GRAMOPHONE Review: Sounds of America – Jon Manasse, Park Avenue Chamber Orchestra/Bernard
I am not familiar with the Park Avenue Chamber Symphony or indeed their conductor David Bernard but there are many issues here that make me wonder why they might have chosen such hotly contested repertoire for a commercial release? There is so much that is unjustly neglected in the extensive catalogue of Americana that you have to ask why an outfit like this wouldn’t seize the opportunity to champion it.
As it is, ‘adequate’ just doesn’t cut it here. You sense this just moments into the ubiquitous but ever miraculous Barber Adagio where what is conceived as a seamless entity unfolding as in a single breath, a single phrase, is already without that essential inner-light. Barlines reappear where there should be no sense of any and the inexorable emotional pull that is not just heard but felt never quite materialises.
The Appalachian Spring Suite is similarly ‘squared off’, a somewhat regimented affair, its folksiness depersonalised and actually rather po-faced. Nothing has a point of view and some of it, from a basic ensemble point of view, is just not as sharp as it might be. Someone should have suggested a retake of the ‘Dance of the Bride’. Or maybe that was as good as it was going to get.
Jon Manasse plays the Copland Clarinet Concerto as if inhibited not liberated by those around him. The ravishing lullaby of the opening paragraph sounds halting and circumspect and where in the cadenza and final movement is that sense of jazzy playfulness and spontaneous excitement? Benny Goodman or Richard Stoltzman he is not.
But worst of all – and I’m sorry to be so brutal – is the constipated rendition of Bernstein’s Symphonic Dances from West Side Story. If the Prologue suggests gangsta grannies on the rampage then just imagine how the frenzied footwork of the ‘Dance at the Gym’ fares. Whatever happened to the explosive percussion at the start of the Mambo? And those roaring mariachi trumpets… It’s really hard to render this number anything less than hair-raising but what we have here barely passes muster. The ballady bits fare better but that’s not saying a lot. ’Cool’? So not.
Sorry, but there’s an air of well-meaning amateurism about the whole disc and it’s hard to think of who but friends, family and subscribers would buy it.
