Page 372 - ASMF Marriner 100 Coverage Book

A funny thing happened at The Granada Theatre last week, when the renowned
Academy of St Martin in the Fields orchestra closed out the CAMA “International
Series” season. An impressive and full-blown drum kit was perched on center stage.
Needless to say, this might be comprehensible at a jazz-oriented show, but is
anything but standard practice in orchestral culture.

Soon enough, the audience realized that the “what’s wrong with this picture?”
scenario was something very right. Said drum set was expertly played by one
Douglas Marriner, a soloist in the world premiere of the fascinating composer-
arranger Vince Mendoza’s Flight of Moving Days. Commissioned by the orchestra to
honor the centennial of the late, great founder-leader Sir Neville Marriner, Mendoza’s
piece featured leader Joshua Bell and Marriner (grandson of Sir Neville) in a
felicitous marriage of classical and jazz manners.

It is exceedingly rare to have an actual world premiere by a prominent world-
renowned orchestra in our town, and strangely, CAMA didn’t stir up proper promotion
or ado about the coup. Last May at the CAMA finale concert, we heard a pair of
intriguing premieres — from Gabriella Smith and Ellen Reid — presented as a later
part of the L.A. Phil’s weekend. Last week, as impressive as the “straighter” portion
of the program was, bolstered by the trusty standard stuff of Brahmss’ Violin
Concerto in D and Schumann’s Second Symphony, it was Mendoza’s music that
owned this night and made it most memorable.

Mendoza occupies a special position in the music world, as a veteran and respected
jazz-centered artist with roots in the classical world, a Los Angeleno who teaches at
USC but has developed a strong link in Europe — and is something of a phenom in
England, apparently. (Check out last year’s lustrous album Olympians, with longtime
associates the Dutch Metropole Orkest.)

That genre-crossing aplomb is clearly evident in Flight of Moving Days, which basks
in the spirit of freedom and flight in jazz, but with the structural elegance of a
classical sensibility, and echoes of Copland and Ravel in the harmonic palette. On
the whole, Flight is an atmospheric piece, steeped in an aura of suspended, probing
graces, with protagonist moments for Bell and Marriner the Grand-Younger, the latter
of whom dispensed with impressive and subtle improvisatory statements, as the
score requests. Count this as one classical-jazz melding which worked wonders.