Deon NIELSEN PRICE
Yellow Jade Banquet for clarinet and orchestra (2006-8) [9:51]
Epitaphs for Fallen Heroes - concert-piece for piano and orchestra
[15:32]
America Themes for orchestra (2002) [4:14]
Gateways for winds and percussion (2006) [5:26]
States of Mind for string orchestra (2003) [15:12]
Dancing on the Brink of the World - tone poem for orchestra - The
Saga of Crissy Field (2007) [15:48]
National Symphony Orchestra of Ukraine/Berkeley A. Price; John McLaughlin
Williams
rec. Grand Concert Studio, National Radio Company of Ukraine, 18-20 October
2007. DDD
CAMBRIA CD1170 [66:01]
The American composer Deon
Nielsen Price studied with Leslie Bassett and Samuel Adler. She has been
active in various academic bodies in West Coast universities. She has written
extensively and with distinction in relation to her instrument, the piano.
Her catalogue of compositions is substantial.
The pieces featured here are recorded at a higher level than usual and every
detail emerges close-up and vivid.
Yellow Jade Banquet sports super-clear textures and lines. Impressions
flood in: an excited squeal, an enchanting undulation, an Oriental swerve,
a hint of chant and seductively inspirational pulses suggestive of minimalism
- which this writing is not. Hovhaness, McPhee, Cowell and Lou Harrison are
perhaps influences on this composer.
The macabre Epitaphs for Fallen Heroes induces awe. There is something
of the ceremony in this piece with its stonily resonant and hieratically
assertive piano part. The Dies Irae and angular dissonance are confidently
mixed. Take this as a sort of Bergian-surreal successor to Liszt’s Totentanz.
America Themes is a phantasmagoria of American traditional tunes with Johnny
comes marching home melting into Taps and thence to Copland and
so on. The composer affectionately continues a tradition made resilient by
Ives and keeps the ear constantly beguiled by each transition.
Gateways is a gritty, rhetorical and tough work for wind band. It
is inspired by life’s paths that step off the way or onward through
gateways. It is as much about the paths as the gateways themselves, we are
told.
States of Mind is a work in four movements: Meditation, Troubled
Thoughts, Mysterious Dream, Transformation. The first is
a tender essay redolent of Barber at his most gentle. Troubled Thoughts thrusts
thorny angles into the pottage and its stinging poignancy sears and scars
in a way suggestive of Schnittke. Mysterious Dream moves from dank
meditation to free-wheeling surreal visions. Transformation has a
serrated Shostakovich-like determination and some stunning headlong pizzicato
passages. The fugal flavour of some of the writing was irritating - a very
personal prejudice.
Dancing on the Brink of the World is much in the same exotic vein
- a sort of time-travelling fantasy from the Yelamu autochthons of Crissy
Field to Hispanic incursion and onwards from the internment of Japanese Americans
to a tribute in retrospect to the ancient cultures. It’s a rich brew
of whooping energy, bristling and chirruping, ratchet and rattle, groaning
brass redolent of Hovhaness and dancing vitality. A smoochy soft shoe dance
is made the more intriguing by a high and anxiously buzzing repeated figure
from the violins. Fragments and musical units are in constant motion like
an inspirational kaleidoscope of the emotions and of inventive imagery. The
effect in this work’s dazzle of consciousness is something like a pellucid
version of Grainger’s Warriors. The work ends with the foghorn
in the Bay.
This disc is a successor to Cambria’s first Deon Nielsen Price CD (CD-1170)
which included To the Children of War, song-cycle for voice and piano; Diversions; Crossroads for
trio; L'Alma Jubilo (The Jubilant Soul), for solo guitar; Big Sur
Triptych, for soprano saxophone and piano: (Sea Otters; Redwoods; Crags); Hexachord: View
from Malibu; and Three Faces of Kim, the Napalm Girl, for alto
and soprano saxophones and piano.
The notes are quite full but fail to tell me things like the composer’s
year of birth and exactly where Crissy Field is.
This music is intriguing - rich and strange indeed. Very Californian in the
freewheeling accommodation it strikes with the Pacific Rim and with history.
Rob Barnett