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Australian/American composer Douglas Knehans has enjoyed worldwide recognition for his imaginative, often whimsical, occasionally apocryphal but never superfluous sound visions and compositional style; music that is at once demanding yet easily understood, charming but not a little haunted. A post-primordial prescience informs the composer’s worldview that when conflated with his kaleidoscopic command of color, grips the imagination and transforms consciousness.

Such is the stunning takeaway from Unfinished Earth a 2018 premiere recording of two substantial and also substantially diverse Knehans works on this beautifully engineered Ablaze Records disc. Tempest For Flute and Orchestra (2014) performed by the extraordinary Principal Flute of the London Symphony Orchestra Gareth Davies and Unfinished Earth for Orchestra (2016) a three-movement journey to the center of Knehans’ molten muse, offer fascinating takes on the Greeks’ five elements - earth, water, air (winds), fire and aether (the void).

The Norman Dinerstein Professor of Composition Scholar at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, Douglas Knehans is also the director of Ablaze Records, founded with the intention of representing todays living composers across a range of media. Unfinished Earth has already garnered five international recording awards for good reason; the sound quality is crystal clear, particularly important considering the sometimes dense orchestrations, fascinating layers of sound color, moody narrative subtexts and virtuoso riffs for not just flute but other instruments in the orchestra - Knehans’ compositional calling card. The performances are executed with uniform virtuosity by the Brno Philharmonic Orchestra and managed throughout with style and finesse by conductor Mikel Toms.

An important new work for a raft of reasons, Knehans’ Tempest - Concerto for Flute and Orchestra (2014) should be on every professional flutist’s must-learn list. It will disappoint neither the artistic priorities of soloist and orchestra, nor at the box office. In three beautifully constructed movements that describe Ostro, a southerly, Mediterranean/Adriatic wind; Mistral Funérailles, the cold, strong northwesterly winds that roar down the Rhone Valley and into the northern Mediterranean and Etesian, the annual summer winds that blow over Greece and the Aegean, Tempest is as fresh and breezy as the currents swirling above the planet it describes; a bright and fascinating new concerto for flute and orchestra that speaks with narrative clarity and an adventurers sense of virtuosity and excitement. Not since John Corigliano’s Pied Piper Fantasy has a flute concerto been so chock-a-block with narrative action and disciplined mischief for both soloist and orchestra; a delight at several levels of pleasure. Kudos to flutist Gareth Davies for a thoughtfully definitive, technically virtuoso world premiere recording of this powerful new addition to the flute concerto repertoire.

Unfinished Earth is an orchestral Earth Abides, focusing energy and color on the catastrophic forces that have shaped the universe, our planet and the collective psyche of its sentient inhabitants since before knowledge. Tempering, Eternal Ocean and Tearing Drift, the three movements of Unfinished Earth afford Knehans a spacious compositional canvas for his dystopian vision of a planet in peril. The first movement Tempering, describes the roiling lava that forms from the void and becomes land, water, air - sustainers of life. The second movement Eternal Ocean “evokes the shifting currents of the deep ocean,” in the composer’s words, but is also a metaphor for the churning subconscious. Tearing Drift, it’s metallic colors and percussive chord clusters imagining seismic disaster, is a swirling maelstrom of chaos and grief, “the Munchian silent scream of isolated man,” according to the composer. The result for listeners is edgy, apocryphal, exciting and satisfying.

Daniel Kepl | Performing Arts Review