Recordings

Of the seven short pieces on this disc, Cal State Northridge professor Daniel Kessner’s “Images of Romania” lasts the longest--a total of 15 minutes--though it is not the most complex or technically ambitious.

Using primary colors across a broad, open sound space, the work paints a series of gritty, atmospheric pictures inspired by trips to Romania. The continuous three-movement piece embeds alternating spoken lines of imagistic Romanian poetry with their English translations. The orchestra creates textures that are less commentary on the poems than parallel compositions. Kessner conducts.

The rest of the CD is a sample of varying and attractive but fairly conservative compositional techniques. What seems universal is a mastery of orchestration.

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