Search - Milton Babbitt, Marshall Taylor, Peter Jarvis :: Babbitt: Soli e Duettini

One of USA's greatest living composers.Bubbling over with in

Peter Heddon | 03/27/2006

(5 out of 5 stars)

"Babbitt wears a benign,gently humorous expression on his face for the front cover of the CD and this is amply expressed in some of the music on this collection-basically a reissue of a Koch classics release.

My personal favourites are:

1. 'Around the Horn'which sounds like it could be a deconstruction of the 3rd Movement of Mahler's 5th...performed with breathtaking agility by William Purvis (solo horn)

2.'Beaten Paths' a gently whimsical marimba solo.

3.'Melismata'(solo violin) the most intense piece on the disc.Heartfelt memories of the Mendelssohn violin Concerto rubbing shoulders with flippant pizzicati.As with all the music here,played with awesome authority (Curtis Macomber) and feeling for the sometimes peculiar rhetoric of Babbitt's language.



The other items are somewhat cooler....the kind of music which keeps the listener at arms length.I prefer Babbitt when he's the musical equivalent of Hermonious Bosch -try supplementing this disc with the impetuos dancing of the Piano Concerto no.1 on New World records or the volumptuos first half of Transfigured Notes.

"