The CDs accumulate during the season when live performances demand a critic's attention. Summer is a good time to catch up with them. Here are five recordings with Florida or Tampa Bay area connections:
ENOCH ARDEN (AMERICUS) - For people of a certain age, Enoch Arden might ring a bell from long-ago English classes. It's a narrative poem by Alfred Lord Tennyson, the eminent Victorian best known for The Charge of the Light Brigade and the Arthurian saga Idylls of the King, but it is largely relegated nowadays to graduate school seminars on epic verse.
Enoch Arden, published in 1864, is about a shipwrecked sailor, presumed dead, who returns home to the Isle of Wight after 10 years to find that his wife has remarried, and her new husband is his childhood friend. Enoch chooses to remain in hiding so as not to intrude on their happiness.
Tennyson's narrative is a touching yarn on the theme of self-sacrifice, and it inspired Richard Strauss to compose incidental music for a reading, which is given a passionate performance by actor Michael York and pianist John Bell Young on this release. Young, a St. Petersburg Times correspondent and reviewer of classical music, wrote about his collaboration with York for the newspaper in October.
York, whose film roles range from Cabaret to Austin Powers in Goldmember, throws himself into Tennyson's melodrama, and his expertise with English accents deftly differentiates between the working-class Enoch and the bourgeois miller who marries his wife. The spare, not terribly interesting music is early Strauss, and the composer later disavowed it, but Young brings a great sense of conviction to the 66-minute performance.
First-class packaging includes informative essays by Young and York; the complete text of the poem, which was slightly cut for the recording; and evocative illustrations from the original edition. CD available from www.americuscd.com
CONCERTOS: ELLEN TAAFFE ZWILICH (KOCH) - It is something of a scandal that the works of Ellen Taaffe Zwilich don't get more performances by Florida symphony orchestras. She is, after all, the state's most prominent contemporary composer, a Pulitzer Prize winner, born in Miami and educated at Florida State University, where she holds the Francis Eppes Distinguished Professorship. Her music can be thorny at times, but it is plenty accessible to ears raised on Bartok and Prokofiev, not to mention Gershwin and Thelonious Monk.
Here are three Zwilich concertos, composed in the '80s and '90s for various combinations of the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, whose members perform them with the Florida State University Orchestra, conducted by Michael Stern. A wonderfully eclectic range of musical styles is on display in these works, from the homages to Beethoven and Brahms in the Double and Triple Concertos to the jazz in sections of the Piano Concerto.
All three works are worth hearing, but the two-movement Double Concerto for violin and cello is Zwilich at her best, perhaps because she is a violinist. Cellist Sharon Robinson and violinist Jaime Laredo mesh beautifully, their instruments often coming together as one complex, beguiling voice. Stern and the FSU students do a fine job of creating an orchestral texture that includes some splendidly forthright brass play. CD available from www.kochentertainment.com
UNMISTAKABLY MODERN (BLUE PEARL RECORDS) - Corey Jane Holt is originally from North Dakota, and one of the coolest pieces on her debut solo CD pays tribute to the pianist's roots in Lawrence Welk's home state: Corey Jane's Polka Madness, a wacky piece for piano and percussion ensemble by Paul Reller. North Dakota's loss was Florida's gain; Holt has been the Tampa Bay area's leading keyboard adventurer into the wild and woolly world of new music for more than a decade, as a performer with bands such as Clang and in the Bonk Festival.
Holt takes on some formidable challenges, such as Robert Constable's six Recursions for piano, machinelike music that she imbues with warmth despite daunting technical requirements. Reller's Executive Outcomes for amplified piano and tape sounds like a mad scientist's nightmare, and Holt reels off the relentless rhythms with elan. For Florida Suite, composer David W. Rogers appropriated the title (and nothing else) from a 19th century work by Delius, and Holt's performance combines moody atmospherics with percussive punch.
For an example of what makes Holt such a valuable artist, listen to Monolog.3, a solo piano work by Greg Boardman. The musical line is obscure, the tempos seemingly random, but she pulls it together with with confidence and flair. CD available via e-mail from moscow@mindspring.com
A. PAUL JOHNSON: THE ART OF MELODY APOLLO PROJECT - St. Petersburg composer A. Paul Johnson has fashioned himself as the preserver of old-fashioned musical values in the face of the avant-garde atonal onslaught, as suggested by the title of this album and the subtitle of his Symphony No. 1, The Romantic. Well, there's nothing wrong with a catchy tune or two, as in Johnson's Irish Serenade, which is given a fetching performance by tenor Tom Godfrey and the Summit Ensemble, conducted by Deidre Reigel. The first symphony, played by the Prague Symphony Orchestra, is likewise infectiously listenable, but Divertimento No. 6, The Acrobats, seems too simple in a choppy performance by an Argentinian chamber orchestra, Ensamble Rosario. CD available from the Apollo Project, 4193 Whiting Drive SE, St. Petersburg, FL 33705; (727) 823-7252; or via e-mail from WD4193@aol.com
MOUNTAIN SONGS KOCH - Susan Glaser used to be a flutist and piccolo player in the Florida Orchestra, but her ambition was always to have a solo career, and she has gotten that in recitals and recordings, the latest of which is Mountain Songs. Glaser always has had a penchant for new music, and here she brings her lyrical tone to an interesting collection of Appalachian songs by Robert Beaser, with excellent guitarist Franco Platino, and Amanda Harberg's Poem and Transformations, with pianist Karl Paulnack. Glaser and Paulnack also perform a set of variations for flute and piano by Beaser. CD available from www.kochentertainment.com
