Musical America Review: 100 Years of America in Music

“Lustrous clarity and great precision”

Image by Kiran West

Review extracted from “100 Years of America in Music” in Musical America Worldwide Magazine

By Clive Paget / November 18, 2021

Released on December 3, Transatlantic takes a slightly different tack by considering how various 20th- and 21st-century composers have been drawn to the idea of America and how it has informed their writing. It’s the brainchild of conductor Garrett Keast and the Berlin Academy of American Music, an ad hoc group of American expats and friends that came together to make music during the pandemic.

It opens with a crisply articulated account of Stravinsky’s Dumbarton Oaks, a tangy, Neoclassical concerto written around the time the Russian composer was becoming a U. S. citizen. A decade later, his opera The Rake's Progress is represented by the aria “No Word from Tom,” sung with incandescent purity by soprano Chen Reiss.

Japanese composer Toru Takemitsu’s Toward the Sea II for alto flute, harp, and strings comprises three filigree musical evocations of scenes from Melville’s Moby Dick. It’s presented by way of complete contrast to Copland’s more typical view of America in Appalachian Spring, here played in its original format for 13 instruments. Both are performed and recorded with lustrous clarity and great precision.

Contemporary music is represented by American composer Craig Urquhart (an assistant and pupil of Bernstein) and Israeli American composer Avner Dorman. The former’s affecting Lamentation for flute and strings is lovingly played by Greek flautist Stathis Karapanos. Dormer’s skirling, modally inflected song cycle Nofim is an instantly appealing setting of Hebrew poems by Yuval Rapaport, depicting scenes from the Tel Aviv neighborhood where he and Dorman grew up best friends. These slinky orchestral songs with their occasional whisper of Kurt Weill draw sensual performances from Reiss and Karapanos.

For the entire read of “100 Years of Music in America,” click here (for Musical America subscribers).