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LISTENING ROOM Click the camera icon while searching in your Spotify mobile app and scan the code below to listen to selections from these albums. AVAILABLE NOW FOR PURCHASE OR STREAMING AVAILABLE NOW FOR PURCHASE OR STREAMING LISTEN ON Navona Records, Ravello Records, Big Round Records, and Ansonica Records are imprints of PARMA Recordings. www.parmarecordings.com
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SOUNDS OF AMERICA Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project turn their attention to the music of David Sanford sung with soaring range by Garineh Avian. A tremendous flood sequence – ‘Moon of the Armenian Tombs’ – in which the assembled forces come together for the first time to overwhelming effect, ends with thunderous timpani recalling the many five-star recordings made in Royce Hall by the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Part 2 opens with an even more resplendent cry from the Book of Lamentations featuring thrilling chromatic writing for the chorus before ending in a radiant Amen illuminated by organist Christoph Bull. This great movement is followed by eight short tracks of a gentler, more conciliatory nature; the last, Krouse’s response to Daniel Varoujan’s ‘Blessing of the Land’, has a shining Mahleresque quality. With the composer producing, conductor Neal Stulberg’s command of the assembled forces – including many of LA’s finest musicians, such as the UCLA Philharmonia’s concertmaster Movses Pogossian – brings with it the assurance of authority. The full texts, which add substantially to the impact, are available on Naxos’s website. Lawrence Vittes Sanford Black Noise. Prayer: in memoriam Dr Martin Luther King, Jra. Scherzo grossob a Sarah Brady l aEric Berlin tpt bMatt Haimovitz vc Boston Modern Orchestra Project / Gil Rose BMOP/sound F Í 1063 (48’ • DDD/DSD) David Sanford (b1963) is an alumnus of the University of Northern Colorado, New England Conservatory and Princeton. He has received a string of awards and fellowships, most notably the Rome Prize and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and American Academy of Arts and Letters. His music, perhaps reflecting in part his African American roots, transcends gramophone.co.uk standard genre boundaries. I do not here mean ‘crossover’: it is far too uncompromising (and slyly humorous) for that label! Sanford’s work with the Pittsburgh Collective, the 20-piece big band he founded in 2003, infuses all the works here with elements of jazz, Latin, funk and contemporary (but tonal) classical. One can hear this mix from the outset of the title-track, Black Noise (2017), a vibrant, 12-minute toccata inverting the notion of white noise (the name works on a number of levels, however). As exciting a listen as John Adams’s more celebrated Short Ride in a Fast Machine, it is, dare I say it, a rather more satisfying one. That Sanford is a composer with something to say is evident from Prayer: in memoriam Dr Martin Luther King, Jr (1992), scored for solo winds, piano, percussion and solo strings (but with an electric bass replacing the acoustic instrument to give the GRAMOPHONE JULY 2019 III

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SOUNDS OF AMERICA

Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project turn their attention to the music of David Sanford sung with soaring range by Garineh Avian. A tremendous flood sequence – ‘Moon of the Armenian Tombs’ – in which the assembled forces come together for the first time to overwhelming effect, ends with thunderous timpani recalling the many five-star recordings made in Royce Hall by the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Part 2 opens with an even more resplendent cry from the Book of Lamentations featuring thrilling chromatic writing for the chorus before ending in a radiant Amen illuminated by organist Christoph Bull. This great movement is followed by eight short tracks of a gentler, more conciliatory nature; the last, Krouse’s response to Daniel Varoujan’s ‘Blessing of the Land’, has a shining Mahleresque quality. With the composer producing, conductor Neal Stulberg’s command of the assembled forces – including many of LA’s finest musicians, such as the UCLA Philharmonia’s concertmaster Movses Pogossian – brings with it the assurance of authority. The full texts, which add substantially to the impact, are available on Naxos’s website. Lawrence Vittes

Sanford Black Noise. Prayer: in memoriam Dr Martin Luther King, Jra. Scherzo grossob a Sarah Brady l aEric Berlin tpt bMatt Haimovitz vc Boston Modern Orchestra Project / Gil Rose BMOP/sound F Í 1063 (48’ • DDD/DSD)

David Sanford (b1963) is an alumnus of the University of Northern Colorado,

New England Conservatory and Princeton. He has received a string of awards and fellowships, most notably the Rome Prize and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and American Academy of Arts and Letters. His music, perhaps reflecting in part his African American roots, transcends gramophone.co.uk standard genre boundaries. I do not here mean ‘crossover’: it is far too uncompromising (and slyly humorous) for that label!

Sanford’s work with the Pittsburgh Collective, the 20-piece big band he founded in 2003, infuses all the works here with elements of jazz, Latin, funk and contemporary (but tonal) classical. One can hear this mix from the outset of the title-track, Black Noise (2017), a vibrant, 12-minute toccata inverting the notion of white noise (the name works on a number of levels, however). As exciting a listen as John Adams’s more celebrated Short Ride in a Fast Machine, it is, dare I say it, a rather more satisfying one.

That Sanford is a composer with something to say is evident from Prayer: in memoriam Dr Martin Luther King, Jr (1992), scored for solo winds, piano, percussion and solo strings (but with an electric bass replacing the acoustic instrument to give the

GRAMOPHONE JULY 2019 III

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