American Spectrum = MICHAEL DAUGHERTY: Sunset Strip; JOHN WILLIAMS: Escapades; NED ROREM: Lions (A Dream); CHRISTOPHER ROUSE: Friandises – Branford Marsalis, saxophone/ Branford Marsalis Quartet/ North Carolina Symphony/ Grant Llewellyn, conductor – BIS Multichannel SACD 1644, 75:28 **** [Distr. by Qualiton]:
I should have known that the title “American Spectrum” was going to put the emphasis on jazz, and so it has, for the most part. I wish it were not so—too much is made of the jazz connection in American classical music. Sure, it was an influence, but certainly with very few exceptions, not an improvisational one, and a lot of recordings sound to me like old “Third Stream” pieces.
So, having prejudged this album according to its cover (egad!), I proceeded to listen to it, and well, I was half right. How could I not be, seeing who the featured soloists are? The good news is this: The North Carolina Symphony sounds really good, and I hope BIS has the wherewithal to continue the relationship; the sound is outstanding, a wonderful SACD recording; and the music is very good, with one exception—the Rouse piece—and it is great.
Friandises is French for “bits” or “morsels” and was written for the New York City Ballet and the Juilliard School. The music is engaging and interesting, dance-like in its suite form, and certainly one of the best things he has done. For it alone this disc is worth the purchase, and I sure as beans don’t say that very often. Daugherty’s Sunset Strip is a mélange of this composer’s typical influences—anything. And not many people are doing it better these days, eclecticism with stunning originality. Paul Randall and Timothy Stewart are the two trumpet soloists in this piece, almost a concertino for trumpets and orchestra, but really catchy and great fun.
I wasn’t expecting this type of jazz inflection in a John Williams piece. Williams, who never gets enough attention for his “serious” works has actually been at it a long time, even before his Fiddler on the Roof orchestration when I caught a piece of his on the flip side of a DGG recording with a Penderecki work on the other side. Those were the days! But I was not expecting so much genuine-sounding jazz from him in this work. But then I read the notes to this piece after hearing—familiarly—and found that it is based on his film score to Catch Me if You Can, the 2002 movie with Tom Hanks and Leonardo DiCaprio, which I liked a lot. The work is essentially a saxophone concerto with lots of thematic associations to the movie. Different for sure, but I think I will grow to like it.
Ned Rorem’s Lions (A Dream) is the oddest ball in this park, and doesn’t sound like anything I have heard of his. To be short, Rorem write a poem called Lions twenty years ago based on a dream. He lost the poem but remembered the dream, too odd—as so many dreams are—for me to repeat here. Suffice it to say that this is his attempt to capture that experience in sound. It really doesn’t work, perhaps only to him, and is the weakest work here, though perhaps more listening will change my already hardening mind.
There you have it—a very worthwhile effort from forces I hope we hear more from.
— Steven Ritter
