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Total Time: 79:16

Edmonton Composers’ Concert Society member composer Michael Horwood has an impressive Curriculum Vitae. A native of Buffalo, New York, USA, he studied musical composition and theory at the State University of New York at Buffalo with István Anhalt, Lukas Foss, Ramon Fuller and Lejaren Hiller, eventually obtaining his Bachelor and Master degrees. He moved to Canada in 1971, upon acquiring the position of professor of music and humanities at Humber College of Applied Arts and Technology in Toronto, where he remained until 2003. In the capacities of educator and performer, he also played piano and percussion in the Ontario-based improvisation ensemble Convergence. Retired from academia, he now resides in Cowley, Alberta.

His compositional palette is varied, including works in jazz, theatre, choral, chamber ensemble and electro acoustic genres as well as more traditional and avant-garde compositions. His more than 70 works have been performed across North America and Europe and many of his works have been issued on the ERM Media, Echiquier, Fleur de Son, Furiant, Opus One and Sept Jardins labels.

Horwood’s most recent CD, Suite and Serious, released in 2007, features four varied orchestral compositions – two of them being suites in the conventional sense of the word, hence, the use of the word “Suite” in the recording’s title.

The earliest music on the album is his Symphony No. 1, dating from 1984. This neo-classical work is structured in the late Baroque, pre-Classical Italianate form of three movements, and is scored for the smaller classical style orchestra. There are vague references to Stravinsky’s style, both in the rhythmic impetus and the harmonic texture of the first movement, entitled “Allegro frammenti.” It is the most creative of the three movements, being based upon a diverse series of musical fragments (hence, the ‘frammenti’ of the title) that appear and then disappear without ever being developed into fully worked themes. However, the composer’s creative genius emerges in the manner in which he juxtaposes these many diverse fragmentary motifs onto the traditional sonata-allegro form of the first movement of a classical symphony. “Passacaglia funebre” is the name given to the slow, lyrical and plaintive middle movement, the most traditional-sounding of the symphony. The finale is a brisk “Vivace in moto perpetuo” that drives forward in a consistent eighth note motion. It is a brief rondo displayed in the manner of a traditional Italian dance known as a saltarello.

The Amusement Park Suite of 1986 blends Horwood’s vocation of musical composition with his passion and hobby for the action of roller coasters and the amusement parks in which they are situated. David Cavlovic’s accompanying liner notes say it all: “In this suite he provides a fifteen–minute sound portrait of the fun, festivities, and jovial distraction of a day in an amusement park.” The five short movements depict, sequentially, ‘The Sky Ride,’ ‘The Log Flume,’ ‘The Carousel,’ ‘The Dark Ride’ and ‘The Roller Coaster.’ The overall style of the work is post-romantic. ‘The Dark Ride,’ in 5/4 time, is constantly and unexpectedly interrupted with intriguing percussion sounds simulating car crashes and accidents. ‘The Roller Coaster’ claims to be modelled after Arthur Honegger’s Pacific 231 and Alexander Mosolov’s Iron Foundry. In this reviewer’s estimation, although the movement is indeed a musical mechanistic simulation, the aforementioned comparison might be a touch overblown.

Horwood’s National Park Suite, dating from 1990, paints orchestral musical portraits of five noteworthy national parks belonging to Canada’s and the United States’ National Park Systems. The opening movement portrays the extremely rugged terrain of Quebec’s ‘Forillon National Park.’ The lighthouse and foghorn that are situated at this isolated locale make up the major musical motifs in the movement. The horseshoe-shaped amphitheatres and hoodoos of Bryce National Park in Utah are the described features of the second movement. The somewhat forlorn Fathom Five Marine Park on Ontario’s Bruce Peninsula, notorious for the appearance of sudden gale-force storms that have caused a plethora of shipwrecks, is the subject of the next section. The world’s oldest national park, Yellowstone National Park in Wyoming, is the featured subject of the fourth movement. Having explored that particular area, it is this reviewer’s opinion that Horwood’s depiction of the natural phenomena – geysers, hot springs, steam vents and wildlife – is extremely lucid and musically pictorial. The same can also be said of Horwood’s musical portrait of the rugged landscape of Alberta’s Jasper National Park, which closes the suite. Mountains, valleys, lakes and rivers all are encapsulated musically. The American composer Ferde Grofé may have composed his orchestral war-horse Grand Canyon Suite in 1931, but to this reviewer’s ear, this suite is even more colourful musically and orchestrally in many ways.

The most recent work of Horwood’s oeuvres on this disk is his Intravariations for piano and orchestra, composed in 1997. The piece is based upon a nine-chord progression, wherein each individual chord is derived from a singularly unique hybrid scale. The broad and expansive main theme comes on the heels of the opening ‘Introduction,’ which is declaimed in the form of a quasi cadenza by the solo piano in which the chords are first introduced in embellished form. With the sole exception of the final one, each of the nine variations which follow places a focus on one of the chords and its particular hybrid scale. The title of the work is interesting – Intravariations could be interpreted to mean variations within variations, which could definitely be said to be the case with the closing Variation 9. Here Horwood employs it in the form of a coda in which the main theme is stated one final time along with references to all of the other variations in fragmented form.

Of the four major works on this recording, Intravariations is clearly the most creative, the most contemporary. Yet it still draws on elements from the past, juxtaposing the Theme and Variation structure within the model of a Concerto for Orchestra with piano solo, clearly a most ingenious endeavour.

This disk of Horwood’s music was recorded in Poland in the studios of Radio Warsaw with Sinfonia Varsovia under the direction of Ian Hobson. The quality of the performance is outstanding, demonstrating thorough and careful rehearsal with much attention to detail. There is dynamic balance between the various sections of the orchestra and in even the softest passages, a clear and radiant sonic translucence of the requisite timbres emerges.

Jerry A. Ozipko