Route 66- Time Machine / Ghost Ranch / Sunset

Product Description This recording is a musical road trip from the unique creative world of Michael Daugherty, one of America's most performed composers, and the visionary conductor Marin Alsop, who has championed his music for over 20 years. The music takes off with Route 66, a high-octane nostalgic drive from Illinois to California through 'Main Street America', as seen through Daugherty's rear view mirror. Along the way, we stop at Ghost Ranch, where Georgia O' Keeffe created her brilliant paintings inspired by the open skies and bone-parched earth of New Mexico. Arriving in Los Angeles, Daugherty takes us for a tuneful spin down Sunset Strip where anything can happen, and it usually does. Our journey concludes as we travel into the fourth dimension with Time Machine, an adventure in rhythm, sound and space for three conductors and orchestra. Review In his pursuit of musically monumentalizing American icons high and, especially, low, the Midwest composer takes an orchestral trip, stopping off at Ghost Ranch and winding up on the Sunset Strip. His music can be jazzy and Coplandesque. The Strip at dawn is surprisingly mellow, slightly Asian and the most seductive spot of all. Marin Alsop conducts the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra with pizazz. --LA Times, Mark Swed, February 2, 2011 10/10 (Artistic & Sound Quality). Michael Daugherty manages to have his musical cake and eat it too. His music's eclectic 'pop' elements rub shoulders with thoroughly modern compositional techniques. Time Machine, for example, requires three conductors, but its various textural layers and rhythmic complexities never sound confused. Indeed, its ticking woodblocks sound very much like Daugherty-something similar occurs at the start of Ghost Ranch, inspired by paintings by the always marvelous Georgia O'Keefe. Both this latter work and Sunset Strip are triptychs in the grand tradition of Ives (Three Places in New England) and Debussy (La mer). Route 66, by contrast, is a seven-minute cross-country travelogue, and one of Daugherty's best-known works (after the expansive Metropolis Symphony). Marin Alsop has established herself as a champion of Daugherty's music, and performs all of it with obvious commitment. The Bournemouth orchestra, particularly its brass section (horns and trumpets), makes the most of the numerous solo opportunities that Daugherty offers the players. Naxo