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Kurt Weill Newsletter
Volume 26, Number 1
Lady in the Dark
Scott Stroman, who conducted One Touch of Venus in 2006,
took the baton again for Lady, and this performance places
him in the first rank of today's Weill interpreters. His background
in both classical music and jazz affords him rare sensitivity
to Lady's demands. Not only did Stroman grasp the differences
among the several jazz styles in the score, he cut loose with
them, too. I have never heard this music sound livelier or
more up to date, and I hope Stroman will continue his Weill
ventures...
Click
to read the article (page 20) |
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Future Firsts in Classical Source
Click
to read the article |
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London Jazz Orchestra at The Vortex,
1 February 2009
Click
to read the article |
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London Jazz Orchestra at The Vortex,
11 January 2009
The Guardian
Click
to read the review
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London Jazz Orchestra at The Vortex,
11 January 2009
Chris Parker
Click
to read the article |
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India tour with T.A.S. Mani &
Ramamani
The Hindu
December 2008
Click
to read 'Musicians raise the bar'
Click
to read 'Fusing Musical Ideas'.
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Lady in the Dark
Paris-Broadway
3 June, 2008 |
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Cette production lyonnaise
fait honneur à l’œuvre sur plusieurs
plans. En premier lieu, on découvre un orchestre
étonnamment à l’aise dans une partition
très éloignée du style musical
auquel il est habitué. La direction précise
et stylée du chef Scott Stroman y est sans doute
pour beaucoup.
This Lyon based production honored
the work in several ways. Firstly, the orchestra was
surprisingly at ease with a score that was very different
from the musical styles they are used to. Without doubt,
the precise and stylish conducting of Scott Stroman
was to thank for this.
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Lady in the Dark
Les Echos
13 May, 2008
Click for larger version |
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| Lady in the Dark
Paris-Broadway
2 May, 2008 |
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Car cette partition est
un véritable délice… et on ne peut que rendre hommage
à la superbe interprétation qu'en fait l'Orchestre de
l'Opéra de Lyon, sous la direction toujours aussi efficace
d'un Scott Stroman parfaitement dans son élément. Le
plaisir que les musiciens prennent à jouer est palpable
depuis le public.
For this score is a true delight… and one can only pay homage to the superb interpretation by the Orchestra of the Lyon Opera, under the effective direction of Scott Stroman who is perfectly in his element. The pleasure that the musicians take in playing this is tangible to the public.
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Lady in the Dark
Le Monde
2 May, 2008
La comédie musicale du compositeur allemand
est donnée au Théâtre de la Renaissance
d'Oullins.
Click for
larger version |
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Leadership... and all that jazz!
From Leadership Matters, Issue 14, May 2008
Read
article |
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Renga Ensemble
The Times
January 10, 2007
Click
to read review |
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London Jazz Orchestra
Guardian Unlimited
January 8, 2007
Click
to read review |
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London Philharmonic Orchestra
2006/2007 Yearbook
Scott Stroman: Michael Church profiles a regular
collaborator with the Orchestra's Education and Community
Department.
Click
to read article |
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Kurt Weill Newsletter
Volume 24, Number 2
One Touch of Venus - June 2006 |
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Stroman led an invigorating
musical performance: even seemingly throw-away numbers,
such as "Catch Hatch," were thrilling here.
Doubtless it helps that the Opera orchestra is accustomed
to varied repertoire, but Stroman really liberated these
players. They delivered a loose, high-spirited reading,
while managing to bring out the melancholy and urgency
that make ths work so compelling.
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| If music’s future
is in the hands of the LPYO, says Geoffrey Smith, it’s
safe.
Country Life
August 2003 |
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It is easy to sympathise
with those who take a gloomy view of the future of classical
music. Given the pervasiveness of “celebrity culture”
and the vapid frenzy which attends fame, regardless
of achievement, the unique challenges and benefits of
great music can seem redundant, especially to young
people.
But anyone prone to such
foreboding would have been heartened by a recent concert
at St. John’s Smith Square by the London Philharmonic
Youth Orchestra. Comprising some 75 players aged 18
to 26, the group had never met before the five days
of intensive rehearsal culminating in the performance.
In addition, the programme selected by conductor Scott
Stroman was no easy amble through a grove of chestnuts.
Bartok’s Music for Strings, Percussion and
Celeste and Stavinsky’s Symphony in Three
Movements are two of the most demanding works in
the 20th-century repertoire, and between them came a
masterpiece with its own distinctive challenge –
the classic suite from George Gershwin’s Porgy
and Bess arranged by Gil Evans for trumpeter Miles
Davis, which produced one of the immortal jazz recordings.
Mr Stroman’s programming was canny:
not only did these works illustrate different aspects
of modern orchestral music, but they gave the separate
sections maximum exposure – strings and percussion
in the Bartok, brass and wind for the Evans, an ensemble
of the whole for the Stravinsky. But any sense of abstract
curiosity in an interesting academic endeavour was swept
away the moment the LPYO began to play. This was simply
a superb concert, thrilling masterpieces masterly performed.
