Garth Baxter: Resistance
Navona Records

Resistance is an interesting choice of title for this latest collection by California-based composer Garth Baxter (b. 1946 in Philadelphia), simply because the recording presents no barrier to impede listeners from warming to its euphonious sounds. Yet though his follow-up to 2018's well-received Ask the Moon is undeniably accessible, it's also music of integrity and power. The label “modern traditionalism” has been applied to his material to capture its coupling of long-standing formal structures, melodicism, and contemporary approaches to harmony. Stated otherwise, his music presents one prototype of how a melding of nineteenth-century Romanticism and twentieth (and even twenty-first) century musical practice might sound.

Eleven works are featured on the release, with a number of different musical configurations involved: duo, trio, and quartet, plus three solo turns by pianist Andrew Stewart that establish a through-line for the recording. With one exception, the works are single-movement settings, each a compact, fully resolved statement, the longest nine minutes and the shortest five. The seduction begins promptly with the two-part The Silver Run, a mesmerizing evocation of the Silver Run area in Carroll County, Maryland that's given a majestic reading by Stewart and flutist Melissa Wertheimer. In the album's penultimate track, the twin guitars of Arabesque Duo Kathrin Murray and Troy King modulate through multiple keys and tempo changes as they chart an explorative path through Edgefield, the instrument's timbres doing much to help make the piece stand out from the others.

The emotionally expressive side of Baxter's music is amplified by violinist Nicholas Currie's sweetly singing lines in Could You Dream What I Dream and the wistful quality Kenny Baik's crystal clear saxophone brings to Des larmes encadrées (“Framed Tears”). As open-hearted as they are, an even more expressive performance is delivered by The Azimuth String Quartet, which imbues MacPherson's Lament with melancholy in one of the album's most impassioned readings (Baxter apparently drew for inspiration from the real-life saga of Scottish fiddler James MacPherson, whose last composition was written just before his hanging). Without lapsing into banality, the music flirts with sentimentality in a couple of places, perhaps most noticeably in Il y a longtemps (“Long Ago”), though it would be a cold heart indeed that wouldn't be moved by the deep feeling with which violinist Currie and pianist Diana Greene invest the performance.

You'd be forgiven for thinking a little bit of Schubert when Romance Without Words arrives, especially when Stewart embroiders its romantic lines with such conviction. For Ballade for a Princess, on the other hand, Baxter drew for inspiration from Chopin's Fantasie-Impromptu for another wondrous solo performance by the pianist. One final example of Baxter's expressive writing arises in From the Headwaters, which the violin-cello-and-piano outfit West Shore Piano Trio illuminates with an intensely lyrical, nine-minute treatment.

February 2019