Pops take liberties with 'America'
Keith Lockhart and the Boston Pops hope to make a splash with their new self-produced patriotic album, ''America." The CD is already in stores, and copies will be on sale at the annual Fourth of July extravaganza on the Esplanade.
Last year's ''Sleigh Ride," the first album the Pops produced on its own, sold 25,000 copies before Christmas, even though it was available only from the Boston Symphony Orchestra's website (www.bso.org) and gift shops.
It remains to be seen if ''America" will do as well, although there will be a lot of potential customers Monday night surrounding the Hatch Shell or watching on television. If you enjoy the red, white, and blue dimension of the Pops experience, you will like ''America"; if you find the Fourth of July show bloated, vulgar, and corny, you'll find more of the same on the disc, although it does feature a couple of soloists (Arlo Guthrie and historian David McCullough) who are a notch or two above some who have appeared on the Esplanade in recent years.
Seven tracks for ''America" were recorded in a single four-hour session April 30, with some postproduction work later (Guthrie laid down his two vocal tracks for ''City of New Orleans" and ''This Land Is Your Land" in a New York studio, and gospel singer Yolanda Adams added her contribution to ''America the Beautiful" in Los Angeles).
The budget didn't allow for recording any more, so the rest of the album recycles seven tracks created for the 1999 album ''A Splash of Pops," newly remixed and reedited. That was the album with the cover picture of Lockhart in a tux, falling backward and spread-eagled into a swimming pool. The new cover is tamer and features a stylized American flag.
''A Splash of Pops" was basically a patriotic album, but it wasn't marketed that way, thereby missing some of its market. The selections repeated from that CD range from ''The Star-Spangled Banner" (in a Robert Russell Bennett arrangement featuring the Tanglewood Festival Chorus) to Tchaikovsky's ''1812" Overture, associated with Fourth of July celebrations all over the country since Arthur Fiedler programmed it with cannons and the bells of the Church of the Advent on the Esplanade in 1974. Here the overture is performed complete, without the traditional cut used in most live Pops performances.
Connoisseurs of recorded Pops arcana will note some changes in the remixed tracks: The fade-out from the end of ''Doodletown Fifers" is gone, and the cannons in ''1812" have been reinforced to create an even more thunderous effect. ''The Stars and Stripes Forever" actually comes from an alternate recording without chorus that was made for, but not used on, ''A Splash of Pops."
Some of the new tracks are nice; the sound of Guthrie's voice, like that of his father before him, is part of America's collective memory, and there is a dignified arrangement of ''God Bless America" featuring the Tanglewood Festival Chorus. McCullough delivers Abraham Lincoln's ''Gettysburg Address" with sincerity and without oratorical excess. A fresh arrangement of the songs of the American services -- Army, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, and Marines -- is stirring.
Some of the other arrangements sound schlocky, however, evoking the actual America of contemporary Las Vegas rather than the idealized America of the songs. And Adams's contribution to ''America the Beautiful" is dreadful. She phrases the words as if she doesn't know or care what they mean (''above the fruited" -- gasp for air -- ''plain"), and her tone in the first stanza is often whispery and thin and therefore ill-matched to the orchestra. When the gospel backbeat kicks in for the later stanzas, she hauls off and starts to sing, which is a little better, but her ornamentation of the vocal line messes with the words and even with the harmonies. Frankly, 2004 POPSearch winner Tracy Silva was a lot better when she sang this arrangement on the Pops' opening night this season.
One also wonders how many listeners will want to hear the adorable children from the Seven Hills Charter School in Worcester recite ''The Pledge of Allegiance" every time they put the disc into the CD player. And nearly everything is heavy, brassy, loud, and excessively climactic. Scaled to reach an Esplanade-size crowd, it's like a steamroller in your living room or in the confines of your car. Associate producer Dennis Alves says Lockhart had hoped to record the Pops' quiet arrangement of ''Shenandoah" for this album, but there wasn't enough time left in the recording session.
Still, the Pops and its public should be grateful to Liberty Mutual for underwriting the album's production; for the sale of each CD, Liberty Mutual will donate $1 to the Boston Arts Academy.
Ozawa stays in Vienna
Conductor Seiji Ozawa will remain as music director of the Vienna State Opera through the 2009-2010 season. Ozawa, 69, began his job in Vienna in 2002, after leaving the post of Boston Symphony Orchestra music director, which he had held for 29 years. The announcement that he had accepted his contract renewal was made in Vienna yesterday; financial terms were not disclosed.
Quartet wins grand prize
The Parker Quartet, composed of four advanced students at New England Conservatory, won the grand prize Wednesday at the 2005 Bordeaux International String Quartet Competition in France. The prize includes $24,000, a tour of 20 European concerts, and a CD recording. The group, founded in 2002, also won the Mozart Prize for the best performance of a Mozart Quartet in the competition.
The players are violinists Daniel Chong and Karen Kim, violist Jessica Bodner, and cellist Kee-Hyun Kim. Earlier this year they won the first prize in the Concert Artists Guild competition in New York and second prize at the Young Concert Artists International Auditions, also in New York.
The Parker Quartet makes its New York debut Nov. 15 at Weill Recital Hall; the program includes the US premiere of a work composed by Gyorgy Kurtag for the Bordeaux Competition, new music so difficult that two quartets withdrew from the competition, according to French newspapers.
The Parker Quartet has worked with Lucy Stoltzman, Laurence Lesser, Paul Katz, and Martha Strongin Katz at NEC.
