“The three works on the new, vividly recorded Adam Schoenberg hybrid SACD from Reference Recordings, recorded in 24/176.4 surround and played by the Kansas City Symphony under Michael Stern, are deliciously tonal, filled with color and energy, and irrepressibly optimistic. …Schoenberg simply dazzles and delights. Plus, anyone who writes a modern-day Pictures at an Exhibition is someone every music-loving audiophile will want to check out. …the [American Symphony] is variously colorful, exciting, unabashedly positive, touching, and luminous. Aretha, Barack and Michelle would have had a ball dancing through the “stars, stripes and celebration” finale. There are no walls in this symphony.…Conceived as a 21st-century Pictures at an Exhibition, Pictures Studies for orchestra (2012) was commissioned by the Kansas City Symphony and Nelson-Atkins Museum. Its inspiration was eight different works by different visual artists, including Kandinsky (with a lot going on in that movement), Calder (even more luminous, with bells and gongs and deliciously deep double bass that will definitely test your system’s low extension and bass control), and Miró (sparkling, light, and danceable). You’ll dance right through this symphony’s equivalent of Mussorgsky’s “The Gates of Kiev,” which here, inspired by Francis Blake’s photography, Pigeons in Flight, creates a big, unmistakably urban, irrepressibly optimistic danceable climax.” —Jason Victor Serinus, Stereophile
Categories : Review