Worthington: Dream Vapors - Selected Works for Orchestra / Robert Ian Winstin, Petr Vronsky, Ovidiu Marinescu – Tonträger gebraucht kaufen

wie neu

53 Min.

2016

CD

120 g

Album: NEU und EINGESCHWEISST (OVP). STILL SEALED

Rain Worthington: Dream Vapors - Selected Works For Orchestra / Czech Philharmonic Orchestra

Release Date: 02/12/2016
Label: Navona Catalog #: 6025 Spars Code: DDD
Composer: Rain Worthington
Conductor: Robert Ian Winstin, Petr Vronsky, Ovidiu Marinescu
Number of Discs: 1
Recorded in: Stereo
Length: 0 Hours 53 Mins.
EAN: 0896931003254


Works on This Recording

1. Shredding Glass, for orchestra by Rain Worthington
Conductor: Robert Ian Winstin
Date of Recording: 2006
Length: 10 Minutes 10 Secs.
2. Reversing Mirrors In The Quiet, for chamber orchestra by Rain Worthington
Conductor: Petr Vronsky
Period: Contemporary
Written: 2012
Date of Recording: 06/11/2015
Venue: Reduta Hall, Olomouc, Czech Republic
Length: 6 Minutes 7 Secs.
3. Tracing a Dream, for orchestra by Rain Worthington
Conductor: Ovidiu Marinescu
Period: Contemporary
Written: 2009
Date of Recording: 03/2010
Venue: Moscow, Russia
Length: 8 Minutes 14 Secs.
4. Fast Through Dark Winds, for chamber orchestra by Rain Worthington
Conductor: Petr Vronsky
Period: Contemporary
Written: 2013
Date of Recording: 06/11/2015
Venue: Reduta Hall, Olomouc, Czech Republic
Length: 6 Minutes 33 Secs.
5. Within a Dance: A Tone Poem of Love, for orchestra by Rain Worthington
Conductor: Petr Vronsky
Period: Contemporary
Date of Recording: 07/02/2013
Venue: Reduta Hall, Olomouc, Czech Republic
Length: 7 Minutes 50 Secs.
6. Yet Still Night, for orchestra by Rain Worthington
Conductor: Robert Ian Winstin
Date of Recording: 2006
Length: 6 Minutes 3 Secs.
7. Of Time Remembered, for orchestra by Rain Worthington
Conductor: Petr Vronsky
Date of Recording: 11/28/2011
Venue: Reduta Hall, Olomouc, Czech Republic
Length: 7 Minutes 58 Secs.
8. [CD-ROM Track] by Unspecified
Period: Modern


Notes and Editorial Reviews

OVERVIEW

Music can possess the power to take hold of our emotions, guiding us along an imagined journey that stirs our inner being, a concurrently unique and familiar experience. New York composer Rain Worthington writes music to captivate the listener, creating textural and lyrical worlds that are inhabited by various colors and tones. On DREAM VAPORS, her full-length solo debut on Navona Records, the composer offers a selection of her orchestral works, presenting intense dreams, intangible perceptions, and musically evocative elaborations.

Worthington's orchestral works place opposing emotional states side-by-side, juxtaposing them to form vulnerable gestures of tension and harmony. Works like Shredding Glass – described by Scott Locke in the Journal of International Alliance for Women in Music, as providing “exquisite disintegration, mere glass filaments casting light in all directions, with an undercurrent of unresolved apprehension… The texture is transparent but luminous, reminiscent perhaps of the late works of Mahler” – address the acceptance of devastating events, overcoming them with steadfast courage and transcendence. Conveying the impressionistic logic of dreams and emotions, Worthington expresses fear and sadness, conviction and love sometimes within the same piece.

Works such as Fast Through Dark Winds and Tracing a Dream emphasize how the desolate and despairing can heighten the joyous and tranquil. Yet Still Night exemplifies the composer's use of texture, dynamics, and phrasing to convey an emotion: “Worthington has achingly difficult things to say to us, and her use of chromaticism, especially downward chromatic movement, to convey anguish, is very effective” (MusicWeb International). Worthington depicts a reality in her music that is relatable, direct, and inviting, revealing an environment in which the stuff of dreams can come alive.

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HIGHLIGHTS

Music journalist Bob Briggs noted that Worthington “writes music which speaks to the senses, is packed with real emotion and, most important of all in contemporary music, really communicates”

Worthington's music has been performed in a wide variety of venues from loft performance spaces and dance clubs in New York City, to chamber concerts in Spain, India, Brazil, and Iceland

She is praised by Kyle Gann of Chamber Music magazine for taking “ideas of American musical style to a new place – like a walk in a familiar, yet very different park... And [her music] isn't afraid to come up with its own startling conclusions”

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It's always a real pleasure to discover a composer whose work is new to you, whose work speaks to the senses and is packed with real emotion.

Shredding Glass is Ms Worthington's response to the atrocity of 9/11, but it's not a wild, violent, “Somebody must pay” kind of piece; it's about the mind-numbing unbelievability of the situation. It's when you stand open-mouthed, wide-eyed, and speechless trying to take in what has happened.

