There are many musical faces to the greatly gifted American composer Stephen Hartke, as recent releases on the labels ECM (“Tituli”) and New World (“Sons of Noah”) prove. This new Naxos disc may be the best of the three.
Each of the four works, all first recordings, represents the idea of a landscape, real and imagined. The principal piece, Hartke’s 2001 Clarinet Concerto (subtitled “Landscapes With Blues”), takes the soloist, the astonishing Richard Stoltzman, on an exhilarating journey laced with Mississippi Delta blues, West African folk singing and down-and-dirty urban funk. Everything is absorbed into a musical grammar that reaches out to the listener without pandering. The concerto would be a natural for the Chicago Symphony’s Larry Combs, and I hope he works it into his repertory soon.
The other works all have their distinctive profiles, as well — from Hartke’s austere evocation of the northern New Mexico desert in the string octet “Rose of the Winds” (1998), to the jerky, jazzy sextet “Gradus” (1999), to “Pacific Rim” (1988), an exuberant travelogue that, in 10 minutes, whisks us from a Japanese gagaku ceremony to a Latin American festival in Los Angeles. Performances and recording are first-rate. I love this disc.
