spare textures in Shadows: Four Dirge-Nocturnes, based on Japanese haiku verses and incorporating delicate homages to Britten, Stravinsky and, most hauntingly, Mahler. Walt Whitman poems motivated the activity in the two movements of The Mystic Trumpeter, another example of Baker’s gifts for melding disparate musical languages and quotations (Ives, Messiaen, Rochberg) into potent and poetic images.
The performances by the St Louis Symphony (which Baker served as composerin-residence during the 1990s) under former music directors Leonard Slatkin and Hans Vonk brilliantly convey the spectrum of beguiling sonorities and styles built into these significant scores. Donald Rosenberg talks to... Nicole Cabell The American soprano on finally recording Ricky Ian Gordon’s songs for her disc ‘Silver Rain’ What attracted you to Gordon’s music? I grew up on American musical theatre and jazz, and Ricky has this wonderful ability to combine hints of those styles within a classical genre. The irst time I met him was in 2002 during my irst year in the young artist programme at Lyric Opera Chicago. We had a black-box theatre production of his opera Morning Star and I just absolutely fell in love with his music. We didn’t meet up again until 2008, at the doctor’s office of all places! I was a paranoid singer getting my vocal cords checked out and he was a paranoid composer getting his ears checked out. It was serendipity – after that we re-fell in love with each other professionally.
is very sensitive on an emotional and spiritual level to people’s pain and he has the ability to tap into that in his music. Hughes’s poetry is very raw, personal and unpretentious – and makes even more sense when it’s set by Ricky.
Describe how Gordon writes for soprano… His music is more difficult than it sounds. You’re utilising all facets of your technique – there’s a huge range, and you’re singing very low to very high in quick succession. But his music also requires that jazzy approach: you need to incorporate swing and a lack of vibrato, but in a way that’s classical.
For ‘Silver Rain’, you focus solely on songs set to Langston Hughes’s poetry… As an African-American woman in America, you learn about his poetry by osmosis. Ricky
What would purists make of this music? This is genuine music. We’re not taking pop music and singing it classically, or vice versa – it’s being sung exactly as Ricky composed it.
Berg . Ibert . Weill Berg Chamber Concerto a Ibert Cello Concerto b
Weill Violin Concerto c ac John Gilbert vn b George Work vc a Dmitri Shteinberg pf Baton Rouge Symphony Chamber Players / Timothy Mu itt Sono Luminus F b (CD + Y) DSL92161 (67’ • DDD) Blu-ray contains programme in 7.1 24-bit/96kHz DTS MA, 5.1 24-bit/192kHz DTS MA and 2.0 24-bit 192kHz LPCM
Baton Rouge soloists with 1920s ensemble pieces The three concertos on this new disc featuring the Baton Rouge Symphony Chamber Players have two things in common: they were written in the mid-1920s and feature winds and brasses as collaborators with string and piano soloists. Yet the musical languages and scoring are sufficiently varied to ward off hints of monotony.
Along with Alban Berg’s Chamber Concerto for piano, violin and 13 wind instruments, which only the most intrepid musicians take up on occasion, are two works that are likely unfamiliar to most listeners, Kurt Weill’s Concerto for violin and wind orchestra and Jacques Ibert’s Concerto for cello and 10 wind instruments. The last two pieces are well worth hearing in their own right, as well as to place them in context in each composer’s canon.
The Weill bears traces of The Threepenny Opera from several years later, in the sardonic moods and lean textures. The violin does its temperamental thing with gramophone.co.uk
GRAMOPHONE JANUARY 2013 I
