"Visconti's writing was both mature and youthful, bristling with exhilarating musical ideas and a powerfully crafted lyricism. The performance rocked, and the piece [Black Bend] made a strong impact."
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
"The big message of Dan Visconti's Fractured Jams was that new music can have some wit. There are smart references to popular music forms, as well as riffs on ragtime and, of all things, farm animals."
—The Washington Post
"The 18-piece orchestra was the star of Dan Visconti’s Low Country Haze, imagining the unfamiliar sounds of nature that 16th-century explorers must have heard in their trip through the American south. Had Debussy worked in the 21st century, he might have come up with some of the pizzicato and brushwork effects Visconti devised for the opening, that soon eased into an evocative tone poem that avoided the trap of slavishly reproducing obvious birdsong and the like."
—Metroland Weekly
"Visconti's new scores are varied and skillful...Graffiti is the more modern of the two, a bold investigation of layered effects and colors woven into a clamorous and delicate narrative. His Storm Windows is somewhat more conventional in musical language but equally affecting in expressive impact. Set to a text by the late U.S. poet laureate, Howard Nemerov, the piece wraps warm string lines around the idyllic verses, until offstage chimes, bells and trombones evoke an aura of languid nostalgia."
—Cleveland Plain Dealer
"The program began with a wily sonic entertainment by a musician just 25. Like so many of his contemporaries, he scorns the border between classical and pop. His bluesy Black Bend, first heard here in December, is a savory stew of found sounds—insects, train whistles, the clickety-clack of steel on steel—seasoned with improvisatory elements and finished with attitude. Originally for string quartet, it sounded completely at home in its orchestral dress. The performance rocked."
—Minneapolis Star-Tribune
"Vivid...[Some Day the Sun Won't Shine] provided a cheerful and colorful assault on the senses."
—The New York Times
"Even though Ballads and Broken Rhymes may have a populist orientation, a riff on a gospel tune or something sweetly lyrical, any sense of quotation is short-lived. It is only a starting place for Visconti to make his own explorations, not only melodically and rhythmically but to experiment with the concept of a string quartet. The group's reading was lively, bridging the diversity of materials with deftness and security."
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
"Dan Visconti also introduced his Black Bend, inspired by tales of a disastrous train wreck in Ohio. This was one of the evening's finest and most powerful pieces, distinguished by a slow build, like a train gaining steam, and a bluesy bass line."
—The Spokesman-Review
"Composer Dan Visconti called on sacred and secular music of Anne Arundel County and sea chanteys of Chesapeake fishermen to create The Breadth of Breaking Waves. The work was affecting and uncluttered. A primitive, mystical quality colored and offset thundering crashes and glittering chime sounds."
—The Washington Post
"[Black Bend] was fun and short, and didn't come larded with the pretensions of the other pieces."
—The Advocate Weekly
"Nakahara opened the concert with Dan Visconti's Black Bend. It's a musical train wreck, literally, an orchestral onomatopoeia that includes screeching brakes, collapsing bridge, falling timbers, calming insect sounds before and
after a bluesy violin improvisatory figure."
—The State
"Commissioned for the Corigliano Quartet by Chamber Music America, Dan Visconti’s Ballads and Broken Rhymes pays homage, the composer says, to Tin Pan Alley and American pop music of the 1920s and ’30s when great songs were being poured out in profusion. [The Ballads] were fun to hear with plenty of tuneful melodies in each, yet with sophisticated harmonies and rhythmic departures which lifted them out of the mundane to something with depth which will bear repeated listening...Jazz, blues, pop and soul all are interwoven with classical techniques, including at times slurs and swoops in both pitch and volume, sometimes haunting, sometimes bright. The whole has a light, clean construction and it shouldn’t meet the one-performance fate of so many new works. This one has staying power."
—Seattle Weekly
"[Fractured Jams] turned out to be a clever and enjoyable piece of performance art with a distinctly effective, if somewhat gimmicky, sense of humor. Visconti's comic bag of tricks included spasmodic, out-of-control ensemble free for alls, "barnyard sounds," and a kind of Cubist, out-of-sync rag. Pianist Fong's duties were expanded to blowing into a jug, plucking strings, and slamming the keyboard lid shut in a tantrum."
