Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra & Kirk Trevor - Cooman: Enchanted Tracings (2009)

American composer Carson Cooman has written hundreds of works and is also quite active as an organist and editor. A good deal of his music has been recorded, some of it by Naxos; the present album, on the New York-based Artek imprint, is distributed by that label. It's a little surprising to read in the composer's introductory note that the pieces included "were specifically chosen to create an interrelated program," for they're quite diverse. Cooman identifies the sources of his style as "the gestures and structural templates of Medieval and Renaissance sacred and secular music and my intertwined interest in American neo-romanticism and athletic modernism." One might add some of the sources of the last two as major influences, notably Copland, the impressionists, and perhaps Bartók, whose treatment of the solo instrument seems to have shaped the three-movement Enchanted Tracings (Piano Concerto No. 2). The early music forms tend to show up in Cooman's writing for brass, which accounts for three of the seven works on the album, while the American Romantic mainstream is heard the the orchestral works, with Copland's evocation of vast physical spaces mirrored in Beyond All Knowing for chamber orchestra, Op. 538. The Oboe Quartet, for oboe and string trio, doesn't fit any of these classifications; it's a dense work with a sort of evolving variation form and a lot of pizzicato writing. What is it, then, that makes these pieces interrelated? Perhaps it is their tone, serious yet generally accessible. The Slovak Radio Symphony Orchestra, which has been pressed into service by so many American composers, gives a decent account of itself; pianist Nora Skuta, in the diverse roles required of the piano in Enchanted Tracings, is a standout. The musicians in the smaller works are also Slovak and apparently drawn from the larger ensemble. Although their styles are not really similar, this music can be recommended to admirers of Alan Hovhaness on the basis of a common relationship of composer to audience.