![]() ![]() ![]() Based on three key episodes in Homer’s Odyssey, it is a double-edged, not altogether sympathetic portrait of Odysseus. Mackey (a student of Corigliano and Erb, no relation to Steven Mackey) dominates ‘Inventions’, the major work being his symphony Wine-Dark Sea (2014). There is much to enjoy in Jun Nagao’s 2013 mash-up of The Planets (originally for saxophone quartet) and John Mackey’s Sasparilla (2005), with its drunken bassoons suggesting there’s more to root beer than this reviewer supposed. Feld’s Divertimento and Paul Dooley’s engaging multi-movement Masks and Machines (2015) are, with Michael Daugherty’s Rio Grande (2015 – no connection to Constant Lambert), the pick of this disc. The ‘Discoveries’ disc centres on Adam Schoenberg’s popular American Symphony (2011, given here in Master Sergeant Donald Patterson’s virtuoso 2014 transcription for the US President’s Marine Band) which, for all the razzmatazz of the concluding ‘Stars, Stripes and Celebrations’, has many passages of subtle gravity and instrumental finesse. GIA’s three releases contain almost exclusively 21st-century compositions – only Corigliano’s Elegy (1965 – from an off-Broadway musical about Helen of Troy), given here in Christopher Anderson’s 2012 arrangement, and Jindřich Feld’s delightful Divertimento (2000) predate our millennium. The American concert band has a sound distinctively its own and a virtuosity that has attracted mainstream composers since the 1950s: Hindemith (B flat Symphony, 1951), Roy Harris and Morton Gould (sesquicentennial West Point Symphonies, 1952), Vincent Persichetti, whose 14 band works include his Sixth Symphony (1956), to name a few. ![]()
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