(+++) THE BROAD SCALE AND THE INTIMATE

Wynton Marsalis: Blues Symphony. Detroit Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jader Bignamini. Pentatone. $17.99.

Music for Unaccompanied Violin by Melia Watras, John Corigliano, Ástor Piazzolla, Paola Prestini, and Leilehua Lanzilotti. Michael Jinsoo Lim, violin. Planet M Records. $15.

     Today’s composers, like those of earlier eras, have many reasons for choosing to write music for large ensembles or small ones – or even for solo performance. The type of material they are working with, the sensibilities they wish to explore and present, and the availability of appropriate-size and appropriately skilled performers all figure into compositional planning. So it certainly makes sense that Wynton Marsalis (born 1961) wanted to create something on a very large scale, for full orchestra, in his Blues Symphony, because Marsalis’ ambition was a grand one: to explore not only the sound of the blues but also the history, background, emotional underpinnings and sociopolitical context of this musical form. That is a lot of text and subtext to pack into a symphony, even a seven-movement one that runs more than an hour. A new Pentatone recording of this 2009 work, featuring the Detroit Symphony Orchestra conducted by Jader Bignamini, provides an opportunity to find out whether Marsalis’ accomplishment matches his ambition. A fair answer would be: not quite, although the composer tries mighty hard to encompass everything about the blues – and the conductor and orchestra do their best to put the composer’s auditory vision across. The symphony is in seven movements, whose titles are integral to Marsalis’ thinking and planning and are therefore crucial for the audience to know and consider while listening to the music: Born in Hope; Swimming in Sorrow; Reconstruction Rag; Southwestern Shakedown; Big City Breaks; Danzon y Mambo, Choro y Samba; and Dialogue in Democracy. As those titles make clear, Marsalis focuses throughout on the society (really, societies) in which the blues were born and developed; a kind of societal gloss is intended to permeate the work. How well it does so, and to what end, is a matter of opinion. The first movement, for example, communicates an upbeat sense of “hope” clearly enough, but it communicates it again and again and yet again – there is clangor in the music whose effectiveness diminishes the longer it goes on. The second and longest movement is dour enough, expressing itself in a rather cinematic (that is to say, surface-level) fashion, with plenty of swells and exclamations contrasted with unhappy string sighs. The third opens with a continuation of the same mood before working itself into something bouncy and upbeat but, at least by implication, with sorrow suppressed rather than eliminated. The fourth features some genuinely bluesy-sounding material, with brass chorale elements mingled with the sound effects of a TV commercial featuring the imagined ruggedness of the Old West – an amusing potpourri that is not, however, intended to amuse; this is a disparity, and not the only one, between the work’s intentions and its execution. The fifth and shortest movement is back in “bounce” mode, now with irregular rhythms and prominent drum set. The sixth movement sighs and laments in a solo violin before lapsing into a vaguely Latin dance beat, then becomes increasingly insistent (and loud) before dipping again into quieter material; the feelings alternate, on and off, until a rather silly police-whistle-dominated section leads to an eventual cartoonish fadeout. The finale immediately brings speediness to the orchestra’s sections, individually and together, with a cartoonish sound of a different sort – a kind of chase scene in which no one ever catches anyone. After going on this way for a while, Marsalis opts for a full-throated climax (with more police whistle) and then a gallop toward a hectic conclusion that, inevitably, comes to an abrupt stop. A lot of this is great fun, and the enthusiasm that conductor and orchestra bring to this performance is enough to gloss over some of the structural and communicative inelegances of this sprawling work – whose sprawl is itself an issue, making the piece sound more like a series of individual tone poems than a tightly knit symphony. Marsalis really wants the symphony to be profound and meaningful, but it does not sound that way, coming across more as a once-over-lightly (but not too lightly) romp through and with a musical form that is scarcely undiscovered and that has already been used by a great many composers in a great many ways for a great many years. Bignamini and the Detroit Symphony have given this work as fine a recorded performance as it is likely to receive. But the piece, despite its many pockets of enjoyment, ultimately tries too hard to assert its importance, and as a result comes across as unconvincing – it just plain takes itself too seriously, or, rather, more seriously than Marsalis is able to communicate convincingly.

