“Saturday’s program at Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center was the finale of the Albany Symphony Orchestra’s annual American Music Festival,” writes Joseph Dalton in Monday’s (5/18) Times-Union (Albany, N.Y.). In Clint Needham’s We Are All From Somewhere Else, “It was easy to imagine a fast-moving film of the Great Plains…. Over the loudspeakers came voices of newish Americans recalling their arrivals in this land. A truly grand finale came in the form of Derek Bermel’s ‘Migration Series’ Concerto for jazz band and orchestra. The half-hour piece drew inspiration from paintings by Jacob Lawrence and was commissioned by Wynton Marsalis and his Lincoln Center Jazz Orchestra, which debuted it in 2006. For this performance … the ASO was joined by 16 members of the Juilliard Jazz Orchestra…. In between the five dense movements came some lightly scored interludes. One of the most attractive featured Bermel himself on a squawking clarinet, in conversational duet with double bass. Chalk up a jazz big band as another first for David Alan Miller’s tenure.” The program also included Michael Daugherty’s Trail of Tears, about the forced Cherokee migration in 1938; and Andrea Reinkemeyer’s NaamJai, drawing upon the composer’s three years in Thailand.
Posted May 19, 2015