—Crosscut
"And yet [conductor Paul Haas's] ability will take him far, as he proved by leading an auspicious world-premiere performance of Some Day the Sun Won’t Shine, a powerful, carefully calibrated rock-driven work by Dan Visconti."
—New York Observer
"In addition to the Shostakovich Sonata, [violist Melia Watras] also offered the audience three (essentially) “show pieces” by Kreisler, Visconti, and Wieniawski. All were played extremely well...worth noting was the young composer Dan Visconti's Hard-Knock Stomp. With its references to blues and folk music, and virtuosic playing by Watras, it was an enjoyable choice to begin the recital."
—Classical in Seattle
"A fresh new breeze has blown through the staid chamber music world of Sarasota with the Sybarite Chamber Players playing to a whooping audience in a freshly transformed Holley Hall Saturday night. This innovative ensemble has been performing together in New York and Aspen, Colorado since they first played together as a quintet in 1997. [...] Dan Visconti’s Black Bend, also a commissioned work, turned the ensemble into an electric blues guitar with a deep sense of soul. Bottom line: it was simply an exhilarating evening which raised the hopes of many for more music and settings like this."
—Sarasota Herald-Tribune
"Contemporary American composer Dan Visconti's Black Bend likewise borrowed, it appeared, from country music. Visconti took his material, disassembled it, turned it around and looked at it from all sides — just as Ravel did in La Valse."
—Allentown Morning Call
"[Fractured Jams] Combines the thrill, confusion and driving power of rock with the carefully-crafted lyricism of Tin Pan Alley."
—The Stranger
"[The audience] was equally appreciative of Fractured Jams, with murmurs of laughter at times. A work of fragments, with snorts and sniggers (clarinet), squeals and slides (strings), crashes, plonks and slaps (piano), it was brief, clever and fun."
—Seattle Post-Intelligencer
"Dan Visconti’s orchestral piece Storm Windows takes its title from a poem by Howard Nemerov. As the orchestra plays, a narrator reads: “People are putting up storm windows now, / Or were, this morning, until the heavy rain / Drove them indoors…” The calming habits that seem to show humanity’s victory over forces of nature are halted, postponed, then destroyed altogether. Soon lawns are flattened, window glass shattered. But the storm’s destruction allows a new kind of communication to exist: “something of / A swaying clarity.”
It is this new clarity that Visconti’s compositions attempt to bring forth, working from the rubble, detritus, and storm-wreck of more habitual and conventional forms of music. Visconti, this year’s Leonore Annenberg Fellow in Music Composition at the American Academy, spent years as a jazz and rock guitarist, and traces of these genres – as well as blues, gospel, and other forms – remain detectable.
At 26, Visconti has already received numerous accolades for his work, including awards from BMI and ASCAP, the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and the Society of Composers. In the past three years, he has had three major orchestral pieces commissioned: Overdrive for the Minnesota Orchestra, The Breadth of Breaking Waves by the Annapolis Symphony, and Low Country Haze by the Albany Symphony. The forcefulness and energy of his compositions are practically palpable: when describing his music, reviewers call it 'bristling,' 'dazzling,' and an 'assault on the senses.' The potency of Visconti’s compositions demonstrates again the power of music to communicate uniquely among the arts."
—Berlin Journal
"Dan Visconti's Love Bleeds Radiant walked the line between music and noise, its choralelike fragments dissolving into slashing dissonance and distortion."
—The Oregonian
"The sound of a needle as it hits the vinyl—those familiar snaps, crackles, and the discordant, unexpected pops that resonate fluidity and jaggedness simultaneously. The syncopated scratchiness that plays accompanist to the guttural chords pulled from a throbbing blues guitar. Lyrics steeped in masculinity, yet with an undeniable undercurrent of fragility and vulnerability. That is the substance of composer Dan Visconti’s newest work, Love Bleeds Radiant, a piece commissioned for the Kronos Quartet that captures the strident contradictions blues music evokes....the work is a heartfelt tribute to the past that bumps flush, and sometimes violently, with the present."
