"Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony play this music like they were born to it:" New Reviews of Aaron Kernis: Color Wheel

From Classical-Modern Music Review:

June 26, 2020

I've gladly covered the music of Aaron Jay Kernis (b. 1960) on these pages (type his name in the search box for additional reviews), yet nonetheless hearing the new one by Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony (Naxos 8.559838) is bringing a specially renewed sense of the bliss of orchestral High Modernity. Specifically this album brings to us the single movement Color Wheel (2001) and the multi-movement Symphony No. 4 "Chromelodeon"  (2018).

There is a commanding sense of orchestral color that is matched by an ever-burgeoning inventive continuousness in both works. Variational considerations mark both works nicely, as does a sure sense of balance and poise.

"Color Wheel" gives us twenty-some-odd minutes of brightly shimmering concerted dazzle and depth for orchestra. It bursts forward like a rapidly soaring bird. The music has endless energy and expanded harmonic declamation one gladly surrenders to with a sense of surprising inevitability. Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony play this music like they were born to it.

The "Chromelodeon" Symphony traverses three poetic mood movements, "Out of Silence" searching, exploring, questioning, "Thorn Rose. Weep Freedom (After Handel)" delightfully melancholy and rethought, and "Fanfare Chromelodia" mysterious, dramatic, brooding, then mercuric. It is masterful fare, brilliantly expansive, in the advanced Modernist tradition yet independently expressive of an original sensibility. You might sense a poetic affinity with Ives and Messiaen, but not in any imitative way. It is that good.

Anyone who loves music that is "ahead" in the most interesting senses will find in this volume a source of considerable interest. Kernis deserves your attention, especially this one! Highly recommended.

More at: https://classicalmodernmusic.blogspot.com/2020/06/aaron-jay-kernis-color-wheel-symphony.html

From Infodad:

Whether composed for a large complement of instruments or a small one, 21st-century classical music has developed its own kind of sound, one in which tonal and atonal, consonant and dissonant, strident and lyrical elements mix and intermingle with apparent abandon. Different composers’ works come across quite differently, of course, but there is a pervasive overall willingness to combine disparate characteristics and techniques of classical music – and jazz, non-Western and other musical forms – for the sake of creating a kind of polyglot aural experience. This plays out in distinct ways depending on each composer’s sound-palette preference. A new Naxos recording of music by Aaron Jay Kernis (born 1960) offers two orchestral works whose titles relate them directly to color, and whose approach focuses on displaying both the massed sounds of a full orchestra and the comparative delicacy of individual sections and, at times, individual instruments. Color Wheel (2001) is a raucous and generally dissonant set of exclamations given in conjunction with periodic episodes of more-moderate expression. It is an orchestral showpiece, and at 22½ minutes a somewhat overextended but often very intriguing one. Giancarlo Guerrero has plenty of chances here to showcase the individual and collective strength of the Nashville Symphony, whose players balance exuberance with episodes of careful attentiveness to sections of the score that exhibit a degree of delicacy. Orchestra and conductor are equally adept with the three-movement Symphony No. 4, “Chromelodeon,” written in 2018 and bearing only a superficial resemblance to anything traditionally symphonic. It does have three movements, but the music and the movements’ titles combine to make the work seem a half-hour tone poem rather than a symphony in recognizable form. The first movement rises, as its title indicates, Out of Silence, and here Kernis uses exclamations from individual instruments and small groups to build to a larger sound. The second movement is oddly and rather puzzlingly titled Thorn Rose | Weep Freedom (after Handel): certainly it is thorny enough in its dissonant denseness, and its overall somber mood comes through effectively, but any resemblance to Handel is so coincidental as to be thoroughly irrelevant. The work’s third and shortest movement, Fanfare Chromelodia, is its most accessible and structurally clearest, being built from and around a fanfare-like theme that somewhat recalls Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. Listeners to this recording of two world premières are left at the disc’s end with a sense of having completed an extended melodic and rhythmic journey through some generally craggy environs.

More at: http://transcentury.blogspot.com/2020/06/sounds-for-our-century.html