The Piano Variations is more austere than the concerto, drained of its jazziness.
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But on this recording, to their credit, Mr. Zimerman and Mr. Rattle do not overdo the jazziness.
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Its alt-jazziness in full swing, "ribface" shows that you shouldn't have to sacrifice perversity for the sake of professionalism.
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It's genuinely thrilling to hear Future's staccato hook run into Nas' commanding flow on a chilled-out, condensation-soaked beat that finds the halfway point between the former's Southern low-riding sound and the latter's timeless NYC jazziness.
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The music's jazziness is echoed in the hip-tilted inflections of the first and third sections, and its marching rhythms are reflected, without emphasis, in the phalanxes of moving bodies that might refer to armies or to the militaristic drill of the corps de ballet.
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Cartoon characters' rubberiness, their jazziness, their cheerful buoyance and idleness all chimed with popular images of African Americans, already embodied in minstrel shows and in Joel Chandler Harris's tales of Uncle Remus, which Disney was to make into an animated feature, Song of the South, in 1946.
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For a few years in the late 1990s, he toured a concert version of Porgy and Bess, partly in honor of his father, who sang the role for Sidney Poitier in the 1959 film version, and partly "to preserve the score's jazziness" in the face of "largely white orchestras" who tend not "to play around the bar lines, to stretch and bend". McFerrin says that because of his father's work in the movie, "This music has been in my body for 40 years, probably longer than any other music."Cori Ellison, "'Porgy' and Music's Racial Politics", December 13, 1998, The New York Times; available online here . Retrieved July 15, 2010.
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Allmusic said "With the ever-changing nature of its music and the relatively short cues, Nosferatu feels much shorter than it is; it's a deeply focused work that holds together easily. While its very subject matter dictates sinister overtones, the music found here, with few exceptions, is quite pleasurable and accessible listening; when taken together, its cues suggest a new kind of American Gothic".Jurek, T. Allmusic Review, accessed November 8, 2013 All About Jazz stated "Zorn's Nosferatu is a generally haunting album, but the composer punctuates the doom and gloom with moments of grandeur, aggression and even outright jazziness... Nosferatu doesn't present any surprises or musical innovation. Nevertheless, the ambient album flows well, and is a solid addition to Zorn's catalog of musical scores with a couple examples of great sax playing".
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" On October 3, 2016, Albright concluded a second three-concert cycle at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where he was raved as the "Undisputed Master of Variations." It was published that "Many pianists possess great technique; many retain a broad repertoire. Charlie Albright has something extra: the propensity to make concerts riveting, fun and exhilarating. His unique way of communing with the music merges his intentions with the composer’s, bringing freshness of vision and unique expressive ability to his performances." In his performance of Handel, “Albright played it as a fellow musician-composer, in intimate communion with the essentials of the music.” With regards to Albright's Kapustin, "Two right hands are just what Albright has, and in his hands the jazziness was not only emphasized, but was perfectly executed in the best rendition of this work that you are likely to hear.
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Ivan Hewett of The Telegraph wrote, “Like all Andriessen’s best pieces, this showed a man constantly engaged, in the most passionate terms, with the unfathomable dichotomies of human life; passion versus rationality, matter versus spirit, life and death.” Andrew Clements of The Guardian rated the Dutch National Opera set four out of five stars and argued, “The tone is wonderfully varied – sometimes profoundly serious, sometimes wildly exuberant or irreverent – matched to a score that is equally diverse and eclectic.” In the Los Angeles Times, Mark Swed lauded it as a “profoundly moving, if slyly unsentimental, meditation on life, love and death [...] it is Andriessen’s “Italian” opera and has the depth, musical richness and (I predict) lasting power of late Verdi.” Swed praised “the humor, the ingratiating jazziness, the terrible fury and, in the end, the ravishing grace of the later scenes.“ In a 2019 poll of critics and editors of The Guardian, the opera was ranked the seventh greatest classical composition of the 21st century, with Clements referring to the score as “wonderfully polyglot”.
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