CARTER PANN (b.1972): Symphony for Piano and Winds "My Brother's Brain", FRANK TICHELI (b.1958): Songs of Love and Life for Soprano and Small Wind Ensemble.

Description: Ticheli's Songs set optimistic texts by contemporary American poets, celebrating simple pleasures of being alive. The music is appropriately music, tonal and thoroughly accessible, though with some striking, unusual and unexpected instrumental colors. Ticheli's brand of vernacular melodiousness in a highly sophisticated idiom recalls aspects of Bernstein or Bolcom. The odd subtitle of Pann's Symphony is explained - kind of - in the composer's notes on the work; the piece is a tribute to a younger brother and a celebration of his unusual ingenuity and admirable character, while acknowledging some episodes of psychiatric disturbance - schizophrenia? - which happily seem to have been resolved, to judge by the uplifting finale, with its chorales and epic, sweeping optimism, resolutely rising out of echoes of the darkness of the preceding movement. The music is tonal, with seamless integration of popular elements here and there (and in the nightmarish central scherzo, a horrifying distorted apparition of the opening of Brahms' 1st Symphony), and overall a boldly and colorfully original use of the full resources of the symphonic wind ensemble. Texts included. Jennifer Bird-Arvidsson (soprano), Carter Pann (piano), University of Colorado Wind Symphony; Allan McMurray.