David Kechley: The Walbrzych Project
Innova

David Kechley's The Walbrzych Project is an interesting release on a number of levels. The title derives from the small Polish town, Walbrzych, where the Philharmonia Sudeka recorded its two orchestral pieces, one a brash single-movement setting and the other a four-movement symphonic work. Though the release totals a modest forty-three-and-a-half minutes, it presents a solid representative sampling of the composer's music. Kechley, whose dramatic works have been performed more than a thousand times by orchestras, chamber groups, and college music ensembles since his first composition was premiered by The Seattle Symphony when he was nineteen, traffics in a kind of hybrid style that sees modern classical blended with elements of vernacular, popular, and ethnic forms.

Time spent in Kyoto, Japan, had a profound and long-lasting impact on his composing, as evidenced, for example, in the title of the album's opening piece Karasuma (though it refers to a street and subway line in Kyoto, the work was premiered by the Boston Pops in 1993 under the title Blackbird). That being said, the high-energy piece also exudes a distinctly American flavour of the kind one might associate with composers like Bernstein and Copland. Like them, Kechley's penchant for vibrant melody and rhythmic drive maximizes the accessibility of Karasuma, the result being material that both the novice and the connoisseur can enjoy and appreciate alike. Besides composing, Kechley was a music professor who recently retired from teaching at Williams College, Massachusetts.

Subtitled “A Fast Funk for Orchestra,” Karasuma might have started out as a classroom exercise at the Doshisha Women's College in Kyoto, but on this recorded version it's more big band-styled colossus. Syncopated rhythms and a full percussive section animate the robust material with muscular drive, while woodwinds, strings, and horns enliven the ride with ample orchestral colour. If the title does, in fact, refer to a street and subway line in Kyoto, it must be a hectic locale indeed. It's not frenetic only, however: a passage emerges where a slow melody by the strings arrests the tempo, even if the rhythms still bubble underneath. All such contrasts aside, Karasuma impresses generally as a high-powered exercise in jazz orchestral writing.

The second work, Wakeful Visions / Moonless Dreams, largely eschews the jazz-inflected flavourings of the opener for a wide-ranging classical symphony whose four movements exploit literary sources as stylistic points of departure. The opening movement, which uses an Old Testament quote as a creative springboard, makes good on its “Whirlwind” title by coupling swirls of strings, woodwinds, and horns into a roiling mass (interestingly, the flourish with which it begins is vaguely reminiscent of the opening to Bartok's The Miraculous Mandarin). But like Karasuma, “Whirlwind” isn't one-dimensional, as in this case the aggressive intro gives way to a lyrical central episode before the action again intensifies.

If “Whirlwind” is boisterous, “Notari Notari” is peaceful and contemplative, at least initially. In this dream-like setting, a haiku by Buson that describes the sea's undulations is convincingly reflected in lulling patterns the strings play in accompaniment to an entrancing flute solo. Gradually, the mood darkens, so much so that at one point the brooding music could be mistaken for adagio writing by Shostakovich. Kechley uses the witches' scene from Macbeth as a basis for the musical material in the third movement, “Something Wicked,” where stabbing strings and restless woodwind expressions add up to an explorative shape-shifter of some eight minutes duration. Drawing for inspiration from Proust's musings on, naturally, time and remembrance, “Moments” caps the work with a sober meditation for muted horns and solo violin that flirts with agitation as it advances and comes full circle when sinuous melodies from the opening movement are voiced once more.

June 2018