Formerly issued on Marco Polo 8.223457, this CD collects
three works by Welcher, a New Yorker who in 1990 was named
Composer in Residence with the Honolulu Symphony Orchestra.
The first work here, Haleakala grew out of that
experience - as did Welcher’s first Symphony. We are told,
in the composer’s own notes, that it was designed both as
a children’s story and as “a piece of mature contemporary
music”. An orchestra which includes a variety of traditional
Hawaiian percussion instruments accompanies, illustrates
and decorates a spoken text which recounts one of the myths
of the trickster hero Maui, an important figure in Polynesian
mythology. There are plenty of effective passages, but for
all the undoubted skill with which Welcher uses his resources,
and for all his claim that “the work can be performed without
narration”, the music comes across as secondary to the text,
prepared by Ann McCutchan and spoken by Richard Chamberlain.
At times I wondered whether Chamberlain’s narration had
been recorded at a different time and the orchestral
and spoken
contributions only brought together after the fact, as
it were. There is some colourful orchestral writing,
some telling
climaxes, but as a piece of music, it all feels decidedly
fragmentary.
I found more musical satisfaction in the other two pieces
on the disc. Prairie Light responds to three watercolours
painted by Georgia O’Keefe in Texas in 1917 - Welcher now
lives in Texas. The three – which give their titles to the
three movements - are ‘Light Coming on the Plains’, ‘Canyon
with Crows’ and ‘Starlight Night’. What one writer (Siglind
Bruhn in ‘A Concert of Paintings’, Poetics Today,
Volume 22, 2001) has called ‘musical ekphrasis’, i.e. when
a composer seeks to find ways to transpose aspects of a painting’s
style and structure or dominant images to his own art form,
now has a pretty lengthy and fairly distinguished history.
In the first of Welcher’s three pieces the horizon and concentric
circles of blue light which characterise O’Keefe’s painting
are ‘represented’ by static bass line and three extended
musical phrases which persuasively mimic the gradual arrival
of sunlight. This is a striking and memorable piece. In the
second, staccato chords and solo lines for woodwinds mimic
the crows of O’Keefe’s painting; in the third, gamelan-like
patterning underlies a larger circular structure, in which
a nocturnal melody is finally fused with the dawn ‘chorus’ of Prairie
Light’s first section.
The Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra starts off in
relatively staid fashion, but is soon overtaken by the
idioms of jazz and the dance hall. The second movement
- described
as ‘Blues and Toccata (on the name ‘Benny Goodman’) – uses
a repeated ostinato over which a range of echoes from the
jazz tradition are played out, the movement ending with the
orchestra reduced to clarinet, vibes, bass and drums – a
jazz quartet, in short. There is much lively writing,
much entertainment throughout the concerto.
Prairie Light is a substantial and perceptively
coloured piece which rewards repeated hearings – best
of all if one can access reproductions of the paintings.
The
Concerto is thoroughly
accomplished, witty music. The more I listen to Haleakala,
however, the thinner and slighter it seems. Still, two out
of three is not bad! For these two earlier pieces, from the
1980s, I recommend this recording as a way of introducing
oneself to the music of Dan Welcher.
Glyn
Pursglove
see also review by Jonathan Woolf
*Richard
Chamberlain (narrator);
