It’s a bird, it’s a plane... holy skyscrapers, it’s a symphony by Michael Daugherty! Daugherty trades in American mythology. Elvis, J. Edgar Hoover, even Desi (I Love Lucy) Arnez headline among his compositions. He has an opera, Jackie O, scheduled for Houston Grand Opera and a piano concertino – Le Tombeau de Liberace – for the London Sinfonietta. He probably believes that the twin towers of Century City, Los Angeles, are the boxes that Disneyland came in. It’s all in the packaging, you see. Daugherty’s music is nothing like as wacky as it sounds.
Metropolis, you’ll have gathered, is a Superman Symphony (actually more of a suite – its five segments may be programmed independently). Daugherty himself describes it as “a musical response to the myth of Superman... a rigorously structured, non-programmatic work expressing the energies, ambiguities, paradoxes, and wit of American popular culture”. Big words. But where do they leave the caped crusader? And what exactly do they mean in musical terms? Less than they appear to. Metropolis is bigger on effects than substance. And even the effects smack of old technology. Four referee whistles sound the off for Superman’s arch-foe Lex Luthor. Lex, for his part (solo violin), comes on as a kind of supersonic Tartini, ‘devil’s trill’ pyrotechnics riding on the back of a theme at once redolent of Mission: Impossible with attitude.
This is music of a cartoon mentality shot through with all manner of percussive exclamation – “Zap!... Pow!... Klang!... Kerunch!” You know the kind of thing. The fourth movement “Oh, Lois!”, marked “faster than a speeding bullet”, brings on those good old stand-bys, the flexatone and whip, to underscore a cartoon history of reporter Lois Lane in peril. A whizzy voyage-round-my-orchestra. “Krypton” attempts a kind of “Neptune” from The Planets, beginning on an intergalactic glissando (siren courtesy of Varese Ameriques) and lumbering towards apocalypse now – and then. “Mxyzptik” is an impish scherzo – antiphonal flutes (wow), assorted open-string pizzicatos and wood blocks – with a languorous (and quite interesting) trio. And “Red Cape Tango” muses on Superman’s fight to the death with Doomsday, drawing into commission the Dies irae finally to suggest a drug-induced parody of Rachmaninov’s last Symphonic Dance.
Daugherty can handle an orchestra, a big one – there’s no doubt about that. In a punch-drunk, slapstick, oddball kind of way he writes good old-fashioned gestural music. But it is old-fashioned, and it is gestural. Metropolis doesn’t surprise nearly enough. And the material simply isn’t strong enough to reward repeated hearings. Not even in this terrific performance and recording from Zinman and company.
But cue track 6, Bizarro for “symphonic winds and percussion”, and a rather different composer – a wilder, funkier and rather better Michael Daugherty – emerges. This Daugherty was the son of a jazz drummer, a one-time keyboard player with jazz, rock and funk bands. And this Daugherty does what comes naturally. Bizarro (another Superman character – Lex Luthor’s imperfect copy of the caped crusader) is a kind of propulsive big-band jam on a theme not a million light years away from the Dies irae. It’s a wonderfully invasive nine minutes. More imperative, more dangerous than anything in the Metropolis Symphony. Towards the close, there’s a brilliant canon for three trombones and four trumpets. But it sounds like an act of terrorism. The Frankenstein Superman, the Frankenstein Daugherty – I like them both better.'