Thrilling as a trip into space - and cheaper

By WILLIAM DART


Fifty-year-old Michael Daugherty writes music as American as the proverbial apple pie.

Works like his 1996 Metropolis Symphony, an Ivesian tribute to Superman, have shaken, stirred and delighted American concert halls.

So have What's that spell? for two cheer-leaders and rock'n'roll chamber orchestra, and Dead Elvis, in which a bassoon soloist, wearing a gold lame suit, trades Dies irae licks with his orchestral colleagues.

Dead Elvis has played twice in Auckland (NZSO-New Zealand Chamber Orchestra and the Auckland Chamber Orchestra), and Daugherty's 1997 opera Jackie O could well be investigated by a local entrepreneur.

After all, it is not every opera that opens with a psychedelic Happening in Andy Warhol's Factory and gives singers the chance to play characters such as Jacqueline Onassis, Liz Taylor and Grace Kelly.

By comparison, a new Naxos CD of Daugherty's orchestral works, played by the Colorado Symphony Orchestra under the estimable Marin Alsop, seems relatively conservative.

Philadelphia Stories is a symphony in all but name. The first movement, Sundown on South Street, takes a musical saunter down the city's famous jazz street in a style that reminds me most of Elmer Bernstein in Magnificent Seven mode.

The finale, Bells for Stokowski, is a magnificent tribute in tintinnabulation to the charismatic conductor.

In between these, The Tell-Tale Harp puns on the fact that Edgar Allan Poe wrote his Tell-Tale Heart in Philadelphia, and could be described as a sort of Duelling Harps in spectacular stereo.

After half-an-hour of well-primed playing, expertly marshalled by Alsop and caught with the presence that makes you feel you are in the best seats in Denver's Boettcher Concert Hall, the star enters in the form of percussionist Evelyn Glennie.

The second work is Daugherty's UFO concerto and, on stage, the percussionist soloist made her entrance disguised as an alien, carrying water-phone and mechanical siren.

While a CD misses out rather on the work's theatrics, there are musical compensations. Glennie's xylophonic wizardry in the opening Unidentified could earn it the alternative title of Dizzy Mallets and the lounge-time layering for orchestra and vibes in Flying is pure Las Vegas cool.

Unearthly sounds abound in ???, in which the Naxos engineers have brilliantly placed the percussion section over yonder in the balcony.

In the final movement, Objects, a 5/4 time signature evokes memories of both Bernsteins, not to mention a certain Mr Brubeck, and Glennie demonstrates just what Daugherty means by warp speed.

The best thing is that you don't have to wait till 2008 and save a few hundred thousand dollars for one of Richard Branson's space trips - this Naxos recording offers some of the same thrills for a mere $14.95.

* Michael Daugherty, Philadelphia Stories, UFO (Naxos 8.559165)