This music is in a world of its own. It has an original voice and is quite specific in what it has to say. Certainly there's much tragedy in the music, but Ms Worthington is no spectator here, she is consumed with what has happened. The affront is personal and she obviously felt the need to share her feelings.

Using a relatively small orchestra – no trumpets, and the most subtle percussion – she allows us to be part of the outrage, but not in any tub-thumping way, more in an intellectual and intelligent way than merely hang 'em high rhetoric. Worthington understands exactly how to convey painstaking agony without ever lapsing into cliché or being maudlin.

This is a very beautiful work, which weaves intricate patterns of sound in an hallucinogenic haze. It's beautifully orchestrated, the material is well handled and it creates a dreamscape of exquisite allure. There are no heroes here, just we impotent onlookers.

Shredding Glass makes for a superb disk, and one not to be missed. Well worth investigating.

Not everything is cosy and nice in the nocturne Yet Still Night. There's a very disturbing undercurrent to this music. Like the Swedish composer Allan Pettersson, Worthington has achingly difficult things to say to us, and her use of chromaticism, especially downward chromatic movement, to convey anguish, is very effective. Yet Still Night starts as a kind of starry night, the wrong notes in both harmony and melody only serving to show that there are clouds on the horizon. It's a child's vision, tempered by a child's knowledge of the Bogeyman. There's a monstrous clock in the middle, somehow eating away at time itself.

In its short playing time, Yet Still Night manages to covey a lifetime of horrors, doubts perhaps, and when it stops – it doesn't end, it simply stops – we're left none the wiser. Disquiet is obviously Worthington's aim, and she succeeds superbly. This is a marvellous piece, with subtle orchestration and a bold wash of melody and harmony. I am excited by it, and I hope you will investigate it because, as they say, it's well worth it. The sound is brilliantly clear and precise.

Bob Briggs

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Rain WORTHINGTON (b.1950)
Dream Vapors: Selected Works for Orchestra
1. Shredding Glass (2004) [10.11]
2. Reversing Mirrors in the Quiet (2012) [6.08]
3. Tracing a Dream (2009) [8.15]
4. Fast Through Dark Winds (2013) [6.33]
5. Within a Dance (2012) [7.51]
6. Yet Still Night (2001) [6.04]
7. Of Time Remembered (2011) [7.56]
Czech Philharmonic Orchestra/Robert Ian Winstin (1,6)
Moravian Philharmonic Orchestra/Petr Vronsky (2,4,5,7)
Russian Philharmonic Orchestra/Ovidiu Marinescu (3)
rec. Reduta Hall, Olomouc, Czech Republic, 11 June 2015 (2, 4), 2 July 2013 (5), 28 November, 2011 (7), no details, 2006 (1, 6), Moscow, March 2010 (3)
NAVONA RECORDS NV6025 [52:58]

This is important and interesting music, from a composer with something significant - and different - to say. Take, for example, the first piece, Shredding Glass, written in the aftermath of 9/11. The shredding glass is from the Twin Towers. The music is not angry, but rather elegiac in tone, from a sombre and striking opening. It has been described, on its original mp3 release, as evoking the feelings of an impotent but concerned spectator. The composer builds tension through tone clusters, with ever-deepening intensity of feeling. This is not simply a technical exercise in composing sad music: one senses the deep emotion behind it, but, more importantly, shares that feeling. It absorbs the listener. There is grief, with all its intensity, but it is the shared concern of humanity: this is human music.

This is Rain Worthington's first CD of orchestral music, after a life of much variety, with time spent as a music teacher, at another time working in the box office at Troy Savings Bank Music Hall in Albany; known for its wooden auditorium and fine acoustic - many of George Lloyd's works were recorded there. Some pieces, such as Shredding Glass, have been available singly as mp3 downloads, but this CD offers to the opportunity to grasp more thoroughly her compositional voice.

That voice is succinct, always clear and with a strong sense of development. Examination of her scores, available at the label's website, together with notes on the works, reveals an approach to orchestration which is often sparse and clear. She has cited Aaron Copland and some of the minimalists as formative influences. Apparent here is that openness and distinctiveness of expression.

Try, for example, the shortest work on the CD, Yet Still Night. This is a cityscape rather than a rural nocturne. It begins with the sounds of bells, on a piano, quiet and clear, very beautiful. These delicate sounds gradually merge into something stronger. The composer describes the piece as one in which 'recurrent punctuations of an urban soundscape reverberate in the late hours and mix with an emotional insight suffused with sadness and clarity that dreams and conflict will continue, insistent and inconsolable.' Exactly so - and the listener is carried through the piece as it builds: and then it stops, without resolution.

For too many composers, modern music is either the sound of squeaky gates or inconsequential, aimless shimmerings. Neither description is appropriate here: the modernity is in speaking to the condition of humanity as it is.

Profits from the CD all go to an Alzheimer's charity.

Explore this - it is special.

Michael Wilkinson

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Navona 6025A