Conjurer:
1. Cadenza I
2. Movement I - Wood
3. Cadenza II
4. Movement II – Meta
5. Cadenza III
6. Movement III - Skin

7. Vocalise

Dame Evelyn Glennie, percussion
Hila Plitmann, soprano
Mark Baechle, electronics
Albany Symphony
David Alan Miller - conductor

Even though John Corigliano has proved himself time and again to be a master of instrumental colors and orchestration, he nonetheless had misgivings about composing a concerto for percussion, a daunting prospect merely because of the large number of instruments at his disposal. Yet Corigliano succeeded brilliantly in Conjurer (2007), the tour de force he composed for Evelyn Glennie, who is universally recognized as the world's foremost percussion virtuoso. And it's all on display in this head-spinning demonstration of percussion instruments, designated in separate families as wood, metal, and skin, with each movement anticipated by a preparatory cadenza. Glennie not only sets the pace in these free-ranging cadenzas, but also provides material for the string orchestra to reiterate and develop, to astounding results. The second piece on this disc is Vocalise (1999), a work for soprano Hila Plitmann and electronics, produced and performed by Mark Baechle. Here, Corigliano exploits the voice's flexibility of pitch and tonal control through the layering of electronic sounds, coinciding with the wordless melody and expanding into a surprisingly effective orchestral accompaniment. The Albany Symphony, conducted by David Alan Miller, is the orchestra in question, and the deep and resonant sonorities it produces are a vibrant background that lets Glennie and Plitmann shine. --- Blair Sanderson, Rovi

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01. Of Rage and Remembrance    [0:13:08.00]
      Chaconne based upon Symphony No. 1, movt. 3
02. Symphony No. 1: Apologue: Of Rage and Remembrance    [0:13:39.00]
03. Symphony No. 1: Tarantella    [0:08:13.00]
04. Symphony No. 1: Chaconne    [0:13:54.38]
05. Symphony No. 1: Epilogue    [0:04:37.67]           play

Michelle De Young (Mezzo soprano)
Oratorio Society Of Washington
The Chorals Arts Society Of Washington
National Symphony Orchestra
Leonard Slatkin (Conductor)

Corigliano's most famous piece of music is the score to the film Altered States. Actually, all of his music kind of sounds like that-- alternating moments of poignant lyricism with explosions of rhythmic energy. The son of the former concertmaster of the New York Philharmonic, Corigliano literally grew up around the orchestra. So it's no surprise that his music is orchestrated with almost preternatural skill and brilliance. The First Symphony, inspired in part by the AIDS tragedy, is both an angry and a moving work. Leonard Slatkin plays it with the kind of manic energy the music demands, and the sound quality is terrific. --David Hurwitz

The focal work of the evening was Corigliano's SYMPHONY NO. 1, a piece written for the Chicago Symphony, which first performed in 1990. This is a programmatic elegy in memory of the composer's friends and loved ones who have died of AIDS. Corigliano's openly emotive, deeply personal response to the devastating loss brought on by the scourge has held up remarkably well on purely musical terms. The score has been adopted by many orchestras and has received two recordings, including a Grammy-winning disc under Daniel Barenboim's direction.

The angry Apologue moves from rage to remembrance, its fury giving way to elegies for three friends. The second movement is a nightmarish Tarantella, a musical depiction of AIDS dementia, that unravels as it plunges ahead ever more violently. Most affecting of all is the third movement in which two cellos interweave a 12-tone chaconne. This is a remarkable piece [of] powerful emotional undercurrent [with an] ingenious way high-decibel violence melts into the most tender sentiment and back again. --John von Rhein, Chicago Tribune

I was extremely moved when I first saw "The Quilt," an ambitious interweaving of several thousand fabric panels, each memorializing a person who had died of AIDS, and, most importantly, each designed and constructed by his or her loved ones. This made me want to memorialize in music those I had lost, and to reflect on those I was still losing. The result was my Symphony No. 1 (commissioned by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra), the third movement of which fuses a tense and heartbroken poem by my friend and collaborator (The Cloisters, the Ghosts of Versailles), the poet and playwright William M. Hoffman, to a litany of names of men lost to AIDS. Of Rage and Remembrance is a reimagining of that movement as a ritual for community chorus. In it, AIDS is not only context but also content: Of Rage and Remembrance cannot be performed abstractly, as just another piece in the choral repertoire. Its audience is not really the audience for choral music; its audience is the community blighted by AIDS. That it now attracts a larger audience is beside the point: rarely has posterity seemed so irrelevant to me. — John Corigliano

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Circus Maximus: Symphony No. 3 For Large Wind Ensemble (2004) 	(35:43)
1 	Introitus 	3:27
2 	Screen/Siren 	4:48
3 	Channel Surfing 	5:03
4 	Night Music I 	6:41
5 	Night Music II 	4:00
6 	Circus Maximus 	4:05
7 	Prayer 	5:59
8 	Coda: Veritas 	1:40

Gazebo Dances For Band (1972) 	(17:06)
9 	Overture 	4:49
10 	Waltz 	2:57
11 	Adagio 	6:36
12 	Tarantella 	2:34

The University Of Texas Wind Ensemble
Jerry Junkin - conductor

This disc contains two works for wind ensembles, one large-scale and one smaller. The first, Circus Maximus, is a named symphony for wind ensemble, though its performance is much more complex than it seems. It was written for three wind bands: a “stage band”, a “surround band” and a marching band. It’s conceived as a work that moves both through time and space - a diagram in the notes shows how the different groups are intended to be set up.

