Grofé: Orchestral Works

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Music CD Cover

• CD Recording
• Ferde GrofT

Free Music Notes for Grofé: Orchestral Works

Free Music Review: Another Grofe cd
Hit: 5 Stars

George Gershwin`s music has never lacked champions, and it is drawing even greater attention this season in honor of his centennial. Perhaps the occasion will lead listeners to reconsider Ferde Grofe, the composer and the arranger for the Paul Whiteman Band who orchestrated Gershwin`s "Rhapsody in Blue", transforming it from a rhythmically vital two-piano score into the atmospheric essay in symphonic jazz that has been a favorite for nearly three-quarters of a century. Little of Grofe`s own music is played today, except two panoramic suites - the "Grand Canyon" and the "Mississippi. In the Modern American Music of Ferde Grofe, the Beau Hunks, an enterprising Dutch ensemble conducted by Jan Stulen, put Grofe`s ambitions in perspective. As a classical trained musician who had held orchestral jobs before joining the Whiteman ban, he believed that the best hope for a flourishing American orchestral style lay in the combination of symphonic music and jazz. It didn`t work out quite that way, but Grofe was clearly onto something: his "Broadway at Night" (1924) paints a vivid picture of the nightlife of the theater district in its heyday, and one of its passing images - a distant muted trumpet - found an expansive echo 16 years later in Aarn Copland`s "Quiet City". There are folksy touches in the " Mississippi Suite" (1925), particularly in the "Mardi Gras" movement that are precursors of moves Copland used in his ballets of the 1940`s. The 17-minute "Metropolis: A Blue Fantasy" (1928) embraces both overt jazziness and fugal counterpoint. The "Cloudburst" movement from the "Grand Canyon Suite",offered as an encore of sortis, is as picturesque an evocation of a storm as you`ll find in the 20th-century repertory. The Beau Hunks' previous explorations have yielded remarkable collections of Raymond Scott`s quirky vignettes and LeRoy Shield`s soundtracks for classic Laurel & Hardy and Little Rascals films. They approach this music the way an early-music group approaches Handel, but with the benefit of erpiod recordings that embody information about the timbres, phrasing and ornamentation of the time. These musicians have picked up these details splendidly: the string glissandos and the grace notes in the trumpet lines in " Metropolis" and "Three Shades of Blue" (1926), the rhythmic fluidity of "Broadway at Night" and the punchy, perfectly balanced wind and brass chording in virtually every work here all create the illusion of a performance from the 1920`s, captured with the clarity and depth of modern recordings. The notes and illustrations also honour Grofe suitably

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