Private Organ Recital in Walt Disney Concert Hall
Jung-A Lee, organ
Yarlung Records 77215
Total Time:  76:14
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

The organ constructed for the Walt Disney Concert Hall has had its critics from its initial conception and installation.  Most of the controversy stems from the “French fry” look and design of how the pipes tie in to the main console of the instrument.  Designed by Manuel Rosales, the completed instrument is certainly one of the most massive of its type with 6,134 pipes with lengths from a few inches to 32 feet!  The overall design, voicing and tuning was a joint effort with the Glatter-Gotz Orgelbau from Owingen, Germany, and Rosales’ Los Angeles company.  One gets a sense of the magnitude of the project from the accompanying booklet for this new release featuring Jung-A Lee.

St. Andrew’s Presbyterian in Newport Beach must count themselves quite lucky to have Jung-A Lee as their regular organist.  She serves their as organist while also performing around the globe.  Her program here is a carefully chosen collection of pieces from throughout time including two new works.  The album itself was conceived as a special gift to Simon Woods, the new CEO of the Los Angeles Philharmonic which celebrates its 100^th Anniversary this year.  The recording was made this past June.

The opening piece, Woods and Brooks is a new composition by Adam Knight Gilbert (b. 1961) commissioned to welcome the Wood family.  The melodic ideas are created by attaching solfeggio syllables to Wood, his wife and their two children.  He also uses this technique for each letter in the name of the orchestra weaving them together with nods to the Renaissance.  A bird call can also be heard which adds to the flair of the work with its more traditional general sound along with jingling bells.  Later, one of Lee’s own compositions, Fantasia on “Blessed Assurance” honors the memory of her late husband and follows a performance of Bach’s Prelude in b, BWV 544 (ca. 1727-1731).  It is a rather beautiful exploration of the melody with some wonderful arpeggio lines that show off the shifting colors of the instrument.

Bach is but one of the Baroque composer’s whose music appears on the album.  Lee uses Francois Couperin’s Elevation: Tierce en taille to explore the flexibility of these massive instrument making adjustments that make it seem as if we are hearing an historic period instrument.  Another classic choice is the Ciacona in c of Buxtehude.  Giving us a more specific flair for late Renaissance organ music is Lee’s choice of the set of variations on the hymn tune Mein junges Leben hat ein End by Jan Pieterszoon Sweelinck (1562-1621).  A modern Dutch organ piece, Miroir (1989) by Ad Wammes gives us a sense of minimalist-like style with intriguing harmonic shifts revealing further colorful aspects of the instrument.

Swiss composer Guy Bovet’s (b. 1942) Hamburger Totentanz is almost like a throwback to classic theater organ music of the early 20^th Century with its engaging insistent rhythm and quotations of Offenbach, Beethoven, and Wagner.  It makes for a delightful restrained piece before we get the organ showpiece by Louis Vierne (1870-1937), Carrillon de Westminster.  To round off the exploration of this European region, Lee includes “Les Anges” from Messiaen’s organ cycle La Nativite du Seigneur.

Two American works fill out the program.  John Weaver’s Toccata in G (1968) is a popular work amongst organists and it is a perfection all-out demonstration vehicle for the organ and Ms. Lee’s talents used to transition us from the Wammes to the Sweelinck in the sequence of selections.  The program concludes with one of the great organ works by American composer Dudley Buck (1839-1909) published 100 years before the Weaver toccata.  Buck’s Concert Variations on the “Star Spangled Banner” is a perfect celebratory piece to this delightful program and it is great to have this performance in the catalog.

Throughout, Lee’s registrations reveal the depth and breadth of Rosales’ instrument and they often make one forget that this is not a recital from throughout different organs but one on a truly singular instrument.  Recording an organ of any kind is an often daunting task, but the engineers here have really managed to give listeners a chance to hear this grand instrument and all that it can do in this space.  It is as close as one might get to being there and may best be enjoyed with your surround speaker system.  It somehow manages to capture some of the lowest ends of the instrument.  Lee’s performance are quite fine throughout, often carefully realized, but with a sense of great musicality that even in the showpieces lets the music shine even when her own virtuosity is the star.  Those who wish to explore grand organ music with this varied program will certainly have much to revel in here and should encourage anyone headed to Los Angeles to double check whenever the organ may be featured in recitals or concerts.  Even better is that the varied program itself is a refreshing change of pace.

