The Ultimate Jazz Album, this, imaginatively programmed and impeccably realized by all involved. We kick off with the dazzling world premiere recording of John Adams’s six-and-a-half-minute Lollapalooza (1995), whose infectiously rhythmic, post-modern cavortings are relished to the full by Tilson Thomas and his superb young band. Even more than MTT’s own 1983 LAPO account, this new Rhapsody in Blue evinces an improvisatory fantasy and edge-of-seat, theatrical fervour to make one appreciate anew the extraordinary boldness, reckless danger even, of Gershwin’s ground-breaking inspiration.
Bernstein’s exhilarating Prelude, Fugue and Riffs receives the outing of a lifetime, a gloriously idiomatic, stunningly assured display which, like the wonderfully poised reading of Stravinsky’s Ebony Concerto, invites and fully withstands comparison with Benny Goodman’s inimitable advocacy. We also get a singularly deft and atmospheric performance of Milhaud’s 1923 ballet masterpiece, La creation du monde, whose striking pre-echoes of Gershwin have, to my ears, never seemed more potent than here.
All of which just leaves Hindemith’s ‘well-tempered’ Ragtime, a mischievous reworking from 1921 of the C minor Fugue from Book 1 of the 48 (and dispatched on this occasion with a gleeful exuberance which looks forward to the same composer’s Symphonic Metamorphosis of over two decades later), George Antheil’s endearingly outrageous A Jazz Symphony (given in its original 1925 guise, and not the shorter 1955 revision favoured by H. K. Gruber and the Ensemble Modern – RCA, 12/96) and David Raksin’s gorgeous main title for Vincente Minnelli’s The Bad and the Beautiful (1952).
Thrillingly realistic sound throughout. Not to be missed!'