This release pairs film/television composer and orchestrator Nan Schwartz with Australian composer Brenton Broadstock in a program of orchestral music with its roots deep in jazz.

Raised at the heart of the Hollywood music scene, Schwartz’s sound has a lithe, film-score clarity, showcased in lucid performances by Australian conductor Kevin Purcell and Vienna’s Synchron Stage Orchestra. The brooding Aspirations and nostalgic Perspectives – shot through with (another Aussie) jazz guitarist Jon Delaney’s atmospheric solos – were written almost two decades apart for The New American (later Henry Mancini Institute) Orchestra. Angels Among Us sees Mat Jodrell’s trumpet evoke distant, elegiac longing, while Romanza‘s wistful violin (Dimitrie Leivici) floats above cool strings.

Broadstock wrote Made in Heaven – a love song to Miles Davis’ iconic Kind of Blue – in 2009 as a concerto for James Morrison (on multiple instruments) during his tenure as the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra’s Composer in Residence, revising the work as a ‘concerto for orchestra’ in 2013. Here Purcell conducts the Bratislava Studio Symphony Orchestra.

The movements correspond to tracks on Davis’s album: the first, for instance, takes the simple repeating cell from So What, expanding and transforming it in broad orchestral colours. It’s a work  of glittering colour and gleaming brass – a perfect companion to the Schwartz.

Composer: Schwartz, Broadstock
Composition: Orchestral works 
Performer: Synchron Stage Orchestra Vienna, Bratislava SO/Kevin Purcell
Catalogue Number: Divine Art DDA25165

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