ok, this is not the best recording you can get out there, but the only one i think that's commercially available is the one of the original commission by pittsburgh symphony and i'm not sure i can legally upload it. plus, this recording is one of me! this is the run-through I did of this piece last week when i ran rehearsal. and these are the program notes that i wrote for the concert that this orchestra is performing it on next weekend.
Eric Moe's No Time Like the Present
is a muscular, energetic, and invigorating five-minute exploration of
orchestral rhythm. Commissioned in 1996 by the Pittsburgh Symphony
Orchestra, it was premiered in 1998 by then-music director Mariss
Jansons. It seeks to respond to the proposition of what might have
happened had Stravinsky spent his time in the States absorbing the
rhythms of Detroit's Motown rather than Los Angeles's Hollywood.
The
work opens with a vigorous motor of sixteenths which underlies
fragments of jagged and “funky” rhythms distributed among solo
wind and brass, and interrupted by bars of siren-like triplets. A
horn solo emerges to inaugurate a rhapsodic contrasting mood,
characterized by solos which move to piccolo, english horn, and
eventually, strings. These are punctuated by outbursts from the brass
and percussion, which flare forth and then melt away as quickly as
they came.
A solo
bass clarinet colored by trombones commences the final section, a
series of angular, increasingly extended and instrumentally-layered
swells that crest in sudden explosions and unexpected silences. Bold
triplets in the horn urge the music forward to a percussion-driven
climax which ends abruptly, leaving only the soft glow of a cluster
of harmonics in the celli, like an “afterimage” of the explosion
we have just witnessed.
Moe is
an American composer and concert pianist who is currently Professor
of Composition and Theory at the University of Pittsburgh.
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