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Fanfare, July/August 2000
An interesting disc offering so many differing styles of music that my imagination began to run riot as I pondered on the lifestyle characteristics of the very lively oboist, Stephen Caplan. I am still uncertain whether I am supposed to view Half Moon at Checkerboard Mesa by Phillip Kent Bimstein as humorous, or whether he really intended this computer-oriented collage of frogs, crickets, and coyote noises to be a serious backdrop to the oboe. Certainly rhythmic croaks of the frogs are a unique idea, but the manipulated sounds eventually strike me as contrived. Still, it is good that composers continue to experiment. William Grant Still was more conventional, his life bridging two centuries, and his compositional style wedded to melodic convention. The five short movements paint pictures ranging from the cowboy tune Ride an Old Paint, to the Peruvian lament Yaravi. An oriental theme is introduced in Alan Hovhaness's Koke No Niwa, a musical tribute to the Moss Temple in Kyoto, and is scored an array of percussion and harp. The plaintive English horn melody is set against a back drop of apparently random sounds, the score a mosaic of sounds and silences. Orpheus Singing is dedicated by the American composer Virko Baley to the memory of Witold Lutoslawski, and the combination of traditional oboe with the exploration of variants on those techniques would surely have been in keeping with the Polish composer's ethos. The first of the two movements is in the form of a recitative and aria, the music moving easily between the two. The second movement is short, and, the composer informs us, is based on music from Western Ukraine. Here the soloist is instructed to play with the reed inside the mouth to create the rustic tone of a folk instrument. The whole piece works very well, and is a score that oboists should be placing in their repertoire. We move into the world of jazz for Yusef Lateef's Saltwater Blues. Transcribed by Hal Stesch, the score is heavily dependent on the use of the oboe as a saxophone, with notes bent, the final product taking you into some smoochy, cigarette-filled night spot where they play jazz just for their own pleasure. In five short movements, Mark Phillips's Sonic Landscapes is for oboe and taped electronic music. Microtones are quite logical in this area of music, and the tape accompaniment set against the "pure" tuning of the oboe can create some quite interesting clashes of sound. Entering this world can be unnerving, particularly in the movement called "Lost in a Funhouse," where sounds are warped, but not to the extent that they lose contact with our conventional view of instrumental music. The next step takes us into a world of musical surrealism in "Close Encounters," and with a bridging passage we awake from this unreal experience into the finale movement, "Rappin' with Diz and Bird," the music, with its rhythmic backing group, entering the "pop" music we are fed every day. Working in Las Vegas, Stephen Caplan leads a very varied life, one day playing as principal oboe of the Las Vegas Philharmonic and quite probably the following night appearing in the backing group for some superstar on the Las Vegas Strip. That background leads to a very comfortable approach to this diverse range of music, his complete command of the instrument providing the many diverse techniques and tonal colors. He seems to particularly enjoy the oboe's more unusual use, and bends notes with the utmost ease and subtlety. 1 particularly enjoyed his wonderfully laidback Saltwater Blues, and the oriental classicism of Koke No Niwa brings a nice sense of mysticism. His many colleagues are all of excellent quality, and the sound quality is crisp and well balanced. - David Denton Fanfare - The Magazine for Serious Record Collectors |