Naxos American Classics

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JoAnn Falletta and the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra continue their series on Naxos of the orchestral works of George Gershwin with this 2013 release, featuring performances by pianist Orion Weiss and clarinetist John Fullam. Weiss, who has established himself as a concerto soloist of prodigious skill, shines in the Rhapsody in Blue, by far the most celebrated selection here and obviously the selling point of the CD, considering the brilliance of this young artist and his vigorous performance. Fullam's turn in Promenade is a small, jaunty solo, but the piece is a charmer with its tripping melody and it serves as a good-natured interlude for the program. The orchestra delivers the overture to the musical Strike Up the Band with more than a little of the excitement of Broadway, but its real showpiece is Catfish Row: Suite from Porgy and Bess, which presents highlights of the opera in a condensed but effective form. It's worth noting that all the selections are arrangements, so in the strictest sense, these are not orchestral works in Gershwin's own hand, though the arrangement by Ferde Grofé of Rhapsody in Blue is so familiar to listeners, it is intextricably a part of the canon. The other arrangements are less familiar, though Gershwin's music is still well-served by the work of arrangers Don Rose, Sol Berkowitz, and Stephen Bowen. These recordings were made between 2010 and 2012 at the Kleinhans Music Hall in Buffalo, and the sound is clear and warm. © TiVo

Conductor Leonard Slatkin has recorded Aaron Copland's much-loved Rodeo before, with the Saint Louis Symphony Orchestra for Angel in the early 1990s. That recording was quite popular in its day, but this new collection of four dance pieces, representative of Slatkin's late-career flowering in Detroit, is at least its equal. One advantage is the inclusion of the little-performed Dance Panels (1959/1962), a transitional work between Copland's populist manner and his full-scale capitulation to modernist diktat. Slatkin actually makes a good case for it here, with vigorous rhythms cutting through the extended harmonies piled atop the composer's characteristic infectious tunes. Slatkin and the Detroit Symphony also do very well with Rodeo. Slatkin fills in a lot of the musical spaces with small details that add spiky, angular rhythms, reserving the full payoff for the final Hoe Down movement. El Salón México also receives an attractive performance, with only the Danzón Cubano of 1942 lacking something in the way of rhythmic zip. The work of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, an organization that reached the brink of disaster and has returned, is also worthy of note; there are few junctures where you can know that you are dealing with a group of preponderantly young players. No doubt Slatkin deserves the lion's share of the credit for this: he has forged an interpretation attuned to the capabilities of the organization he's working with: urgent, a bit rough. The ensemble sounds great in its longstanding home, downtown Detroit's Orchestra Hall, with contributions from the hall's house engineer, Matt Pons. Well worth the time even of those wondering whether they need yet more Copland. © TiVo

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The pieces on this Naxos release, issued in 2013, were all quite new works by American composer Michael Daugherty at the time; all were world premieres, and all marked new departures from his usual style of somewhat Stravinsky-ized American pop culture motifs. Time will tell whether they attain the familiarity of such works as Dead Elvis or the Metropolis Symphony, but all stretch in new directions, and none feels tired. Mount Rushmore (2010) is a grander, less bracing work than one is accustomed to from Daugherty; it is a choral-orchestral depiction of the four U.S. presidents on the face of the titular mountain, with relevant musical material for each woven into a larger structure. The texts are various and unexpected: Washington is given the not-quite-appropriate New England hymn Chester, while the Jefferson music is set to fragments of text, including an Italian-language song sent to Jefferson by Maria Conway in Paris. Theodore Roosevelt's words come from one of his stirring speeches, and Lincoln's words are from the Gettysburg Address. Radio City is, as its subtitle indicates, a musical survey of conductor Arturo Toscanini's musical life in America; unlike most of Daugherty's works it presupposes a good deal of musical knowledge. Perhaps the highlight of the set of The Gospel According to Sister Aimee, for organ, brass, and percussion. "Sister Aimee" is evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, and this work is an ingenious combination of music from two sources: the tradition of oversized Romantic organ music with ensemble and American popular hymnody; as in the best of Daugherty's works the combination is seamless. There is nothing to fault in the performances by the Pacific Symphony under Carl St. Clair, which have the right balance between brashness and control, and the big solo organ part in The Gospel According to Sister Aimee, whose idiomatic writing is impressive in itself, gets the weighty treatment it needs from organist Paul Jacobs. Recommended, especially for performers looking for a really unusual and fresh work for brasses and organ. © TiVo

Orchestration was Duke Ellington's forte, and it is not a great challenge to adapt his works for full symphony orchestra. The challenge is even slighter in the large tone poems with which Ellington occupied himself for most of the later part of his career; these works, which make up the bulk of the program here, are already written for large group and are replete with instrumental effects. Generally speaking, the arrangers here have transferred some of the wind lines to the orchestral strings and left Ellington's brass writing intact. Indeed, the biggest problem with these works is not as classical music -- Ellington's ambitions clearly went in that direction -- but as jazz: the solos were written for musicians with whom Ellington worked closely, and nobody else can quite duplicate their particular texture and snap. This said, the Buffalo Symphony Orchestra under JoAnn Falletta is filled with musicians with plenty of experience in performing jazz, and this release is nowhere less than enjoyable. Its primary interest lies in the late works, which may be uneven but which show the aging composer continuing to explore new ideas drawn equally from jazz, classical orchestral repertory, and (an underappreciated component of his later style) film music. The album contains Ellington's last composition, the ballet Les Trois Rois Noirs (The Three Black Kings, referring to the King of the Magi, Solomon, and the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr., in whose memory the music was composed). The graphics erroneously give a 1943 date for this work, which was left unfinished at Ellington's death in 1974 and completed by his son. It is quite unlike any other classical-jazz crossover work, with highly original musical imagery. The opening King of the Magi movement is a stylized boogie woogie, focusing unexpectedly on the travels of the Magi to see Jesus, not on the luxury of conventional iconography. The middle King Solomon movement could have come from a film score, while the MLK finale has a warm jubilee mood. The River (1970) is another underplayed score; its images of the Mississippi River are similarly inventive. Bookending these are the more familiar Black, Brown and Beige suite, Harlem, and, most familiar of all, Take the "A" Train, for which Ellington himself was the arranger in this case. Recording the orchestra in its Buffalo home of Kleinhans Music Hall, Naxos achieves idiomatic sound. Recommended for Ellington lovers, especially those interested in the later part of his career. © TiVo