This is the excellent, conductor-less Orpheus Chamber Orchestra, whose all-Copland disc I commended in my round-up of Copland on record (11/90). The Orpheus has established its fastidious profile largely through repertoire of the classical period, but this new release is another facet of its enterprise. The ensemble joined forces with the Los Angeles and St Paul chamber orchestras to commission three new works—everything here except the Bolcom, which was the result of a grant from Frank E. Taplin.
Overall the results of this imaginative scheme, where each composer delivers a 15-minute piece, are a little disappointing. The Lerdahl—like Gandolfi he is new to the British catalogue—is saturated with regular patterns deriving from minimalism. This ought to be suitable for a work called Waves, but the procedure has become a 1980s cliche. Druckman, who won a Pulitzer Prize for his orchestral Windows in 1972, is better known here. Nor Spell nor Charm elaborates a song (text from A Midsummer Night's Dream) written for the American mezzo Jan DeGaetani and is in her memory. Druckman is resourceful in orchestral textures, often using them dramatically, but this piece meanders.
Bolcom, in these pluralistic times, has more to offer. His six-movement Orphee-Serenade is modelled on the Aspen Serenade by his teacher, Milhaud, and it brings together various types of music through the process of style-modulation. (I invented the term to cover this technique and it can now be found in some dictionaries!) The scoring includes an important piano part which the composer plays himself. The joker in every pack, Bolcom has no fear of eccentricity and I admire him for it. He can be lyrical and witty in close proximity, even if the reason for lifting chunks of Mozart's Haffner Serenade in the last movement is not always clear. Both this and the overtly salon orientation of the previous movement have to be recognized as a Bolcom fingerprint—his way of living in the late twentieth century. Gandolfi, by comparison, is responsible but arid.'