     The foundational element is different on a new Planet M Records disc featuring Michael Jinsoo Lim and released under the title KINETIC: it is dance, with everything that Lim plays said to be dance-derived to a greater or lesser extent. The approach is different as well: these are works for a single instrument, the solo violin, rather than an ensemble. The CD presents material by five composers, arranged rather arbitrarily: for example, the two works by John Corigliano (born 1938) are separated by a Tango-Étude by Ástor Piazzolla (1921-1992), while works by Melia Watras (born 1969) appear first, fifth, and ninth among the 10 pieces on the disc. This peculiarity of arrangement also extends to Piazzolla’s music, which shows up third, sixth, and tenth. The rather forced sequencing does not, however, detract from the interesting elements of the program, from the effectiveness that can result in certain instances from using a single instrument rather than a group of them, or from the considerable verve with which Lim performs. Actually, Lim does bend the “solo instrument” approach a bit: Watras’ A dance of honey and inexorable delight includes a narrator (Herbert Woodward Martin), and A Jarful of Bees by Paola Prestini (born 1975) is for violin and electronics. Nevertheless, the overall impression here is of a solo recital, and a very nicely performed one at that. The three Piazzolla Tango-Études from 1987 (Nos. 1, 3 and 4, given in reverse order as well as being separated on the CD) are high points, by turns sultry and alluring, playful and (especially in the case of No. 1) quixotic. John Corigliano’s contributions are also noteworthy (so to speak). Stomp (2011) is somewhat overdone, over-insistent, and, well, over-produced, but it certainly puts Lim through his paces and has a somewhat endearing quality of trying a bit too hard. The Red Violin Caprices (1999), which predate Corigliano’s well-known Red Violin Concerto (2003) that is based on the 1997 film, consist of a theme and five variations in a compact 10-minute time frame, during which the violin needs to evoke extreme emotionality while displaying substantial technical prowess. The other major elements of this recording come from Watras. A dance of honey and inexorable delight (2022) is not especially evocative of either poetic emotion or apian matters, and Homage to Swan Lake (2018), thematic fragments aside, pays little attention to the unending melodiousness and dark beauty of Tchaikovsky. Watras’ Doppelgänger Dances (2017) are more intriguing. Although they are somewhat self-consciously modern in sound and technique, and frequently lose sight of the meaning of “dance” in favor of irregular rhythms and uncertain motion, they are often interesting to hear if they are not thought of too closely in a dance context: the movement called Fantasia and the fantasia-like concluding William are high points. The remaining two works on this very well-played but programmatically rather scattered CD are brief. Prestini’s A Jarful of Bees (2020) is the longest work on the disc, its 11-minute single movement more extended than the seven elements of Doppelgänger Dances or the six of The Red Violin Caprices. Even with the addition of electronics to expand its aural world, Prestini’s work goes on much too long: the repetitive electronic elements include the usual cloud-sounding background noises and snippets of mallet-percussion-like tones, all mostly at odds with the surprisingly rather tender (but scarcely dancelike) material given to the violin through most of the piece. And in where we used to be (a 2022 piece that bears one of those insistently non-capitalized titles), Leilehua Lanzilotti (born 1983) also presents a kind of soundcloud, here emanating from the violin itself – followed by some brighter material that then subsides into pizzicati and harmonics, the totality leaving the impression of a six-minute technical exploration far closer in spirit and approach to an instructional étude than to anything remotely dance-oriented. It is to Lim’s credit that he plays all these works with equal commitment and an equal determination to extract from them as much meaning and interest as they contain. That amount, though, varies so widely that the disc becomes one that will be found considerably more engaging by listeners interested in fine solo-violin performance for its own sake than by an audience that is genuinely attracted to dance in any of its multifaceted forms.