Gandolfi: The Garden of Cosmic Speculation (SACD review)

Robert Spano, Atlanta Symphony Orchestra.  Telarc SACD-60696.

If you can get by the pretentious, New Age-sounding title, you may find composer Michael Gandolfi's music interesting in a fragmented sort of way.  Gandolfi found his inspiration in a real-life Scottish garden that tries to represent the newest scientific theories about the mysteries of the universe in its flowers, hills, and terraces:  the Big Bang, superstring theory, wave theory, subatomic particles, DNA, etc.  What Gandolfi does is attempt to transpose those visual symbols into aural, musical ones.  The result is a mixed bag, to say the least.

Like the garden, which is ever changing, the music is in segments that can be rearranged, added to, or subtracted from however its performers decide.  In the case of the present disc, a world-première recording, conductor Robert Spano chose to offer up a three-movement suite of sixteen sections, with names like "The Zeroroom," "Soliton Waves," "The Snail and the Poetics of Going Slow," "The Universe Cascade," "The Garden of Senses," "Fractal Terrace," "The quark Walk," and other such descriptive monikers.

The problem is that apart from each piece of music trying its best to represent some esoteric theory of physics, the whole thing reminded me of the soundtrack to Disney's old movie, "The Black Hole."  Not that that's bad, you understand.  There is a lot of fascinating music here, in styles that range everywhere from ninth-century chants through Bach to Steve Reich to modern cacophony.  And it begins and ends where every good garden should begin and end, with the sounds of birds gaily tootling in the distance.  I suppose we're to take it all seriously, but I couldn't help finding it more than a bit whimsical.

Telarc sent me two discs to review, this hybrid SACD and a regular CD edition, so I had a chance to play the SACD two-channel layer and the regular CD two-channel version side-by-side in separate machines for instant comparisons.  I confess I could hear little or no difference through my bi-amped VMPS RM40 speakers.  Perhaps the SACD sounded a tad more open and dynamic, but it might simply have been my imagination.  In any case, if you have a 5.1 channel setup, you'll get the benefit of the SACD's multichannel playback.  What's more, no matter which layer you play, you'll get some pretty decent and typically "Telarc" sound, with good imaging, good impact, good stereo spread, and good midrange clarity.  So, the disc offers some unusual if somewhat lightweight music in pleasant, modern digital sound.

JJP