Liebermann: Symphony No. 2; Concerto for Flute and Orchestra. Eugenia Zukerman, flute; Andrew Litton, Dallas Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. Delos DE 3256.(Review)

Liebermann: Symphony No. 2; Concerto for Flute and Orchestra. Eugenia Zukerman, flute; Andrew Litton, Dallas Symphony Orchestra and Chorus. Delos DE 3256.

At last, somebody is listening. Lowell Liebermann takes 20th-century music out of the realm of purely atonal dissonance and attempts to move us with beautiful sounds. In the booklet insert, Peter G. Davis asks, "Did musical composition take a wrong turn at some point early in the twentieth century?" Clearly, the answer is yes, or how explain the public's general dissatisfaction with modern classical music. Critics throughout the 20th century have been telling the public they are just too unsophisticated, too ignorant, to "understand" modern music, but the ruse hasn't worked. Music for the masses, music with melody and rhythm and harmony, is making a comeback, and people like Lowell Liebermann are in the forefront of the movement.

Liebermann's Symphony No. 2, composed in 1999 and here finding its premiere recording, could just as easily have been written at the end of the nineteenth century as at the end of the 20th. It is reminiscent in many ways of Mahler, filled with big, sweeping tunes, marches, soaring harmonic lines, and even a choral component. It's based on passages from the American poet Walt Whitman and celebrates, as Whitman did, life and love of life and nature. It may not make anyone forget Beethoven, Brahms, or Mahler, but it's a step in the right direction to get ...