Frankenstein [Double Album] (World Premiere Recording)

There is much to admire here. The San Francisco Ballet Orchestra plays wonderfully with great tone, exemplary dynamic range and a genuine sensitivity to the changes in color and emotion found in this work, which are considerable.

The recording is superb - everything is captured on the broadest of sound stages with great depth and presence. Musically, the piece is extraordinary, tuneful, full of expression, dramatic, and ever-changing.

I was afraid, as I am about most contemporary ballet recordings, that the two-hour time period would prove monotonous or dull, but this was not the case. Liebermann makes good use of all the combinations of orchestral color at his disposal, and you are hard-pressed to find even one moment of waning inspiration, and the music is extremely accessible.

This album is a marvel, and if you don’t know any of Liebermann’s work, I can’t think of a better place to start.

Lowell Liebermann's Frankenstein, a collaboration with the late choreographer Liam Scarlett, was composed in the mid-2010s and had several performances in Britain. This recording was made live in 2018 and marked the U.S. Premiere in San Francisco, featuring the San Francisco Ballet Orchestra under conductor Martin West.

It is to be recommended for the live atmosphere alone. A good deal of enthusiastic applause is retained, and the audiophile engineering staff at Reference Recordings proves itself as able in live recording as it is in the studio. The sound has a wonderful immediacy rare in theatrical recordings.

Liebermann's score is immediately appealing. Ballet music and film scores have much in common, with both forms comprising short pieces that each illustrate a single scene. Liebermann's music is cinematic, indeed evoking the great tradition of 1930s Hollywood horror film scores, but as the music approaches its considerable climaxes in Act III, his harmonic palette darkens, as if to emphasize the modern resonances of the Frankenstein story.

Conductor West is alert to both the Hollywood evocations, giving the strings a heated, melodramatic tone and the shift in style as the music proceeds.