Mark John McEncroe: My Symphonic Poems: Orchestral Images
Navona Records
By his own admission, Mark John McEncroe came to composing late in life and based on the number of recent recordings bearing his name would seem to be making up for lost time. After working in an administrative capacity in the music business during his early twenties and thirties, he formally undertook piano studies and then, finding his truest calling, composition study. A 2006 collaboration with Mark Saliba, who orchestrated a piano work of McEncroe's, has led to a long-standing relationship, with Saliba since then having orchestrated many of the composer's works. McEncroe has seen recent recordings of solo piano and orchestral material issued on Navona Records (which he joined in 2016), the former represented by Musical Images for Piano (2018) and the latter Dark Clouds in Life (2017), Symphonic Suites No. 1 and 2 (2017), and now My Symphonic Poems. Testifying to the wealth of music McEncroe has produced in a short time, all of those releases except for Dark Clouds in Life are double-CD sets.
Performed by the Janácek Philharmonic Orchestra with Anthony Armore conducting, much of My Symphonic Poems is reflective in character, its settings emphasizing the plaintive side of McEncroe's music; a track title such as “Summer's Last Hurrah” alone suggests the tone of the material in play. No one speaks better on behalf of his music than the composer himself. In liner notes, he presents a manifesto of sorts, even if one humbly articulated. McEncroe professes no allegiance to any particular school or style and eschews any ambition to advance music's theoretical, intellectual, or technical boundaries; instead, his focus is on expressing his thoughts, feelings, and life experiences through musical means, to create a genuine “emotional platform” that will resonate with listeners and inspire them to also feel something and reflect on their own lives.
Two principal themes dominate My Symphonic Poems, the first reflecting the composer's desire to remind listeners of the magnificence of the natural world and how much our present-day activities threaten to destroy it, and the second centering on the challenges life throws our way; that both themes are of a highly personal nature is mirrored in the intensely expressive quality of McEncroe's music. Seven of the ten settings relate to the nature theme; the others are of a deeply introspective character.
Saliba again handled the orchestration side of the project and thus deserves a large share of the credit for the music's impact; as splendid as the composer's writing is, its reception is powerfully affected by the orchestrator's presentation of the material. He's clearly a kindred spirit to McEncroe in the restraint he brings to his orchestration role, and the composer's material benefits considerably from Saliba's sensitive handling. In “Mid Autumn's Deep Colours,” for instance, clarinet and flutes blend with strings to evoke the sadness of the season's passing, while horns express the glorious sight of nature settings resplendent in warm orange, red, and brown hues, and when bells, gong, cymbals, bass drums, and snare join the strings and horns towards the end of “An Early Autumn Morning,” they're there for a reason, to intensify the climactic effect. Never are instruments used gratuitously, and the different timbres of the orchestral resources are deployed to capture the spirit of the piece in question.
Though an undercurrent of sadness is present, “Summer's Last Hurrah” also exudes a quietly triumphant air in its stately, even ceremonial design; “A Pageant at the County Fair” and “A Celebration of the Natural World” achieve something similar in conveying, respectively, the joys of a medieval county fair visit and appreciation for the beauties of the pastoral world. McEncroe's gift for melody regularly surfaces, from the folk-like motif voiced by multiple instrument groups in “That Old Indian Summer” to the wistful theme that flows so gracefully through “Movements in the Night.” Naturally the introspective settings are the most emotionally piercing, with “The Passing” and “Echoes From a Haunted Past” marked by outpourings of strings that suggest struggles of various kinds.
Like Mahler and Brucker, McEncroe isn't averse to movements of extended duration, as shown by the inclusion of disc one's closer, the twenty-one-minute “An Early Autumn Morning,” and the release's final setting, the seventeen-minute “A Celebration of the Natural World.” They're two of the album's loveliest settings, in part due to the patience with which they develop. When meditative pieces such as these are granted time to unfold as they naturally should, the listener is drawn into their stirring worlds all the more fully and experiences their emotional effects all the more profoundly. In fact, though McEncroe distances himself from others, there are moments when My Symphonic Poems reminds me a little bit of Anton Bruckner's music, and, in some photos, McEncroe even bears a faint physical resemblance to the Austrian composer. In both cases, material is presented without unnecessary ornamentation, the music pared to its essence to communicate without obfuscation and with clarity and immediacy, and common to both figures is a penchant for strong, unfussy melodies and solid orchestral structures.November 2018