Listening Post /Brief reviews of select releases
Pop
New Kids on the Block, “The Block” (Interscope). They’re far from new, no longer boys, but New Kids on the Block have definitely been around the block since making tween girls scream with joy in the late ’80s and early ’90s before breaking up in 1994. “The Block,” the pop-R&B’s group’s reunion album, comes 20 years after 1988’s “Hangin’ Tough” went multiplatinum. The guys — Joey McIntyre, Donnie Wahlberg, Danny Wood and brothers Jonathan and Jordan Knight — look handsomely rugged now, a sure draw for old-time female fans, now in their mid-20s to 30s. Songs such as “2 In the Morning” and “Summertime” have an undeniable retro groove. The album’s myriad producers and writers, including Bryan-Michael Cox, Emmanuel Kiriakou, RedOne, Fernando and Nazaree, layer on the sleekness. NKOTB are back, boys to men. “Click Click Click,” a breathy slow jam riding on hand claps and vocal trills, takes a page from the Justin Timberlake handbook. Timberlake’s former boy band ’N Sync may have climbed the mountain NKOTB built, but the reunited quintet now looks to the anointed Timberlake for guidance. ★★ 1/2 (Solvej Schou, Associated Press)
Classical
Nikolai Miaskovsky, Complete Symphonies, Sinfoniettas and Other Orchestral Works performed by the Orchestra Symphonique D’Etat de la federation de Russie and Orchestra Symphonique de L’Urss conducted by Evgeny Svetlanov (Warner Classics/France, 16 discs). Once upon a time, Nikolai Miaskovsky was known to us in the West as “the Dostoevsky of Russian music,” largely because of the mahogany-hued gloom of the earliest of his 27 — yes 27 — symphonies. Obviously such a feloniously neat formulation does a rank disservice to both Miaskovsky and Dostoevsky (whose psychological complexities and spiritual anxieties are inimitable in literature, let alone other arts). Much better, in Miaskovsky’s case, would be to contrast him with his near contemporaries, the older and increasingly beloved Russian composer/pianists Rachmaninoff and, especially, Scriabin. Miaskovsky and Scriabin both began compositional careers with Chopinesque piano pieces but they became perfect polar opposites. Scriabin, a megalomaniacal, near-mad and short-lived adventurer into atonality and ecstatic extremes, Miaskovsky a functioning academic (at the Moscow Conservatory) and friend of Prokofiev who taught Khachaturian and Kabalevsky and managed to evade even the worst humiliation of the aesthetic Stalinists and artistic bureaucrats who launched punishing havoc for the unquestioned titans of 20th century Russian music, Prokofiev and Shostakovich. When it was what was required, Miaskovsky could write “socialist realism” with the best of them and if, at his best, he only slightly exceeded Prokofiev and Shostakovich at their absolute worst, he is still revealed here in this massive 16-disc set to be a composer of vastly greater variety and even fascination than is reflected by the neglect that so often settles on composers so prodigiously prolific. Svetlanov, his great champion among conductors, met the collapse of the Soviet Union with a project to conduct ALL the orchestral music of the 20th century’s most prolific symphonist. It is a Siberian landscape of a set, by turns arid, harrowingly rigorous, fascinating, immense and beautiful. ★★★( Jeff Simon)
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Bernstein Conducts Bernstein performed by the New York Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein (Sony Classics, 10 discs.) Lenny, dear Lenny, would have been 90 on Aug. 25th if a frequently frenetic international career and more than a little high life hadn’t taken him at 72. The year 2008 also marked the 65th anniversary of his Carnegie Hall debut. It ought to go without saying a hundred times over that no matter how dated the sound can be here (a couple of these discs are mono), no one ever conducted Bernstein like Bernstein or ever will. The clarity and theatricality of the music was matched by the clarity and theatricality of the conductor, no matter how much kitsch and melodrama he got into. Once upon a time, the theater man who wrote “West Side Story,” the ballet “Fancy Free” and the stunning film music for “On the Waterfront” promised much. In the two versions for piano and orchestra of “Age of Anxiety” (performed here by former BPO conductor Lukas Foss and, in the expanded revision by Philippe Entremont) and the “Jeremiah” Symphony he was a different sort of composer than the quintessential concert hall theater man he turned out to be in the “Kaddish” Symphony No. 3, and “Mass.” In this large 10- disc set from Sony’s superb “Original Jacket” series, you get mono and stereo versions of the violin Serenade After Plato’s Symposium (with, respectively, Isaac Stern and Zino Francescatti), Kentonesque pseudo-jazz and a good deal of what was probably the theater man’s favorite form, the stylistic metropolitan mish mash of whatever was au courant in Lenny’s head and salon (places always intimate connected). He WAS a great conductor, even if he was too much himself to ever become the great post-Copland composer that once seemed possible. ★★★ 1/2 ( J.S.)
Jazz/Fusion
S. M. V., “Thunder” (Heads Up). S is for Stanley Clarke, M is for Marcus Miller and V is for Victor Wooten. What you get when such exalted journeymen in the Brotherhood of the Electric Bass combine isn’t thunder, no matter what they claim, but a lot of inconsequential and busy jive despite the presence of Clarke’s old friend and employer Chick Corea on one tune (and George Duke on some others). Which isn’t to say that it isn’t sometimes fun. There’s a lot of digital gymnastics, though, to little apparent purpose except to elicit “oohs” and “aahs”; there’s also a lot of synth-pomp and a good deal of doubling too (between them, Miller and Clarke virtually make up a big band by themselves). There’s even some music (the more rock in this fusion, the better). And — are you ready? — there’s also the wonderful singer/beat boxer Butterscotch from “America’s Got Talent” last season on three tunes here (one of them Miles Davis’ “Tutu”), thereby finding a proper home for one of the most impressive talents ever introduced to the world by, uh, Jerry Springer. ★★ 1/2 ( J.S.)
