AMERICAN RECORD GUIDE REVIEW January/February 2008

"This is a highly gratifying recording, offering variety and splendid playing."
SONGS AMERICIA LOVES TO SING
Atlanta Chamber Players – MSR 1190 – 72 min

This release replicates a typical concert by this superb ensemble. Variety of styles and instruments is the group's hallmark, and that is that we get here. Mozart's Kegelstatt Trio is given an elegant, amiable reading; it sounds like a fluid conversation between old friends, which is exactly what Mozart intended when he wrote it for his musical circle. Laura Ardan, principal clarinet for the Atlanta Symphony, carries the gorgeous clarinet part with supple grace.

The rest of the program offers modern and contemporary American music, all of it attractive. The newest, Kenji Bunch's "Slow Dance", is a hypnotic tribute to torch music. Lyrical string lines combine with icy piano chords to create a nostalgic tapestry. The long, rapt code includes high harmonics over plunging bass slides. John Harbison's Songs America Loves to Sing is a collection of solos and canons based on American root songs such as "Amazing Grace", "Will the Circle Be Unbroken", and "We Shall Overcome". The effect is vaguely Ivesian, though textures are more transparent. Songs are sometimes barely recognizable, but occasionally, as in "Will the Circle Be Unbroken", a tune will emerge relatively unscathed, its original spirit intact. Paul Piece's (sic) piano solo in "What a Friend We Have in Jesus" has great spirit; This is a winning piece from a composer who often leaves me cold.
But my favorite work is Norman Dello Joio's trio for flute, cello, and piano. The outer movements are birdlike bursts of color, the slow movement a deep, gorgeous Adagio. Christina Smith, principal flute of the Atlanta Symphony, plays with joyful brightness.
The recording, made at the Dozier Centre for the Performing Arts in Kennesaw, Georgia, has a warm ambiance ideal for chamber music. The rich string sonorities and eerie harmonics of violinist Christopher Pulgram, violist Catherine Lynn, and cellist Brad Ritchie are not ruined by the cold scratchiness that afflicts so many chamber recordings. This is a highly gratifying recording, offering variety and splendid playing. -- SULLIVAN

BBC MUSIC
SONGS AMERICIA LOVES TO SING
Works by Harbison, Mozart, Joio and Bunch
Atlanta Chamber Players
MSR Classics MSR 1190 – 72:47 mins

John Harbison's Songs America Loves To Sing is a suite for instrumental Quintet in which well-known songs are freely arranged alternately as Solos, in which one of the instruments are highlighted, and Cannons. The treatments are never predictable: 'St Louis Blues' keeps on swinging even while being dissected into an accompanied double canon by inversion; 'We Shall Overcome" is transformed into a medieval carol interrupted by bursts of faster versions of itself; the closing 'Anniversary Song' dissolves into a haze of harmonics and glissandos on the piano strings. It could easily have been unbearably tricksy, but it's handled with obvious affection for the material and it's a delight from start to finish.

The Atlanta Chamber Players, for whom the piece was written in 2004, play it with great delicacy and flair, though the recording's unhelpful acoustic flattens out dynamics and obscures some balances. Also included is Kenji Bunch's smoochy but insubstantial Slow Dance for piano trio, Norman Della Joio's early, fresh, light-textured Trio for flute, cello and piano, and - rather than the Ives or Bolcom we might have expected - a lively rethinking of Mozart's Trio for clarinet, viola and piano. Anthony Burton
PERFORMANCE ****
SOUND ***

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