In Requiem Without Words, an anguished, deeply felt memorial to victims of the 2003 Istanbul terrorist attacks, the grim tone is entirely appropriate. The two shorter works occasionally call to mind the music of John Adams, but they are colorful, spirited, and evocative, and they don’t wear out their welcome. The composer conducts the Bilkent Symphony Orchestra and the Turkish Ministry of Culture Choir in committed performances. Read complete review

Kamran Ince (b.1960), born in Montana and raised in Turkey, is probably the only composer to have written a symphony for and about a soccer team (or, as Naxos phrases it, keeping the non-American audience in mind, a “football club”). Galatasaray, founded more than a century ago, is a kind of religion to many of the Turkish people, I gather, so why not write a Galatasaray symphony? The question then becomes, what can this music possibly mean to those of us who are not Turkish, and who might not even be all that excited about soccer? Well, it’s pretty exciting stuff—imagine if John Adams (not John Luther Adams, but the John Adams of Nixon in China fame) had rewritten Carl Orff’s Carmina Burana, and you’ll have an idea about what’s going on here. There’s a lengthy Turkish text, fortunately translated into English in Naxos’s booklet. Here’s an example: “Speak. Tell me. / Where does this love come from? / Tell me. Reveal the secret. / What’s the reason for this pride, this passion?” Yes, these people love their soccer, and don’t you dare get in between the two. If you don’t know a word of Turkish—and you probably don’t—and you don’t read the text, you might well guess that you’re listening to a patriotic oratorio. The appearance of a boy soprano clinches it. And you know what? You’ll probably like this poster-sized, heroic, and appropriately populist music immensely, even if you dislike soccer, or even sports in general. It certainly impressed me.

The other big piece on this CD is the Requiem Without Words, composed in the wake of the terrorist bombings in Istanbul in 2003 that killed Muslims, Christians, and Jews alike. A wordless Requiem, then, fittingly becomes a non-denominational one. Still, the keening, melismatic vocals of the ethnic singer create the most potent sense of location. Again, after the work’s opening onslaughts, a more elegiac mood (but equally intense) is established, and Ince’s Minimalist writing (but not strictly so—there is more of Adams than of Philip Glass, although both influences are present) comes to the fore. The singers either sing the vowel “ah,” or (in the work’s agitated climax) seemingly random syllables. Some of the work’s more fragile scoring is very pretty, and when it is, one is reminded of the late Henryk Górecki as well. Like the “Galatasaray” Symphony, this is not difficult music to respond to. Our ears are now trained to accept modern music composed in this style, and when a composer wears his heart on his sleeve as openly as Ince does, we tend not to resist. Very effective stuff.

The two shorter works are no less gripping. Red, Hot, Cold, Vibrant, written in 1992 for the California Symphony, is like an industrial fever dream, full of pounding and shrieking, and madly driving rhythms. If inserted in a film, it would be an immediate hit, and I am surprised no onmore....

Review By Graham Rickson,The Arts Desk,June 2011

Hot, Red, Cold, Vibrant and Before Infrared are well-structured showpieces, attempts to convey irresistible forward movement, occasionally disrupted by Ince’s shifting offbeat thwacks and crashes. Before Infrared concludes in a mood of twinkling, shimmering serenity—a pleasant few minutes of calm after the relentless kinetic energy of what’s gone before. Read complete review

It has been six years since Naxos released American composer Kamran Ince’s first CD. It featured his Third and Fourth Symphonies and was warmly reviewed here. Like buses, however, Naxos has, in addition to the present disc, sent along three further volumes of Ince’s music—8.572554, 9.70011 and 9.70141—though as yet these three are only available as downloads.