Presto Recording of the Week
14th July 2023

Gramophone Magazine
October 2023
Editor's Choice

Adam Walker (flute), Sinfonia of London, John Wilson

Fuchs, K: Cloud Slant
Fuchs, K: Solitary the Thrush
Fuchs, K: Pacific Visions
Fuchs, K: Quiet in the Land

Grammy-Award-winning Kenneth Fuchs (born 1956) is without doubt one of American music’s leading orchestral composers. His orchestral output has grown and developed to encompass a wide range of genres, from overtures and tone poems to suites and concertos (ten to date, including ones for string quartet, electric guitar, and piano, the last entitled Spiritualist), inspired by a diverse range of subjects, testimony to his wide sympathies and fields of knowledge. His output includes chamber music (including five string quartets), solos and duos, vocal and choral music, and four chamber musicals. Cloud Slant is a virtuoso orchestral concerto based on three of Helen Frankenthaler’s canvasses: Blue Fall (1966), Flood (1967), and Cloud Slant (1968) –not just musical depictions of them but also the composer’s reactions to their artistic sweep and power.

The flute was Fuchs’ first instrument, so it was inevitable that he would compose a flute concerto. However, it was not until 2019 that he set about the task – for the flautist Peg Luke, to whom the concerto is dedicated. As is customary of compositions by this composer, the concerto carries a descriptive title, Solitary the Thrush, a reference to lines from Whitman’s elegy for Abraham Lincoln, 'When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d'. Commissioned by the Californian Musique Sur La Mer Orchestras, Pacific Visions is scored for string orchestra, and is a single, dynamic movement sub-divided into five sections. Quiet in the Land, a Poem for Orchestra is a revision of a chamber work Fuchs composed in 2003, inspired by the rolling prairie of the Midwestern United States and the ‘immense arching sky’ under which it sits, cast against the impact of the Second Gulf War which had then recently broken out. The orchestral version heard here was composed in 2017 for the Phoenix Symphony. The album was recorded in Surround Sound, and is available as a Hybrid SACD and in Spatial Audio.

"Stylistically, Fuchs's music sits very much in the late-twentieth-century American idiom, frequently reminding me of composers such as Alan Hovhaness, David Diamond, Paul Moravec and others, and yet I was also struck by how often this piece ventured beyond its native shores...Constantly alive with movement and intricate invention, and full of dazzling flourishes and imaginative touches of orchestration, it suits Sinfonia of London perfectly." - James Longstaffe, Presto Music, 14th July 2023.