ANDERSON-BAZZOLI Continent's End
View record and artist detailsRecord and Artist Details
Composer or Director: Kevin Korth, Christopher Anderson-Bazzoli
Genre:
Vocal
Label: Delos
Magazine Review Date: 04/2019
Media Format: CD or Download
Media Runtime: 0
Mastering:
DDD
Catalogue Number: DE3567
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Tracks:
Composition | Artist Credit |
---|---|
Continent’s End |
Christopher Anderson-Bazzoli, Composer
Buffy Baggott, Mezzo soprano Christopher Anderson-Bazzoli, Composer Kevin Korth, Composer |
Author: David Patrick Stearns
However short the disc (33 minutes), epic qualities abound. The poems are full of quickly shifting imagery conveying a rugged coastal terrain with a belief in survival of the fittest, no matter how cruel it may seem, one poem describing the horrible beauty of wild fires. The opening song, ‘Granite and Cypress’, sets the tone, with arioso ish vocal lines unfurling over aggressive arpeggios that are as changeable as coastal weather. The ending is oddly nonchalant but leads well into the following song, ‘Natural Music’, which characterises ‘the old voice of the ocean’. That music is slow, spare and with less defined harmonic direction. Later songs create narrative by developing thematic content gradually, though most often songs are built from alternately lyrical and rhetorical modules that flow together in some instances but also crash up against each other with a poetic juxtaposition that sounds fortuitously accidental.
One of the composer’s wittiest inspirations comes from Jeffers’s more detached portrayals of mankind, set to music suggesting an extremely busy ant hill. Though not particularly original, Anderson-Bazzoli admirably doesn’t follow in anybody’s footsteps.
Should this cycle take its place alongside, say, Elgar’s Sea Pictures? Hard to say in this performance because mezzo-soprano Buffy Baggott is severely miscast. Plenty of moments hint at how much she has taken the music into her mind and heart. But rarely does that come out of her voice, which is suited more to Verdi’s Amneris than a piece that walks extremely fine lines, ones that are admirably etched by pianist Kevin Korth. Words are indistinguishable for long passages. And that’s much of what we’re here for.
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