MMC’s New Century series continues to present interesting and challenging works by American composers that, due to the increasingly pop-managed classical recording industry, might not otherwise see the light of a recording studio. The current release is no exception, and opens excitedly with S.M. Clark’s vitriolic Cyranoverture (1993), which boasts all the youthful bravura of one of Korngold’s swashbuckling film scores. The work literally leaps off the page into a whirlwind of energy, so much so that the Moravian Philharmonic has trouble with articulation and intonation at Vit Micka’s spirited tempos. If Roger Price’s 1995 Rhapsodies for Piano and Orchestra evokes cinematic scene painting via creepy strings, timpani heartbeats, and piano tone clusters, then CarltonGamer’s Arkhe may as well have been a film score, sounding as it does like the opening sequence from Close Encounters of the Third Kind.
A highly original conception follows in Scott Robbins’ four-movement Micro-Symphony from 1992 (a Bill Gates commission?), which, at just over seven and one half minutes, is one of the shortest ever works with “symphony” in the title. The Symphony alternates between movements of dance (orchestrated à la Copland) and Schoenbergian mood painting. The finale, being the longest of the four movements at 3:45, actually seems to last way beyond its timing. The same can be said for Ross Moyer’s Fantasia (1992), which contains a whole pile of musical events (dances, mini-fugues, hints of Shostakovich’s Fourth Symphony) packed into its six minutes-plus duration. Moyer turns serious in his Kaddish (1995), composed in memory of his mother. Beginning with an expectedly somber tone, the piece turns lively in its contrasting ostinato mid-section. The Warsaw National Philharmonic is far more on top of the music than its Moravian disc-mates, and Jerzy Swoboda conducts as if he were “Born in the USA”. The sound, kind of scattered and noisy in the Cyranoverture, is satisfyingly natural for the remaining works. This is new music you don’t need your slide rule to enjoy.
