DECEMBER 18^th-24^th

• Naxos on “Soundcheck”: Justin Davidson highlights Naxos on WNYC arts show
• Bolcom and Naïve’s Different Trains make “best of” lists
• Naxos, Analekta, and BBC/Opus Arte make gift lists

DECEMBER 18^th-24^th

Naxos, the low-budget, high-volume classical record label, has been one of the few success stories in an embattled corner of the record industry over the last decade. The company is quietly expanding its reach in the music world, and a major new project has it commissioning, recording, and promoting a series of ten new string quartets from the British composer Sir Peter Maxwell Davies. But is the label (or its artists) making any money? Justin Davidson, classical music critic of Newsday, drops by to shed some light on the topic.

Bolcom and Naïve’s Different Trains: Best of 2004

From “High Notes” by David Weininger
Boston Phoenix, December 17^th-21^st, 2004

The most important release of contemporary music this year was William Bolcom’s epic setting of William Blake’s visionary Songs of Innocence and of Experience on the indispensable Naxos label. Bolcom’s cycle is a massive work for soloists, chorus, and many musicians that speaks in a bewildering variety of musical tongues: atonal modernism, jazz, rock, and grand operatic ensembles all find their way into the tapestry. This creates the perfect space for Blake’s hallucinatory poetry. Leonard Slatkin leads a gigantic array of performers and ensembles, most of them from the University of Michigan, where Bolcom has taught since 1973. The two-hour-plus experience is thrillingly unorthodox, just like the poet himself.

From “The Year’s Best CDs” by Richard Scheinin
San Jose Mercury News, Sunday, December 19^th, 2004
(Also appeared in the Portsmouth (NH) Herald, circ. 14,099)

Steve Reich: Different Trains/Triple Quartet/The Four Sections,' Orchestre National de Lyon, conducted by David Robertson (Naive): After 40 years, Reich's music is entering the repertory and becoming popular, because his ''minimalism'' is actually expansive, beautiful, and full of feeling. Robertson is one of his best and most dedicated interpreters.

From “Music and Misteltoe” by Craig Smith
Pasatiempo, weekly insert in Santa Fe New Mexican, December 10^th-16^th, 2004

Jeremy Jouve, Guitar Recital, Naxos.  This 25-year-old Frenchman won the 2003 Guitar Foundation of America competition, the latest in a string of prizes taken in the last three years at contests in Poland, Portugal, Sardinia, Romania, Spain, and Italy. This debut recording shows him to be a careful, detail-oriented musician with a good command of his instrument and an even better take on programming.

Plenty of guitarists have recorded Joaqun Rodrigo and Joaqun Turina, but Jouve goes beyond those familiar standards with a set of ricercari by Francesco da Milano (1497-1543) and Britten's disturbing, deep, and nearly 20-minute-long Nocturne. And his final piece is played with just the right blend of giddiness, gaiety, and show-off confidence: the delightful "Fantasy on Themes from La Traviata" by the mid-19th century Spanish virtuoso Juli n Arcas -- the guitar's answer to Liszt's piano paraphrases on Verdi's operatic hits.

Amy Beach, Songs, Naxos American Classics.  Mrs. H.H.A. (Amy) Beach is generally a scholarly footnote these days, but in her own time (1867-1944) the American composer enjoyed success and reputation. This recording is of interest because the singer, mezzo-soprano Katherine Kelton, was a longtime Desert Chorale member.

Kelton and pianist Catherine Bringerud are technically fluent, they work well together, and Kelton's booklet essay on Beach imparts plenty of information without being dry. The performances themselves show up something I've always felt to be a weakness on Beach's part: much of her vocal writing seems to fight the words, as if she thought in terms of musical line more than dramatic communication. Kelton does her best to overcome this, but this album is best listened to with the text in hand.

Matthew White & Les Voix Baroques, Elegeia, Analekta.I don't know why so many Baroque-era recordings have pleased me so much lately, but this Canadian disc is one of them. Countertenor Matthew White has a firm yet fluid and very clear sound in his selections by J.S. Bach, J.C. Bach, John Blow, William Byrd, and Purcell, and the instrumental group Les Voix Baroques supports him tenderly and assertively.

