Zwilich: Cello Concerto – Zuill Bailey

Ellen Taaffe Zwilich turned eighty-five this year, and the honors don’t seem to have slowed her down. Pulitzers and lifetime-achievement plaques have a way of calcifying a composer’s reputation into something museum-bound, settled and safe and over. Not here. The new Cello Concerto, finished when she was well into her ninth decade, sounds like the work of someone still curious about what an orchestra can do, still willing to let a melody wander off and see where it lands.

The backstory matters, and Delos gives us just enough of it. Zwilich wrote the concerto for Zuill Bailey and the South Florida Symphony, her hometown band — Miami being where she grew up, a fact you can sometimes hear in the loose-limbed rhythmic profile of her later scores. The premiere, in 2020, happened over the internet, an audience-less Covid broadcast, cellist and director separated from listeners by law and by fear. That the first commercial recording comes instead from Sonoma County, from an orchestra Zwilich has no biographical tie to whatsoever, is one of those quirks of the record business that will strike future musicologists as odd. It doesn’t diminish the interpretation. Francesco Lecce-Chong gets a reading from the Santa Rosa players that’s alert, well-sprung, unfussy. No glamour orchestra, but a band that clearly enjoys the material.

And there is a lot to enjoy. Nineteen minutes, three movements fused into a single unbroken span. Zwilich has always had a weakness for continuous forms, going back to the Symphony No. 1 that won her the Pulitzer in 1983, the first ever awarded to a woman composer. It is worth pausing on that date. Nineteen eighty-three. Not 1943, not 1893. 1983, within living memory of most people reading this. The concerto opens in a plaintive, almost improvisatory voice, Bailey’s cello singing low and unhurried against sparse orchestral shading, before the music tips over into something jazzier, hip-swaying, brass and winds trading syncopations like they’re passing a joke around a room. Bailey has the tone for both moods, dark and grainy in the opening pages, then bright and articulate once the rhythmic games start. He doesn’t oversell the jazz inflections, which is right; Zwilich’s jazz isn’t jazz exactly, it’s jazz filtered through a composer who came up through twelve-tone rigor with Elliott Carter and Roger Sessions and never entirely shook off the discipline, even after she’d abandoned the idiom.

That biographical hinge is the whole story of her later music, really. The turn from atonalism toward a lush, tonally grounded neo-romanticism follows almost exactly from 1979, the year her husband, the violinist Joseph Zwilich, died suddenly. You don’t want to be reductive about grief and style — plenty of composers suffer terribly and keep writing the same way regardless — but something did shift, audibly, and every piece on this disc lives on the far side of that shift.

Peanuts Gallery, from 1996, is the disc’s charmer, and one of her most-performed scores. Six vignettes for piano and orchestra, each one a comic-strip character sketch. “Schroeder’s Beethoven Fantasy” opens things wittily, tossing off crunched fragments of the Fifth as if Schroeder himself were pounding them out on his toy piano. “Snoopy Does the Samba” is pure delight, hip motion and clattering percussion, and Elizabeth Dorman plays it with a light comic touch that never curdles into cuteness. “Charlie Brown’s Lament” is the emotional center: a slow, aching little tune, understated, almost embarrassed by its own sadness, which is exactly right for Charlie Brown. Zwilich apparently never met Charles Schulz, though he spent his last three decades a short drive from where this recording was made, in Santa Rosa; the Green Music Center sits practically in his backyard. Whether that geographical accident justified handing this repertoire to the Santa Rosa Symphony, I can’t say. But it’s a nice enough coincidence for the liner notes.

The two shorter works are more modest, but neither is filler. The Romance for violin and orchestra, with Joseph Edelberg a warm, unforced soloist, avoids the syrupy sentimentality its title threatens. There’s a tartness underneath the surface lyricism, some harmonic friction that keeps it from going soft. Prologue and Variations, the earliest piece here, from 1983, shows Zwilich still working out how much of her old rigor to keep and how much to let go; you can hear both languages in it, arguing.

Sound engineering from the Green Music Center is clean, a touch close-miked on the cello, but nothing to complain about. Is this essential listening, a first choice above all others? For the Cello Concerto, there’s no competition yet. This is it, the only album. For Peanuts Gallery, there are other versions worth knowing, but none more affectionately turned than this. Zwilich remains a composer too rarely programmed by the major orchestras who ought to know better. This disc won’t fix that on its own. But it makes as good a case as any for why they should.