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SOUNDS OF AMERICA S A Y L E S B R A D : P H O T O G R A P H Y Mezzo-soprano Sonja Bruzauskas is joined by ‘a raft of talented Houston musicians’ for Delos’s disc of works by Robert Nelson co-author of five music theory books – has had a long-term affair with the voice, words and poetry. In addition to writing five operas, the most recent being A Room With a View, Nelson served 15 seasons as musical director and composer-in-residence for the Houston Shakespeare Festival, during which time he composed original scores for 22 of Shakespeare’s plays. On his first CD for Delos, Nelson teams up with mezzo-soprano Sonja Bruzauskas, who participated in ECM’s 2015 recording of Morton Feldman’s Rothko Chapel (which is in Houston – 1/16) and a raft of talented Houston musicians in a programme that demonstrates his range of styles and interests, from cabaret songs to a full‑length children’s entertainment. The most eagerly anticipated will be the 25‑minute Zoo Stories, in which Bruzauskas, hornist Brian Thomas and pianist Timothy Hester sing, narrate and otherwise engagingly carry on (the cycle opens with Thomas playing the theme from Ein Heldenleben with wild abandon); but the original stories by Kate Pogue, each with a surprisingly serious moral and populated by complex characters, go on at such length that many children might consider this a tale for adults. More memorable are Sapphire, Two Love Lyrics (to Shakespeare and TS Eliot) and Bowls, set to five haunting poems by Ava Leavell Haymon, Poet Laureate of Louisiana 2013‑15. Laurence Vittes Reale D Seven Deadly Sinsa. Composers’ Reminiscences. Violin Sonata, ‘Celtic Wedding’a. Holiday Suitea Jessica Mathaes vn aColette Valentine pf Naxos American Classics S D 9 70204 (65’ • DDD) Austin Symphony concertmaster Jessica Mathaes, its youngestever and the first woman to hold the post, captures the essence of the American composer Paul Reale in a quartet of premiere recordings, leading off with Seven Deadly Sins, written for Mathaes in 2009. As an irreverent, tonal SoCal composer would, Reale chose the Seven Deadly Sins – as enumerated by Dante – to serve as both an amusing 20-minute party game in case any of the sins apply to any listeners, and a Hogarthian morality play; both have their pleasant tonal moments but the outcomes, as they should be for sinners, are not particularly nice. Reale’s Greed slinks, Gluttony boozily invokes Beethoven’s Fifth and Sloth lumbers destructively on the rails of a passacaglia. Throughout it all, partnered with a rich palette of colour by Colette Valentine, Mathaes plays as if she were the heroine in a fantasy – and indeed, she is posed accordingly on the CD cover complete with a white violin. The two take a more sober, powerful approach to the 2007 revision of Reale’s impressively large Violin Sonata, a serious personal statement subtitled Celtic Wedding based on a wedding song from Brittany made popular by The Chieftains. Reale, for four decades a mainstay of the Southern California composing scene, returns to fun and games in Holiday Suite and Composers’ Reminiscences, the latter a tour de force for solo violin consisting of free impressions of seven composers; and while Reale gives the game away in Haydn and Paganini, he deals more subtly with Bartók and more sentimentally with Ives. Laurence Vittes Sokolović ‘Folklore imaginaire’ Vez. Portrait parle. Trois Etudes. Mesh. Un bouquet de brume. Ciaccona Ensemble Transmission Naxos Canadian Classics B 8 573304 (58’ • DDD) Born in Serbia but resident in Montreal for more than 20 years, Ana Sokolovic´ has been taken to the heart of the Canadian composing community – she even composed two operas for Toronto’s Queen of Puddings Music Theatre – and now heads the instrumental composition department at the Université de Montréal. It’s no surprise that for this all-Ana gramophone.co.uk GRAMOPHONE JULY 2016 III

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