aworks :: "new" american classical music

Alternative Energy (2012). Mason Bates /broad and inventive/

(Getty Images via @daylife)

Joshua Kosman hails Mason Bates' Alternative Energy as the most exciting work played by orchestras visiting San Francisco:

...Mason Bates' broad and inventive "Alternative Energy," for Chicago, was by far the most exciting new work of the series. I wasn't as taken with the pieces written for Los Angeles by Enrico Chapela and Esteban Benzecry, but they did give evidence of Dudamel's coherent tastes, just as the Boston performances of music by Elliott Carter and John Harbison attested to Levine's commitment to the patrician modernists. At the other end of the spectrum was Philadelphia, whose sole contemporary offering - a brief, bland curtain-raiser - was so feeble and begrudging that it seemed almost an insult. 

More from the February premiere in Chicago here.

Alternative Energy (2012). Mason Bates /"hip" populist riffing/

Chicago Classical Review:

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.

Mason Bates:

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.