Brian Field (b. 1967)
Choral and Orchestral Works
No recording details supplied.
RMN CLASSICAL RMN70709 [63]
Brian Field had his upbringing in Ohio, USA. He holds distinguished academic credentials. His post-graduate studies were pursued at the Juilliard with Milton Babbitt and elsewhere with Mario Davidovsky. With those two avant-garde figures in his CV we might perhaps expect music of the same stamp. In practice, no such thing.
His chosen fields have so far been TV and theatre, chamber, ballet, choral (extensive), electro-acoustic and orchestral. Field describes the musical language he employs as an "eclectic fusion of lyricism and driving rhythm that [bring] together elements of post-romanticism, minimalism and jazz." That’s a pretty fair summary of what we hear on this disc. There are twelve shortish pieces, ranging in length from 3:08 to 11:02, each allocated a track. Much of this is for choir.
Nine, Four by Four is an ever so slightly sinister and stimulating piece for wind ensemble. It recalls the music of Franco Piersanti in the Inspector Montalbano title music. Another resemblance is to the score by Miguel D’Oliveira for Murder in Provence.
The pieces for choir are a pleasure. They triangulate around Vaughan Williams, Holst, Howells and Randall Thompson: tonal and tangy. The settings do not shrink from classical texts such as ‘Remember’ and ‘A Christmas Carol’ (In the Bleak Midwinter) by Christina Rossetti and ‘When You are Old’ by W.B. Yeats. The music hums around a gorgeous tonal centre making much of the velvety extremes of the voice. The Composers’ Choir conducted by Daniel Shaw are persuasive advocates and often able to imbue dazzle much to the advantage of what is being sung. Field has a gift for deriving the quintessential nostalgia from his orchestral pieces and these partake a little of pastoral Copland in ‘Oliana's Dream of the Sea’ and become more fraught, surreptitious and heavier with threat in ‘Shiva Tandava’. There’s an unhurried, irresistibly lambent quality to be heard as in Jeff Beal’s scores for the Jesse Stone television series. Placidly expressed beneficent music radiates from ‘Beatitudines’. By the way, the sung words for all the vocal pieces are printed on the casing for the disc.
This disc opens our ears, through the agency of a dozen fairly short pieces, to a language that is imaginative, tonal, tuneful and charged with balm.
Rob Barnett
Tracklist
1 Nine, Four by Four (wind ensemble Anita Szabó, Dóra Nagy, Reé György, Anna Beleznay, Dávid Frettyán, Sándor Csárics, Csaba Erdei)
2 Remember (Budapest Symphonic Chorus/Péter Illényi)
3 When You Are Old (Composers’ Choir/Daniel Shaw)
4 Oliana's Dream of the Sea (Budapest Symphonic Orchestra/Péter Illényi)
5 A Christmas Carol (Composers’ Choir/Daniel Shaw)
6 Shiva Tandava (Budapest Symphonic Orchestra/Péter Illényi)
7 Aurora Lucis Rutilat (Composers’ Choir/Daniel Shaw)
8 O Magnum Mysterium (Composers’ Choir/Daniel Shaw)
9 Beatitudines (Lviv Philharmonic Society and Chorus/Ferdinando Nazzaro)
10 Lauda Anima Mea Dominum (Budapest Symphonic Chorus/Péter Illényi)
11 Fare Thee Well (Composers’ Choir/Daniel Shaw)
12 Sweet Forgiveness (Heelan Chorale/John Flannery)
