Three new works, substantial compositions of chamber music, are enough to celebrate. When presented in such fine performances, the pleasure is even greater.

To read the complete review, please visit American Record Guide online.

At the beginning of this month, I cited an excellent way to become familiar with the music of Jennifer Higdon through the American Classics series released by Naxos in December of 2006. This past August Naxos released another disc in the same series entitled Awakenings: New American Chamber Music for Guitar. What gives this CD particularly local interest is that two of the compositions it offers were written for the 2006 opening of the new home of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music on Oak Street in the Civic Center. The third work on the disc is equally “historic,” but for a far sadder reason: it was the penultimate composition by Jorge Liderman, then on the composition faculty at the University of California at Berkeley, before his unexpected death at the age of 50 in 2008. All three compositions feature performances by David Tanenbaum, who directs the Guitar Department at the Conservatory.

By far the most intriguing of the three offerings is “Measures of Turbulence” by Steven Mackey, which the Conservatory Guitar Ensemble (directed by Tanenbaum) performed to celebrate the Conservatory’s new home. Mackey is Chairman of the Music Department at Princeton University, which will probably surprise those who remember that he got his start playing electric guitar in rock bands in Northern California. However, those experiences provided him with a auditory acuity sensitive to the subtle sonorities of both acoustic and electric guitars. He exercised that acuity in this composition by scoring it for five acoustic guitars, two electric ones, and a bass guitar (also electric).

He used the electric instruments primarily for the realization of “multiphonic” tones, from which the ear readily detects the pitches of several upper harmonics, rather than a single fundamental with a particularly rich spectrum. These complex sonorities serve as foreground against a richly textured background (from the acoustic instruments) of 15-against-8 polyrhythms. All this may sound highly cerebral (threatening to be more of an exercise in mathematics than in music); but the combination of churning rhythm and almost alien sonorities results in a highly exhilarating listening experience. Mackey was also responsible for producing the recording made for this disc (along with engineer Roni Jules); so we have every reason to believe that he tried to insure that the sounds from an actual performance were properly captured. The performance by the Guitar Ensemble also makes for a valuable reminder of just how much talent has emerged from the Conservatory’s Guitar Department.
Equally spirited was Liderman’s “Aged Tunes,” scored for guitar (performed by Tanenbaum) and string quartet, the Cuarteto Latinoamericao (violins Saúl Bitrán and Arón Bitrán, viola Javier Monteil, and cello Alvaro Bitrán). Liderman’s death on February 3, 2008 was an apparent suicide, which may lead some to seek out a macabre reading of his final works; but there is more....

Review By Gapplegate,Gapplegate Guitar and Bass Blog,October 2010

The present volume exemplifies the diverse, multi-stylistic musical world we currently inhabit. Awakenings: New American Chamber Music for Guitar (Naxos 8.559650) centers around three modern classical works written in the last decade. The styles covered are of a widely contrasting sort.

The classical guitar has come light years since Andres Segovia raised it to the status of a concert instrument, and this superb new disc features exquisitely wrought works by North and South American composers. Aaron Jay Kernis brings the lustrous voice soprano Hila Plitmann to his poetic “Two Awakenings,” and Jorge Liderman’s “Aged Tunes” is a marriage of sonorities for guitar and string quartet. The San Francisco Conservatory Guitar Ensemble displays its virtuosity in Steven Mackey’s 15-minute dreamscape “Measures of Turbulence.”