Escapade: Music for Large and Small Ensembles
US Air Force Academy Band/Lt. Col. Philip C. Chevallard, Lt. Col. Steven Grimo;
Solar Winds;
Eastern Wind Symphony/Todd Nichols;
Danny Helseth, euphonium. Mark Dorosheff, Nathan Wisniewski, violins. Bryce Bunner, viola. Christine Choi, cello;
Steven Przyzycki, xylophone. Stellar Brass
Big Round Records 8957
Total Time:  54:11
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

Joseph Spaniola serves as composer/arranger for the US Air Force Academy Band before his current position on the faculty of the University of West Florida.  He has received numerous accolades from a number of band organizations and ensembles.  In this new release, ensembles that he wrote this music for are featured here in six works mostly for winds.

The US Air Force Academy Band is featured in two works.  They start things off with the piece that lends the album its title, Escapade.  The piece is a motivic exploration that moves across a number of variations of color and rhythmic excitement.  The latter blends jazz references, punctuated by brass and sax interplay, as well as some great expanded percussion writing.  It makes for an exciting opening to the album.  The Eastern Wind Symphony commissioned, and performs, Blow, Eastern Winds.  A swirling figure in woodwinds opens with longer brass lines layered over the top before we move into a section that has a great lower ostinato pattern and slightly more dissonant musical ideas, more modal coupled with a bit of jazz-like extended harmonies in the brass.  As in the opening number, this work too explores the various colors of the band with plenty of percussion interplay and a few contemporary techniques (blowing air through instruments).  For the most part though, the music is engaging and accessible adding some important works to band literature.

The Solar Winds are a group of clarinetists (performing on a variety of Bb, Eb, basset horn, and bass instruments depending on the piece).  The more significant work for this combination is the three-movement Klempirik Farms for clarinet quartet.  Spaniola crafts some jaunty melodic ideas that also have a nice jazz-like quality to them.  The music has a more personal connection referencing the composer’s memories of his family farm.  Gentle, lyrical melodies provide a nice contrast in the central “Fertile Ground” without really referencing a Copland-esque Americana.  Spaniola’s tends to fall more in the traditional romantic-tinged style with a beautiful simplicity that also has some wonderful coloristic harmony.  “Playful Hearts” has a quirkier rhythmic quality which adds a nice shift and moves into a more dance-like finale with great dialogue sections between the quartet.  They are also featured in a work for band that highlights clarinets in The Winds of the Quadrumvirate.  Spaniolar explores the quality of each of the four clarinets in the quartet against a directional application (North, South, East, West) that then pulls them all back together to unify their otherwise diverse sounds and applications in the piece as a whole.  Each of these are essentially movement/mood shifts that provide a variety of color.  The melodic writing is always engaging and Spaniola’s rhythm backdrops provide a great punctuation to the lyrical melodies as heard in the other pieces on the album.

One of the more unique works on the album is Dream.  Written for Danny Helseth,  who performs it here, Dream is a series of unique episodes that further explore Helseth’s virtuosity both technically and expressively.  The setting of euphonium with string quartet is a rather fascinating one in and of itself (and it would be fascinating to hear how this might translate to string orchestra).  Spaniola’s style here tends to a more classical concert approach, the rhythmic ideas of the wind band music are apparent here as well, but the string quartet adds a decidedly different dimension.  Though the music is mostly tonal, the dissonance in this work becomes more advanced and closely intertwined in the strings especially.  The euphonium then elaborates in larger swaths of material that picks up these motives and rhythms and expounds upon them.

The album closes with a delightful klezmer-like piece, Der Heyser Bulgar for brass and xylophone.

While it would be wonderful to have a full album of Spaniola’s band music, this collection of his work provides some great contrast of ensembles that show off his compositional abilities and voice.  The music is quite accessible and always engaging throughout.  Big Round will hopefully explore additional wind band literature, especially when it has such excellent ensembles and performers to bring this music to a wider audience.

