David Ott
I caught a piece by David Ott (b.7/5/47) on public radio Sunday (WKSU from Kent OH). It was in a regular mixed Sunday-afternoon slot, which should tell you a bit about the style. The piece, Andante Cantabile, was for cello and orchestra. The title suggests Tchaikovsky, but the cantabile in this case more resembled the soprano line of Del Tredici's Final Alice...lots of high alternating 6ths. And way too much repetition of short motives, same stuff I was griping about in early Rosner (he outgrew it though). It was well orchestrated. But somehow, it didn't work. There was no sense of forward motion in the work, and what passed for voice was little harmonic lurches and grinds.
I had first come across David Ott in the form of a CD of his 2nd and 3rd symphonies (Koss Classics KC-3301) in a used CD store. It was the Grand Rapids Symphony with Catherine Comet, and Ott is a Youper (Michigan Upper Peninsula resident) by birth, so I wanted to see what the homies were up to. I'd only listened once, as Ott had a 2nd mortgage with Bank Shostakovich. But I figured I'd give it another listen, having heard the other piece.
He's not as dreadful as I thought. He gets pretty bombastic in his finales (that of #2 is particularly weak). He doesn't have great ideas and his forms aren't always terribly clear. and I didn't really catch any "wow" moments, those places in a piece when you suddenly know that you're breathing the air of another planet. (Well, maybe sorta when the harp comes in in the slow movement of #3.) But he keeps the piece going forward. There's a superficial attractiveness of color and harmony. I can see why he's getting performances; he delivers what a typical concert audience is expecting. I'm not at all convinced he's a great composer. But he's not an idiot. And he's got a goodly number of recordings out there.
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