RECORD REVIEWS
Even though Henry Brant’s mind-boggling Ice Field for orchestra and organ won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 2002—the year after its premiere—and years later was revisited by the San Francisco Symphony, for which it was commissioned, no recording format has succeeded at capturing its musical and spatial wonders. Until now.
In a first for the San Francisco Symphony, the 2014 performance of Ice Field, recorded in 24/192 PCM in Davies Symphony Hall, has been issued as a bargain-priced (about $7) 24/48 WAV download-only binaural recording. Processed with Dolby Atmos, Ice Field is intended for anyone with two-channel playback gear and a pair of headphones.
And what a listen it is. This work, which combines carefully orchestrated sections with passages that depend on spontaneous improvisation, stretches the limits with its wildly divergent but ultimately unified sonic excursions. In the huge expanse of Davies Symphony Hall, one hears percussive blows, silly treble organ exclamations followed by rumbles from the lowest pedals, deep growls, bits of swinging jazz, and mysterious but determinedly consonant sections that touch the heart—a crazy cacophony of careening sounds and lines superimposed one over the other that fascinates even as it confounds.
Conceived for the unique acoustic of San Francisco’s Davies Symphony Hall, Brant’s virtually unclassifiable work places two conductors and countless musicians in multiple locations within the hall. Years ago, I attended the work’s premiere and was so distracted by the many disparate sound sources that I was unable, at times, to comprehend where Brant’s score intended to take me. SFS Media’s binaural issue is the first time I’ve been able to close my eyes, focus on the music, and begin to make sense of Ice Field’s divine chaos.
Imagine this spatial scenario, which Brant (1913–2008) shared with New Music champion Charles Amirkhanian before ’s premiere: “On the stage will be the string orchestra in the place where it usually sits, all together. The only other instruments on the stage are two pianos, two harps, and the timpanist. So the sound that comes from that area of the stage is not what you ordinarily hear. It’s more intensified because you hear each tone quality by itself, not duplicated by anything else. Behind the stage, in the organ loft, I put the oboes and bassoons. What they play is a kind of music that the strings, pianos, harps, and timpani never play. In the first tier is the entire
