It's no surprise that Naxos has seen fit to reissue this 1992 recording in its Marco Polo series; contemporary children's music in the concert tradition, critical as the task of writing it might seem, remains in short supply. Dan Welcher, a professor at the University of Texas, composed Haleakala: How Maui Snared the Sun in 1991, when he was composer-in-residence at the Honolulu Symphony. The text, by Ann McCutchan, is drawn on a Polynesian folktale that sketches an origin for the seasons (yes, they do have them in Hawaii). Welcher's music, beginning with a
Copland-esque vocabulary, follows the text closely but has convincing arcs of its own; it is not a film soundtrack. Hawaiian percussion and bits of melody are employed. The story centers on a youthful trickster god named Maui, whose namesake is presumably one of the present Hawaiian islands. The narrator is none other than actor Richard Chamberlain. Whether or not it's because it has an unusually large applicant pool, the little-heard Honolulu Symphony sounds like a major-city ensemble here; the large spaces, tricky percussion parts, and wide dynamic range of Welcher's music are rendered without audible strain. On the quiet tone poem Prairie Light and the jazz- and rock-inflected Concerto for clarinet and orchestra the players remain equal to idiomatic but challenging music; clarinetist Bill Jackson does well in the passages at the instrument's upper extremity that Welcher uses to frame sections of the concerto. The album was recorded at Honolulu's Blaisdell Concert Hall, and the engineering was among the best Naxos managed during the early '90s.