Vintage Alice - Dracula (David Del Tredici - Lewis Carroll - Alfred Corn)

Album review

This disc includes two of David del Tredici's monodrama/melodramas for orchestra and singer who doubles as narrator. Vintage Alice: Fantascene on "A Mad Tea Party," dating from 1972, is one of his earliest Alice pieces. It consists largely of a narrator reading Lewis Carroll's text, punctuated by explosions of orchestral commentary and moments when the narrator breaks into song. Much of the music is derived from the tunes "Twinkle, twinkle, little star," (or, in Carroll's version, "Twinkle, twinkle, little bat! How I wonder what you're at!"), and "God save our gracious Queen," here referring to the Queen of Hearts. The whole enterprise is so sublimely silly and so skillfully executed that it's hard not to give in to its charms and just guffaw, or at least smile. Del Tredici is a master of creating a highly sophisticated but immediately communicative sense of the absurd, and he has impeccable comic timing. His sure sense of drama is perhaps even more clearly evident in Dracula, written in 1998 for the Eos Orchestra and the Cleveland Chamber Symphony, based on the poem "My neighbor, the distinguished guest" by Alfred Corn. The piece is flamboyantly melodramatic, and vacillates between macabre humor and genuinely sinister moments. Soprano Hila Plitmann's performance is stunningly virtuosic and hilarious -- she's a genuinely talented comedian, and the subtleties of her speaking voice are as finely tuned as her brilliant and supple coloratura. (Dracula has a range of over three octaves, which she executes without any apparent strain.) The composer leads the Cleveland Chamber Symphony in polished and exuberant performances. The sound is generally clean, but at a few points the tone gets unaccountably woofy, and there are clearly audible clicks at the beginning of the tracks, which is annoying in Vintage Alice, which is in 13 sections, played without pause.
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