Bullet Ballet 1998

It was George Szell who made the Cleveland Orchestra into a highly responsive virtuoso body, and when he died in 1970 he was in due course succeeded by Lorin Maazel, himself a renowned orchestral trainer. Here is Maazel's first Cleveland recording, notable for a quite outstanding quality of orchestral playing. The strings in particular have a remarkable depth of tone, though they play with great delicacy when it is needed; but then the orchestra as a whole plays with extraordinary virtuosity, tonal weight and exactness of ensemble. If the woodwind have a somewhat piquant blend this suits the music, which throughout is admirably served by Maazel's highly rhythmic, dramatic conducting.

In full neoclassic mode as in the opening bars of 'Les Biches,' Francis Poulenc sounds quite a bit like Igor Stravinsky. (It's the predominance of wind instruments and the careful attention to instrumental voicing.) He shifts modes easily, and the shadow of Stravinsky disappears as smoothly as it came. Poulenc has often been taken to be a composer of trifles, of light music. His elegance and wit came at a time when music had to be profound and atonal to be taken seriously. Yet in Paris between the wars, Poulenc's music fared well. Each of his works is an evocative, tuneful jewel, unabashedly tonal yet filled with inventive chromatic turns.

After Tchaikovsky, but with Glazunov, and before Stravinsky and the rest, Nikolai Tcherepnin (1873-1945) made a not so quiet contribution to the continuing development of the Russian ballet. But he was quite an overshadowed figure, in large part due to the success of Stravinsky & his son, Alexander Tcherepnin and to modernist trends that became prevalent by the early Twentieth Century (Nikolay’s music remains rooted in the sound-worlds and mannerisms of Tchaikovsky, Massenet, and Faure). But the language of "Narcisse et Echo" (1911) and telling subtleties in its orchestral resources point to Ravel's "Daphnis et Chloe" written a year later.

The Aeolus issue of Bob van Asperen's Krieg und Frieden (War and Peace) is a rather unusual survey in several ways. The central theme of this is tied to the two major conflicts in continental Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the 80 Years War and the 30 Years War, both of which were ultimately resolved by the Westphalian Peace Accord of 1648. Generally when we think of the so-called battle pieces of olden times it brings up memories of music that is rather arcane and none too challenging – thundering, repeated major triads with a rolling tremolo in the bass.

Writer-director Guy Ritchie's street-tough look at London's decrepit underworld and the unsavory dealings of four best friends whose cockiness is undercut by some serious trouble features a soundtrack of quick dialogue sound clips, a smattering of classic rock, pop, and reggae, and a few current submissions as well. Junior Murvin's "Police and Thieves," known most to rock audiences by the Clash cover, is a great piece of political resistance and laidback dub groove. James Brown's "The Payback" and "The Boss" and Iggy and the Stooges' "I Wanna Be Your Dog" stake out the sharp end, while the late Dusty Springfield paints the softer corner with "Spooky." Ocean Colour Scene delivers the backwards guitar driven "100 Mile High City," and Stretch's "Why Did You Do It?" is a great recreation of early '70s soul.

Shine on Brightly was influential in the development of progressive rock by breaking all pop and rock music standards with the 17-minute epic "In Held Twas In I", which marked the beginning of the lengthy progressive rock suites that would occur later in the 1970s…