The music has clear Ivesian influences. It starts with a raucous attack, and when the music gets quieter, such as during the third movement, “Channel Surfing”, there are sections when a band leaps out at the listener. Other movements, such as the two Night Music parts, are more subtle and very soft, providing just wisps of music in an impressionistic style that brings to mind wild animals in the wind.

The writing is a combination of tonal and atonal, with melodic snippets that remind the listener of a wide range of musics. Corigliano planned this work as a sort of statement about modern society, and in a way it is an example of what music can do wrong. By satirizing the excesses of today, and paralleling them with the excesses of imperial Rome, he ends up with a piece that is neither here nor there. It sounds more like a catalogue of sound ideas than a coherent work.

The composer says this about the piece: “The parallels between the high decadence of Rome and our present time are obvious. Entertainment dominates our culture, and ever-more-extreme ‘reality’ shows dominate our entertainment. Many of us have become as bemused by the violence and humiliation that flood the 500-plus channels of our television screens as those mobs of imperial Rome who considered the devouring of human beings by starving lions just another Sunday show.”

This is all fine, but a programmatic symphony about reality TV and the evils of modern society seems to be an odd proposal, and the music gives few hints as to this hidden program.

The work is ambitious, however, in ways that cannot come across in the recording. Again, most likely influenced by Charles Ives - who loved the sounds of different marching bands playing different music and crossing each other in the street - Corigliano conceived of this as a spatial piece. For example, in his notes, he says that, for the sixth movement, there is a “band marching down the aisles”. There is a Blu-Ray audio version of this work, which would give a much better idea of these spatial aspects, but I only have the CD to listen to, so many of those elements are lost.

Oh, and it ends with a gunshot; there seems to be something deep about that, but I need to listen to the gunshot many more times to grasp it.

The second work, Gazebo Dances, is an arrangement of a set of four-hand piano pieces originally written in 1972. The sound here is oddly much more like what one would expect from a wind band. Not having heard the piano versions, I can’t imagine how they would sound for that instrument. They are attractive pieces, with little pretension, and the arrangements are delightful. This music sounds fun, and these four brief episodes make a very nice suite. There’s a bit of the circus to them - not the ‘maximus’ kind, but the one with rings - and they are light and pleasant to listen to.

This disc will most likely appeal to those with a special affinity for wind ensembles and bands. While the two works are very different, they do show a composer who has written some interesting music. ---Kirk McElhearn, musicweb-international.com

download (mp3 @320 kbs):

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01. The Red Violin Concerto : I. Chaconne [0:16:27.92]
02. II. Pianissimo Scherzo [0:05:06.92]
03. III. Andante Flautando [0:06:24.38]
04. IV. Accelerando Finale [0:09:21.77]
05. Sonata for Violin and Piano : Allegro [0:02:38.36]
06. Andantino [0:07:02.08]
07. Lento [0:05:12.26]
08. Allegro [0:07:52.20]

The Red Violin : Concerto for Violin and Orchestra
Joshua Bell : Violin
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
Marin Alsop : Conductor
Recorded at Meyerhoff Symphony Hall, Baltimore, Maryland, June 15-17,
2006.

Sonata for Violin and Piano
Joshua Bell : Violin
Jeremy Denk : Piano

The title of the Red Violin Concerto by John Corigliano may suggest to some listeners that they're getting an expanded version of the composer's music from the successful film, which grew from a recurring motif in the film soundtrack itself to the closely related The Red Violin: Chaconne for Violin and Orchestra. This is not exactly true; the last three movements of the present concerto are newly composed, although they have links to both the action and the musical material of the film. The Chaconne forms the first movement; Corigliano states, honestly enough, that he simply wanted to expand the music to dimensions that would fill out part of a concert program. He was smart enough not to fool with the Chaconne, which dwarfs the other three movements. The work is rounded out with a quietly energetic scherzo, an andante that is a fine specimen of Corigliano's lyrical mode, and most impressively an "Accelerando Finale" containing such novelties as a "crunch" -- a pitchless violin sound created by dragging the bow hard across the strings. Corigliano has tried to make himself into the inheritor of a brash, ambitious tradition, running from Mahler through Leonard Bernstein, in which unabashed sentiment is balanced with a sense of modern chaos, and the three additional concerto movements will give listeners who know Corigliano only through the Red Violin film a good idea of his style. Violinist Joshua Bell has been involved with this music from the beginning, and it's hard to imagine that anyone could play it better. The crisp sentimentality Bell inherited from his violinistic idol, Fritz Kreisler, is ideal for Corigliano's music, as is the vivacious, slightly edgy sound of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra under Marin Alsop. The early Sonata for violin and piano that rounds out the album is a less distinctive work, but it is brief, and in the nature of something that brings the curtain down. This is a good choice for the listener who wants to try one Corigliano recording. --- James Manheim, Rovi

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