The beautiful, terrifying music of John Corigliano

“Those gay composers sure write beautiful music.”

Those were a friend’s first words to me during an intermission at a concert late this past spring at the Troy Savings Bank Music Hall.  He could have been speaking of so many different folks, such as the Americans Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, or Leonard Bernstein, to name just a few. Or from the classics there’s Tchaikovsky or Handel, for that matter.  But on this occasion the swooning was prompted by music of John Corigliano.

We heard a fair amount of Corigliano this past season in Albany. There were works on two different programs of the Albany Symphony Orchestra, a little tone poem and then his big theatrical flute concerto “Piped Piper Fantasy.”  In April his luscious “Fern Hill” for chorus and orchestra was performed by the Albany Pro Musica, which is when the intermission remark was made.

Corigliano turned 70 last year and is one of our country’s most prominent composers. He’s been out for ages, and his partner is the 40-something composer Mark Adamo, who’s first opera “Little Women” has been a knock-out hit at small companies and college music schools.  Corigliano’s had his own success with music for the dramatic stage. His only opera, “The Ghosts of Versailles,” was written for nothing less than the Metropolitan Opera, where it premiered back in the early 1990s.

While he’s got a large catalog of works in many genres, Corigliano’s most famous pieces are probably his two Hollywood film scores, “Altered States” (1980) and “The Red Violin” (1997).  He won an Academy Award for the latter. And when he received the Pulitzer Prize in 2001 for his Second Symphony, he became the only composer besides Copland to receive these top honors in such divergent realms of the cultural universe.

The American Classics series on Naxos has been releasing lots of Corigliano’s music lately and since the CDs (or the downloads) are moderately priced at around $9 each, they make for a rather low-risk way to sample his music.  And much of it is indeed beautiful, as my friend remarked, but there’s also something grand and apocalyptic about Corigliano’s sonic universe.

Take for example “A Dylan Thomas Trilogy,” performed on a recent CD by the Nashville Symphony Orchestra and Chorus, conducted by Leonard Slatkin.  It’s a rather autobiographical work, more than an hour long, that pulls together disparate pieces written from the late 1950s to the late 1990s. While it incorporates the youthful and tuneful “Fern Hill,” it also explores the dark emotions of midlife (“Poem in October”) with rather terrifying vividness.

Playing with time through a mixture of nostalgia and mystery is another thing Corigliano masters.  “Three Hallucinations (from Altered States)” blends together distant sounds of Renaissance music and sacred hymns with angular, modern turbulence and noise. Performed by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and conductor JoAnn Falletta, the piece is actually the filler on a recent Naxos disc with that features a more recent work, “Mr. Tambourine Man: Seven Poems of Bob Dylan.”  It’s hard to believe, but Corigliano swears he never heard a note of Dylan’s music so he was able to take some of Dylan’s lyrics and make his own songs out of them, even the iconic “Blowin’ in the Wind.”  The orchestral song cycle, performed by soprano Hila Plittmann, is certainly convincing and original, and again there’s a characteristic mixing or alternating of springtime folk-music optimism and doom and gloom poundings and mutterings from the orchestra.

Yet another new disc features one of Corigliano’s newest major works, “Circus Maximus,” a seven movement piece, scored for a ginormous wind band, played by the University of Texas Wind Ensemble led by conductor Jerry Junkin.  Over filled with irony, sass and sarcasm, as well as blaring sound effects and even gun shots, I found it just too raucous and loud even for my modern-attuned ears.  The composer’s notes suggest it’s a comment on the crassness of our commercial society. My response is — well as if we need any reminding.

It’s interesting that Corigliano dubbed the piece his Symphony No. 3, considering that he once declared he’d never ever write a symphony.  It was the AIDS crisis that convinced him to take on such a lofty mantle as the symphonic form.  His 1991 effort, Symphony No. 1 “Of Rage and Remembrance,” perfectly captured the grief and anger of those days and has earned Corigliano a permanent place of honor among the pantheon of gay composers.