Music in the Round

Sidebar 2: Recordings in the Round

Del Tredici: Child Alice
Courtenay Budd, soprano; Gil Rose, Boston Modern Orchestra Project>BR> BMOP/sound 1056 (2 SACD/CDs). 2017. DDD. TT: 133:44.

I'm thrilled to tell you about this release. Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland has been a lifelong fascination for composer David Del Tredici, who in 1980 won a Pulitzer Prize for Part 1 of Child Alice. Since then he's written a stream of similarly inspired works, though they seem linked less by any continuous narrative than by a rich and continuous stream of creativity. Recordings of Del Tredici's Final Alice (with Barbara Hendricks, Georg Solti, and the Chicago Symphony, Decca Eloquence 4429955) and An Alice Symphony (with Phyllis Bryn-Julson, Oliver Knussen, and the Tanglewood Music Center Orchestra, CRI 688) are treasures of my collection.

When I heard, in 2016, that Gil Rose and the Boston Modern Orchestra Project would be performing Child Alice, I was disappointed that I couldn't get up to Boston, but elated that they planned to record the performances in the hope of releasing it on SACD. It would be the first complete recording of the work, and BMOP opened a Kickstarter campaign to underwrite its production, release, and distribution. With our small contribution helping a bit, it was successful.

The result is everything I'd hoped for. Del Tredici was a master of orchestration and vocal writing from the beginning, and his music has since evolved to be even more complex and more integrated while losing none of its beauty, passion, or capacity to communicate. In asking for help with the Kickstarter campaign, I said, "For a taste of Del Tredici's Alice music, think of Mahler's soaring and powerful melodic expression with hints of Copland!" That thumbnail description also applies to Child Alice—but there's so much more here.

Each of the work's six movements—Simple Alice, Triumphant Alice, Ecstatic Alice, Quaint Events, Happy Voices, All in the Golden Afternoon—has its own musical character, but leitmotifs thread through and bind them all. As an example of the range, I hear Ecstatic Alice as a 20th-century evolution of the Liebestod, from Wagner's Tristan und Isolde, with echoes of Leonard Bernstein in the vocal line. All in the Golden Afternoon has a fin de siècle languor that recalls late Richard Strauss, albeit with a bit of spice that conjures Berio and Stockhausen. But just as you can't appreciate the pleasure of great food from a list of ingredients, you can't realize the delight and pleasure I get from this long-awaited, first recording. Perhaps, however, it will entice you.

The BMOP continues to impress me with its abilities over a wide repertoire, and under director Gil Rose they always seem to capture the right flavor for the work at hand. At first I noted a slight wavering of soprano Courtenay Budd's voice, but that awareness quickly evaporated—she fully embodies the music, to the point that I found it hard to imagine another singer in her place. The BMOP recording team always does a great job of providing the transparency needed for Del Tredici's rich, complex orchestral textures, but with adequate weight, and in a lifelike reproduction of the sound of the recording venue. But I urge you to buy this recording for the music.—Kalman Rubinson