Wayne Peterson, Transformations, Prism Quartet, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, Gil Rose

There are living US composers that you find you have missed completely, yet you can think of no good reason why. Wayne Peterson is one of those, even though he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for "The Face of the Night, The Heart of the Dark." My excuse perhaps is by 1992 I began a work situation that gradually ate up all my available time through 9-11 and its absolute, permanent collapse. I picked up the shreds of my life though and I slowly caught up with the very important developments in that period. Looks like I am still catching up!

Nonetheless I am very glad to make the composer's aural acquaintance  on his new collection of orchestral compositions, Transformations (BMOP Sound 1053), with the ever-essential Boston Modern Orchestra Project doing the honors under conductor Gil Rose, and the PRISM Quartet stepping in for the spotlight role on the work "And the Winds Shall Blow."

He writes complex chromatic music, high modernist shrines of intricate latticework. If you imagine Elliot Carter, and why should you not, you might put Wayne Paterson in his league, so to speak, not as some clone, but another highly individual later modern chromaticist.

That to me is an extraordinarily good thing!

In the three works on this recording, we hear Peterson at his best.

The Pulitzer Prize work "The Face of the Night, The Heart of the Dark" (1990) gets focused attention and we are all the better for it. It like the other works here give us a swirl of continually evolving phantasmagorias of sound, classic but evolved sound color matrixes of brilliant explosions and implosions of vivid hues and rhythmically charged musical utterances.

And with the opening works, "Transformations" (1985), "And the Winds Shall Blow" (1994), we get variational fireworks of constant refluxive reiterations and post-iterations, if you will have it.

"Winds" distinguishes itself via the welcome presence of the PRISM Saxophone Quartet, who with wind and percussion create an aura of deft interwoven complexities.

This is fabulously complicated high modernist profundity. Anyone (like me) who still thrives on the ear stretching kind of contemporaneity will take to this as exceptionally invigorating.

Modernists, do not miss!