Matt Haimovitz has devoted a large part of his distinguished career to playing and promoting the music of his time, often by young composers. On this disc, he turns to music by three older American composers, all of whom have won the Pulitzer Prize. Two of the pieces are based on literary texts.
Ned Rorem's After Reading Shakespeare (1980) is a suite whose movements are evocations of characters from the plays or brief quotes from the sonnets.
Rorem writes idiomatically and passionately for the cello. It's easy to hear the connection between his brief, distinctively varied movements and the characters or texts they illuminate, but the music is fully independent of the literary references and would make an effective and attractive listening experience even if the movements were simply titled One through Nine.
Paul Moravec and
Lewis Spratlan are teaching composers whose work was not widely known before they were recognized with the Pulitzer, and
Haimovitz commissioned both of the works on this disc.
Moravec's Mark Twain Sez (2006) is based on some of
Twain's aphorisms, which the performer is instructed to speak at the beginning of each movement. This inescapably calls attention to the texts, and perhaps weakens the impact of the piece; it's difficult not to hear the music as primarily illustrative and dependent on the words in order to make an impact.
Spratlan's four-movement Shadow (2006) is the most musically abstract work on the album, as well as the most overtly indebted to a modernist aesthetic; its four movements are rigorously structured but dramatically varied.
Haimovitz plays each of the pieces with full commitment and consummate technical mastery. He has a rich, warm tone that remains sweet and unstrained even when he's at the stratospheric extreme of the cello's range. Oxingale's sound is lively and present.