“Over the last two decades, Wynton Marsalis has been composing jazz-inflected music for the classical concert hall,” writes David Bratman in Tuesday’s (8/13) San Francisco Classical Voice. “Two major works from this project formed the final concert of this year’s Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music [led] the festival’s music director, Cristian Măcelaru…. Marsalis has found a mixture with a distinctive flavor of his own. The focus of the concert was on the [40-minute] Concerto in D for Violin and Orchestra, written in 2015 for the Scottish violinist Nicola Benedetti, who played it on Sunday…. The opening idiom, seemingly the basic language of the work, is neo-Romantic modernist…. Gradually the solo part is infected with the flattened and bent notes and slides of blues scales…. At the end … Benedetti … quietly played a repeating figure while wandering offstage…. Marsalis’s The Blues Symphony for orchestra is an even larger work, seven movements lasting an hour. It’s recognizably by the same composer, but has an entirely different feel…. The symphony is built around a repeating 12-bar blues progression. This is kept in the bass and functions roughly as a passacaglia…. It’s cool-toned and genial where the concerto is nervous and jittery.”
Posted August 19, 2019
