Robert McCormick, director of the
McCormick Percussion Ensemble, commissioned many of the works on this album, and his ensemble plays them with energy and a broad range of expressiveness. The solo parts are expertly taken by members of the ensemble, students at the University of South Florida. The limits of using only percussion instruments in place of a traditional orchestra pushes composers to find new solutions to the question of the relationship of the soloist to the accompanying ensemble, and the works here demonstrate a variety of inventive uses of timbre and rhythm to replace the conventional melodic ensemble. Some, like Daniel Adams' and
Paul Reller's concertos and Jan van Landeghem's Concertino, are driven by a propulsive rhythmic impulse. Others, such as Paul Bissell's The Alabados Song, create shimmering clouds of evolving sonorities. Chihchun Chi-sun Lee devotes one of the three movements of her Concerto for marimba and four percussionists primarily to sounds created by the body -- vocalizations, claps, and slaps. Cayenna Rosa Ponchione's The Creation, perhaps the most effective work on the album, is wonderfully evocative of slow-moving and cataclysmic primordial processes. Each of the works uses the soloist and the percussion ensemble with a high level of inventiveness, ingenuity, and a strong sensitivity to the color possibilities of the instruments, both individually and in ensemble. Capstone's sound is clean and natural.