Van Zandt is a composer based in Los Angeles. He studied with Thea Musgrave and Peter Maxwell Davies, among others. Van Zandt offers a vast panorama of influences which, in their completed form as contemporary scores, are often spellbinding.
The title piece, A Chaos of Light and Motion, is based on a text by Shelley and is the first of four pieces forming a complete cycle. All the other pieces are also based on poems by the Englishman, and deploy sonorities that draw on French spectralism, Indian music, luminist modernism and so on, echoing Shelley’s own sources: Hinduism, Buddhism and science. Van Zandt draws strange and fascinating landscapes, bathed in rich colours thanks to a chamber ensemble that favours textural contrasts and accompanies a soprano (the excellent Canadian Stacey Fraser). Superb.
This is followed by three excerpts from a two-hour tribute to Monteverdi in the form of a contemporary madrigal called On the Shores of Eternity, based on poems by Rabindranath Tagore. As well as music for soprano and alto flute, the multimedia work includes synthesiser, electric guitar and video. Here, too, Van Zandt has built an exciting edifice of sound, full of details that titillate even the most attentive listener, while retaining its appeal for the uninitiated but curious ear. That said, the overall atmosphere becomes much more soaring, supported by synthetic cushions that allow the soprano and flute, largely reverberated by the recording, to float mysteriously over the score. Fascinating and seductively intriguing, event without the visual part to give us the complete experience.
Finally, two “character songs” from The New Frontier: An Atomic Age Jazz Opera, a humorous musical theatre piece about nuclear angst in 1950s-60s California, with several references to jazz of the period, but without any too explicit details. Stacey Fraser is apparently a faithful collaborator of Van Zandt, which explains her obvious ease with this music. Although her rather generous vibrato can sometimes weigh down the words, her timbre is nonetheless very beautiful and the fluid plasticity of her phrasing makes her a solid interpreter of this high quality music.
I had no idea what to expect when I started listening to this album, having, I confess, never heard of this composer before. What a wonderful and nourishing surprise! Thank you Neuma. This is one of the finest discoveries of the year.
