On the latest release from BMOP/sound, White Heron, composer Robert Carl takes the listener on a cross-country journey, recalling a drive across the Great Plains to the Rocky Mountains, reminiscing on porch conversations, and remembers a particularly curious heron.
Featuring four of the composer’s orchestral works, this portrait album concerns Carl’s life-long fascination: time and space-concrete, geographical, and metaphorical.
White Heron opens with the eponymous work inspired by the birds of the Florida Keys followed by the most radical and direct piece on the album, What’s Underfoot.
Symphony No.5 “Land” comes from the composer’s experience driving across the American midland, while Rocking Chair Serenade celebrates the composer’s time spent in a rocking chair both currently in his home, his childhood on a porch in Alabama, and on the site of the piece’s premiere in the Appalachian Mountains.
Carl hopes that his music creates something of a model for how the listener can cope “with our increasingly fragmented, intense, and vertiginous experience of life today, and find a sense of energising peace.”
He said: “Above all, I hope this space is one in which the listener can feel freedom and be amplified. If there is exhilaration or a gentle transcendence, then I’ve done my job.”
Reviewing for Gramophone, Thomas May, writes: “Aficionados of contemporary music will be familiar with the name Robert Carl. He recently authored a collection of essays on the challenges faced by 21st-century composers. As an exemplar of the latter, Carl has been steadily building an admirable body of work.
“The orchestral pieces gathered here exhibit his mature synthesis of far-ranging interests into a unique sound world that is recognisably contemporary while aiming for a timeless sublimity – the kind of transportive experience for which our era has so little patience.”
