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Head-Fi's Sybil
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[size=xx-small]Moderators: I originally wrote this for the SACD Review thread, but the review grew long enough that I felt it should have a separate thread. Feel free to remove the previous copy if you feel it's overkill.[/size]
William Schuman, Credendum, Piano Concerto, Symphony No. 4, David Alan Miller and the Albany Symphony Orchestra, with soliost John McCabe (Albany Recordings)
William Schuman is not to be confused with Robert Schumann, German romantic composer and embodiment of the Romantic Period's excesses.* While the latter is legend, the former is equally worthy of praise. After all, Schuman was an important American composer whose works comprise a purist's synthesis of specific modernist techniques. Like Stravinsky, Roger Sessions, Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Walter Piston, Quincy Jones and many others, Schuman studied composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris (for a list of Boulanger's American composition students, click here). His style is neo-classical, but his orchestration can be Copland-lush. He is also known for his use of the polychord (one chord stacked on top of another -- the most famous examples are perhaps Stravinsky's Petroushka chord (C Major against F-sharp Major) and the slow arpeggiation that opens Appalachian Spring (A Major on its third (1st inversion), with E Major stacked above on its fifth (2nd inversion)). Throughout his career, he used this device continuously (perhaps even reflexively); textbook examples can be drawn from virtually all of his works; he is to the polychord what Darius Milhaud is to polytonality.**
So far, it is rare in SACD that the choice of material should be superior to that of most CDs: one expects entire box sets of Arvo Part before a single symphony by Henze, Webern or Honegger is released (let alone a great performance). Happily, the Credendum is the exception that proves the rule. The music chosen here is unusually uncompromising and intelligent, and shows Schuman at his cerebral best. The opening of the Credendum is formidable and voiced wide -- in severity, it rivals Honegger's mortality-pondering masterpiece, the Symphony No. 5. (Populists might call the Credenum "sobering" or "sincere".) The Piano Concerto is linear and neo-baroque, and could be paired with Stravinsky's Piano Concerto on another recording. The Symphony No. 4, with its fugal sections and extensive counterpoint, is one of my favorites (though the case could be made that it is dry and derivative of other neo-classical composers, such as Stravinsky and Hindemith).
The performances are overly forceful in places, but this is due, I think, to the desire to present digital music dynamically. The contrapuntal sections in the strings (Symphony No. 4, opening movement) could be better delineated, and I do think this is a fault that should have been corrected. However, you could not ask for a more intelligent presentation of the neo-classical work of a mid-twentieth century American composer. The music is not difficult, but neither is it superficially attractive. In these days of musical illiteracy, such a recording shines like a beacon above a greasy sea of performances of Barber's "Adagio for Strings" (which seems never to be presented in its original form: as a single movement from a string quartet which should be listened to in its entirety).
Bill Evans Trio, Waltz for Debby (Analogue Productions)
Now that I've spent time with this new release, I can affirm that Waltz for Debby is a necessary addition to anyone's SACD jazz library. While I'd love to know the history of certain concentration-rending recording/restoration imperfections (as in the first and fifth chords of "My Romance (take 1)," which sounds as if the master were damaged in places), the overall sound of this release is superb. Listening to Waltz for Debby through standard studio monitors is a waste of time and conveys only the New Drabness of SACD (far less shrill than CD, but thin and lacking in depth compared to vinyl -- it's like a stunning fresco painted before the time of Ucello: worlds of detail, but perspective doesn't exist), whereas an RS1/Meta or 831/EAR+ combination reveals the fullness and depth of the recording -- far less thin and two-dimensional. The sound of certain parts of the drum kit -- the frequency emphasis of the hi-hat is scaldingly and unnaturally high, and the kick seems to issue from some aquatic substratum through the sub-woofer I don't possess -- is the one irritating aspect of this transfer. The piano and bass couldn't sound better.
The Summing Up:
Bill Evans, Waltz for Debby: recommended.
William Schuman, Credendum: recommended strenuously; this recording is an antidote for banality.
___________________
* Symptoms of Robert Schumann's hyper-romanticism:
Artistically: obsessive repetition in place of thematic development; illogical but effective use of contrast; compulsively literary music composition and self-consciously musical prose.
Personally: synesthesia, schizophrenia, morbidity; aspired to virtuosity to the point of self-destructiveness.
**Polytonality is the technique of superimposing one or more keys over another. (Its ancestry is traceable to a Beethoven symphony which introduces the tonic key before it modulates back from the dominant; early publishers thought this was a mistake and tried to correct it, much to the composer's annoyance.) For superb examples of polytonality, see Milhaud's La Creation du Monde and the first movement of Honegger's Fifth Symphony (di tre re).
