Paulus: Three Places of Enlightenment, Veil of Tears & Grand Concerto

Chronique

The American composer Stephen Paulus died in 2014, and this performance of several of his major works makes a fitting memorial. Paulus' most famous single work may be the opera The Postman Always Rings Twice, but he spent many years as composer-in-residence for top American orchestras, and collectively his orchestral music may be more typical of his work. It is accessible, serious, and oriented toward extended tonality, with weighty and long slow movements that may bring to mind an American Shostakovich. Paulus may also follow Shostakovich in his use of passages of purely tonal melody that carry extramusical associations. Most of all it is brilliantly colorful, with unusual sonorities exploited in appealing and logical ways. The rare basic combination in the Concerto for string quartet and orchestra (1995) is augmented by a piano in the orchestra, adding a haunting sound especially in the slow movement (track two, a good place to start in sampling), where it is evocative of the subtitle "From Afar." "Veil of Tears," the second work on the program, is an excerpt from Paulus' Holocaust oratorio To Be Certain of the Dawn; it is a dark interlude that again recalls Shostakovich. The real winner here is the final Grand Concerto for organ and orchestra, which reaches back beyond Shostakovich to the French organ tradition of the 19th century and updates it thrillingly. Conductor Giancarlo Guerrero and the Nashville Symphony Orchestra have emerged as convincing champions of modern American orchestral music of this type, and they excel in the dense, virtuoso writing Paulus offered here. Naxos' engineering, too, is up to the considerable challenges of this music, which is entirely worthy of the acclaim it has received from Grammy voters.

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