Edward Smaldone: What no one else sees …
New Focus Recordings

A seventy-five-minute portrait of American composer Edward Smaldone, What no one else sees… presents five well-crafted works performed by a variety of ensembles. Two large-scale orchestral pieces sit comfortably alongside a clarinet concerto, piano concerto, and woodwind quintet, the set collectively testifying to Smaldone's gifts and eclecticism. Now Professor Emeritus of Music at the Aaron Copland School of Music, Queens College, City University of New York, Smaldone (b. 1956) was on faculty from 1989 to 2024 and has received numerous awards and recognitions for his work. His music has been performed by orchestras, ensembles, and soloists throughout the world and appeared on labels such as New World, Naxos, and, of course, New Focus Recordings.

The composer himself acknowledges that his music's sown from multiple seeds, musical, of course, but architectural too. As someone who's played jazz guitar for half a century and absorbed music by figures such as Miles Davis and Maria Schneider, it's only natural that the vocabulary of jazz would have seeped into his writing, even if indirectly. While no one will encounter a straight-up jazz riff in a Smaldone work, rhythmic thrust often animates his material and lends it a jazz-like spontaneity. The sophisticated writing and orchestration for which Schneider's known finds a place in Smaldone's music too, and of course classical music in all its forms have influenced him also. It isn't unusual for a passage of Bernstein-like vitality to enliven one piece and a sober twelve-tone-influenced episode another.

The architectural dimension arises in his wise contention that disparate parts require a cohesive structure if an aesthetically satisfying whole is to result. For him, “music is built up from a series of small carefully controlled moments into large structures [and] each moment needs to live as part of the whole, like the bricks of a building.” Like a great architectural design, a Smaldone composition develops organically yet is also constructed with meticulous, incremental care into a smartly synthesized whole. Bolstering the present album's appeal is the calibre of the performers involved, from the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Denmark's Royal Life Guards Music Band, and the Brno Philharmonic to the Opus Zoo Woodwind Quintet and soloists Niklas Sivelöv (piano) and Søren-Filip Brix Hansen (clarinet). Overseeing three performances are Mikel Toms, with Giordano Bellincampi conducting the fourth.

Its title derived from a line in Wallace Stevens' beloved poem, 13 Ways of looking at a Blackbird, Beauty of Innuendo initiates the recording with an audacious reverie performed by Toms and the Brno Philharmonic. A bold meditation on experience and the memories that accrue from it, the material follows an intensifying intro of blustery eruption with a calmer, almost pastoral passage of woodwinds and strings. The organic character of Smaldone's music is evident in the naturalness of the material's unfolding and the smoothness of its transitions. Teetering on the brink of chaos at certain junctures, the work eventually reaches a state of peaceful resolution before becoming a memory.

While Smaldone's concerto for piano and orchestra, Prendendo Fuoco (Catching Fire), was composed in 2020 for a spring premiere, its first presentation had to be pushed ahead because of the pandemic and finally appeared in 2024 with the Swedish pianist Niklas Sivelöv (for whom it was written) as the soloist; that gap allowed Smaldone to tinker with the work and also incorporate some suggestions made by Sivelöv. Toms conducts again, with this time the Royal Scottish National Orchestra performing with the pianist. Section titles cue the listener as to what to expect, with “Introduction (Smoldering)” laying evocative groundwork for the conversational interplay of the ornate “Ballad, Singing,” robust “Fire Dances,” and self-explanatory “Incendiary (Quiet before the storm, Catching Fire)” parts. Sivelöv is terrific throughout the performance, which progresses without pause for twenty-one minutes, as the movement markings identify shifts in musical character, not distinct statements.

Written for clarinet and wind orchestra, Murmurations is performed by Hansen (the inspiration for the work), Bellincampi, and the Royal Life Guards Music Band. Consistent with the title, the musical material is fashioned to suggest birds swooping and circling in the air, with the solo clarinet the “lead bird” and the wind orchestra its swirling partner. In this tone painting, Smaldone's writing convincingly evokes the animated image in the music's fluid movements and the acrobatic flight of Hansen's clarinet. In the penultimate June 2011, Toms conducts the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in dramatic material written after the passing of Smaldone's mother-in-law. Instead of a one-dimensional expression of grief, however, the piece plays more like a celebration of life when rhythmic material (hinting at Bernstein's West Side Story) segues into a lyrical meditation that honours her memory. The final word goes to the Opus Zoo Woodwind Quintet for its live performance of What no one else sees …, whose title comes from a line in producer Rick Rubin's The Creative Act that refers to the idea that the artist “sees” a work before bringing it into being. While the work is non-programmatic, each of its parts has a distinct character, as intimated by the movement titles. The classic fast-slow-fast structure is adhered to when the buoyant “Playful” and “Free Spirited” parts bookend the earnest “Serious” in a stripped-down arrangement that presents Smaldone's music at its most appealing.

February 2025