Americana Symphony Press
Mark O'Connor's Americana Symphony
April 10, 2009
"O'Connor's "Americana Symphony," subtitled "Variations on Appalachia Waltz," is as unrepentantly tonal, accessibly melodic and sonically spacious as a great Elmer Bernstein film score. As in most of his work, themes develop, mutate and transform with complex passage work that often incorporates bent notes or pulsing rhythms drawn from jazz, country, folk and blues sources." -Los Angeles Times - March 15th, 2009
•---------------------------------------
Review
Fanfare Magazine - May/June 2009 [bold green]
MARK O'CONNOR Americana Symphony "Variations on Appalachia Waltz"
Viotti wrote 29 violin concertos; Spohr, 15; Vieuxtemps, seven; and Wieniawski, two. The combined total for the violinists of the golden age, Heifetz, Francescatti, Milstein, Oistrakh, and Stern: zero. Those who lament that the roles of performer and composer have separated in modern times can take consolation in the ambitious output of fiddler Mark O'Connor...now approaching Vieuxtemps's total and, at his age, seems destined to pass the older master. Now, he's written a symphony (2006) in the form of variations on his popular "Appalachia Waltz." And when did the last violinist compose a symphony?
...The first movement, or variation, suggests the sound that has come to be associated with the American music in the works of Harris, Copland, Schuman, and, more recently, John Williams, though it's hardly stale and derivative. The second movement, according to O'Connor, suggests an Irish jig refracted into many ethnic bands through a prism of highly colorful orchestration. The third movement, more somber, lets fly another arrow in O'Connor's orchestral quiver, making solemnly imposing statements. Like the second movement, the fourth represents a dance, this time a hoe-down, and once again displays a kaleidoscope of styles, while the fifth begins with a lugubrious quasi-ostinato theme, producing an effect similar to that of Mahler's parody movement of "Frere Jacques" in his "First Symphony" - without sardonic overtones - or the opening of the last movement of Respighi's "Pines of Rome." As does Respighi's triumphant procession, this one proceeds inexorably to its climax, often contrapuntally. I don't remember being impressed by so masterly a demonstration of orchestral, compositional, or polyphonic technique in the first of O'Connor's works for violin and orchestra that I heard - "The Fiddle Concerto" - though it seemed heartening that at last a violinist had attempted to compose a concerto for his own use. Warmly recommended.
•Robert Maxham
Mark O'Connor feature article in the Los Angeles Times (Sunday). Read on line at: http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/music/la-ca-oconnor15-2009mar15,0,1593724.story
•---------------------------------------
Congratulations on the release of your new disc. I have been enjoying listening to it, many times now. I truly love the special sound you achieve in your harmonic language. I also love to hear you play you own concertos. It is very special to hear the creative and interpretive synergies going on at the same time.
All the best, and BRAVO!
Dr. Kenneth Fuchs
Professor of Composition
Department of Music
University of Connecticut
•---------------------------------
"Love your Americana Symphony and your Concerto #6 CD- it's dynamite!" -Pulitzer Prize Winning Composer, Joseph Schwantner
********************************************
Minnesota Public Radio, by Julie Amacher
New Classical Tracks: Mark O'Connor, fiddler and composer.
During his musical sojourn as a composer, Mark O'Connor has discovered that all of his pieces, including his new symphony, embody a similar kind of American optimism.
"The symphony easily describes the westward journey. Coming out of Appalachia, or the Eastern Seaboard, and discovering a new day, a better tomorrow. It's the same kind of sentiment that Americans hold dear even to this day," said O'Connor. "We all leave our homes and try to discover a new life for us to lead, and one, hopefully, that could even be better than our parents had. And we believe in that optimism, and that really is the driving force behind the Americana Symphony."
For more than 400 years there was little cross-pollination between classical violin playing and American fiddling. That's where Mark O'Connor comes in.
He's helped bridge that historic gap by establishing a whole new musical style on the violin, and by composing works like his new "Americana Symphony" and his "Old Brass" concerto, which enhance the flavor of American classical music.
•---------------------------------------------
Review: JamBase.com
Mark O'Connor: Americana Symphony
By: Dennis Cook
Not everyone can communicate without words. Getting meaning, feeling and narrative across using nuance and texture instead of defined syllables is beyond the grasp of many musicians. Yet, Mark O'Connor has always told vivid tales with his violin and compositions. From his early pithiness as a Nashville session hot shot through innumerable award winning projects in the jazz, bluegrass and classical fields, O'Connor has shown himself a remarkable storyteller, eliciting laughs, scares and sighs with ease, a wordless screenwriter who's thrilling and calming by turns and never wants for emotional oomph.
