Dreamers:  The Music of Jeffrey Jacob
Jeffrey Jacob, piano; oboe; electronics
Janacek Philharmonic Orchestra/Jiri Petrdlik
Philadelphia Virtuosi Chamber Orchestra/Daniel Spalding
Moscow Symphony Orchestra/Joel Spiegleman
Hradec Kralove Philharmonic Orchestra/Jon Mitchell
Cleveland Chamber Orchestra/Edwin London
Navona 6248
Total Time:  62:38
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

A couple years ago, Navona released an album featuring music by Jeffrey Jacob.  Jacob is perhaps best known as a pianist with hundreds of recordings (with highlights being his performances of Barber, Crumb, and major works of Bartok).  The current album features him as soloist as well this time in his own works for piano and orchestra.

The album takes its title from the opening work, the Symphony No. 5.  The work gradually adds in orchestral sections with the first movement scored for piano, strings, and percussion; the second adding in beautiful wind writing, and the final movement featuring brass.  There is a somewhat mystical feel with the restrained bell tones against a repeated piano figure in a sparkling upper end of the instrument as the work opens.  Against this is a rather melancholy lyrical theme connecting with the opening movement’s subtitle, “Rain, Lagrimas (Tears)”.  Violin and cello float above the slowly-moving harmonic shifts.  It is a fascinating spiritual minimalist sensibility cast in traditional harmony.  Repeated motives also become a unifying factor in this work.  In the second movement, shorter cells of material are repeated in the piano against a more unsettled orchestral backdrop.  This gives way to a more gentle second section which thus delineates the two aspects of the movement, “Fear, Grace”.  The final movement is a bit more tortuous and slowly builds as brass begin to assert themselves over the texture.  It is all quite gorgeous music, though one does want the finale to perhapas move a bit more.

At the center of the album are three single movement works.  Sanctuary I is for strings and solo piccolo.  Jacobs intent with the piece is to reference the sense of sanctuary that cities and churches have come to embrace in our current immigrant crisis.  The piccolo takes on a role relative to a pan pipe, representing traditional Peruvian music and Latin America.  It is really a heart-achingly beautiful theme that really makes this piece stand out.  In the Adagieto, which feels like it could be part of a larger work, the piano returns along with moments highlighting oboe.  It is piece with slightly more dissonance (expressed in more angular ideas and clusters) often played against consonant lines of arpeggios or thematic threads.  The Epitaph is a more evocative, and somewhat somber, work that has a bit more interplay and counterpoint that is a nice miniature of Jacob’s compositional approaches.

In The Persistence of Memory, Jacobs takes a nostalgic look at some of the music that he has performed over the years.  There are hints at the Romanticism of Brahms, Schumann, and Schubert, and eventually a bit more energetic burst of Bartok tempered by a somewhat Impressionistic element.  The two movements are somewhat episodic with three segments in each that move effortlessly from one conceptual connection to the next.  The music takes on a bit more dissonance in an almost Messiaen-like finale with its rather sudden ending.

The odder piece is sort of an “extra” that closes off the album.  Final Sanctuary features Jacobs as oboist and features some electronic exploration.  It fits musically with the other pieces here with a slightly more ambient quality against a very-forward oboe line.

In this particular collection of orchestral work, we get a larger sense of Jacob’s blend of romanticism and minimalism.  The deeper, spiritual concepts often attached provide an additional component to hang one’s imagination on as the music plays out.  The music has a sort of languid and restrained quality to it that demands little from the listener in these very accessible, and often deeply-moving works.  It is certainly a perfect way to explore some of Jacob’s music.

The various venues and orchestras are equalized well here.  Performances with the American orchestras seem to be slightly better which may be due to more familiarity with the pieces, at least in the case of the exemplary performance from the Philadelphia ensemble.  The symphony feels just a little too careful at times in the performance but manages to still communicate Jacob’s intentions well.  Any of these works would stand out on their own and one cannot help but be moved by what is included in this release.