They also dig in with what I can best call authoritative tact in works by Heinrich Ignaz Franz von Biber, Johann Heinrich Schmelzer, Thomas Simpson, and Anthony Holborne. And that's one of the reasons I like this CD, come to think of it: the repertoire by both familiar and unfamiliar composers is out of the ordinary. It's a reminder that in the late Renaissance and early Baroque, music was as much a part of everyday life as it is today -- only it was made fresh for you by musicians, not piped in from a set of ubiquitous radio stations or MP3 downloads. White and Les Voix Baroques re-create that sense of something being made new and on the spot, and that's an achievement many bigger or well-known groups never manage.

From “Bach, Beethoven, and Nagano” by Richard Scheinin
San Jose Mercury News, Sunday, December 12^th, 2004

Hear more music. See more music. Read about more music. Here are some classical music gift ideas, on CD, DVD and in books. You might want to keep a few for yourself.
...
"Jacqueline du Pre: in Portrait"(BBC/Opus Arte, $28.99): The late cellist, whose career was cut short by multiple sclerosis at age 28, is alive on DVD -- vibrantly so. ``Portrait'' includes a pair of documentaries shot in 1967 and around 1970 by Christopher Nupen, who captured du Pre performing Elgar's Cello Concerto in E Minor and Beethoven's Piano Trio No. 5 in D Major (``The Ghost''). With Daniel Barenboim, Pinchas Zukerman and Sir John Barbirolli conducting the Philharmonia Orchestra. Great music, played with charisma.
...
Marin Alsop, music director of the Cabrillo Music Festival in Santa Cruz, leads the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra in a disc-full of works by John Adams on the Naxos label ($7.99). The performances -- of ``Shaker Loops,'' ``The Wound-Dresser'' and ``Short Ride in a Fast Machine'' -- chart the composer's moods, from dark to full-throttle energized.

"Give the gift of music by Ann Arbor-based musicians"by Susan Isaacs Nisbett Ann Arbor News, Sunday, December 19, 2004

William Bolcom - "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" Soloists; University of Michigan orchestras and choruses; University Musical Society Choral Union; Leonard Slatkin, conductor (Naxos)

With a cast of Cecil B. DeMille proportions, William Bolcom's "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" has received precious few performances since the Pulitzer Prize-winning University of Michigan-based composer completed his critically acclaimed song cycle 1984 - after nearly 30 years setting the poems that William Blake, gathered under the same title in the 18th century.

But on April 8 this year - under Leonard Slatkin's baton - U-M choruses and orchestras, with soloists drawn from town, gown and well beyond, massed on the Hill Auditorium stage, some 450 strong, for a historic, 20th anniversary performance of the work.

The performance took the piece back to the stage on which it received its U.S. premiere, and the project, a collaboration between the School of Music and the University Musical Society, drew national attention - not just from critics, but from Naxos Records, whose personnel were on hand to put the live concert onto three CDs, released as part of Naxos' American Classics series.

It is the first full-length commercial recording of Bolcom's magnum opus, a work he has called "the chief source and progenitor" of all his other works. The importance of making "Songs" accessible, given the rarity of performances and its status as both a powerful realization of Blake's poems and a triumph of musical architecture and synthesis, cannot be overstated.

Happily, the CDs - which come with notes by the composer, complete texts and a list of performers that runs to 12 pages - capture the thrill of that April 8 performance as well as the impeccable diction of the excellent choirs and soloists.

Listeners in the comfort of their own homes may not want to digest all three hours in one sitting, but from the work's first screaming dissonances - a cataclysmic big bang that sows the seeds of experience in this first section devoted to innocence, presaging a Blakean unification of contraries - Bolcom's settings hold you in their hand.

Once again, one marvels at how uncannily and surprisingly Bolcom - known for his polystylism and his embrace of vernacular music of all sorts - fits his musical diction to Blake's poetic diction, making the pairings seem inevitable. He turns "The Shepherd," for example, into a country ballad (realized in song and on harmonica by Ann Arbor's Peter Madcat Ruth), and "The Divine Image," the work's conclusion, into a grand and powerfully uplifting reggae number that slowly but surely draws on all the forces on stage. In between, there is everything from late 20th century concert music to madrigals and rock. If Blake's poems are a world unto themselves, so, too, are Bolcom's settings of them.

