Search - Edward MacDowell, David Wiley, Roanokle Symphony Orchestra :: American Piano Concertos

American P Ctos - MacDowell 2, Wiley 3: Strong, Beautiful, R

Dan Fee | Berkeley, CA USA | 01/12/2009

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Well this disc is quite a surprise. Let me count the ways.



For starters, here we get a very, very strong regional band performance, recorded in Virginia USA, at Radford University's Preston Hall, in 1996, published 1998. The band is not perfect, and lacks the tonal depth and plush that we expect as given with old-world bands like Berlin, Vienna, or Dresden. Instead Roanoke offers up plenty of warm, direct music-making that strikes my ear as quintessentially USA. Based on this disc, I can hear nothing tired or sleepy, thin or scraggly about Roanoke. And this recording captures them better than, say, other releases have captured the Virginia SO in Norfolk under the esteemed JoAnn Falletta. One wants by all means to hear the VSO equally well recorded; so maybe the engineers and producers should talk to each other more often. After all, everybody is around somewhere in the same state?



What Norman Krieger brings to this outing, seconded alertly with happy verve by the Roanoke players, is what I associate with my own top picks - that is, a certain ineffable North American-ness, a combination of nineteenth century European roots with a new intellectual and emotional directness. Whatever this quality is, Norman Krieger has it in spades when he plays the MacDowell. (Or Gershwin, for that matter.) He is taking the music deeply, seriously. His transparent method still allows plenty of wit, frisky gesture, and charm to flow through to the listener. His powerhouse keyboard technique means that he never, ever has to be fazed as he takes on virtuoso challenges. Runs, trills, repeated notes, leaps or skips, octaves, chords - everything just sounds unlabored, musical. The instant you hear his easy authority as he lays out the opening first entry in the second MacDowell concerto, you can sit back, safely at home, in good musical hands. Something about the way Krieger and Roanoke state a variety of musical ideas is the very opposite of pretension or ham-fistedness. High intelligence never has to be stuffy, nor get in the way of charm or fun or that optimistic neighborliness that is supposed to be built into the American character.



After the success and satisfaction of the MacDowell, the disc finishes up with a third piano concerto by conductor David Wiley who is also a composer. It turns out that he wrote his first piano concerto by age ten, so although I had never heard of him, I tried to keep an open mind. Most prodigies who attempt a first piano concerto by age ten do not see it performed in concert, let alone survive the climb to complete advanced music degrees while adding two more concertos to the lot. DW also conducts the Long Island Symphony, in addition to Roanoke. He was immersed in the music life and training of both Boston-New England and Indiana University's famed glitterati faculty, coming up.



What sort of music does DW write? Well he is not simply pigeon-holed, and that is a good thing. His music is tonal plus ( in this third piano concerto). He writes music that sounds clean, clear, and purposeful. The style is giant Mother May I Steps more modern, so contrasts with MacDowell's nineteenth century European Romantic habits. Nevertheless, the two concertos make good disc companions.



DW's first movement starts off in arresting manner, sketching out vigorous rhythms and fielding a deft texture diaphanously touched by chiming sounds. This rapidly builds into a full-blown dance, muscular just short of Prokofiev or Bartok sonatas for piano and percussion hammering. While all the rhythms and cross rhythms are happening, DW very cleverly is also moving imperturbably into polyphonic manners using multiple voices. Bartok again comes to mind in this regard, and at least one of the models contributing here must surely be Bartok's second piano concerto. Do not fear, a listener can hear how well we are still having a good time, here in USA, not turning clocks backwards to old European models.



Kudos again to Norman Krieger, by the way. DW's piece cannot have been easy to learn; it is anything but piano plus strings pop fluff. True to his many gifts, Krieger keeps all the textures strong and clean and clear, whether he is throwing fistfuls of notes at us, or cascading in octaves up and down the keyboard, or most delicately and tenderly otherwise.



DW's way with phrases and what functions as melodies or motifs reminds this listener of that famous USA composer, William Schuman. I don't recall that Schumann ever wrote a piano concerto, but I think he could have borne up sitting through DW's third without feeling at all displaced or forgotten.



Two things stand out in immediate retrospect as the first movement ends. One is the consistently high intelligence of DW's writing. A listener is never asked to turn off his or her brain, at any point in the first movement. The other lasting impression is of complete musical mastery. DW's materials are clearly built to last, and he deploys all his changes in a convincing, intent way.



True to concerto traditions and forms, the second DW movement carries us for an enchanting while into softer, gentler music. But still not less, for all the relative surface relaxation, a call out to sentient and intelligent musical spirits. Bartok middle movements, night music, yet again come to mind. After heating up a bit for contrast, the middle movement goes waltzy and features the piano soloist more often than not. Props at this point to the Roanoke band who deftly join in, in passing, without competing with the soloist and without derailing the flow or the musical message.



DW's third movement stays true to concerto form. The piano immediately launches into a vigorous finale. The instrumental scoring for the orchestra sounds really indebted now, to Bartok's way with tuned percussion and related. We are still clean and clear in USA, recalling William Schuman. In culmination, at big melody begins in the band and is taken up by the piano. This tune has bare touches of our heritage in North American hymnody; think William Billings, and then blur quickly forward, up to and including Charles Ives' habits of mind and heart. DW lets this all build up, relentlessly. It would strike the ear as Rachmaninoff, except that it never for a passing second has even an extra ounce of drippy sentimentality. By the end we are rather saluting the flag as we repeat the pledge of allegiance, but not necessarily in a exclusively right wing dedication to my country, torture or no.



In sum, on first hearings this third piano concerto of David Wiley does not immediately reach out, drawing the listener in like the most popular concertos of the modern era. It is to that extent less superficially attractive and costumed, compared to Prokofiev's first or third concertos, or Barber, or even more popularly, even Gershwin or Ravel. That said, there sounds to be depth and wit and intelligence to this concerto, and my hunch is that future hearings will only reveal it, more and more and more. David Wiley writes in ways that are appropriately situated in modern American time and culture. Our ears know Barber, William Schuman, Elliott Carter, and above all, we are still hearing out Charles Ives.



What next? Well I fearlessly hope for the first MacDowell piano concerto, and maybe the Wiley second or first, from these same forces. Then I would surely think about turning them completely loose to do the three Bartok piano concertos, and maybe the Ravel and Prokofiev to boot. Given the way they do the MacDowell second, one suspects that the Barber piano concerto would be child's play for them. Plus, probably, Copland and Menotti during the session breaks? That is just how capable the pianist, conductor, and band fall on the ear in the disc's two concertos.



Roanoke is on this disc as prime evidence one of the hardest working regional bands around in USA. Five regional band stars, definitely rising on the catalog horizons. Listeners might do well to keep an ear out for conductor-composer David Wiley, plus outstanding pianist Norman Krieger."