Since first rising to prominence as a teenage national champion on fiddle, as well as guitar and mandolin, in the early 1970s, O'Connor has remained an active, hugely diverse voice in American music, predictably high quality at all times but unpredictable in every other respect. Where one release may find him sculpting a folk mass, another may be a series of intimate duets or art-ed up mountain music. His large group works in recent years reveal an even more exhaustively vigorous and musically authoritative mind than even his ridiculously laudatory career had already hinted at. Beyond being a superb soloist and violinist of the first order, O'Connor the composer possesses a brilliance that harnesses some of the playful wit of Carl Stalling, the melodic dexterity of Duke Ellington, the brainy conceptualizing of Charles Mingus, the ingenious arranging skill of Gil Evans and the heat and speed of Louis Armstrong, all incongruously yet perfectly touched by immigrant folk elements and hillbilly spirit. In Mark O'Connor's work we find just about all the sweet meat of American music stirred to utter perfection.
On March 10, 2009, the man who once garnered "Musician of the Year" honors six years running (1991-1996) from the Country Music Association released his first symphony, Americana Symphony: Variations On Appalachia Waltz (OMAC Records). Conducted by Marin Alsop and performed by the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra it is a moving, evocative, tremendously ambitious addition to the modern classical canon and further confirmation of the admiration and creative fellowship he's enjoyed with contemporary masters like Yo Yo Ma and Edgar Meyer, as well as further evidence that the guy can handle and excel at everything from salty sailor reels to swing jazz to commercial country and every damn thing in between and beyond.
•--------------------------------------------------
In Nashville for many, many years, Mark O'Connor's name was good as gold. If you wanted the best fiddle parts played on any given sessions, he was the person to call. There was a decade or more when almost every album credit included the man's contributions, and he had County Music Association awards and Grammys galore to prove it. But something else was stirring inside O'Connor, a sound of the place he came from and his family's destiny. What would come to be called his "Fiddle Concerto," and when he began work on it, the piece was something he thought was only for himself. But the writing became his passion, so he did what hardly anyone ever does: he walked away from the lucrative session scene in Music City and devoted himself to the classical style that had started to consume him. In 2006 he composed the six-movement Americana Symphony and what a thrill it is. It follows his family's early roots in America, and his father's side arrival in the 1840s from Ireland. The sweeping passages of strings suggest the vistas that inspired them to make the journey to the Pacific Northwest, just as his mother's side did, looking for a place where everything was new. As each movement unfolds, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra sounds like they're discovering the new land too, with the string sections dramatic turns capturing the feeling of each new challenge. By the final movement, "Splendid Horizons," the hope of finally arriving on the Pacific coast is almost palpable. O'Connor has confronted his own musical destiny, and given us a chance to hear a person who found a new future. The second half of the album, Concerto No. 6 "Old Brass" is performed with the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston, and shows once again just how inspired Mark O'Connor's music has become. He had to find that part of himself that wasn't afraid to go where he hadn't gone before, just as his ancestors did all those years ago, but in doing so he is able to become the explorer that's so obviously in his heart.
http://www.sonicboomers.com/
— 03/14/2009
•------------------------------------
02/26/2009
Mark O'Connor: Americana Symphony: "Variations on Appalachia Waltz" (*) – Concerto No. 6 "Old Brass" (for violin and orchestra) (**)
Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, Marin Alsop (conductor) (*), Mark O'Connor (violin), Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra of Boston, Joel Smirnoff (conductor) (**)
Recorded in Meyerhoff Orchestra Hall, Baltimore, Maryland (September 10, 2008) and in Sanders Theatre at Harvard, Cambridge, Massachusetts (September 22, 2008) – 67'39
OMAC/Mark O'Connor Musik International, 2009 Reference # OMAC-12 – English language booklet
Full disclosure: I am a Southern-born person, with deep ancestral roots in the Appalachian Mountains, who grew up to write for some rather venerated classical music entities. It's an interesting and intermittently frustrating history, as one consequently deals with a myriad of uninformed questions from those who cannot fathom an intelligently artistic soul who possess such an etiology. Inevitably then, the work of composer/violinist Mark O'Connor - who is notably the only internationally celebrated classical violinist who is non-classically trained, who has also developed a instrumental method purely derived from the American folk violin tradition, and whose many recordings include such intriguing titles as Folk Mass, Soppin'the Gravy, and The New Nashville Cats - is immediately appealing. As Mr. O'Connor's career trajectory prodigiously demonstrates, a gifted individual may acquire polished musicianship through hard work and study – but musicality itself is an inborn thing.
