Exciting Elfman Concert Work Premieres

Elfman: Percussion Concerto/Wunderkammer Colin Currie, percussion. Kantos Chamber Choir, Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra/JoAnn Falletta Sony Classical 19658889842 Total Time:  62:03

Recording:   ****/****

Performance: ****/****

Over the past year or so, the concert music by a variety of film composers has appeared with great frequency than it has in some years.  Works by John Williams and Joe Hisaishi have led the pack, but there have also been releases of works by James Newton Howard, and now a release of new concert pieces by Danny Elfman.  The recordings were made last year with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic with conductor JoAnn Falletta on the podium. 

The album opens with Wunderkammer which is a sort of post-minimalist, and Elfman-esque blend of musical gestures and ideas that blend together to form a rather delightful orchestral showpiece.  The piece was commissioned by the National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain and Elfman has crafted a piece that allows the different areas of the orchestra to be highlighted along the way.  There are moments that have a decided John Adams-like energy.  Then there are the colors here and the way the strings might slide about a bit against vocables in the choir that are familiar to all who know Elfman’s film music.  Here they work well out of the small motivic threads that are tightly woven together here in an opening music with infectious energy.  Subtler colors appear in a quite moving central movement in modernist language.  Elfman’s love of Shostakovich and Prokofiev which often informs his film music, here gets a chance to fully flower in a quite moving slow movement.  The sinuous harmonic writing here provides another connection to those earlier masters.  The final movement features an opportunity for percussion to shine a bit and some of the musical gestures are similar to some of the jazzier lyrical writing of scores like The Nightmare Before Christmas.  There is more a sense of the quirky and circus-like atmosphere as things churn along to the end.

At the center of the release is a new Percussion Concerto featuring Colin Currie.  Some of the same post-modernist styles appear in this work as well.  The blend of various pitched and unpitched percussion elements creates its own unique sound against the orchestral punctuations.  Perhaps the closest film score in Elfman’s work that is a distant cousin is what he did for Planet of the Apes.  This work further explores the various ways to create sound with mallets, sticks, and even hands.  The four-movement work shows off Currie’s skills quite well.  The opening movement (“Triangle”) features a blend of angular writing with jazzy rhythmic syncopations followed by a more lyrical section for contrast, but the energy continues to be ever present.  That nod to Shostakovich also pops up here in the appropriately subtitled second movement, “D.S.C.H.” which continues the energy which dissipates toward the end to transition into “Down”.  Here Elfman creates a somewhat-relaxed almost dreamy atmosphere with gorgeous string harmonies that are both a bit dissonant (in a Bartokian sort of way) slowly growing in intensity.  As the movement progresses, it becomes a bit more experimental exploring interesting timbres across strings and percussion in often fascinating ways.  The energy returns with the music returning to the sort of propulsive motion of the opening in a bit more disjointed way, connecting to the subtitle well (“Syncopate”).  This is a solid concert piece that really exhibits Elfman’s musical voice well here while also revealing some of his own compositional influences as well. 

The album concludes with a work arranged for chorus and orchestra, Are You Lost?  The piece is a reimagining of an earlier trio for violin, voice, and piano.  Even in this expanded orchestration, there is a decided intimacy to the music with its sinuous Shostakovich-like string writing.  It is a rather personal little piece of atmospheric writing that creates a haunting quality in its opening first half, gradually shifting a bit more into Elfman’s semi-lyrical style.

Fans of Elfman’s music will find there to be some interesting experiments here coupled with his own compositional style and voice finding new expression here.  The opening two works are solid pieces that hopefully will see some broader performances appear in the coming years as they should be great audience pleasers.  The music is quite accessible and engaging with colorful writing.  The pieces all receive committed performances here as well.