The two works on this release by the ever-adventurous Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony Orchestra were composed some 30 years apart, but they evince a similar fascination with the tensions along the line between text and music. Tobias Picker's language is tonal, and the music fits the kind of accessibility often pursued by this conductor and ensemble. Yet, it doesn't count as neo-Romantic, and there's something quite modern in their way of rethinking basic musical elements. The earlier of the two works, The ...
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The two works on this release by the ever-adventurous Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony Orchestra were composed some 30 years apart, but they evince a similar fascination with the tensions along the line between text and music. Tobias Picker's language is tonal, and the music fits the kind of accessibility often pursued by this conductor and ensemble. Yet, it doesn't count as neo-Romantic, and there's something quite modern in their way of rethinking basic musical elements. The earlier of the two works, The Encantadas, might be called a melodrama, although it doesn't fit the dramatic conventions of that form. It's a work for narrator and orchestra, to texts by Herman Melville from The Encantadas , a sort of prose poem about what are now called the Galápagos Islands. The text has a fascinating kind of narrative but somewhat elevated language, and Picker's language falls into a unique zone between drama and orchestral song, all anchored to the text. Opera Without Words, co-commissioned...
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