Michael Sheppard Plays Rodgers / Hough, Barber, Crumb, Corigliano, Gershwin / Wild & Bolcom

Presentación del Álbum

Though billed as a disc of "American Fantasies," exploring the possibilities of transcription in a manner reminiscent of the nineteenth century virtuoso, American pianist Michael Sheppard here attempts something more unusual -- and something more frequently undertaken by foreigners thus far than by American musicians, into whom intensely German thoughtways concerning the separation of the temple of the classics from the common vernacular street are still almost always inculcated; he offers a programming continuum running from popular song to concert-music experimentalism and asserts that it can all be held together by virtue of its American-ness, and by the inevitability (unavoidability) of popular musical influence. The transcription aspect of the program is fuzzier, with some of the pieces being Sheppard's own transcriptions (songs by Samuel Barber and Richard Rodgers), while others involve adaptations by others of popular songs to a classical setting. Sheppard is a technically gifted pianist with the power to make an audience sit up and pay attention to something like this, and he gets things off to a roaring start with Earl Wild's Fantasy on Gershwin's Porgy & Bess of 1976, an underrated work that pianists ought to explore more often. It is both a potpourri in the grand manner and a commentary on the form, as Wild introduces ghostly counterpoints to Gershwin's tunes, difficult enough for the performer, that seem to suggest there is more to music than is dreamt of in popular philosophy. From there on out the program is uneven but never dull. William Bolcom's Graceful Ghost, one of the composer's early straightforward rags, was an inspired choice, depicting a stage in which classical composers fall for popular forms wholeheartedly before introducing elaborations of their own. The lurch from ragtime to the prepared-piano experiments of George Crumb's Dream Images seems startling at first, but the appearance of a series of quotations, beginning with Chopin's Fantasie-Impromptu (aka, I'm Always Chasing Rainbows, aka, the theme from the video game Clock Tower 3). This neatly ties everything together and propels the listener forward to John Corigliano's early Etude Fantasy, the only work (except perhaps for the Barber songs) that lacks any popular content, although it does pick up from the Bartókian elements in the Crumb work. On the whole it's an ambitious effort of the best kind, not without a few loose ends, but thought-provoking for performers and listeners alike.
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