GRAMOPHONE Review: AMERICA Bernstein/Gershwin/Ellington etc – Daniel Hope/Zürich Chamber Orchestra

Daniel Hope was never just another violin virtuoso. His curiosity, his ability to think outside the box, to embrace passions beyond the so-called core repertoire, is borne out with each successive album. This one pays homage to AMERICA – its tunes, its songbook, its diversity, its jazz. And in fusing a jazz trio (the Marcus Roberts Trio) with a conventional string orchestra (the Zürcher Kammerorchester) the overriding headline here is that the spirit of improvisation impacts on all music-making regardless of its genre or nature.

George Gershwin, of course, invited it. The swing and inflection of those thoroughbreds of the American Songbook was inbred from his noodling at the keyboard in the wee small hours. Those melodies, glorious in their own right, lend themselves to ‘spin’ – as witness Marcus Roberts chasing the fancy of that ‘Fascinating Rhythm’ up and down the ivories or wherever the spirit of the song takes him and his colleagues. All of which rubs off on Hope. The unusual take on ‘Summertime’ suggests the strenuous rhythm of hard labour in and around some shanty town and only at the key change is Hope’s solo voice carried aloft on a plush underlay of strings. ‘The Man I Love’ gets the lavished attention it demands changing mood and complexion in the playing of it. ‘I Got Rhythm’ is a celebration of that simple fact.

In general (and maybe this says something about the jazzer – or not – in me) the purely lyric numbers and/or

ballads fare best. There’s something very moving about a group of kindred spirits – vocalist Joy Denalane, pianist Sylvia Thereza, Hope et al – saying just how they feel about Sam Cooke’s ‘A Change Is Gonna Come’ and Paul Bateman’s arrangements of ‘Come Sunday’ from Duke Ellington’s seminal Black, Brown and Beige or Copland’s homespun ‘spiritual’ ‘Long Time Ago’ could convey to a Martian where the spirit of America resides. It is there in abundance in Florence Price’s Adoration – another little gem unearthed from neglect to stir us once more. Glorious how it feels so familiar when it so plainly isn’t.

Bateman’s two suites – from West Side Story and the Kurt Weill American Songbook – have their moments. Violin and guitar (Joscho Stephan) are natural bedfellows and lend a sepia tone to Weill’s ‘September Song’ and ‘Speak Low’ – but ‘Mack the Knife’ is hardly a product of the ‘American’ Weill – just saying. Also there is no way of disguising that West Side Story without its brass and percussion is only half that particular story. The three great ballads soar – you don’t need words to convey the rapture of ‘Maria’ or the heartbreak of ‘I Have a Love’ – but the addition of bongos doesn’t do it for ‘Mambo’ and Hope is no mariachi trumpet for all his best intentions.

But I applaud the spirit that drives the album and it’s heart is definitely in the right place.