American Themes from a Berlin Point of View

courtesy of PIAS

At the end of last month ONYX Classics released a new album entitled Transatlantic. That title reflects the selections on the album and how they were performed. The album marks the recording debut of the Berlin Academy of American Music, founded about a year ago by its Artistic Director and Conductor Garrett Keast. (Yes, this ensemble was formed in the midst of pandemic conditions.)

This is one of those groups that was created for the performance of a specific composition. In this case the work was “Lamentation,” created by the American composer Craig Urquhart and originally scored for flute and piano. The work was first performed in the summer of 2020 at the Schleswig-Holstein Musik Festival, where it was honored with the 2020 Leonard Bernstein Award. The following November Keast discussed with Urquhart and flutist Stathis Karapanos, who had given the premiere performance, the possibility of recording a new, orchestrated version. Recruiting an ensemble for that recording project resulted in the creation of the Berlin Academy. That project culminated in selecting and performing the repertoire for the Transatlantic album.

That said, the “American Music” modifier is likely to confound the usual expectations. The only other American-born composer on the album is Aaron Copland. The album begins with Igor Stravinsky’s E-flat chamber concerto given the title “Dumbarton Oaks,” which was first performed (at Dumbarton Oaks) in 1938. Stravinsky became a naturalized citizen of the United Stated, but not until December of 1945. Avner Dorman, who currently teaches Theory and Composition at the Sunderman Conservatory of Music at Gettysburg College in Pennsylvania, maintains his Israeli citizenship. His contribution to the album is the song cycle Nofim, setting texts in Hebrew. Tōru Takemitsu, on the other hand, was born in Tokyo and died there; but his Toward the Sea suite was inspired by the American novel Moby Dick.

Copland is represented by “Appalachian Spring;” and it is a bit ironic and a bit more disappointing that I should be writing about this music so soon after having listened to Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) conduct the San Francisco Symphony in a full-orchestra arrangement of Copland’s complete score. The music was composed for a dance choreographed by Martha Graham and was scored for only thirteen players. I had previously written that instrumentation was probably determined by “limitations in both space and capital,” since Graham and her company of dancers first performed the work at the Library of Congress. Copland subsequently extracted a suite from the score to be played by a full orchestra. Keast decided to have the suite performed by the original thirteen-instrument resources. While this is a satisfactory solution for a chamber ensemble, it elides over the most visceral qualities of Copland’s score, resulting in a somewhat feeble account of the sentiment-laden rhetoric pouring out of a full orchestra in the suite version.

Taken as a whole, I must confess that I find the overall repertoire of the album a bit on the weak side. Stravinsky towers above all the other tracks on the album, not only through the “Dumbarton Oaks” concerto but also In soprano Chen Reiss’  account of Anne Truelove’s aria at the conclusion of the first act of The Rake’s Progress. Indeed, both of these selections provide excellent examples of Stravinsky’s “neo-classical” approach to composition, since the concerto is a nod to Johann Sebastian Bach, while Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart overshadows Anne’s aria. In that context even Takemitsu comes across as somewhat diminished, and Copland definitely deserved better.