Encouraged by Mr Stroman’s clear
beat and relaxed authority, the players entered fully
into these diverse worlds. The Bartok – mysterious,
organic, endlessly surprising – must seem to be
playing itself if it is to be played at all. Stravinsky’s
“War Symphony” is hard-edged and noe-classical,
its strident outer movements contrasting with the odd
Rococo calm of its Andante. But the Gil Evans
Porgy and Bess represented perhaps the severest
test of all to the players largely unfamiliar with jazz.
Yet, under guest conductor Joe Muccioli, the LPYO ensemble
conveyed both the subtleties of swing and the gorgeous
impressionist textures Evans called “clouds of
sound”, which provided a perfect foil for his
great original collaborator, Miles Davis.
At St John’s, the soloist was
the excellent American trumpeter Marvin Stamm, who impressed
everyone with his creative virtuosity. And his impromptu
remarks were a fitting comment on the whole evening.
Praising the quality of the LPYO and the London Philharmonic’s
youth initiative, he noted that very little like it
existed in the States. He only wished every American
orchestra would undertake such a programme, because,
he said: “The future of music in your country
and mine depends on people like these”. One felt
that if the future really was in the hands of the likes
of the LPYO, it was a cause for rejoicing.
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London Jazz Orchestra & Rufus
Reid at The Vortex, June 2002
The Independent
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The pantheon of illustrious
British double bass players features several called
Dave – as in Holland, or Green. American double
bass maestros tend to have first names beginning with
"R": Ron Carter, Reggie Workman, Ray Brown.
Doubly blessed by possessing both forename and surname
initials starting with the 18th letter of the alphabet,
Rufus Reid certainly belongs on that list, even though
he is not as well known as those just mentioned.
The pantheon of illustrious British double bass players
features several called Dave – as in Holland,
or Green. American double bass maestros tend to have
first names beginning with "R": Ron Carter,
Reggie Workman, Ray Brown. Doubly blessed by possessing
both forename and surname initials starting with the
18th letter of the alphabet, Rufus Reid certainly belongs
on that list, even though he is not as well known as
those just mentioned. A largish, amiable man who looks
like a slightly slimmer relative of Eddie Murphy in
The Nutty Professor, Reid was taught double bass by
a member of the Tokyo Symphony Orchestra, and has since
played with the Mel Lewis/Thad Jones orchestra, Dexter
Gordon, Stan Getz and other jazz luminaries. He has
a tone rich enough to threaten the audience with the
confessional – the pleasure of hearing it narrowly
misses being one of the cardinal sins – and his
solos are so melodic that several of this reviewer's
discs are in danger of wearing out through repeated
listening.
His presence in this country is a rare treat, and his
incredibly smooth walking bass lines provided an assured
foundation for the London Jazz Orchestra's arrangements.
This ensemble, conducted by the Guildhall's Scott Stroman,
is as fine a big band as you'll find anywhere in Britain.
Complex lines, tempi and dynamics were handled comfortably
by the 17-piece orchestra, with energetic direction
from Stroman. An American, although long resident here,
he has an ease with his presence at the podium (not
that there is one at the Vortex) that would elude a
diffident Englishman. Stroman swaggered, he grooved,
he used all sorts of strange movements that a Solti
or a Karajan would not have recognised. At one point
he could have been directing air traffic, at another
enacting the children's rhyme, "Here's the church,
here's the steeple, here's the doors, and here's the
people." No matter. It worked. His diction I found
harder to follow, though. I swear that he introduced
one of the alto saxophonists as "Ralph Inoculator".
But back to the star guest, who was there not only
as a player, but also as a composer and arranger. The
introduction to Reid's arrangement of "'Round Midnight"
was a dark, grainy Forties film, trombones mournfully
contradicting each other like cacophonous taxis on a
winter day on which the sun couldn't bring itself to
rise. Reid then took the melody himself, anchoring the
harmony with lard-thick slabs of notes on his extra-low
bottom string. He put his bow to good use, too, swooping
to the top of the G string with a quavery vibrato that
could have issued from the throat of a loose-bosomed
MGM starlet, then bowing near the bridge to thin the
tone to an eerie whisper. The evening ended with Reid's
impressive "Elegy" in memory of the great
bassist Sam Jones. One day, not for many decades, one
hopes, he himself will deserve just such a musical monument.
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Porgy and Bess – Barbican Hall,
London
HAPPY RETURN
by Chris Parker
The Times
9 December 1998 |
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Recorded
in one of Miles Davis’ most productive periods,
in 1958, Porgy and Bess proved such a commercial
success that Columbia tried to persuade the trumpeter
to repeat his collaboration with the arranger Gil Evans
on the music from another hit show, Doctor Dolittle.
“No way, Jose” was Davis’s response;
Sketches of Spain was to be the pair’s only wholly
satisfactory subsequent project, and their interpretation
of Gershwin was never performed in its entirety, its
score lost until last year, when it was unearthed in
a New York warehouse.
