Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Robert Spano - Jennifer Higdon: City Scape, Concerto For Orchestra (2004)

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Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Robert Spano - Jennifer Higdon: City Scape, Concerto For Orchestra (2004)

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Jennifer Higdon is a masterful colorist whose music is immediately appealing, full of energy and dash, but also with lyrical movements that grab you and hold your interest with their variety and melodic freshness. She can be brassy and bold like William Schuman and lushly Romantic like Samuel Barber, to mention just two American predecessors her music calls to mind. She also has a strong profile of her own, as we hear in City Scapes, a musical portrait of Atlanta that captures the bustle of a metropolis on the move. It's centerpiece, "river sings a song to trees," is wonderfully paced and engrossing. Concerto for Orchestra is a grand workout for a virtuoso band, teeming with solo turns that can tax all but the best musicians, and passages that spotlight sections of the orchestra with opportunities to strut their stuff. It's a brilliant piece brilliantly played by the Atlantans. Add Telarc's usual terrific sound and this disc becomes a must for fans of accessible modern music.

Review by Dan Davis

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Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Robert Spano - Jennifer Higdon: City Scape, Concerto For Orchestra (2004)

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Jennifer Higdon's chamber works have received a good bit of attention on disc–wissahickon poeTrees (on Albany) is especially worth hearing. Her orchestral piece Blue Cathedral is featured on another recent four-composer Telarc collection from these forces called Rainbow Body (the title work not by Higdon), but even in the company of such familiar additional names as Barber and Copland, Higdon's work stands out for its vibrant colors, accessibility, and craftsmanship. All of these qualities are on display in this magnificent new production devoted to a couple of her large-orchestra works, and judging from the results she's one of the best American composers on the scene today.

The Concerto for Orchestra, in five movements echoing Bartók's seminal work in the form, explores dazzling extreme orchestral virtuosity with amazing confidence and mastery. The opening movement offers an explosion of sonic brilliance from all sections of the orchestra, followed by a delightful strings-only scherzo whose writing at times has something of the ecstatic quality of Michael Tippett. The middle movement offers each group of instruments an opportunity for lyrical display, while the fourth movement belongs primarily to the percussion, first mallets and then unpitched instruments creating the ostinato that carries over into the finale, a brilliantly judged gradual accelerando that closes with a bang.

This bare-bones description hardly does justice to the music's ear-appeal and structural integrity, for although it plays for about 35 minutes, the time passes with amazing speed. There aren't any "dead spots" at all, and in this performance under Robert Spano the Atlanta players have what sounds like a blast with the many opportunities the piece offers them. Originally written for the Philadelphia Orchestra, which staged its triumphant premiere in 2002, it's difficult to imagine the Concerto being better played or recorded than here. Certainly the work should be taken up by orchestras everywhere.

The same qualities that characterize the Concerto also inhabit City Scape, a three-movement tribute to Atlanta, the city of the composer's birth. Written with every bit as much gusto and flair as the Concerto for Orchestra, this piece has a more obvious melodic basis, particularly in the central movement–river sings a song to trees–an impressively sustained 17-minute meditation that concludes with what sounds like a cross between the first movement of Berg's Three Pieces for Orchestra and the enchanted garden scene in Ravel's L'enfant et les sortileges. State of the art sonics once again offer maximum impact while capturing the music's great lyrical beauty with crystal clarity.

Unquestionably Higdon has it all as a composer: a generous fund of ideas, terrific technique, an excellent sense of musical timing, and enough concern for her audience to write music that can be enjoyed at first hearing but that never panders or sounds derivative. I originally filed the Rainbow Body CD under "B" for "Barber", but I'm moving it over to "H" as a companion to this remarkable release. How wonderful it is that recording contemporary music these days is becoming a pleasure rather than a penance! Let's hope my Higdon discography soon has much more company.

Review by David Hurwitz, ClassicsToday.com

Jennifer Higdon is a forty-something composer who teaches at Curtis and has garnered a lot of attention and interest where it counts – commissions from major performers and orchestras, Guggenheim fellowships, residencies with major ensembles and festivals, and acclaim from critics and audiences alike. With the Telarc CD City Scape, Higdon has another rare honor to add to her cap – a living composer who has two new, large-scale orchestral works recorded by a major classical firm. Higdon does deliver the goods – she writes big, dynamic orchestral music that seems to pick up the American populist thread right where it was left behind in the early '50s, after which the steamroller of international serialism began to flatten all other forms of concert music in its wake. Higdon's music does not incorporate techniques derived from minimalist practices, perhaps some see this as a weak way composers once used to get back to traditional tonality. These are full-blooded, "big city" orchestral pieces with an expanded sense of tonality, yet if Higdon needs to put a plain old major triad in the brass section she goes right ahead and adds it, rather than trying to find ways to work around it.

Higdon's Concerto for Orchestra was premiered by the Philadelphia Orchestra on June 12, 2002. It is reminiscent of William Schuman with a dash of Messiaen added for color. The shadow of Stravinsky and Copland lurk behind City Scape, Higdon's work written under commission for the artists heard here, Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, and premiered on November 14, 2002. Both are tightly constructed, well-orchestrated pieces that are unlikely to offend the most puritan of ears, yet they are serious in tone and never dissolve into a truculent manner that says to the audience "like me." Of the two works, City Scape is preferable, as the Concerto seems to lose focus for a bit in the third movement; overall, City Scape is a fine introduction to a composer one is sure to be hearing about in the future.

Review by Uncle Dave Lewis, Allmusic.com

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Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Robert Spano - Jennifer Higdon: City Scape, Concerto For Orchestra (2004)

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Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Robert Spano - Jennifer Higdon: City Scape, Concerto For Orchestra (2004)

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Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Robert Spano - Jennifer Higdon: City Scape, Concerto For Orchestra (2004)

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Atlanta Symphony Orchestra, Robert Spano - Jennifer Higdon: City Scape, Concerto For Orchestra (2004)

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