"Daugherty: Fire & Blood - Motorcity Triptych; Raise the Roof" - 2020

Product Description This recording celebrates three exciting works commissioned and premiered by the Detroit Symphony Orch. During Michael Daugherty's four years as composer in residence. Inspired by Diego Rivera's monumental fresco and Frida's Kahlo's painting created in Detroit, Michigan. Review The three works here dig deep into Detroit's cultural soil. Fire and Blood (2003) is a violin concerto inspired by Diego Rivera's incomparable Detroit Industry murals at the Detroit Institute of Arts. MotorCity Triptych (2000) proposes a travelogue with movements that channel Motown concerts at the Roostertail nightclub in 1966, a high-speed drive along Michigan Avenue and an homage to civil rights hero Rosa Parks. Raise the Roof (2003), a de facto timpani concerto, was commissioned for the opening of the Max M. Fisher Music Center. Best of the lot is Fire and Blood, which made a dazzling impression on its premiere and sounds even better six years later. It is the most profound Daugherty piece I know, the best example of his eclectic and kinetic style reaching beyond surface excitement for deeply moving music that touches the soul. Played with striking authority by Detroit-bred soloist Ida Kavafian and a vibrantly alive orchestra under Järvi's baton, the 28-minute, three-movement piece translates Rivera's dynamic depiction of the River Rouge assembly line and heroic laborers into music that pulsates with muscle, percussive commotion, sweeping energy, bright colors and mournful shadow. The outer movements are full of fury as the soloist, rarely out of the spotlight, explodes in fury and sheets-of-sounds passages. The central movement, inspired by Rivera's wife, artist Frida Kahlo, features a nostalgic minor-key melody perched halfway between a mariachi folk melody and Mahler funeral march that throbs with feeling. The highly syncopated MotorCity Triptych is less consistent than the concerto, but its best moments -- particularly the Rosa Parks finale, with three trombones orating sermons of blues shouts, plaintive cries and fragments of the spiritual Oh Freedom -- pack a strong emotional wallop. Elsewhere there are evocations of Motown ballads, Middle Eastern restaurants and more filtered through Daugherty's neon orchestrations. The ear catches streaks of inspiration, but some melodies veer close to cliché and the collage of ideas doesn't always meld into an organic whole. On the other hand, the performance is exemplary. Järvi invests the music with his incomparable spontaneity and rhythmic pop and the soloists -- principally the trombone trio of Ken Thompkins, Michael Becker and Randy Hawes and trumpeter Ramon Parcells -- play like aces. Raise the Roof, a 13-minute showcase for the DSO's brilliant virtuoso timpanist Brian Jones, is heavily flavored by jazz, especially in the Stan Kenton-like passages girded by Latin rhythms, a piano vamp and punchy brass. It's not the most serious music, but it was never meant to be. It's a party piece and there's nothing wrong with that. --Detroit Free Press, Mark Stryker, September 2009
ASIN: B002DHSGW2
VSKU: DBV.B002DHSGW2.G
Condition: Good