Edward Smaldone: What no one else sees...

Today’s composers may be influenced not only by their contemporaries and the works of the recent past, but also by differing types of music – as well as nonmusical material. Edward Smaldone (born 1956) is one composer who casts an especially wide net, as is shown on a New Focus Recordings release of five of his works for various sizes and types of ensembles. Beauty of Innuendo and June 2011 are orchestral pieces, both here conducted by Michael Toms, the first featuring the Brno Philharmonic and the second the Royal Scottish National Orchestra. Beauty of Innuendo is a rather intense, brassy, proclamatory work with contrasting lyrical touches and an overall sound of emphatic intensity. June 2011 is more jazzy and less Coplandesque, with pointed xylophone and glockenspiel elements. Toms and the Royal Scottish National Orchestra also perform Prendendo Fuoco (Catching Fire), an extended piano-and-orchestra work requiring the soloist (Niklas Sivelöv) to engage with a wide variety of styles and some decidedly over-the-top passages showing the influence of multiple compositional approaches. This is an impressively spun-out piece that is perhaps a touch too breathless for its own good but that, as it progresses, certainly will have listeners wondering what is coming next. Another solo-and-ensemble work here, Murmurations, is more modest in scope: it features clarinetist Søren-Filip Brix Hansen with the wind orchestra Den Kongelige Livgardes Musikkorps conducted by Giordano Bellincampi. Somewhat self-consciously imitative of avian communication, the piece is interesting for some of its wind-against-winds settings. Winds are also the focus of What no one else sees… (spelled that way, including ellipsis). This is a pleasant, largely lighthearted three-movement work for woodwind quintet (played by a group called Opus Zoo). The movement titles – “Playful,” “Serious,” and “Free Spirited” – sum up the moods of the work rather well, although there is a somewhat sly hint of the not-too-serious in the central movement. These disparate pieces show Smaldone’s interest in a wide variety of compositional techniques and influences and highlight the varying effects of his focuses on different organizational principles, musical structures and stylistic approaches.

— Mark Estren, 1.30.2025

Beauty In Flurries of Sound

A couple of years ago, New Focus released a collection of chamber music by composer Edward Smaldone (b. 1956). Smaldone is Professor Emeritus of Music at the Aaron Copland School of Music, CUNY-Queens. The current release shifts the focus to some of his larger works for orchestra and wind ensemble. The album takes its title from a woodwind quintet that closes the album.

Beauty if Innuendo (premiered in 2013) which gets things off to an exciting start with its flurry of sound around a string tremolo. There are splashes of color from across the orchestra that add to a sense of exhilaration. A variety of extended harmonic clusters of sound provide a waning contrasting section before things begin to build again into a swirl of sounds. All this eventually dissolves to a single held note in violins. The piece is quite dramatic and rather exciting with its postmodern orchestral style. The other orchestral work, June 2011, hearkens back to a mid-century American contemporary music with its Bernstein-like fusion of Americana and jazz and forays into third-stream styles. This lends it a sort of swagger in some of the gestures and in the brass and mallet percussion.

There are two works for solos and orchestra/ensemble are placed between the purely orchestral pieces. The first is a piano concerto of sorts, Prendendo Fuoco (2020). The work features five interconnected movements. Here one gets a better feel for the colorful orchestral palette. Some of the piano flourishes are a blend of post-romantic style with little jazz inflections. It has an overall rhapsodic quality. There are also some excellent moments of interplay between orchestral solos and the piano here. Some of the more astringent harmonic ideas provide an added dramatic flair with their closer intervallic writing. Within that language though are some equally romantic gestures that help create an interesting blend of sound. There are some interesting rhythmic punctuations that add an additional jazz-like feel with the syncopated styles and harmonies as the piece enters its midpoint. Murmurations is for clarinet and wind orchestra. Here the solo line takes the part of a bird in flight. The ensemble is provides interesting color here too with hints at “big band” sound and also a variety of interaction through the imitation that is a structural mark of the work. It creates an interesting textural piece at times with interesting layers of sound.

