The booklet notes for this Swedish release are superbly done. Did you know that
Henry Mancini,
Nelson Riddle,
André Previn,
Jerry Goldsmith, and
John Williams all studied with Mario Castelnuovo-Tedesco?
Williams' Concerto for tuba and orchestra is one of four little-known but delightful works for tuba and orchestra brought together here.
Williams was modest about the work ("I hope it has enough events in it to make it fun"), but it may be the highlight of the group, with an effective fusion of the composer's cinematic idiom with the tensions of classical concerto form. The stage is effectively set at the beginning, with its opposition of very low tuba lines and high, one might say galactic, string figures that are very smoothly executed by the
Singapore Symphony Orchestra's players. This Asian group has been among the inspired finds of the BIS label as it has rediscovered and explored the virtuoso repertory of the twentieth century. Many of the works thus unearthed have dated from the early part of the century; the music here is more recent. Probably the best known of the group is
Ralph Vaughan Williams' Concerto for bass tuba, written in 1954 in the composer's ninth decade. Tubist
Øystein Baadsvik, claimed to be the only player in the world to have made a living as a tuba soloist independent of work for another ensemble, handles the unusually stiff technical challenges of this piece without cracking a sweat. The Concerto for tuba and orchestra of Alexander Arutiunian, the longtime conductor of the
Armenian Philharmonic Orchestra, draws on the language of his compatriot
Aram Khachaturian, with plenty of motor rhythms and glockenspiel accents. The Landscape for tuba, string orchestra, and piano by Torbjörn Iwan Lundquist, features lyrical tuba writing (really!) in a sequence of events that is something more than the pastoral scene the title might imply. None of the music here could be called profound, but all of it is profoundly enjoyable, and the BIS engineers outdo themselves in surmounting the problems of registral extremity inherent in a project of this kind.