Persistence

AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE

"This 3-disc collection offers ten of those pieces, most of them only a few years old. Andrew Boysen’s cheerful, 8-minute December Dance (2005) is the lively opener. Ralph Hultgren’s 3-movement, 12-minute Wind Ensemble Concertino (2011) is fierce in I (‘Con Forza’), calm in a low-register flute-solo II (‘Semplice’), the alternately fierce and joyous in III. Nigel Clarke’s Mata Hari (2002) presents “three speculative scenes from her life” : exotic ‘Dancer in the Shadows’,World War I spy 9(Deceit and Seduction’), and eventual ‘evasion and Capture’. The work ends by portraying her defiance in the face of a firing squad. Two of the works have soprano soloists Carrie Henneman Shaw is heard in Dana Wilson’s How Very Close (2013), settings of six poems that deal with love at its most intense. The texts (included) are by disparate poets: Sappho (5th-Century BC Greek), Rumi (13th-Century Persian), Emily Dickinson, and so on. Ms Shaw’s consonants are not always audible (her diction is clear at solo moments but often obscured when accompanied), and her expressiveness often seems suppressed, but her voice is lovely and pure-often sounding like a solo instrument. Casy Barker is the wordless soloist in the program’s biggest piece, Boris Pigovat’s 5-movement, 41-minute Lights from the Yellow Star: Music of Sorrow and Love (2011). The piece is about Robert Fisch, who survived Holocaust concentration camps and the Soviet crushed 1956 Hungarian Revolution, then moved to the US, and became an artist and physician in the Minneapolis area. The Introduction is portentous and beautiful. ‘When the Stones Weep’ is first brutal, then lovely and mournful in solos by bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet and flute. ‘1956’ begins as a happy march that turns ugly. ‘Silent Music’ and ‘Song of Love and HOpe’ present many challenges to instrumental soloists and sections, and except for occasional lapses of tone or intonation, these young musicians pass the tests. Luis Serrano Alarcon’s evocative Duende (2010) has become a wind ensemble favorite (two recordings are reviewed in J/F 2016:213). Composer Jesus Santandreu is tenor saxophone soloist in his own Oneiric Discourse (2011), a 20-minute excursion into jazz-based harmonies and gestures. He is a fine player with warm tone and the ability to shift easily from standard to extended playing techniques; and his musical ideas are interesting. So are the ideas in Aldo Raphael Forte’s 17-minute Dali (2003), the last piece on this three-hour program, where each of the five movements depicts an artwork by the Spanish surrealist. A few of the pieces didn’t do much for me. In Shamir Tandon’s 11-minute Desi Jhalak (2012) the Indian flavors and musical ideas seem shallow -or at least they seem odd as played by a Western concert band. Victoriano Valencia Rincon’s Sinu (Origenes) (2012) tells the sad tale of the Zenues, a South American people who fell to the invading Spanish in the 16th century. Here my response seems tied to the performance, at least as much as to the actual music. When the playing is quiet- when tone qualities and intonation are unsure-the music itself seems rather mediocre. But when the playing is animated or intense, the music seems most interesting.  This university band and its director Matthew george deserve praise for bringing a very large project to fruition."