Another DG project, this one featuring pieces composed for Yuja Wang, beginning with Michael Tilson Thomas’s You Come Here Often?, an enjoyably witty and jazzy solo that nicely cues Teddy Abrams’s Piano Concerto, a close-on forty-minute score that invests a number of styles into its continuous whole (please see the second link below for how the eleven sections pan out) and proves to be consistently diverting and engaging in its invention – foot-tapping pumping rhythms, lyrical asides, colourfully orchestrated (saxes, drum-kit, big-band brass to the fore), proceeding energetically through its Americana course with a sense of a filmic narrative – all episodes belonging in a musically organic way. Wang’s virtuosity can be taken for granted (she has four cadenzas that prove to be more than staging posts) and with the composer conducting the up-for-it Louisville Orchestra (Abrams is music director) then this is a pretty definitive account of an ambitious and impressive work that ends like Gershwin. DG 486 4478.
https://www.deutschegrammophon.com/en/catalogue/products/the-american-project-yuja-wang-12891