O'Connor is of course quite well known for a number of high-profile, commercially viable ventures - the closing ceremony interlude for the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, and the incidental music for the TV miniseries Liberty among them - as well as for a number of juicy collaborations with such "legit" string performance luminaries as Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman, and Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg. With the release of Americana Symphony, one has the opportunity to explore O'Connor's artistry in the area of symphonic composition; an endeavor which, according to Julliard's David Wallace as quoted in the CD's promotional material, fields the composer's answer to the query "How do you write the great American symphony?"
This is a wonderful piece – bold and brassy, ineffably affecting, and virtually dripping the American experience from every measure. Based upon O'Connor's own chamber piece Appalachia Waltz, the symphony provides a fascinating aural narrative of the 19th century expansionist era, encompassing the journey from the eastern mountains to the grandeur of the western territory; and on another level perhaps reflects the composer's own progression from his adolescent triumphs in folk fiddle competitions to the world of classical music, all told in six movements of increasing complexity. An opening fanfare suggests the great unexplored reaches of the New World, before matters settle into an introductory movement redolent with barely suppressed excitement ("New World Fanciful Dance") and an achingly poignant interlude ("Different Paths Towards Home") which pensively capture the hopes and fears of the pioneer homestead spirit. There then follows a delightful progression from the subsequent "Open Plains Hoedown", a celebratory movement featuring hints of the composer's grounding in country fiddle and sounding exactly as its title would suggest, to the symphony's final two movements; ("Soaring Eagle, Setting Sun", and the romantically expansive "Splendid Horizons") which provide a stirring portrait in sound of the Rocky Mountain's imposing glory as seen through virgin eyes, and then triumphantly conclude this musical journey.
Given the symphony's bold rhythms, playfully aggressive percussive writing, and brightly shining brass, comparisons to Copland are inevitable, but also deceivingly facile – the American idiom brings its similarities, but the voice is entirely O'Connor's own.
Marin Alsop leads the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra with great vigor. The live recording from Meyerhof Orchestral Hall is spacious and finds the players caught in a most congenial acoustic despite an extraneous noise or so.
As fine as the symphony is, the "filler" item is possibly the offering that I will turn to most frequently; a spirited performance of O'Connor's Violin Concerto No. 6, the "Old Brass", featuring the Pro Arte Chamber Orchestra, with the composer himself on violin. Inspired by a visit to a South Carolina plantation designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, the composition lovingly, and occasionally with a gentle dissonance, captures the ambiance of the South and provides an excellent showcase for O'Connor's own instrumental virtuosity
Most listeners however, will undoubtedly turn to this set for its titular composition, if only to ponder the composer's success in the endeavor posed by Julliard's Wallace above. So, has O'Connor given us the so-called "Great American Symphony"? Well, only time can tell, but given the impact of this music here in the present, his effort is at the very least a hell of a strong contender, and provides a fine introduction to O'Connor's accessibly visceral, often challenging, and unapologetically tuneful creativity.
Supporting documentation is spare, but well done; the English-only booklet contains some interesting commentary by the composer and is graced by some lovely photography - something of a travelogue magazine-like complement to the music.
To conclude matters in a consistently honest vein, I will proffer that when moved to explore aural Americana via my own youthful roots, I will probably turn to O'Connor's delightfully classically informed, and virtuosic rendering of Orange Blossom Special; but when I wish to do so through the filter of serious music, Americana Symphony is just the ticket. This is one of the most enjoyable contemporary orchestral CD's heard in quite some time.
Mark Thomas Ketterson
ConcertoNet.com
The Classical Music Network
•---------------------------------------------
'This will be a week I will always remember,' violinist and composer Mark O'Connor says to the orchestra during rehearsal at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music. Standing in loose brown pants, sandals, and a Hawaiian shirt " appropriate dress for a hot August day in Santa Cruz, California " O'Connor and conductor Marin Alsop chat about corrections to his Symphony No. 1, which is set for its world premiere in eight hours.
