Paul Reale: American Mosaic

Album review

Paul Reale, who passed away in 2020, was perhaps better known as a teacher at the University of California at Los Angeles than as a composer, but his composing career accelerated in later life. This release, mostly recorded in 2022, offers a useful introduction to his work. Physical album buyers get his own highly informative notes, in which he expresses admiration for Roy Harris, David Diamond, and other composers whom he terms "Amerikanische." These provide a clue to Reale's extended tonal idiom and his feel for programmatic music, but his structures, which he calls quasi-cinematic, are his own, as are the jazz and popular music influences. The three pieces here seem episodic but reveal inner connections on repeated hearings. Hear the Piano Concerto No. 1, featuring Reale himself on the piano (although it is unclear how this could have occurred, for the notes give a 2022 recording date for the piece, which also lists him as producer). It features quotations of the African American spiritual I'm On My Way to Canaan's Land, inspired when the composer heard gospel singer Mahalia Jackson perform that hymn. The quotations are subtle and fragmentary in the first two movements, cohering dramatically in the finale. The Piano Sonata No. 6 ("The Waste Land") is indeed based on T.S. Eliot's poem, and its four sections evoke moods from that work. Again, Reale's structures are shifting, not general, seeming to pick up hidden currents in Eliot's poetry. The opening Concerto for cello, strings, and percussion ("Live Free or Die") was composed in 17 days after Reale received his terminal diagnosis. The Yale Symphony Orchestra under conductor William Boughton seems to have a real affinity for the two orchestral works, although the two collegiate auditoriums where the music was recorded do the music no favors. Performers and listeners interested in extensions of the mid-20th century American style are well-advised to check out Reale's music, which will be unfamiliar to many of them.

© James Manheim /TiVo