M. Brouwer: Rhapsodies

On the evidence of this wonderful album, Margaret Brouwer’s music is a beguiling blend of 19th-century European symphonic traditions, Stravinskian colour, flavours from Latin cultures, and a major nod to the music of 20th-century America. There’s no doubt that she deserves a place among the very best contemporary American composers. Conductor Marin Alsop worked closely with Brouwer on the album and is convinced that Brouwer’s moment has come. “Timing plays a big role in a composer’s trajectory,” Alsop tells Apple Music Classical. “Margaret was composing tonal, listenable music at a time when that was unpopular—programmatic music often gets short shrift, or certainly did in the 1980s and ’90s.” Beautifully and imaginatively orchestrated, the opening work, 2020’s The Art of Sailing at Dawn, recalls Debussy’s powerful evocation La mer in the vividness of its musical descriptions, from the glint of the rising sun on glassy water to the cry of loons in the stillness of the twilight. There’s an almost Straussian richness to Brouwer’s cinematic Path at Sunrise, Masses of Flowers, and her Symphony No. 1 “Lake Voices”—a longer, more substantial work from 1997—is full of majestic, Copland-esque soundscapes, woven through with the haunting peal of bells. Concluding the album is 1997’s Pluto, originally commissioned as a sequel to Holst’s The Planets. Brouwer’s portrait of the Roman god of the underworld is the perfect showcase for her art, as convincing in its portrayal of destructive violence as it is in its moments of lyrical Barber-inspired beauty.