Keyboard Transcriptions
Michael Adcock, piano.
Centaur 3534
Total Time:  64:47
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

Released in 2016, Michael Adcock’s recording of piano transcriptions features an interestingly varied program that also revisits some of the great virtuosi who created these pieces.  Adcock is a student of Leon Fleisher and Ellen Mack and teaches at Washington Conservatory in Maryland.  The release is a collection of virtuoso showpieces that also pays homage to some of the great pianists of the 19^th and 20^th Century.  The Prokofiev is a fairly muscular work at times but requires a great deal of interpretive shading along the way.  There are several recordings of the work but none by the sort of “big name” soloists.  That is fine, because it then boils down to programming and Adcock may have the edge here with his blend of Romantic favorites and some jazz.

The first half of the program are the ten pieces that Prokofiev selected from his rejected ballet of Romeo and Juliet.  The Ten Pieces for Piano, Op. 75 were created in 1937 from the early suites the composer salvaged for orchestral performances.  The selections move us across the main moments of the story launching with a delightful “Folk Dance” and then moving us through a few scene settings before exploring characters.  Adcock has a crisp articulation here and tends to make the most of the accents in the music drawing these out quite a bit.  The music here really requires some attention to shading and interpretation and Adcock proves to be up to the task.  His performance of “The Young Juliet” is a certain highlight that captures the delightful playfulness in the opening measures as well as the romantic depth in the lyrical, reflective moments.  These shifts between Prokofiev’s modernist and almost impressionistic qualities is captured very well here.  “Montagues and Capulets” is another perfect example of how Adcock carefully shifts to capture the different tones in the music.  “Mercutio” is eqully impressive.  The listener is essentially enthralled quickly by the performance and this makes for a very satisfying performance.

For the second half of the program, Adcock must channel some of the greatest virtuoso pianists of the last 200 years.  The program nicely bookends these with first a Liszt version of the Schumann song, “Widmung” and then Godowsky’s fascinating version of “The Swan” from Saint-Saens’ Carnival of the Animals.  In between are the Seven Virtuoso Etudes (1950/1976) that Earl Wild (1915-2010) created from popular songs by Gershwin.  Wild was one of the finest of interpreters of Gershwin’s music with classic performances of Rhapsody in Blue that are still hard to beat.  These etudes are almost like “what if” explorations of technique and musical style that runs the gamut from Liszt to Rachmaninoff and even Art Tatum.  Each familiar song is thus transformed into something even more amazing than its tuneful familiarity might otherwise suggest.  Adcock’s performances are stunning here with a sense that these are evolving almost like improvisations which is quite amazing.  Vladimir Horowitz’s Variations on a theme from Bizet’s “Carmen” was one of the pianist’s popular encores.  Though written down, he never published the work which appears to have been altered at least a few times over the years.  It was one of the pieces he performed and recorded in 1978 for his White House concert.  The current piece then is a sort of codified version of the variants Horowitz introduced across his career.  It is after all the sort of piece a 19^th-Century composer/pianist would have tended to create on the spot and it is fun to have this nugget on this recording as well.

The program here is really well-conceived.  It demonstrates different aspects of Adcock’s technical skill, virtuosic flair, and interpretive ability.  The music here is certainly the sort of collection of music that even a casual listener will want to return to regularly.

 Sparks: Miniature Works for Orchestra
Siberian State Symphony Orchestra/Vladimir Landa
Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra/Petr Vronsky
Richard Stoltzman, clarinet.  Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra/Kirk Trevor
The Wembley Players/Bruce Babcock
Navona Records 6050
Total Time: 48:53
Recording:   ****/****
Performance: ****/****

Navona Records tends to focus on highlighting modern music and in this release provides some space for a variety of composers to be exposed.  Sparks features 13 works for orchestra by an equal number of new composers (though there is one arrangement at the center of Gershwin’s “Summertime”).  As such, the listener has a chance to hear the state of orchestral writing in a postmodern world.  The music tends to be quite accessible and often very dramatic lending a more filmic quality and often tied to a single idea.  The recordings date mostly from the past couple of years, though one (Bruce Babcock’s Event Horizon) was made in 1984, and the Gershwin in 2005.  The album is sort of a modern compilation of pieces that parallels some of the “pops” like covers of popular pieces of previous periods.

Jay Anthony Gach’s Gangsta opens the selection.  It is entirely inspired by great 1940s crime and film noir styles and comes across like a long lost Rosza suite.  A touch of this, with some jazz-like suggestions with a nice inclusion of a vibraphone color, appears in the following work by Rain Worthington, Still Motion.  Marga Richter’s Fragments is a fascinating five-movement work exploring different orchestral color—it too has an almost film-like dramatic flow.  Motivic ideas are the binding factor here to move the music forward with fascinating textures.  Explorations of single dance forms are always a unique way for a composer to create a faster audience connection and Phillip Rhodes accomplishes this well in his A Tango Fantasy, a sort of deconstruction of the rhythms and musical phrasing of a tango.  At the center is a nice little arrangement of “Summertime” featuring clarinetist Richard Stoltzman whose central section allows for a variety of pyrotechnics and shift into suggestions of other Gershwin melodies in these riffs.  This is followed by a touching portrait for the late conductor of the Dayton Symphony, Charles-Wendelken-Wilson, Prelude for Charles.  Steven Winteregg's music here has a wonderful, romantic flow, exploring sections of the orchestra and following interesting musical gestures developed across the brief tribute.  In Memoriam continues this thematic sense of remembrance.  Douglas Anderson’s work though came out of a response to the 9-11 attacks and a personal sense of loss that might help heal and remember those lost.  The work opens with a chime and a cluster of sound that then opens into a warm string sound with delicate wind and brass lines floating through the texture in this moving work.  Film music fans will likely recognize the name Bruce Babcock.  He is an Emmy-winning composer who also has numerous orchestration credits over a career spanning some 40 years.  Event Horizon, recorded in 1984 with the Wembley Players, is his personal nod to the many film composers and teachers he has learned from and loves.  The work opens with unsettling and eerie string writing against brass.  It has a serial feel and is the most atonal of the pieces on the album (think some of Goldsmith’s Alien score).  Interestingly enough, the piece does reflect the sort of orchestral writing that was common in orchestral concert music at the time.  The final work is Stephen Lias’ Crown of the Continent.  The piece is an example of landscape-inspired orchestral music.  Here it is of Glacier National Park and the “old West” vistas of Montana.  The style is akin to that for the modern Western in scores like those by Bruce Boughton (Silverado).

The performances here feel as if they were rehearsed well and the result is that the music is quite engaging.  The sequencing also works to draw the listener into the modern styles and then begin to strip things away gradually.  It all works quite well.  Many, if not all, of these pieces, could fit very well in any number of symphony programs both serious and light connecting to a specific theme.  Composers tend to be forced into smaller forms to find space on modern symphony programs and perhaps pieces like these might open the door a little wider for those represented here to try their hand at larger scale pieces.  Certainly, Sparks is an important collection of new voices for any music lover wanting to support modern orchestral music.  Checking out the links at their website even lets you explore some of the scores.