Mezzanine Seat
Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra/Petr Vronsky
Bruno Philipp, clarinet.  Croatian Chamber Orchestra/Miran Vaupotic
Navona Records 6186
Total Time:  74:16
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

Last year, Navona released the complete (to date) string quartets of Michigan-born composer Michael G. Cunningham.  Now we have an opportunity to move from these more intimate compositions to those written on a larger scale in this new release featuring four orchestral pieces.

The album opens with the nine-movement Silhouettes, Op. 225 (a first version was completed in the late 1950s).  In these little movements, the composer takes us through a variety of musical suggestions and feels a bit like a contemporary pastiche.  He begins with touches of modernism which in the opening “Corps de Ballet” tend to occur with dissonances being created against long, lyrical lines.  The closer intervals help add this sense with bursts of energy.  “Basse Danse” adds to this intense dramatic style with an opening ostinato pattern with small motivic ideas repeated and expanded upon adding to the tension and quite dramatic sensibility of the music.  These abstract imaginations move through a variety of brief picturesque suggestions like a modern update to the Renaissance suite.  Cunningham’s catalogue is filled with explorations of musical styles which he likes to integrate into his own work.  This is delightfully added into the “Gerswhin Portrait” movement which is a modern exploration of traditional jazz and exciting syncopations in one of the more standout moments from this work.  He also explores the Classical Period in his “Mozart Metamorphosis”, though in a more abstract disassembling.  “March” moves us back to more accessible, off-kilter, harmonic interplay with a sort of post-Hindemith style.  A calmer “Triolet” adds an air of mystery as it unfolds and the piece concludes with a brilliant perpetual motion-like “Furioso”.  Overall, it is an interesting work with engaging writing and orchestral exploration that would prove compelling for performers as well as listeners.  A strong work that is a welcome addition to the discography of modern American music.

Bruno Philipp tackles the composer’s Clarinet Concerto, Op. 186.  Cast in three movements, Cunningham opens with a burst of nervous energy that then shifts into a rather virtuosic display by the soloist against the dark textures of the orchestra.  Hindemith feels very much in the background of this work as well with Cunningham’s tendency to use a similar harmonic approach that supports his long thematic ideas that build and build like extensions of a Baroque motif stretched to the breaking point.  “Lithe” moves us into a suave moment of relaxation in tempo but the undercurrent of the music still maintains a sort of sinister quality.  Hints at the musical motives of the first movement flit into the texture adding a sort of twittering unease.  “Charivari” means essentially a “bunch of noise” often in folk mock parades intended to either celebrate a marriage or make fun of an unpopular person.  The style here certainly suggests such an intent with the fast-paced four-note motif that opens the work (an almost Prokofievian approach) with the serenade qualities reflected in the lyrical second idea.  The first movement motif returns as the piece moves towards a gradual piled-up harmony, last statement by clarinet and final cadence.  An excellent concerto, though perhaps the darkest of its type for the instrument!

The three-movement Symphonette, Op, 200 (1999) is a little symphony (it would be Cunningham’s fourth).  Prokofiev’s orchestral style also seems to be an underlying cousin to this work.  The fast-paced ideas that march along underneath the sinuous, long thematic lines creates this sense in what is a rather intense opening “Con Spirito”, but the final bars seem to move us to a sense of hope.  “Calmato” brings us into a more reflective mode that begins with an intriguing horn solo as the string wind their way around their own idea.  A happier shift begins to appear in the final movement, “Giovale”, which has a big orchestral chord to bookend the development and appearance of jaunty thematic lines.  It is really a great work that deserves a wider audience and we can be appreciative for its appearance here.

In Bach Diadem, Cunningham’s interest in taking older musical models and “updating” them is on display in full force.  Here we have three works (“French Prelude”, “Toccata Prelude”, and “Brandenburg Allegro”) that pay tribute to the great Baroque composer rethinking things a bit in modern orchestral dress.  The result is a sort of aural orchestration exploration.

For those unfamiliar with Cunningham’s music, this would be an excellent place to begin as the pieces here are all quite engaging, excellently written works with enough diversity that they allow the listener to begin to hear his own musical voice, one definitely worth listening to for anyone interested in modern American music.