William Schuman, Credendum, Piano Concerto, Symphony No. 4, David Alan Miller and the Albany Symphony Orchestra, with soliost John McCabe (Albany Recordings)
William Schuman is not to be confused with Robert Schumann, German romantic composer and embodiment of the Romantic Period's excesses.* While the latter is legend, the former is equally worthy of praise. After all, Schuman was an important American composer whose works comprise a purist's synthesis of specific modernist techniques. Like Stravinsky, Roger Sessions, Aaron Copland, Roy Harris, Walter Piston, Quincy Jones and many others, Schuman studied composition with Nadia Boulanger in Paris (for a list of Boulanger's American composition students, click here). His style is neo-classical, but his orchestration can be Copland-lush. He is also known for his use of the polychord (one chord stacked on top of another -- the most famous examples are perhaps Stravinsky's Petroushka chord (C Major against F-sharp Major) and the slow arpeggiation that opens Appalachian Spring (A Major on its third (1st inversion), with E Major stacked above on its fifth (2nd inversion)). Throughout his career, he used this device continuously (perhaps even reflexively); textbook examples can be drawn from virtually all of his works; he is to the polychord what Darius Milhaud is to polytonality.**
So far, it is rare in SACD that the choice of material should be superior to that of most CDs: one expects entire box sets of Arvo Part before a single symphony by Henze, Webern or Honegger is released (let alone a great performance). Happily, the Credendum is the exception that proves the rule. The music chosen here is unusually uncompromising and intelligent, and shows Schuman at his cerebral best. The opening of the Credendum is formidable and voiced wide -- in severity, it rivals Honegger's mortality-pondering masterpiece, the Symphony No. 5. (Populists might call the Credenum "sobering" or "sincere".) The Piano Concerto is linear and neo-baroque, and could be paired with Stravinsky's Piano Concerto on another recording. The Symphony No. 4, with its fugal sections and extensive counterpoint, is one of my favorites (though the case could be made that it is dry and derivative of other neo-classical composers, such as Stravinsky and Hindemith).
The performances are overly forceful in places, but this is due, I think, to the desire to present digital music dynamically. The contrapuntal sections in the strings (Symphony No. 4, opening movement) could be better delineated, and I do think this is a fault that should have been corrected. However, you could not ask for a more intelligent presentation of the neo-classical work of a mid-twentieth century American composer. The music is not difficult, but neither is it superficially attractive. In these days of musical illiteracy, such a recording shines like a beacon above a greasy sea of performances of Barber's "Adagio for Strings" (which seems never to be presented in its original form: as a single movement from a string quartet which should be listened to in its entirety).
Bill Evans Trio, Waltz for Debby (Analogue Productions)
Now that I've spent time with this new release, I can affirm that Waltz for Debby is a necessary addition to anyone's SACD jazz library. While I'd love to know the history of certain concentration-rending recording/restoration imperfections (as in the first and fifth chords of "My Romance (take 1)," which sounds as if the master were damaged in places), the overall sound of this release is superb. Listening to Waltz for Debby through standard studio monitors is a waste of time and conveys only the New Drabness of SACD (far less shrill than CD, but thin and lacking in depth compared to vinyl -- it's like a stunning fresco painted before the time of Ucello: worlds of detail, but perspective doesn't exist), whereas an RS1/Meta or 831/EAR+ combination reveals the fullness and depth of the recording -- far less thin and two-dimensional. The sound of certain parts of the drum kit -- the frequency emphasis of the hi-hat is scaldingly and unnaturally high, and the kick seems to issue from some aquatic substratum through the sub-woofer I don't possess -- is the one irritating aspect of this transfer. The piano and bass couldn't sound better.
The Summing Up:
Bill Evans, Waltz for Debby: recommended.
William Schuman, Credendum: recommended strenuously; this recording is an antidote for banality.
___________________
* Symptoms of Robert Schumann's hyper-romanticism:
Artistically: obsessive repetition in place of thematic development; illogical but effective use of contrast; compulsively literary music composition and self-consciously musical prose.
Personally: synesthesia, schizophrenia, morbidity; aspired to virtuosity to the point of self-destructiveness.
**Polytonality is the technique of superimposing one or more keys over another. (Its ancestry is traceable to a Beethoven symphony which introduces the tonic key before it modulates back from the dominant; early publishers thought this was a mistake and tried to correct it, much to the composer's annoyance.) For superb examples of polytonality, see Milhaud's La Creation du Monde and the first movement of Honegger's Fifth Symphony (di tre re).
