Together
is the name of the first CD recording of the New Century Chamber
Orchestra under its new director, Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg, released on
Salerno-Sonnenberg's own NSS label. This recording is an excellent
opportunity to review two of the key performances of
Salerno-Sonnenberg's first season with the Orchestra, the Impressions suite by Featured Composer Clarice Assad and Astor Piazzolla's The Four Seasons of Buenos Aires. It also serves as an amuse-gueule prior to the beginning of the Orchestra's 2009–2010 season in about three weeks' time.
Unfortunately,
I was not able to take advantage of Assad's residency with the
Orchestra until the final concert of the 2008–2009 season, when I heard
the world premiere of her "Dreamscapes," for solo violin (performed by
Salerno-Sonnenberg) and string orchestra. In her own notes for this
work, Assad wrote about its "maze of unpredictability and uncertainty;"
and, while I found that maze challenging to negotiate on first hearing,
I wrote at the time that it "left me both fascinated and eager to hear it again" (which I continue to regard as high praise for any new composition). Impressions
is a more approachable composition; or perhaps it just was for me,
because I felt that it approached the challenge of composing for an
all-string ensemble in the same spirit that Benjamin Britten had brought
to his early (1937) composition of variations on a theme by his
teacher, Frank Bridge. Not only is the first movement of Assad's suite
an explicit set of variations; but also two of her movements use forms
from the Bridge variations, a waltz and a perpetuum mobile.
Furthermore, like the Bridge variations, the suite concludes by
reflecting back on its very opening. Most important, however, is the
way in which Assad may have taken the diversity of sonorities that
Britten conceived for his variations and developed a new diversity
entirely of her own making.
Similarly, one can guess from its
title that Piazzolla's composition (actually four separate pieces
subsequently collected and reorchestrated for Gidon Kremer) is a
reflection on earlier source material. The scope of that reflection,
however, extended beyond Antonio Vivaldi, including a
not-particularly-veiled reference to Johann Pachelbel and a variety of
idioms from the violin repertoire extending all the way into the
twentieth century. Those familiar with "Four, for Tango," which
Piazzolla composed for the Kronos Quartet, know the wild abandon that he
can bring to his composition for strings, high-energy rhythms with
glissandi that practically fly off the score pages into the
stratosphere; and this Four Seasons suite is just as wild.
The
remainder of the disc consists of two arrangements of familiar works
from the early twentieth century: Béla Bartók's 1915 suite of six
Romanian folk dances and "Bess, You Is My Woman Now," from George
Gershwin's opera, Porgy and Bess. The Bartók arrangement was by
Salerno-Sonnenberg herself, replacing the instrumental solos that Bartók
had conceived for his orchestral version with a characteristic set of
string solos. The Gershwin was a transcription by David Rimelis of
Jascha Heifetz' arrangement for violin and piano. If
Salerno-Sonnenberg's orchestration of Bartók is not as colorful as the
original, the performance does full justice to the folk spirit of the
music, while the Gershwin arrangement reminds us of how successful he
was in making the shift from song writer to opera composer. Taken as a
whole, this CD is an excellent celebration of the "new generation" of
the New Century Chamber Orchestra.
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