—STRINGS Magazine
American Individualism: Scharoun Ensemble at Radialsystem
In the end, the Philharmonic's Scharoun Ensemble transformed itself into a glass harmonica: The musicians put their instruments aside and began to draw their fingers across the rims of tuned wine glasses. A soft blanket of sound ended Dan Visconti's Low Country Haze.
Previously, the ensemble under the direction of Michael Hasel basked in lush, impressionistic swelling sounds in a premiere [Drift of Rainbows] commissioned by the ensemble—Visconti knows how to bend the idioms of traditional music to such a degree that they sound refreshing rather than stale.
Stylistic obstacles are nowhere in sight of the 27-year-old Visconti, who is currently a fellow of the American Academy; for him the entire American tradition from Varèse to Cage is apparently colloquial. Each of the five pieces heard at Radialsystem this evening has a very different stylistic orientation. His Black Bend for string quintet, for example, is a masterful collage of blues elements executed with joy and wit, whereas his Fractured Jams locates itself at the unlikely intersection of improvised rock and dense avant-garde tone clusters. Remembrances for Cello and Piano is a melancholic cantilena close to the edge of kitsch, and yet Visconti always manages through asymmetric phrasing to imbue the music with such willfulness that one can enjoy the piece with a clear conscience.
On the European avant-garde festivals, Visconti’s music might have a tough time, because the diversity of styles and approaches has yet to yield a unified compositional language. At the same time, it’s difficult to imagine this causing him to lose any sleep.
—Der Tagesspiegel (Berlin)
Genre-Bending Composer Creates Music for Open Minds:
(excerpted from
Cleveland Arts Prize feature in the Plain Dealer)
"A lot of my work has been connected to Cleveland," says Dan Visconti. "It's the place where I progressed from student to young professional."
But the link to Cleveland runs much deeper. The city also has served as the setting for numerous life-altering experiences and offered inspiration both creative and financial for some of his most important compositions.
Alas, Cleveland cannot take credit for Visconti's twin musical passion, the blues, which he says are "really a part of me, flowing through my veins pretty strongly." That honor goes to Chicago, where Visconti grew up, and to Nashville, Tenn., where the composer has done occasional work as an arranger.
But Cleveland was indeed the place where Visconti had his first serious encounter with jazz, an art form that continues to affect his musical thinking and define him as a composer... playing jazz on a pickup basis, Visconti says he discovered casual performance to be rewarding. This, in turn, taught him that 21st-century composers like himself must "create a concert experience that is special again, something that's particular rather than generic."
Unlike many musicians of today, Visconti eschews computers and sophisticated technology in favor of paper, pencil, his two favorite instruments (violin and guitar) and a rinky-dink electric keyboard he describes as "so incredibly lacking in musicality...it somehow frees me up."
Paul Cox, chair of the Cleveland Arts Prize's music and dance jury, said he found Visconti's music bold and complex but also easy to decipher. "He focuses on the details, almost obsessively, weaving these really unique textures," Cox explained. "He gives you this vague feeling you're listening to jazz, but then transcends the genre with a climax that would be intense in any context."
At the moment, he's busy fulfilling no fewer than three significant commissions. Clevelanders should get their next chance to hear Visconti's music in October, when an ensemble plans to perform his Christmas in America, a work from 2007 for soprano and electric guitar Visconti describes as "an old Christmas novelty-song that seemingly goes off on some kind of acid-trip about halfway through."
Visconti says he plans to write all three this summer while on a guest-teaching stint at the Cleveland Institute of Music and next year during a term at the American Academy in Berlin.
In the meantime, Visconti remains on the quest for fresh ears. He says his ideal listener is anyone who's open-minded, whose tastes, like his, tend to be broad rather than narrow.
In other words, someone who can't be easily pigeonholed. "I can think of no greater accomplishment than if I could, through my music, lead someone towards something new and unfamiliar to them," Visconti explains. "If my music could serve as a bridge, that would be a real privilege."
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