A Screaming Comes Across the Sky

[Dave Monroe]

Music of 3 Americans emerging Saturday
Columbia Orchestra's 'A New World' to close out season
By Judah E. Adashi
special to the sun
Originally published June 1, 2007

Next season promises to be a good one for contemporary
American music in Baltimore. With Marin Alsop as its
new music director, the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra
will perform nearly a dozen pieces by living American
composers, as well as 20th-century masterworks by
Samuel Barber, Aaron Copland, Duke Ellington and
George Gershwin.

But local enthusiasts of new and recent American works
need not wait for Alsop's arrival to hear the
indigenous music of our time. At 7:30 p.m. tomorrow at
Jim Rouse Theatre, music director Jason Love and the
Columbia Orchestra will close out their season with "A
New World," a program featuring music by three
Americans and one famous European visitor.

The evening begins with David Heuser's A Screaming
Comes Across the Sky, the winning work in the
orchestra's biannual American Composer Competition.
Called "all-American music at its most dynamic and
visceral" by Charles Ward of the Houston Chronicle,
Heuser's percussion-driven score from 2005 takes its
title and temperament from the opening line of Thomas
Pynchon's novel, Gravity's Rainbow. Heuser's energetic
overture is immediately contrasted with Barber's
poignant Adagio for Strings, the composer's adaptation
of the slow movement from his 1936 String Quartet....

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/howard/bal-ho.orchestra01jun01,0,152108.story?coll=bal-local-howard


 
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