New releases from Daugherty and Tann
These days a column about the local classical music scene could easily become a long and sad litany of what concerts, operas and festivals are not happening due to COVID-19. This month, the Albany Symphony Orchestra would normally be operating at full capacity with its American Music Festival at EMPAC. One of the highlights in the always-busy schedule is the annual concert by the Dogs of Desire, the chamber subset led by music director David Alan Miller.
Well, there’s good news for the Dogs and their fans with the release of a new recording from Naxos. There’s only one composition on the disc, Michael Daugherty’s “This Land Sings,” a beautiful and fascinating tribute to the great folk singer and labor activist Woody Guthrie.
I’ll bet that even some of the most loyal ASO patrons don’t remember the concert of this piece. It was tucked into a Saturday afternoon time slot during the 2017 festival and only a middling sized audience showed up in the EMPAC theater. For those of us who were there, it was a memorable event that’s been well captured by producer and engineer Silas Brown.
Miller’s advocacy of Daugherty’s music dates back at least to his second season of the ASO when he conducted the composer’s Superman-inspired “Metropolis Symphony” followed by the Beethoven Fifth. Another Daugherty recording of concertos with the full ASO was released two years ago, also on Naxos.
Daugherty finds inspiration in American culture, from the bawdy to the refined, and yet his pieces aren’t cheap or obvious but skillful, colorful and dramatic. “My music is abstract and realistic at the same time. You can hear it either way, depending on your point of view,” he told me a few years back.
“This Land Sings” is scored for soprano, baritone and an ensemble of seven instruments. Across 17 short movements that last about an hour, Daugherty accomplishes much. It sometimes feels like a song cycle but it’s not hard to envision the material being expanded into a theatrical or a multimedia piece. There are generous quotes from Guthrie’s song repertoire, but also sophisticated and demanding writing for the musicians.
In “Bread and Roses” soprano Annika Socolofsky sings a rather mournful tribute to the suffragists accompanied by bassoonist Oleksiy Zakharov, who’s give an endless and haunted line. The composer himself plays a mean harmonica in “My Heart Is Burning,” another sad but searing number that’s a duet with bassist Michael Fittipaldi. It’s followed by “I’m Gonna Walk This Lonesome Valley,” which was one of Guthrie’s hits. Daugherty uses the words but gives them a new tune crafted on a similar gently rocking terrain. This one’s also a duet, bringing together the soulful baritone John Daugherty (no relation to the composer) and the crystalline clarinet playing of Weixiong Wang.
The progression of vocal and instrumental numbers was conceived as a broadcast from the Grand Ole Opry. For the EMPAC concert, Daugherty read a narration that got left off the recording due to time constraints. The material holds up fine without it.
Daugherty wrote most of the