CONTENTSCONGRATULATIONS
TO . . ., 3 LIVE EVENTS Veddy British Music
(Kraft) <> Going Into 'Understated Drive' (Kroll), 6 DOTTED NOTES from … Kraft, Kroll, Greenfest, Hickey, BLC, 16 SPEAKING OUT! Thoughts on the Pulitzer Prize, 17 AN INTERVIEW WITH … David Holzman, 19 THE PRINTED WORD Berger's Reflections (Kraft), 20 THE SCOREBOARD Sperry's Encores (Drogin), 21 RECORDINGSMini but Not Mousy
(Cleary) <> Bell's Echoes of Bela (Cleary) <> Just a Few Will Do (Cleary),
22 RECENT RELEASES, 24 THE PUZZLE CORNER, 25 COMPOSER INDEX, 27 BULLETIN BOARD, 27
WEB SUPPLEMENTA John Adams biography and an interview LIVE EVENTS Boston
Modern Orchestra Project CD REVIEWS Angel
Shadows: Laurel Ann Maurer |
Review of CD EDWARD SMALDONE: SCENES FROM THE HEARTLAND Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra (1993), Solo Sonata for Violin (1980), Three Scenes from "The Heartland” (1994), Trio: Dance & Nocturne (1984), Two Sides of the Same Coin (1990) Allen Blustine, clarinet; Michael Boriskin, piano; Andrè Emilianoff, cello; Curtis Macomber, violin; Donald Pirone, piano; Munich Radio Orchestra, Arthur Fagen—cond; Speculum Musicae CRI CD 863 Edward Smaldone is a New York-based composer currently on the faculty at Queens College. The music heard on this release covers a fifteen-year timespan and shows a surprising and unusual evolution of style. The earliest works here exhibit a fetching take on East Coast style dissonance. What helps make this music so fluidly charming is its easy embrace of gestures and formats from earlier periods. Solo Sonata for Violin (1980), for example, contains showy virtuosic writing that ultimately descends from J.S. Bach's solo fiddle classics, replete with double stops, left hand pizzicatos, and similar fare. And ternary form is encountered in the clarinet/violin/cello piece Trio: Dance & Nocturne (1984), though the recapitulation cleverly incorporates elements from both prior sections. Smaldone's later music includes prominent jazz inflections and more blatant employment of older gestures while still retaining the earlier atonal verticals and traditional structures. The piano piece Three Scenes from "The Heartland” (1994) sports such things as Liszt style "thumb-melodies" surrounded by 19th-century manner of filigree and Bach type fugatos. Jazzy figures so pervade the Rhapsody for Piano and Orchestra (1993) that the work in places suggests a clangorous version of Gershwin's famous essays for this combination. These, as well as Two Sides of the Same Coin (1990—a clarinet and piano duo) manage to delineate a certain personal take on Americana without resorting to Copland-style pandiatonicism. Your reviewer found these more recent works somewhat harder to fathom, their unusually broad ranging mixture of style traits from differing eras being a bit challenging to reconcile aesthetically. But one thing all the music on this CD has very much in its favor is a carefully considered, clearly expressed motivic tautness. Performances here are excellent. Violinist Curtis Macomber, pianists Michael Boriskin and Donald Pirone, clarinetist Allen Blustine, cellist Andrè Emelianoff, and the Munich Radio Orchestra (led by Arthur Fagen) do a splendid job. Sound and editing are fine as well. This often intriguing release is worth a listen. --David Cleary |