The album closes with a delightful little woodwind quintet, What no one else sees…The work is a bit more abstract in conception with a typical fast-slow-fast movement structure. The central movement is notable for its gorgeous English Horn solo. The sort of virtuosic writing on display is handled well by the quintet. Interesting syncopation and groove elements all appear in this little coda of a work.

The opening work was recorded for Ablaze Records and has been reissued here along with recordings made over the past four years. Predendo Fuoco has a very lively acoustic which results in a blend of forward piano that is quite crisp the orchestral textures which get moved to the back of the sound picture in the balance. This is carried through to the clarinet piece a bit which helps add to the crisp attacks of the winds here. The accompanying booklet provides some additional details about Smaldone’s works with some nods to the difficulties of performance and recording during the 2020 pandemic.

The performances are all quite committed and tackle the music with great energy and excitement. Niklas Sivelov certainly throws himself into the technical qualities here displaying a great command of rhythmic articulation as well as managing to help communicate the phrasing of the music well. The beautiful playing of Soren-Filip Brix Hansen also invites the listener into the clarinet work with rich, full tones that give way to some great virtuosic demands.

Here is another fine album of contemporary American orchestral music with engaging works that are quite accessible even within some of their more modern harmonic moments.

— Steven Kennedy, 2.07.2025

“I’d like to prepare you for this CD with some ideas about three passions of mine: food, music, and architecture”, writes American composer Edward Smaldone in the foreword to this issue, and continues, “You can imagine this CD as a large table filled with musical dishes prepared over the course of 15 years, assembled here in the anachronistic form of a single CD. Think of it as a plate from which to sample from the buffet, returning as often as you like for the complete five-course banquet. I hope your ears and your emotions will be surprised, intrigued, drawn in, fascinated, enticed, tickled, and possibly even shocked from time to time with an array of satisfying and tasty bits.”

As a dedicated omnivore, I approached the buffet with both curiosity and some trepidation. I snapped up, while perusing the rest of the foreword, that Smaldone’s musical household gods are jazz musicians, in particular bebop names like Miles Davis, Oscar Peterson, Joe Pass and others. Also that he has himself been a performing jazz guitarist for fifty years. This is certainly my cup of tea. The other side of the coin is his fascination for dodecaphony, ie. twelve-tone music. I understand the principle and I have no aversions against the dissonances that are an unavoidable result of the technique, but I’m still sceptical. I fully understand that Edward Smaldone, with his interest in architecture, is fascinated by structures. Anyway, when I indulged in the buffet, I certainly appreciated the dishes; I even returned to several of them for a second helping.

My first impression of the opening piece, Beauty of Innuendo, was that here Smaldone wallows in his love of big band jazz: smashing, brass dominated fanfare chords and heavy percussion, really powerful music, but after circa three minutes he changes focus to softer, woodwind chamber music. Then the focus shifts several times, like a dialogue between two antipodes. In the end, it is the woodwind softness that wins the battle and discretely leaves the battlefield.

The piano concerto, Prendendo Fuoco [Catching Fire] from 2020 is the longest piece in this programme. It is written in four consecutive movements, played attacca: Introduction (Smoldering), Ballad (Singing), Fire Dances, Incendiary (Quiet before the storm, Catching Fire). It is initially a rather lyrical work, with a rhapsodic piano part, jazzy with rather jagged rhythms. In the finale, Catching Fire, the soloist has a field day with virtuoso playing of the highest order. It was composed for Swedish pianist Niklas Sivelöv, himself a successful composer, and it was finished in 2020. Then came the pandemic which paralysed the whole world and the planned premiere was postponed until March 2023, when it was performed in New York City with the composer conducting. It was recorded in Glasgow the following year, with Sivelöv playing the solo part.

Murmurations (2021) is the most recent work here and is composed for military band and clarinet soloist, the eminent Dane, Søren-Filip Brix Hansen. There is a mystical atmosphere about the music – hence the puzzling title – but the jazzy atmosphere is there. The solo part is virtuoso.

June 2011 is also strongly influenced by big band jazz, but there are also long stretches of inwardness, referring to the title. That was the month when the last member of the previous generation passed away.

