The career of Texas-to-New York-to-Texas transplant Don Gillis, a protégé of no less than Arturo Toscanini, would seem ripe for rediscovery in this age of neo-tonalism. This disc perhaps presupposes too much knowledge of a composer who has been largely forgotten -- it omits his best-known work, the Symphony No. 5 ˝ ("A Symphony for Fun," which is included on a different release in the same series on the Albany Troy contemporary music label), and it includes a work Gillis himself rejected, the rather meandering Symphony No. ...
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The career of Texas-to-New York-to-Texas transplant Don Gillis, a protégé of no less than Arturo Toscanini, would seem ripe for rediscovery in this age of neo-tonalism. This disc perhaps presupposes too much knowledge of a composer who has been largely forgotten -- it omits his best-known work, the Symphony No. 5 ˝ ("A Symphony for Fun," which is included on a different release in the same series on the Albany Troy contemporary music label), and it includes a work Gillis himself rejected, the rather meandering Symphony No. 3: A Symphony for Free Men. It's still an entertaining introduction to a composer whom the booklet notes call "a cowboy-country Neil Simon of the concert hall." Actually the influences are not so much country (although there is a dash of Copland's "Hoedown" idiom, as well as numerous imprints of his music in general) as pop-symphonic, band music, and, to a degree, jazz. The music is nationalistic in a Fourth-of-July-under-the-stars way, but it makes room for a distinctive sense of...
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