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Tuesday, April 19, 2005
All-Americans
American Masters for the 21st Century, Society for New Music, Innova

What a delightful box of goodies this is. Since its founding in 1972, Syracuse’s Society for New Music has been commissioning works by rising young composers and this 5-CD 30-year retrospective called “American Masters for the 21st Century” is a tribute to the Society’s remarkable ability to spot talent in the making. Virtually all the chamber works premiered here are by composers who have gone on to distinguished careers, beginning with recent Pulitzer Prize winner Steven Stuckey’s Sappho Fragments, which is cut one, side one, and ranging through such now familiar names as Christopher Rouse, Melinda Wagner, Brian Israel, Howard Boatwright, Roberto Sierra, Augusta Read Thomas and Richard Wernick. There are many highlights and each listening reveals new treasures but Sierra’s Cronica del discubrimiento is a special delight and Joseph Downing’s Partita VI, which draws upon Appalachian folk melodies, has a particular resonance for me personally. Highly recommended.

Quilt Music, Beth Anderson, Keith Borden (baritone), Joseph Kubera (piano), et al.
Albany Records


In the corner of Appalachia where I grew up quilts made of leftover scraps of many different colors, shapes and sizes of fabrics were called “crazy” quilts because they had no obvious preconceived pattern yet often produced astonishingly beautiful results depending on the skill of the maker. (The one on the cover was made by Beth's mother.) It is not a bad analogy for this collection of pieces by the unabashedly new romantic composer Beth Anderson. The title piece is a long, slowly unfolding work for solo piano originally written as a score for a dance, there are funny and tender songs for baritone and piano, bright duos for violin and piano, and finally one of her “swales,” which are bouncy chamber pieces for various instruments (in this case, the piano and two double basses) with contagious hooks that wonderfully capture the many different spirits of country life. (The first time I heard her “March Swale” on WNYC, it stopped me dead in my tracks.) Anderson is an original all-America voice and a musical seamstress of exceptional skill.

 



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