Bates’s music is usually most convincing when he has a large canvas to work with as was the case with his The B-Sides, which Muti and the CSO played last May...Yet I confess I found much of Alternative Energy overblown, slick and superficial, centered on surface sonic glitz and “hip” populist riffing with little musical substance at its core.
Alternative Energy is an ‘energy symphony’ spanning four movements and hundreds of years. Beginning in a rustic Midwestern junkyard in the late 19th Century, the piece travels through ever greater and more powerful forces of energy — a present-day particle collider, a futuristic Chinese nuclear plant — until it reaches a future Icelandic rainforest, where humanity’s last inhabitants seek a return to a simpler way of life.
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