O'Connor is visibly tense but soon relaxes when the orchestra digs into a familiar theme, his GrammyAward-winning Appalachia Waltz, which was expanded from a five-minute miniature to five movements that total nearly 30 minutes. Though this performance will be a step toward the symphony's finalization, O'Connor says the composition process is still taking place. And, indeed, there are several last-minute changes this afternoon.
But why rush a work that has been 14 years in the making?
This waltz was born in 1993. Laboring away in New Mexico on a piece titled 'Trail of Tears,' a 'burdensome' movement that documents the 1838 forced eviction of the Cherokee Nation from Georgia, O'Connor was struck with inspiration. 'All of a sudden, a window of optimism opened up in my writing studio,' O'Connor says. 'A breath of fresh air came over, and I wrote the 'Appalachia Waltz' melody in about 20 minutes.
O'Connor filed it away for two years, but revived the piece during a jam session with cellist Yo-Yo Ma and double bassist Edgar Meyer. Ma later helped O'Connor push it through the formal recording process.
Ever since its acceptance by music lovers the world over, the waltz has demanded O'Connor's attention.
'When you have a good piece of music, a good theme and subject, you can stretch it, pull it, repackage it, toss it out the window, toss it back in, and it still retains the essence and it's still compelling,' O'Connor says. 'It was the same kind of melody you could play anywhere"a funeral, a wedding.
'I was thinking the ultimate (goal) for this melody is a full symphonic treatment.'
Appalachia Waltz and the symphony call on all of a player's abilities to smooth over advanced techniques and make it sound like Americana, a genre that O'Connor champions and that is evident in all aspects of the piece.
'(The symphony is) creating a forum for dialogue, to see and find new ways for the rich cultural music of America to exist in the concert hall with classical musicians,' he says.
Whether the dialogue could include the audience was to be answered that evening. The orchestra played through O'Connor's movements with a kind of cinematic fervor, and concluded with three string players performing the original bars that recalled the piece's beginnings.
'Woohoo!' an older gentleman screams wile the rush of applause and ovation sweeps the auditorium. It has taken 14 years to come to this point, but that response is proper encouragement to move forward.
The Finale of the Americana Symphony receives its NYC debut February 28th at Avery Fisher Hall, Lincoln Center for the Abraham Lincoln Bicentennial tribute performance. (Mark O'Connor with the Little Orchestra Society)
The Journal Star, by Gary Panetta
Review: Ultimately, an American original
"Americana Symphony" in six movements. The conception is a bold one - music that tries to capture something of America's spirit by weaving the hetereogeneous musical elements from Europe, Africa, Asia and South America.
Like a page out of Walt Whitman, the piece is sincere and passionate and aims to be nothing less than a song of America itself. Its coloristic effects are frequently imaginative. Witness the fifth movement: a repeating theme that begins on the basses - and how strange and eerie this sounded Saturday night - and gradually spreads through the orchestra and creates a powerful sense of something taking flight.
Mark O'Connor's "Americana Symphony" RECEIVES CRITICAL PRAISE AND IS A NATIONAL BESTSELLER
"a monumental work...inevitably will be compared to Copland"
-Associated Press
"as unrepentantly tonal, accessibly melodic and sonically spacious as a great Elmer Bernstein film score"
-Los Angeles Times
"Love the Americana Symphony - it's dynamite!"
-Pulitzer Prize Winning Composer, Joseph Schwantner
"This is one of the most enjoyable contemporary orchestral CD's heard in quite some time."
-ConcertoNet.com - The Classical Music Network
"the six-movement Americana Symphony, and what a thrill it is"
-Sonicboomers.com
"I have been enjoying listening to it, many times now. I truly love the special sound achieved in the harmonic language."
-Dr. Kenneth Fuchs - Professor of Composition - University of Connecticut
"Mark O'Connor provides his answer to a question that has intrigued U. S. composers since the debut of Dvorak's New World Symphony in 1892: "How do you write the great American Symphony?"
-David Wallace- Juilliard School
"Americana Symphony" may well be regarded one day as one of this country's great gifts to the classical music canon, as well as being a pivotal moment in the rise of the new American classical music"
-David McGee (Spin, Rolling Stone, Barnesandnoble.com, BluegrassSpecial.com)
"One might have expected little more than warmed-over Copland, but the results are actually highly listenable. Anyone who has enjoyed O'Connor's work with Ma and Meyer will greet this new work with interest."
-All Music Guide
"A hit"
-Marin Alsop