The impact of the piece’s introductory
selection, Buzzard Song, was therefore considerable
at Porgy and Bess’s first complete live
performance in Britain at the Barbican Hall. In the
Guildhall Jazz Band, comprised of jazz and classical
students, both the more straightahead jazz material
and the delicate tone poems found subtle yet vigorous
interpreters. Evans’s trademark sonorities, using
a combination of three french horns and tuba with muted
trombones, or piquant mixes of flutes and muted trumpets,
were reproduced with great accuracy.
It was the American trumpeter Randy
Brecker, however, who was the main focus of attention.
Eschewing the softer toned flugelhorn in favour of open
trumpet, he did not attempt to reproduce the haunting,
vulnerable sound of the original. Instead, he used his
more robust approach to great effect on garrulous visits
to Summertime and It Ain’t Necessarily
So, and played the piece’s most adventurous
arrangements, Prayer (Oh Doctor Jesus) and
Here Comes the Honey Man, and the opera’s
celebrated ballads with restrained power and elegance.
This concert was a triumph for Scott
Stroman’s students and for Brecker, but, most
important, it helped to establish a true jazz classic
in the music’s live repertoire.
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Porgy and Bess – Barbican Hall,
London
MILES AHEAD, YEARS LATER
by Richard Williams
The Independent
9 December 1998 |
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When Gil
Evans and Miles Davis set out to create an instrumental
jazz version of George Gershwin’s Porgy and Bess,
they were still aglow with the warm critical response
to Miles Ahead, the orchestral suite with which
they realised the promise inherent in their brief initial
collaboration in the late forties. In Gershwin’s
folk opera they found material destined to exalt composer,
arranger and soloist alike.
In 1958 Davis was at his early peak,
his playing marked by a beauty of tone and a perfection
of line which brought him the affection of an audience
far beyond the regular jazz constituency. His use of
fugelhorn in place of his usual trumpet for most of
Porgy and Bess merely enhanced the almost unbearable
loveliness of his sound, while Evans’ orchestrations,
which could be lean and unsentimental or warmly seductive,
provided a matchless setting.
For many years, however, this was destined
to be music with no life outside the recording studio.
Only on a handful of occasions were Davis and Evans
provided with sufficient funds to perform their collaborations
in concert. By the time the value of their music became
clear even to the most dim-witted promoter, both men
had moved on, so the initiative shown by Scott Stroman
and the jazz orchestra of the Guildhall School of Music
and Drama in searching out Evans’ elusive manuscripts
and preparing them for concert performances results
in many kinds of stirred emotion.
If it is asking a great deal of student
musicians to live up to such a legacy, then their pleasure
in the privilege of inhabiting the structures of this
music was easy to appreciate. But can its spirit be
inhabited by any group of musicians not under the direct
control of Gil Evans? This is the sort of question confronting
all those who wish to make a living repertoire out of
the music of the great jazz composers of the past.
So faithfully and sensitively did the
orchestra perform the suite, all the way from the fevered
fanfare of “Buzzard Song” to the jaunty
farewell of “There’s a Boat That’s
Leaving Soon For New York”, that the highest possible
compliment would be to say that there were moments when
the music seemed to be playing itself, reanimated once
more by Evans’ unique spirit. All the trademarks
of colour and texture were given full value: the weightless
woodwind combinations, the calm French horns , the quick
stabs of muted brass, the daring use of unison tuba
and double bass as a combined lead voice.
And in the impossible role of Davis
himself, the veteran American trumpeter Randy Brecker
gave a skilled and generous interpretation – a
little more prone to displays of virtuosity and self-conscious
bluesiness than Davis himself, perhaps, but if this
music were about exact imitation then it would have
no value. A labour of love then, and received in kind.
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OPUS 20 at St. Giles, Cripplegate
MODERN MIRACLES
by Paul Driver
The Sunday Times
13 April 1997 |
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The string
ensemble OPUS 20’s enjoyable concert under Scott
Stroman at St. Giles, Cripplegate, also included a world
premiere: Chroma, by the Bristol-born composer Dudley
Hughes (b 1968). The densely but tellingly scored movement
for solo quartet and a further seven players lights
up the traditional English string fantasy (Vaughan Williams,
Tippett) with a wealth of interior nuance. Sometimes
the mellifluous idiom is lightly peppered with dissonance;
sometimes the first cello will strain expressively into
a high register. The players are instructed to use “hardly
any vibrato”, but it is a richly sonorous music
for all that, 12 minutes of steady efflorescence. Bradley
Creswick was a fine pyrotechnical soloist in Paul Patterson’s
1992 concerto for violin and strings, an expertly written
three-movement piece with an accessibility and poignancy
not unreminiscent of Malcolm Arnold.
To end the programme came Britten’s
overwhelming Variations on a Theme of Frank Bridge (1937),
the 13 players standing (except for the cellos and bass),
Stroman conducting (from memory) with zest and even
a touch of magnificence.
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