Kenneth Fuchs Orchestral Works, Vol. 1: Cloud Slant; Quiet in the Land; Pacific Visions; Solitary the Thrush* *Adam Walker (flute); Sinfonia of London/John Wilson Chandos CHSA 5296 (CD/SACD) 59:16 mins
Seven albums of Kenneth Fuchs’s music may have been released on Naxos, but the American composer’s cupboard is far from bare. All of the recent items collected on Chandos’s release (labelled ‘Orchestral Works, Volume 1’) are listed as premiere recordings, though his musical language is such that it often feels that we’ve heard everything before. Glittering arpeggios drench us with the salt sea air of Britten’s interludes from Peter Grimes, while Copland’s ‘big sky’ manner haunts the cut and curl of individual phrases. And whatever Fuchs’s sources of inspiration – from Helen Frankenthaler’s abstract paintings to lines of Walt Whitman and the prairie lands of the Midwest – experience shows that you’re never far from similar gestures: big tutti whooshes, fast-changing colours, agile timpani tattoos.
High-level craftsmanship also predominates, further polished by the verve and precision of John Wilson’s Sinfonia of London, at their most impressive in the bright colour splashes of Cloud Slant, the concerto for orchestra especially written for Wilson and this album. Expert flautist Adam Walker adds his own lustre in the wheeling arabesques of the Whitman-inspired Solitary the Thrush. So, sonic dazzlements galore; though there’s only one piece that advances enough beyond surface delight to achieve a forceful emotional impact. It’s Quiet in the Land from 2017, a sharpened version of a chamber landscape piece written during the Second Gulf War, newly disrupted by menacing dissonances, a snarling side drum, and, right at the end, the kind of disquiet that gets under your skin.
Geoff Brown