The last work stands out from the rest of the programme in several ways. It was written for woodwind quintet, a glaring contrast to the big orchestral forces of the other pieces. The names of the three movements are straightforward and the whole work was recorded live and presented here without moppings-up or other editing. The title, What no one else sees … is taken from a line in “The Creative Act” by Rick Rubin, a music producer best known for his work with pop and hip-hop artists. It can of course be interpreted in many ways, so the field is wide open for the listeners to create their own visions. The first movement, Playful, is exactly that: a typical scherzo full of joy and syncopated, so jazz isn’t far away here either. The following movement, Serious, is kind of sighing, but in between there are long beautiful cantilenas, while Free Spirited is again rhythmic, full of action; a lot happens in a short time. It is very stimulating, and the Danish Opus Zoo Woodwind Quintet, for whom the work was composed, are really inspired. Exactly when the work was written does not emerge from the text.

My brief comments about the works are not intended to be analyses, just my spontaneous first reactions. For more deep probing descriptions, Edward Smaldone’s own descriptions are a more reliable source. This was my first contact with his music. It was a pleasant meeting, and it was moreish. The harmonies are bold, littered with dissonances, which may be a hindrance for some listeners to appreciate it, but it is worth the effort to give it a try. A good piece of advice to sceptics is to start with What no one else sees … The first movement, Playful, should clear away any doubts.

— Göran Forsling, 2.09.2025

A seventy-five-minute portrait of American composer Edward Smaldone, What no one else sees… presents five well-crafted works performed by a variety of ensembles. Two large-scale orchestral pieces sit comfortably alongside a clarinet concerto, piano concerto, and woodwind quintet, the set collectively testifying to Smaldone's gifts and eclecticism. Now Professor Emeritus of Music at the Aaron Copland School of Music, Queens College, City University of New York, Smaldone (b. 1956) was on faculty from 1989 to 2024 and has received numerous awards and recognitions for his work. His music has been performed by orchestras, ensembles, and soloists throughout the world and appeared on labels such as New World, Naxos, and, of course, New Focus Recordings.

The composer himself acknowledges that his music's sown from multiple seeds, musical, of course, but architectural too. As someone who's played jazz guitar for half a century and absorbed music by figures such as Miles Davis and Maria Schneider, it's only natural that the vocabulary of jazz would have seeped into his writing, even if indirectly. While no one will encounter a straight-up jazz riff in a Smaldone work, rhythmic thrust often animates his material and lends it a jazz-like spontaneity. The sophisticated writing and orchestration for which Schneider's known finds a place in Smaldone's music too, and of course classical music in all its forms have influenced him also. It isn't unusual for a passage of Bernstein-like vitality to enliven one piece and a sober twelve-tone-influenced episode another.

The architectural dimension arises in his wise contention that disparate parts require a cohesive structure if an aesthetically satisfying whole is to result. For him, “music is built up from a series of small carefully controlled moments into large structures [and] each moment needs to live as part of the whole, like the bricks of a building.” Like a great architectural design, a Smaldone composition develops organically yet is also constructed with meticulous, incremental care into a smartly synthesized whole. Bolstering the present album's appeal is the calibre of the performers involved, from the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, Denmark's Royal Life Guards Music Band, and the Brno Philharmonic to the Opus Zoo Woodwind Quintet and soloists Niklas Sivelöv (piano) and Søren-Filip Brix Hansen (clarinet). Overseeing three performances are Mikel Toms, with Giordano Bellincampi conducting the fourth.

Its title derived from a line in Wallace Stevens' beloved poem, 13 Ways of looking at a Blackbird, Beauty of Innuendo initiates the recording with an audacious reverie performed by Toms and the Brno Philharmonic. A bold meditation on experience and the memories that accrue from it, the material follows an intensifying intro of blustery eruption with a calmer, almost pastoral passage of woodwinds and strings. The organic character of Smaldone's music is evident in the naturalness of the material's unfolding and the smoothness of its transitions. Teetering on the brink of chaos at certain junctures, the work eventually reaches a state of peaceful resolution before becoming a memory.

