I was quite struck by Ellen Taaffe Zwilich's First Symphony (New World, 6/87), and immediately recognized the characteristic intensity of her manner in the much more recent (1993) Third. Her style is modern but accessible: no one who responds to Shostakovich or to such American symphonists as Walter Piston or William Schuman will find it problematic. And yet a reservation that I had about the First Symphony seems in the Third to have become almost insuperable. I described the First as ''lacking a conclusion''; it is not so much that, I now suspect, as a lack of any real sense of direction. The Third Symphony contains plenty of good ideas: a sombre and long-spanned viola melody that acts as 'first subject' in the opening movement; the malign march that propels the central scherzo. But I really cannot feel that the symphony would be much harmed if its movements were played in reverse order, or if the outer ones in particular were to be cut by about three minutes apiece.
This is still more of a problem in the Oboe Concerto, which agreeably exploits the instrument's capacity for lyricism and ingeniously provides it with a 'family' (a second oboe, oboe d'amore and cor anglais) with which it can have more intimate conversations than with the main orchestra, but the music does not so much develop as alternate between slow and fast ideas. This contrast runs out of interest after about ten minutes, but the piece lasts for 17. The best music here by far is the Concerto grosso, whose outer sections are orchestral variants of a Handel sonata (Op. 1 No. 1), the three inner movements much more personal meditations on it. The central Largo has more sustained invention and intensity of feeling than symphony and concerto put together.
The performances of all three pieces are good, but the recording of the symphony seems rather unbalanced: the ear strains to hear details that it suspects are important but which are not quite in focus.'