David Amram (b. 1930)
Voyages for Solo Violin (2024)
Piano Sonata (1960)
Violin Sonata (1960)
Elmira Darvarova (violin), Thomas Weaver (piano)
rec. 2024, Oktaven Audio, Mount Vernon, USA
Naxos 8.559962 [57]

If known at all, the name of Philadelphian composer David Amram has long been associated with jazz, with ethnic Jewish music, with Woody Guthrie, Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac and – at the other ‘extreme’ – with the Hollywood studios. His film scores for Splendour in the Grass (1961) and The Manchurian Candidate (1962) have secured a place for him not far distant from the inexhaustible bonfire of fame. Going by his long litany of dedications, collaborations and work titles Amram is not a man to coast loyally close to convention or to cosy up to the great and the good. There are a couple of symphonies and more than a handful of concertos; chamber works as well. Over the years his music has not been as well treated as it deserves by record companies. An early exception is the Violin Concerto – a work of the 1970s – which was issued by Newport Classics in a recording by Charles Castleman with the Manhattan Chamber Orchestra conducted by Richard Auldon Clark.

The present disc, which draws on a potentially severe repertoire region, is in fact quite accessible; not exactly disarming but certainly welcoming. Each of the two sonatas is from one of Amram’s high noons. All three featured works are in three movements. His Voyages takes the listener on an opulent world cruise to Cairo, Lahore, Athens, New Orleans, Kansas City, Mobile, Cork, London and Quebec City. The music is not as varied as the referenced locales might suggest but it is welcoming and not at all forbidding. The farthest North it might probe is to recall works like Holst’s Four Songs for voice and violin. More usually it coils and uncoils in delightful variety. It opens the window onto music such as Jay Ungar’s Ashokan Lament – a work that was used to poignant effect by Ken Burns in his epic American Civil War documentary. Amram has his own voice but takes a tincture here from Vaughan Williams, from tangibly bluesy jazz and there from Celtic melancholia. The two sonatas, given their year of composition, might have been harder going … not so. The Piano Sonata takes the serious listener through the full gamut of dressage: loose-wristed jazz and a lugubrious, statuesque lullaby-land. The Violin Sonata,as you might guess from the year of composition, inhabits the same accessibility but a complete rejection of blandness.

Elmira Darvarova is one of the most valiant of musical souls. She is familiar from her articulate and engaged pleading for Alfano (review ~ review), Duke, Marx and Korngold and Emile Goué. Evidently a thoughtful and subtle artist, Darvarova takes neither quality to excess. Her work with pianist Thomas Weaver clearly suits both musicians. The recording has a very pleasing muscularity and forwardly projected close-up quality. Darvarova provided the useful liner-essay.

Rob Barnett

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