While Smaldone's concerto for piano and orchestra, Prendendo Fuoco (Catching Fire), was composed in 2020 for a spring premiere, its first presentation had to be pushed ahead because of the pandemic and finally appeared in 2024 with the Swedish pianist Niklas Sivelöv (for whom it was written) as the soloist; that gap allowed Smaldone to tinker with the work and also incorporate some suggestions made by Sivelöv. Toms conducts again, with this time the Royal Scottish National Orchestra performing with the pianist. Section titles cue the listener as to what to expect, with “Introduction (Smoldering)” laying evocative groundwork for the conversational interplay of the ornate “Ballad, Singing,” robust “Fire Dances,” and self-explanatory “Incendiary (Quiet before the storm, Catching Fire)” parts. Sivelöv is terrific throughout the performance, which progresses without pause for twenty-one minutes, as the movement markings identify shifts in musical character, not distinct statements.

Written for clarinet and wind orchestra, Murmurations is performed by Hansen (the inspiration for the work), Bellincampi, and the Royal Life Guards Music Band. Consistent with the title, the musical material is fashioned to suggest birds swooping and circling in the air, with the solo clarinet the “lead bird” and the wind orchestra its swirling partner. In this tone painting, Smaldone's writing convincingly evokes the animated image in the music's fluid movements and the acrobatic flight of Hansen's clarinet. In the penultimate June 2011, Toms conducts the Royal Scottish National Orchestra in dramatic material written after the passing of Smaldone's mother-in-law. Instead of a one-dimensional expression of grief, however, the piece plays more like a celebration of life when rhythmic material (hinting at Bernstein's West Side Story) segues into a lyrical meditation that honours her memory. The final word goes to the Opus Zoo Woodwind Quintet for its live performance of What no one else sees …, whose title comes from a line in producer Rick Rubin's The Creative Act that refers to the idea that the artist “sees” a work before bringing it into being. While the work is non-programmatic, each of its parts has a distinct character, as intimated by the movement titles. The classic fast-slow-fast structure is adhered to when the buoyant “Playful” and “Free Spirited” parts bookend the earnest “Serious” in a stripped-down arrangement that presents Smaldone's music at its most appealing.

His hope for the release, that the listener will encounter a variety of works “assembled in one place that explores a consistent compositional voice through a wide variety of musical landscapes,” is fully realized by the presentation. As a portrait-like overview of his music, the release meets that goal splendidly.

The New York composer Edward Smaldone (b. 1956) has been warmly praised in Fanfare, and his credentials are impressive. He is a professor emeritus at the Aaron Copland School of Music, Queens College, also serving for 14 years as the school’s director and president for two years of the League of Composers, with the attendant honors and grants that you’d expect. This album, which spans 15 years, includes five thoroughly impressive works: two concertos, for piano and clarinet; two large-scale orchestral pieces; and a woodwind quintet. Smaldone, like almost all contemporary composers, has developed his own eclectic style. More than half a century as a jazz guitarist forms one of his strongest influences, although it isn’t directly reflected in these works.

I can’t help but think of a parallel career, William Schuman’s, another high- profile New York composer carving out an eclectic modern style, although Smaldone is friendlier toward the 12-tone system, while heading up a major music school, in his case Juilliard. What was expected in Schuman’s day, more than two generations ago, was for major composers to contribute to a nation’s culture, which involved concerns that were broadly humanist. Even though this is my first encounter with Smaldone, his articulate program notes and the inspiration he takes from modern architecture, not to mention that he quotes Wallace Stevens’s “13 Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” (from which he took the title, Beauty of Innuendo), leads me to the sense that being part of culture is meaningful for Smaldone, a sense underscored by the modesty of how he presents himself in prose.

Getting down to practicalities, craft and detailed workmanship are clearly a priority in these pieces. Smaldone tells us that his conception of musical structure is to create small ideas that can grow organically into large expressions, even crashing climaxes. That occurs in Beauty of Innuendo, which begins with spare tremolos and ends on a single note in the violins. A lot happens in between, including three lyrical woodwind solos amid an impressive stream of shifting emotions and musical ideas. The pace is fast and energized, with a few respites, and the harmonies remain largely on the conservative side compared, say, with Thomas Adès or Jörg Widmann. One gets the impression of a modernist language that Smaldone assimilated as he matured and has remained at his core.

