SOUNDS OF AMERICA
Vladimir Lande conducts his St Petersburg forces in Sean Hickey’s Cello and Clarinet Concertos time and place, the overriding sensibility here is palpably New World. Like many hyphenated citizens, the Arab-American Fairouz succeeds neither by conserving nor jettisoning his background but rather by emphasising the elements that resonate best around him. Ken Smith
Hickey ‘Concertos’ Cello Concerto a . Clarinet Concerto b b Alexander Fiterstein cl a Dmitry Kouzov vc St Petersburg State b Academic Symphony Orchestra / Vladimir Lande Delos F DE3448 (49’ • DDD)
St Petersburg orchestras play Detroit-born composer Hickey Sean Hickey’s two big three-movement concertos give their soloists a huge range of extended passages, riffs and cadenzas with which to stand up and out against often explosively colourful orchestral support (with frequent solo opportunities for the woodwinds and brass). The Cello Concerto, composed in 2008, features Dmitry Kouzov, who commissioned the work, in a setting that dramatically showcases his astounding virtuoso skills. Hickey, who perfectly captures both the lyrical and the ecstatic nature of the instrument, sets it from the start in relentlessly turbulent, emotional landscapes. The mood becomes even more highly charged in the second movement, which begins incongruously with cartoonish bumps in the bass but is soon, in the composer’s words, ‘haunted and dismayed by the constant images of the futile bloodshed in Iraq’. A fierce cadenza for cello and mixed percussion leads to the concerto’s most touching moment, a slow closing lament accompanied by pounding timpani.
The Clarinet Concerto, composed in 2006 and collaboratively commissioned by David Gould, New York’s Metro Chamber Orchestra and the Vandoren clarinet reed and mouthpiece company, features the brilliant young clarinettist Alexander Fiterstein in music that draws in part, both delightfully and wickedly, on Scottish folk tunes and reels laid over a foundation of populist harmonies. Like the Cello Concerto, the second movement is its most personal, intended by Hickey as ‘a restless, yet haunting recollection of life in the US heartland’. The stunning audiophile recording, produced by Alexei Barashkin, was made at St Petersburg’s Melodiya Studios. Laurence Vittes
‘Summer Sounds, Op 1’ Griebling-Haigh Alegrias. Sinfonia concertante Mozart String Quartet No 14, K387 a
Rathbun Phases Members of the Cleveland Orchestra and faculty from Kent State University; a Miami Quartet Kent/Blossom Music Festival F (79’ • DDD) Recorded live at the Kent/Blossom Music Festival, 2012
Fruits of the 2012 Kent/ Blossom Music Festival The Kent/Blossom Music Festival has been a prime training ground for gifted young musicians ever since Kent State University and the Cleveland Orchestra inaugurated the programme in the summer of 1968 in conjunction with the opening of the orchestra’s summer home, Blossom Music Center. The superior level of faculty artistry at Kent/ Blossom can be gleaned on this new disc, ‘Summer Sounds, Op 1’, which juxtaposes recent works by Margaret Griebling-Haigh and Jeffrey Rathbun with a Mozart string quartet.
Griebling-Haigh’s penchant for exotic atmospheres is on display in two pieces of rich and haunting personality. The Sinfonia concertante is scored for the fresh amalgam of two oboes, bassoon and string quintet, which engage in sinuous and impassioned conversations until whimsy takes over in the third movement, an evocation of rascally rabbits. In Alegrias, Griebling-Haigh blends Sephardic sounds of several regions in a stew of flavourful ingredients. With yet another novel instrumentation – accordion, dumbek, oboe, piano, strings, tambourine – the music swirls and stomps in off-beat flamenco rhythms to disarming effect.
Rathbun, assistant principal oboe of the Cleveland Orchestra when not composing, reveals vibrant creative skills in Phases, a work for woodwind quintet whose five movements highlight different incarnations of salient material. It’s at once piquant and poetic, with ample opportunity for orchestra members to exude characteristic elegance and pinpoint clarity.
Amid these 21st-century offerings, Mozart’s Quartet in G major, K387, unfolds with cherished vitality and poignancy as placed in refined, articulate and buoyant perspective by the Miami String Quartet. By all means, bring on ‘Summer Sounds, Op 2’. Donald Rosenberg gramophone.co.uk
GRAMOPHONE AUGUST 2013 V