 Voyages

Kate Mulgrew, narrator.
Cincinnati Pops/John Morris Russell
Fanfare Cincinnati 15
Total Time:  64:26
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: (*)***/****

 Several years have elapsed since the last film music compilation from the Cincinatti Pops.  John Morris Russell, who assumed the music director post after Erich Kunzel’s departure, has continued to incorporate standard pops favorites while also expanding their repertoire with new arrangements and commissioned works.  That is also the case here on Voyage which is the orchestra’s 96^th album and is being released to commemorate the 50^th anniversary of the Apollo 11 Moon landing.  For this occasion, Russell has culled together a collection of music reminiscent of the Boston Pops Out of this World album.  Here though composer Michael Giacchino gets to be front and center.

Giacchino was commissioned to craft an orchestral work that captured the anxiousness and exhilarating thrill of the moon landing.  The resulting work is also assigned as the album’s title, Voyage.  The ten-minute piece features warm thematic writing in the sort of Star Trek-like style.  It is a rather gorgeous work with nice percussion touches and brass writing, but it also feels as if it is providing nice challenges across the orchestra.  After the initial thematic statement, the music shifts into a fascinating blend of repeated motives in a growing dense, somewhat dissonant mass before a glorious unison appears (taking a page from Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra opening as used in 2001: A Space Odyssey).  Giacchino fans will appreciate hearing some of his familiar scoring tropes as they provide transitions into his always engaging, rich thematic writing.  Time will tell if the piece gets more opportunities for performances in the coming years.

There are some nice surprises along the way.  Russell frames the film music selections with movements from the titular classical science fiction nod, Holst’s The Planets.  He uses “Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity” as an opener to get things off to a nice start.  Later the other popular, “Mars, the Bringer of War” will serve as a penultimate track.  Of the three, it has the best bite.  The album closes with Holst’s Venus movement which features a reading of John Gillespie McGee’s “High Flight”.  The reading is by none other than Captain Janeway herself, Kate Mulgrew.  Though, unfortunately, the album misses out on also including the theme from Star Trek: Voyager.  The tribute though to the moon landing, outlined in this text, does help provide a programmatic shape to the collection.

Appealing first to a younger generation of music lovers, Russell kicks off the film music section with the title track to 2009’s reboot of Star Trek with Giacchino’s exciting new themes.  No science fiction film music compilation would be complete with at least some Star Wars music.  Here, we are treated to “The Jedi Steps and Finale” from Williams’ score to Star Wars: The Force Awakens.  Immediate comparisons between Williams’ own style and Giacchino’s can be made here as three selections from the latter’s score for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (“Jyn Erso and Hope Suite”, “The Imperial Suite”, “Guardians of the Whills Suite”) follow with about twelve minutes of music from that score.  It is also wonderful to see David Newman’s delightful parody score for Galaxy Quest being represented with the theme from that film.  On the orchestra’s Superheroes! Russell had included a suite that covered some of the great television themes of old.  Here Rebecca Pellett has created new arrangements of six themes in a new “suite” called Spaced Out! Favorite Sci-Fi TV Themes.  Each theme is assigned its own track which should satisfy fans who want to repeat any of them again.  One of the great surprises is that Williams’ themes from Lost In Space are included and used to bookend the collection.  The theme from the first two seasons kicks things off and the variation used for season three brings it to a close.  In between are brief covers of the themes for Battlestar Gallactica (sic), Dr. Who (the Ron Grainer version), Buck Rogers, and Space:1999.  This is the suite of favorites for Gen X-ers to be sure.  The other interesting selection here, and another nod that Russell keeps an ear open for new film music, is the inclusion of the theme from Justin Hurwitz’s score First Man (2018) which won a Golden Globe for best score this year.  The piece for harp and theremin makes for an interesting contrast to Giacchino’s more traditional commission which precedes it.

Russell is wise to focus on more unique repertoire here which allows his orchestra room for their own interpretations of this music.  The sound here has a full, rich quality.  It might be just slightly bass heavy in spots (hard to tell on the downloaded version provided here).  The release is certainly filled with engaging music that is superbly played and well-sequenced. It also helps that there is not a lot of duplicated music here from other compilations.