Michael Torke's An American Abroad inhabits worryingly familiar territory. The title - and, for that matter, some of the music - carries echoes of Gershwin's An American in Paris, though the piece brings other associations in its wake.
Torke, associate composer with the Royal Scottish National Orchestra, lives in New York, and describes his tone poem as an expression of "the natural naivety an American might feel travelling abroad". This is Jamesian stuff, in other words: the portrait of an American as a stereotypical innocent, touched with arrogance, confronting sophistication elsewhere with wide-eyed wonder until his innate brashness is effectively transformed and muted.
The opening, brass-drenched theme has a swaggering, big-band bravado, though its confidence isn't maintained for long. A couple of Wagnerian chords stop it in its tracks, ushering in a meditative section in which a gracious oboe solo picks its way over swaying strings, before Torke plunges into a finale in which the opening theme turns into salsa over glittery, exuberant percussion. Torke refrains from telling us where "abroad" is, though the stately tolling of bells at one point hints at a European capital (Rome, maybe), while the finale suggests either Spain or Latin America.
Torke's bravura handling of a Strauss-sized orchestra makes it glitzily effective. The principal flaw lies in the fact that the work is rooted in melodic repetition rather than thematic development - and Torke, unfortunately, isn't a great melodist.
The world premiere was conducted with panache by another American abroad, Marin Alsop, and played with glittering ferocity by the RSNO. Its companion pieces, reflecting back on Torke's subject, placed it at a distinct disadvantage, however. Copland's Appalachian Spring examines American "natural naivety" in the context of the earth-rooted rituals of a Pennsylvania farming community, while Stravinsky's Petrushka is one of the greatest cityscapes of European music, the city in question being the teeming, dangerous St Petersburg of Dostoevsky.
Alsop was fabulous in both works, with Appalachian Spring hovering in some archetypal area beyond time and place, and the fractured, polyrhythmic modernism of Petrushka captured with exhausting immediacy. In each case, the RSNO's playing was stamped with greatness.