Prendendo Fuoco (Catching Fire) was written as a concerto in all but name for the admired Swedish pianist Niklas Sivelöv, who is the soloist here. Broadly speaking the work’s five movements, played continuously, proceed as you’d expect from the theme of fire, beginning with “Smoldering” and ending with ‘Incendiary.” Centrally placed are three “Fire Dances” at the apex of the arch. The solo part lies in an enticing limbo between Rachmaninoff and Oscar Peterson, between the soulful and the decoratively cosmopolitan. Room is made for a ballad along with interlaced keyboard virtuosity. Sivelöv is so effortless that he lends the piano part a note of effervescent cool. The composer’s notes don’t mention South America, but passages of rhythmic ebullience ask for someone to shout “Arriba!” This is the most scintillating piece on the program.

A concerto-like work for clarinet and wind orchestra is Murmurations, taking the name for those hypnotically swirling flocks of starlings at twilight. In broad outline the clarinet is the lead bird whose movements are followed by the orchestra as his flock. I’m not sure, however, that listeners would make an automatic connection with flight except for the title. There are sustained and extended lines along with restless motion and twittering. In some ways this feels like a harmonically advanced Benny Goodman backed up by a big band— massed sectional blasts are exciting accents. At other times the layered chords are quite complex. Danish clarinetist Søren-Filip Brix Hansen studied at the Aaron Copland School before returning to Copenhagen to become concertmaster of the Danish wind orchestra that performs here; it also commissioned the piece in his honor.

The other orchestral work on the program, June 2011, is a personal reference to the date when the last member of Smaldone’s family from the previous generation passed away. Although there are elegiac passages, the music diverges from melancholy, much less grief, in its melodic tone, which might be mistaken for Samuel Barber’s Romantic lushness at times. June 2011 has a direct appeal that overcomes a drawback I feel about the other three works with orchestra: They exuberantly address the audience while presenting harmonies too complex and structures too abstract for general listeners. This piece doesn’t, which makes it a good entry point to the program if you do online sampling.

A woodwind quintet, What no one else sees..., is the album’s title work, although in this case the cryptic title has no bearing on the music, which is more clearly depicted by the moods of the three movements: “Playful,” “Serious,” and “Free Spirited” in a typical fast-slow-fast sequence. Woodwind quintets tend to follow in the serenade tradition established by Mozart’s Harmonienmusick (he didn’t write a woodwind quintet himself, only the great quintet for piano and winds). Smaldone’s bouncy, sparkling, syncopated first movement adheres to the tradition nicely. A string of separate chords that opens the slow movement establishes a series of abstract relationships I couldn’t connect with. An attractive English horn melody graces this movement. Elsewhere Smaldone doesn’t often display a melodic gift; he has more serious intentions for his motifs and seed cells.

The finale doesn’t break new ground, being little different from the first movement for sparkle, bounciness, and syncopation, minus half the fun. All told, I felt like a detached listener to this work, despite the excellent performance by the Danish quintet, Opus Zoo, for whom it was written. This is a good place to say that all the performances here rise to a high quality without exception, and the recorded sound from various dates and venues is quite good.

For me, the high points here are Prendendo Fuoco and June 2011, particularly with general listeners in mind. The problem with the prevailing eclecticism in contemporary music is that conveying a personal voice is more difficult than ever, while the level of skill among composers is generally higher than ever. Smaldone, as represented here, doesn’t transcend the problem, but that didn’t stop me from respecting his gift for intricate craftsmanship or his quick-witted imagination.

— Huntley Dent, 3.06.2025

In his introduction to this disc, the composer, Edward Smaldone, suggests treating it as a five-course banquet laid out on a table as separate dishes which the listener is encouraged to treat as a buffet from which they can sample as many as they wish, returning to the table as often as they like. I approve of the analogy, as I remember once, when I had properly discovered chamber music, going through a phase when I felt overfed by symphonic music, in that it was like being served a three-course meal on a single plate. In reviewing the disc I have, indeed returned to the table multiple times but have never felt either overfed. What happened, as indeed it should, is that every time I returned I discovered something I had missed before, and savouring the multitude of flavours became a thing of great joy.

