Category: Tracks

Philadelphia Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra conducted by Daniel Spalding

George Antheil earned the moniker “bad boy of music” from both the title of his hyperbolic autobiography and from his early exploits as a composer, which included shocking audiences with tone clusters, airplane propellers, etc. Four generations later, most of the shock value has waned—is anything shocking now, anyway?—and we are just left with the music which contains many treasures beneath the surface. Pianist Guy Livingston has been Antheil’s most ardent champion in recent years, both through his dynamic performances and erudite scholarship. This new disc on New World gives us a bit of both sides of Livingston: a fascinating set of program notes on three little-known Antheil works and a rousing performance of one of them, the Piano Concerto No. 2 completed in 1927. This is not to say that the other works on the disc are any less worthy, but the performance of this concerto—which sounds like El Salon Mexico filtered through Charles Ives’s Second Orchestral Set—might have even made a convert out of Virgil Thomson, who dismissed the work at its premiere.

—FJO

Guitar Gabriel, born Robert Lewis Jones in Georgia on October 12, 1925, grew up the son of a legendary bluesman. After WWII, he criss-crossed the country performing in old-time medicine shows, Dixieland bands, and for burlesque acts. In the 1990s, however, interest in his music grew and earned him spots at big-name clubs, halls, and festivals. He passed away a decade ago, but true to its mission, the Music Maker label—an outfit dedicated to preserving the sound of Southern musical traditions—is working to keep his voice in the public’s ear. Though much of this album is made up of cleanly crafted bluesy tunes, the last track opens up the floor to really get at the heart of Gabriel’s artistry.

—MS

Nathaniel Bartlett, marimba

You might assume a disc including compositions by Augusta Read Thomas and Steve Reich back-to-back to be somewhat disjointed, if not downright disconcerting, but marimbist Nathaniel Bartlett makes the juxtaposition sound not only natural but inevitable. And, according to his program notes, this was his goal, which makes highlighting just one track from it all the more difficult. That said, Allan Schindler’s Precipice, which lends the disc its title, raises the stakes by adding computer-generated sounds to the marimba mix, making the music all the more mysterious and alluring.

—FJO

Danny Elfman’s Serenada Schizophrana conjures precisely the sort of fantastical aural world you’d expect from the composer—he is, after all, the guy Tim Burton rings up when he needs a soundtrack. In this case, however, it was the American Composers Orchestra that commissioned the six-movement work from the largely self-taught composer. (This recording, however, is not the orchestra’s 2005 premiere performance, but a new recording made with a studio pick up group on the West Coast.) The piece, scored for a full orchestra, electronics, two pianos, and female choir, is windingly cinematic, but “I Forget” seems to most directly contain the souls of some of Burton’s extraordinary characters. If you’ve taken the kids to the movie theater recently, you may have already heard some of the music without realizing it—Serenada Schizophrana has also been excerpted and adapted to serve as the soundtrack to the IMAX short film Deep Sea 3D.

—MS

Despite the fitness savvy titles, Christian Wolff’s series of Exercises aren’t formulated to inspire the local gym’s spinning class. In this music, like much of the composer’s oeuvre, something seems eerily missing. Melody, rhythm, and harmony sound aloof to one another’s presence, creating a tentative atmosphere of happy accidents. These mishaps usually err on the side of profound rather than tragic. Take Exercise 18, a hodgepodge of passages that has the potential to synchronize into a familiar waltz, but things don’t turn out so obviously. This stuttering passacaglia sounds as if it could have been homebrewed in the tool shed out back. You can attribute this to Wolff’s open design in terms of both instrumentation and interpretation, as well as the adventurous groups of performers which include fellow composers Fredrick Rzewski (piano, percussion), Larry Polansky (electric guitar, percussion), and Chiyoko Szlavnics (soprano saxophone, percussion) joined by new music percussionist extraordinaire Robyn Schulkowsky.

—RN