The instrumental and vocal ensembles featured on the recording - which has drawn national praise - include the University Symphony Orchestra; the U-M Contemporary Directions Ensemble; U-M Choirs and the UMS Choral Union; and the Michigan State University Children's Choir. They were prepared, respectively, by Kenneth Keisler; Jonathan Shames; Jerry Blackstone; and Mary Alice Stollak. The CDs also feature performances by a diverse baker's dozen of soloists, with backgrounds in opera, classical music, musical theater, country and popular music. They include sopranos Christine Brewer, Measha Brueggergosman, Ilana Davidson, Linda Hohenfeld and U-M's Carmen Pelton; mezzo-soprano Joan Morris, Bolcom's wife and frequent music partner in cabaret; contralto Marietta Simpson; tenor Thomas Young; baritone Nmon Ford; speaker and vocalist Nathan Lee Graham; harmonica virtuoso Peter "Madcat" Ruth; and fiddle player Jeremy Kittel.

Michael Daugherty - "Philadelphia Stories" and "UFO" Evelyn Glennie, Percussion Colorado Symphony Orchestra; Marin Alsop, conductor (Naxos)

It is not so much popular music as popular culture that is at the heart of the serious concert music of Michael Daugherty, a mid-career star of the U-M composition department. American icons - from Superman comics ("Metropolis Symphony") to Elvis ("Dead Elvis") - and legendary locales ("Route 66") inspire his works, and he looks to life around him in These United States for ideas for his compositions.

Last year, in a commission that celebrated the joint 75th anniversaries of the Ann Arbor Symphony Orchestra and the Michigan Theater, Daugherty drew on cinema (specifically, "Citizen Kane") and his memories of playing the organ in a local movie theater as a teen. The result was "Once Upon a Castle," for theater organ and symphony orchestra, premiered by the A2SO.

The Daugherty works on the Naxos disc predate "Castle," and portions of them have appeared in previous recordings. But anyone wanting an introduction to Daugherty's highly accessible work, or a continuation of the acquaintance kindled by last year's local commission, should consider this excellent and, as usual, budget-priced Naxos recording, which gives a full account of "Philadelphia Stories" (2001), commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra; and "UFO" (1999), commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra and written for percussion whiz Evelyn Glennie. Under Alsop's baton, the Colorado Symphony does the honors admirably, and Evelyn Glennie is, well, Evelyn Glennie. The works were recorded at Boettcher Concert Hall in Denver in November 2002.

"Philadelphia Stories" unrolls in three movements, from dusk to dawn, that take listeners on a jazzy, energized "something's comin"' cruise down the city's South Street; into the haunted and haunting midnight realms of the "Tell-Tale Harp," a nod to Edgar Allan Poe; and to a pull-out-the stops fantasy musical morning meeting between famed conductor Leopold Stokowski and all Philadelphia's bells, beginning with the Liberty Bell. If this sounds like a visual description, so be it. Daugherty's music, both here and in "UFO," has an almost filmic feeling. Cued by his descriptions, the listener is primed to "see" the scenes he creates musically.

The five-movement "UFO" is less succinct than "Philadelphia Stories," and sometimes, on disc, at least, its two longer movements feel somewhat discursive. It is easy to see, however, that the case would be otherwise in live performance, and home listeners will be riveted by Glennie's playing and Daugherty's witty and evocative scoring.

Daugherty's flying saucer journey begins with the small reverberations and sonic takeoff of "Traveling Music," a prologue to movements titled "Unidentified," "Flying," "???" and "Objects." On xylophone, vibraphone, cymbals, pieces of unidentified metal, mark tree (wind chimes), drums and other percussion instruments, Glennie creates effects that range from delicate - she's an impish, outerspace Tinker Bell in "Unidentified" - to wildly robust - a one-women spacecraft factory hammering out an unearthly din in "Objects." Meanwhile, the orchestra is along for the ride, shifting meters like gears, rising from terra firma, winking out with a shimmer in the desert moonlight. From the lyrical excursions of "Flying" to the eerie landscape - as much primeval as extraterrestrial - of "???," "UFO" is a trip worth taking.

From “Listen up for last-minute gifts” by Frank Behrens
Nashua (NH) Telegraph, Thursday, Dec. 23, 2004

For many years now, I have been admiring two series that attempt to make opera accessible to any and all interested in that genre of theater: the Metropolitan Opera Guild’s “Talking About Opera” and Naxos' "Opera Explained."
...
The Naxos series is entirely the product of writer Thomson Smillie and narrator/actor David Timson. The latest addition to this series is Rossini’s “Tancredi” (8.558121), an early serious work by that composer known mostly for his comic operas. I am delighted to report that Smillie gets down to his topic a lot faster than he has done in recent releases, which had far too much background and not enough of the work in question.

I suggest you check into the Naxos of America and Met Guild Web sites and try to get more of these two series. Even when both of them handle the same opera, it is worth having both in your collection.