Direct Contact
Roberta Rust, piano.
Navona Records 6229
Total Time: 68:48
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

Roberta Rust teaches at the Lynn Conservatory of Music in Boca Raton, Florida.  Her debut album with Navona collects music from eight contemporary composers with music spanning across seven decades.  There are also more personal connections that the pianist brings to each of these works either through direct contact with the composers, or as important works in her own development as a performer.  The music provides a snapshot of 20^th Century piano music and its many musical expressions across North and South America.  The program is filled with engaging musical discoveries in excellent performances that make a perfect case for all the music here.

The album opens with a somewhat uncharacteristic excerpt from George Rochberg’s Carnival Music (1971).  “Blues” has a very Gershwin-esque piano style that only slowly begins to unravel into more contemporary language in its final bars.  Two works by Michael Anderson (b. 1989) follow.  Thirteen Plus 4 (2005) builds on the sort of expanded jazz harmonies of the opening selection providing a nice transition into a piece that is more restrained, much more like a late night jazz reflection.  The same can be said of the first movement from the composer’s Sonata (2008) which has a rather compelling melodic idea with beautiful harmonic writing in this equally contemplative piece.   In a somewhat similar vein, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich’s Lament (1999) was composed in response to Judith Arron’s death, a person whom the composer held in high esteem for her work in the redevelopment and rebirth of Carnegie Hall.  The music has this rather intense expressive style that seems to reach out in askance.  Chromatic shifts in the melody add this pained quality to the music set against Zwilich’s somewhat romantic musical gestures in what is a very intimately personal work.  There also seem to be some additional veiled musical references that are like passing memories.  The oldest selections on the album come from the composer’s husband, Philip Evans (b. 1928).  First is one of his first compositions, the Minuetto (1939), a more traditional piece of Neo-Classical influences, but a most gorgeous primary melody.  It is then followed by two selections from his Suite 1945 (“Sarabande” and “Aria”) which are more modernist in tone in a Bartok-ian way, though Evans’ music still has a rather engaging melodic content that blends traditional harmony within Bartok’s piano style.  Thomas McKinley’s Fantasy Pieces (2005) are two more intense and expressionistic works that have a tight construction in a couple of very brief pieces.  Three of John Sharpley’s Four Preludes (1998) conclude this album.  The first, “Reflection”, is an aptly-named restrained piece.  The other two are in the tradition of Ives-like quotation of American popular tunes and hymnody extrapolated into more modern sounds within the composer’s personal musical language.

In addition to the host of selections by American composers, Rust has included music from Cuba and Brazil.  Leo Brouwer’s Diez Bocetos (2007) was inspired by Cuban artists and in at least two of the pieces require the performer to improvise.  Rust has chosen three of the pieces: nos. 4, 5, and 7.  For the seventh, she incorporates a Bach theme in between the habanera framing sections in a moment that has a somewhat jazz-like sensibility.  Brouwer’s music always has a delightful combination of rhythmic excitement that can be heard in these selections which shift between mostly tonal harmony and forays into the slightly more dissonant.  The other music from South America is by the Brazilian composer Almeida Prado (1943-2010).  Rust gave the premiere of his 1986 work Halley.  The three-movement piece was written to the year the famous named comet appeared again near Earth.  Prado studied with Boulanger and Messiaen and his music reflects some of the latter’s aesthetic.  The first movement begins with an exploration of the lower nether regions of the piano.  The music is more atonal with intriguing clusters of sound out of which emerge different motivic threads.  It represents a more advanced tonal sound palette that is eased by the descriptive connections of the music.  There are moments where the music shimmers almost like an Impressionist piece before returning to its more angular lines.  Each movement is an exploration of motive and unique colors of the piano.  A host of grand gestures also make for a rather dramatic work that requires more virtuosic demands which Rust handles well.  This is especially true of the way the music shifts in tone from the more dissonant to the more sparkling aspects, from dark rumblings to final ethereal evaporation.

Rust’s performances here are beautifully captured by the sound of this recording.  The piano has the perfect presence and this further enhances her delicate performances of the lyrical music on this album.  This is an excellent collection of pieces all well worth hearing and further exploring for anyone interested in accessible contemporary piano music.