“[Dawn To Dust] sets off into new territory with three commissioned pieces that the Utah Symphony performed and recorded last year.…Switch, by the omnipresent Andrew Norman, is the longest and most interesting piece here, virtually a percussion concerto for the nimble hands of Colin Currie, who is kept very busy with his arsenal of sticks and mallets. As per Norman’s well-known fixation on video games, the percussionist caroms all over the orchestra in a short-attention-span landscape that constantly changes at high speed. There are meditative troughs which give the soloist some much-needed rest, but the pinball machine (in Currie’s vivid description) starts up again soon enough; eventually he finds some peace at the end on a simple E major scale. … give Fischer and Utah plenty of credit for enterprise, joining their orchestral colleagues further west in bringing some new music onto disc. Given the frequency in which Norman’s music is played nationwide, there is shockingly little Norman available on CD, so this SACD automatically becomes a valuable addition to his slim discography.” —Richard S Ginell, Classical Voice North America
Labels: Andrew Norman, Classical Voice North America, Colin Currie, DawnToDust, Review, Richard Ginell, Switch, Thierry Fischer, Utah Symphony