Allison Loggins-Hull: The Cleveland Residency. Legacy; Can You See?; Grit. Grace. Glory. The Cleveland Orchestra, Franz Welser-Möst (conductor). TCO Media TCO0017. Total time: 39:26.
DIGITAL REVIEW – Allison Loggins-Hull (born 1982) served as the Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellow at the Cleveland Orchestra 2022-2025, also immersing herself in community outreach, closing her tenure with Grit. Grace. Glory., a veritable love song to that community. This new, in-house live recording from the orchestra presents a striking profile of this important composer.
It opens with Legacy, a string sextet inspired by the composer’s collaborations with Cleveland groups such as the Hryhory Kytasty Cleveland School of Bandura, the Fatima Family Center, and the Karamu House Theatre. This resulted in a piece that combines virtuosic string playing with elements of the blues and gestures from Ukrainian bandura traditions. Remarkably, Loggins-Hull’s sound world avoids the post-Stravinskian tendency to push melodic material to extremes of pitch. She prefers to place lyrical thoughts in the mid-range, the scope of the voice. She manages to sound distinctive in a number of ways: When she is using tonal/modal chords, they are often destabilized by inversion. Further volatility comes from passing tones piling up into tone-clusters. Factor in obsessively syncopated rhythms, with an Ivesian tendency to separate activity into overlapping layers, and you have a voice completely American, yet very much of the world. The players, drawn from the Cleveland Orchestra, savor the material and play it with conviction.
Can You See? is heard in its full orchestral version, premiered by the Cleveland Orchestra in 2023. Deconstructing the U.S. national anthem, the piece aims to find shadows and nuance instead of a chest-thumping patriotic ode. The melody is so torn apart that the average listener wouldn’t likely even recognize the source, which arguably weakens any socio-political statements being made.
Nonetheless, the vividness of the music speaks to the imaginative probing of the material. It is particularly effective following Legacy, in that it offers almost the reverse process, taking apart the theme instead of building on it. Franz Welser-Möst, the orchestra’s music director, has the winds emphasize their keening glissandos, bringing to mind images of shrieking shore birds, or possibly “bombs bursting in air.” Either image contrasts sharply with the syncopated groove in the percussion and bass. The playing is persuasive, though an occasional opaqueness to the recorded sound makes it hard to hear every detail.
The most compelling of the three pieces here is Grit. Grace. Glory., the last work commissioned during Loggins-Hull’s fellowship. The four-movement piece opens with “Steel,” which nods to Cleveland’s industrial background but not in a mournful elegy to the city’s “Rust Belt” status; rather, the composer is interested in the city’s forward drive. Industry may have been Cleveland’s past, but this vibrant music depicts the energy and hard work of a deeper, more personal kind of steel. Minimalist in gesture, the music is maximalist in restless layering.
The second movement, “Shoreline Shadows,” abruptly adumbrates the bright sun with the mysterious weather of Lake Erie. The shift from upbeat kinetic energy to gloomy stasis is as sudden and total as a snow squall. From the depths of the orchestra, an extraordinary low wailing emerges — a bowed tam-tam? — which sounds like the cries of Lake Erie’s legendary cryptid, South Bay Bessie. Loggins-Hull used melodic material suggested by students to assemble this movement. In an outreach project, she had students compose melodies, reflecting their experiences of the city, titled “The Lake,” “Gentrification Battle,” “Gun Violence,” and “New to Cleveland.” The result starts like a post-industrial sequel to Debussy’s First Nocturne (Nuages) before it yields to a meltingly tender middle section. It’s a pity the student contributors aren’t named.
The delightful third movement, “Quip,” is witty and sassy, humor being a longstanding Cleveland resource. The final section, “Ode,” is described as “rocking out” at its climax, though it is here that one can’t help but wonder if another conductor might be willing to take this music a little further out on the edge. Welser-Möst offers dutiful but contained energy, where the music wants something more reckless.
The recorded sound captures advantages and disadvantages of the Mandel Concert Hall in Severance Music Center. Welser-Möst has favored a sleek orchestral sound over the years that seeks to avoid clangor by flattening out articulation and shunning saturated richness. That aspect is revealed faithfully by this recording, which is to say that it works better for some parts of Loggins-Hull’s music than others. Having attended one of the concerts where the final piece was recorded, though, I feel that the mix arguably clouds the collective sound of the ensemble. If the microphone layout for the recording is the same seen deployed during concerts, then it features a large number of microphones, whose feeds are apparently mixed together to create a slightly opaque picture of the orchestra’s sound.
Granted, Mandel Hall is not the most gorgeous-sounding hall for symphonic music in the U.S. (that would be Boston’s Symphony Hall), but it does uniquely ally clarity and warmth in its relatively short reverberation. While this recording is handsome and eminently listenable, it doesn’t quite embrace the magic of the hall’s live sound. Either rehearsal or patching edits were used to eliminate applause at the end, but the live audience response of chuckles after “Quip” was also disappointingly omitted. This way, we get neither full studio presentation nor the sense of occasion of a warts-and-all live recording, typical of the modern classical recording experience.