Smaldone cites his major influences as both jazz and concert music, and having spent over fifty years as a performing jazz guitarist, he should know what he’s talking about. As a jazz fan myself, I can attest that the influence is clearly there. I also thoroughly approve of his assertion that “the brainy parts of contemporary concert music should never get in the way of expressing heartfelt, soulful, swinging music that exudes the spirit of spontaneity. The two sides combine.” The more often the listener ‘returns to the table’ the more all these strands will merge in the brain and the more the ‘diner’ will enjoy the feast.

Beauty of innuendo is an extremely powerful work, as are all the works on the disc. There is a virtual musical maelstrom created for the first two and a half minutes before the energy seems to burn itself out, making way for a gentler interlude before the intensity builds once again and continues for the rest of the work, ending with a gradually reducing tension culminating with a single note from the violins before the piece evaporates into silence.

For me, the piano concerto Prendendo Fuoco (Catching Fire) is the highlight of the disc. It is divided into four sections subtitled Introduction (Smouldering); Ballad, Singing; Fire Dances; Incendiary (Quiet before the storm, Catching Fire). As suggested, the opening alludes to the beginnings of a fire when it is still simply smouldering. The beauty of these opening sections belies the ferocity that awaits. The quiet occurring before the moment of spontaneous combustion is such a contrast to when it finally bursts into all-consuming flames that the power is almost tangible. All the orchestral forces are brought to bear to create a sound picture of the increasing flames that morph into total conflagration with the piano providing the detail. There are some moments when the soloist is called upon to perform considerable feats of dexterity with hands leaping from right to left with greater and greater speed, especially in the closing minute. It must be quite an experience to watch the work, written specifically for Niklas Sivelöv, performed live. Repeated hearings only serve to allow the listener to get more out of it and marvel at both the work and the soloist.

Composers are a special breed who often challenge themselves to represent increasingly difficult scenarios and the next work is, like creating the sound of fire, a hard one indeed: a murmuration of starlings. It is a magical experience and to painting that picture in music exerts particular challenges which Edward Smaldone manages with amazing aplomb. It is the next best thing to seeing it and a blind person listening would be better able to imagine it than by any other method. The composer’s choice of using a clarinet is perfect; it has a special grace and the ability to enable the listener to envisage the swooping, soaring, circling and diving of birds. It is a powerfully expressive work.

The next piece was, once again a difficult challenge which the composer set himself: namely to represent a moment in time when life for his family changed forever following the loss of the last member of his wife’s generation, her mother. The music is meant to represent the specific moment when this occurred and its emotional impact on the family. The music begins powerfully, presumably representing his mother-in-law’s hold on life and her unquenchable spirit; it then relaxes into a calm and peaceful period as her life begins to slip away before ending with more of a bang than a whimper. I trust my interpretation is not too far from how it was meant.

The final work on this intriguing disc is a woodwind quintet entitled, as is the entire disc, What no one else sees… It is divided into three sections: Playful, Serious, Free Spirited. The idea behind the title came from a book “The Creative Act” that holds that the creative artist “sees” the work they are creating before it exists, in ways no one else does. It is a fascinating concept, for how many of us have wondered how a composer begins to write a work, especially those (and there are many) who can compose one in a matter of days, if not hours? The music is completely abstract with two fast outer movements enveloping a pensive slow movement. The whole is a complete joy and wind bands around the world will surely gratefully welcome it into their repertoire.

I’ve always found American music extremely interesting; there is a very strong and highly expressive spirit of innovation and a feeling of spontaneity (which he mentions in the notes) in the music coming out of that country. Edward Smaldone is, therefore, as one might expect, someone with a singularly unique voice and the disc is an excellent starting point from which to discover his attractive and individual music. All the musicians who perform it here were, it seems, carefully chosen and the two orchestras, two conductors, Den Kongelige Livgardes Musikkorps (Royal Life Guards Music Band) as well as the individual performers all show total commitment to the music and the composer – and from what he writes in the booklet notes it would seem that he was more than pleased with the results. Proof of this is shown by the fact that two of the works had already appeared on another label, performed by the same forces but were selected to be part of the present disc.

— Steve Arloff, 3.12.2025