This
Avie
release takes its title from that of the three-movement work by
Michael Tilson Thomas
that opens the program, here receiving its world premiere. It might be considered the main attraction, inasmuch as
Tilson Thomas
is much better known as a conductor than as a composer, and the quality of this work, written in stages in the 1960s and '70s, suggests that audiences have been missing a lot since composing took a back seat in his career. Pianist
John Wilson
's program is a cohesive whole, not a main work with a pair of encores.
George Gershwin
is present in name only as the composer of the songs elaborated by
Earl Wild
in his
Seven Virtuoso Etudes after Gershwin
(which pose no problems for
Wilson
technically), but really,
Gershwin
hangs over the whole album. The
work is like a late 20th century take on
, adding more modern forms of jazz, bossa nova, and more to
's basic language. It seems to fill a great need for music that develops
's ideas for something closer to our own time, and
has done a great service by recording it;
dedicates the last movement of the piece to
Yuja Wang
, and while one hopes to hear it from her sometime,
's reading is fully equal to the work's challenges.
Aaron Copland
's
Piano Sonata
of 1940 is also fascinating to hear in this context. This sonata, not often played, doesn't easily fit into the modernist or the populist classification of
Copland
's work, and in this performance, one picks up the hints of
's more accessible language in its dissonant environment. This release was one of those that brought
Elaine Martone
a Producer of the Year Grammy nomination in 2022 (she shared production duties with
himself), and indeed, the sound from the Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center in La Jolla, California, is wonderfully idiomatic and well managed. ~ James Manheim