Search - Don Gillis, Ian Hobson, Sinfonia Varsovia :: Don Gillis: Twinkletoes; Rhapsody; Encore Concerto; Short Overture to an unwritten opera [Hybrid SACD]

American Comfort Music

J Scott Morrison | Middlebury VT, USA | 04/19/2008

(5 out of 5 stars)

"This is yet another in the delightful series of CDs of music by Don Gillis recorded by Ian Hobson leading the Sinfonia Varsovia. The series includes Don Gillis: Symphonies 1, 2 & 5 1/2, Star-Spangled Symphony, and Don Gillis: Symphonies No. 3 & 10; Tulsa among others. Gillis wrote light-hearted, sometimes patriotic, sometimes maudlin, always good-humored music that is always beautifully crafted, strongly melodic, often using Latin and jazzy inflections. He is not by any stretch of the imagination a major composer, but his music never fails to invigorate and amuse. I first heard his Symphony No. 5 1/2 as a youth and I have a strong emotional and nostalgic reaction to anything of his I hear, as in this CD of short works.



'Twinkletoes' (1956) is a jazzy short number originally intended for a ballet that never materialized. Blue notes abound along with quasi-Broadway licks. 'Rhapsody for Harp and Orchestra' (1953) is a fifteen-minute mini-concerto written for Ed Vito, the then-principal harpist of the NBC Symphony (for which Gillis was the radio broadcast producer). A New York Times critic described it as 'a kind of prairie-dance-meets-Debussy'. Harpist Anna Sikorzak-Olek plays it beautifully.



'The Encore Concerto' (Piano Concerto No. 1, 1956) was written on request by an unnamed pianist who then never played it. It was to be a short concerto that could be programmed along with a short concerto of the ilk of some of the Mozart concertos, and it fills that bill, lasting about seventeen minutes. Gillis amusingly describes shopping it around to other pianists who 'received it with an eagerness normally reserved for a solemn walk to the gallows.' Before this recording it was played only once, in Corpus Christi, Texas, and recorded in 1957 by Gillis, pianist Joseph Kahn and the US Navy Band Orchestra. The work is an absolute delight. It is in three movements -- fast-slow-fast. The first movement somehow manages to combine Mozartean decorum with a Texas one-step. The second movement is a blues that sounds like an eerie combination of Gershwin and Ellington. The finale is another jazzy Western swing number. Ian Hobson conducts from the keyboard; he plays it with pizzazz. I loved this little gem.



'Short Overture to an Unwritten Opera' (1945) was the first number of Gillis's ever played by the NBC Symphony. Surely the 'unwritten opera' for which it was (not) intended, would surely have had to be a comedy; it is energetic, jazzy, sassy and over almost before you know it. A perfect concert opener.



'Rhapsody for Trumpet and Orchestra' was written in 1970 for the popular bandleader/trumpeter for the Tonight Show, Doc Severinsen. Lasting about seventeen minutes, it is virtuosic in the extreme for the soloist. It is in four sequences that range from blues to military fanfare to lyric outpourings. And it includes a riff, in the closing section, on the schoolyard taunt of NYAH-nyahyah-NYAH-yah, perhaps a reminder that school trumpet players are often cocky showoffs. Trumpeter Krzysztof Bednarczyk plays the devil out of the fiendishly difficult solo part.



I loved this disc. It ain't Beethoven, but who needs Beethoven all the time?



Scott Morrison"