Andrew Imbrie: Requiem; Piano Concerto No. 3

Lisa Saffer, soprano
New York Virtuoso Singers
Alan Feinberg, piano
George Rothman, conductor
Riverside Symphony

Bridge 9091

Andrew Imbrie (1921-), known to me before only for his opera based on
Wallace Stegner's novel 'Angle of Repose', is represented on this disc
by two large works. The Requiem, composed in response to the death of
his son John in 1981, is a work written to a text that combines the
ancient text of the Mass for the Dead with more modern poetry (Blake
 ['To the Evening Star'], Donne ['Death be not proud'], George Herbert
 ['Prayer']) that comments on death. It is a heartfelt work, written in
Imbrie's highly chromatic and melodious style, and feelingly performed
by soprano Lisa Saffer and the New York Virtuoso Singers, a group dedicated
to singing contemporary choral music. The Riverside Symphony (that's
Riverside, New York City, not California) does a superb job of playing
Imbrie's rhythmically complex music.

The third Piano Concerto, commissioned by the Riverside Symphony for
pianist Alan Feinberg, that indefatigable champion of modern piano music
 [just yesterday I heard him play the newly 'assembled' "Emerson Concerto"
of Charles Ives], grows out of chords reminiscent, Imbrie says, of the
insistent New York City taxi horns of his childhood; he goes on to point
out that they are nothing like Gershwin's perky Paris taxi horns in 'An
American in Paris.' The slow second movement is a nocturne that has a
lighter, playful middle section. The last movement is a rondo that builds
in intensity to a climax that calls back the taxi horns of the first
movement. No one but an American could have written this concerto, and
it is fitting that a New York pianist and a New York orchestra have made
this superb recording.

Scott Morrison